Maybe Read: The Piano Tuner by Daniel Mason

In a Nutshell:

I am finding in my journey reading that there are many books such as this one; Uptight Brit who has lived quietly and within structure and expectation goes somewhere exotic and flourishes. They open their mind, their heart and their experiences because of a new, strange land. This story is really no different. But it does have some unique elements that make the story more interesting. First, the main character, Edgar Drake, is a piano tuner of very specific kind of piano called and Erard. He is asked by the British army to go to the Shan states in Burma and tune this kind of piano at some British jungle outpost. The piano is in the jungle by request of an eccentric Major Carroll who has found that music was a way to communicate and negotiate with the Shan tribes there. With England colonizing the area, political tensions between the natives and the army are a constant theme in the book. He describes the perilous journey not only for this quiet piano tuner, but retells the journey of the piano to the jungle outpost. As he makes his home at this outpost, Edgar gets acquainted with the natives, and Major Carroll, and some of the tribal kings. He starts an odd relationship with a beautiful Burmese woman that has some sexual tension that never really gets resolved. She signifies all that is exotic and lovely about Burma to Edgar, and in the same way, just as untouchable. 

My Take:

There is a dreamlike, lyrical quality to the writing of this book. That being said, I felt like the writer left a lot of holes in the plot for my taste. Edgar leaves England and his wife to do this mission for Queen and country, but as he is sucked into the new exotic culture. There is no more talk of his life or wife in England, at all. The political web in which he finds himself in is complicated for the reader and seems important considering it becomes his undoing. But I found it to be confusing and not really interesting. The interactions with the piano I think were the most interesting and textural parts of the book. And as I have had time to think on it, this out-of-place, stately piano in the middle of the jungle that loses it's tune on account of the humidity, gets gunshots through it's wood, and becomes warped might be a symbolic parallel to Britain colonization of Burma itself. And the more they try and use it and fix it, the more things unravel. It JUST doesn't belong there, just like Britain. I did like the beautiful, descriptive writing of Burma itself. It was languid and exotic, like Burma itself. There were merits to the book, but I don't know if I loved it. There were parts that were tiresome and confusing. I liked it-didn't love it.

Must Read: The Memory Keeper’s Daughter by Kim Edwards

In a Nutshell:

This book is about the repercussions of decisions you make in your life. Big ones, the ones that you have a couple minutes to decide and can change the course of everything around you. This story revolves around two main characters that parallel path each other. The first character being Dr. David Henry, an orthopedic surgeon, who because of a snow storm needs to deliver his beloved wife's twins on his own with the sole help of a nurse. The second character is the nurse, Caroline, who after helping deliver the twins, is told to take the baby girl (who turns out to have downs syndrome) and take her to a children's disability hospital and leave her there. Dr. Henry asks her to do this in a state of shock and exhaustion while his wife is asleep. When she wakes, he tells his wife that though her son lived, the little girl died. So he learns to live with the lies he told his wife and the sorrow of his decision through the years. That dishonest moment causes a ripple effect in his life and in his marriage as he tries to atone for it. Meanwhile the nurse, horrified at the condition of the hospital, looks at the little baby and decides to take care of her herself as her mother. The time was the late 60's, where not a lot was known about Down's and how to help children become functioning adults in society with this disorder. So the choice she made was hard but she makes much progress through the years and helps her daughter grow to become a bright, young woman. You follow both families through the years until the inevitable climax where both families meet.

My Take:

I really enjoyed this book, though I found myself getting frustrated with Norah Henry. She is depressed and pretty much a mess in this whole book. Yes, it is her husband's lies at the root of it all, and she doesn't know that. She just kind of knows something is not right between them. And the death of her baby girl she can' t get over, and it prevents her from loving her son who is right in front of her! I have no patience for that. You have a child who needs you, step up to the plate, lady!

The contrast of these two families, one supposedly picture perfect, like Dr. Henry wanted or else he wouldn't have sent his daughter away in the first place, and Caroline's hard life with Phoebe, a Down's child. I think it is a commentary about what successful family relationships really mean vs. what we expect them to mean. But I don't think Edwards goes deep enough in each of these scenarios so we can really feel what the characters are feeling. It is a very sad book, but beautifully written. Very descriptive. It has it's shortcomings but it is thought provoking and engrossing all the same.