CBR-III #5 Faithful Place - Tana French

This is the third of Tana French's novels that I have read and I have enjoyed them all. This last installment is similar in some ways to the first two, but it takes the feel of the other two and moves in a new direction.

Faithful Place, unlike the first two novels, is less focused on the solving of a crime and more focused on the place where it happened and the people it happened too. Frank Mackey is a detective from Faithful Place, who left twenty two years ago and never looked back, of course, until now. The single sibling of four with whom he still speaks calls him in for an emergency: a suitcase has turned up in an abandoned house at it looks to be his high school sweet heart's case. The one who left him (and apparently the case) behind the night they were suppose to run away. Frank rushes to drop of his nine year old daughter back off with his ex-wife and heads directly for Faithful Place. We learn a lot in those opening pages.

The mystery of who killed Rosie Daly unravels slowly. And maybe it's a result of having read her other two novels so recently, I knew who did it relatively early. The beauty is it just didn't matter. French does such an amazing job with a slew of damaged, frightened, bitter, scared characters, most of whom are still on Faithful Place to this day, that the mystery takes second place behind the unraveling of all these characters. French treats them all with such honestly that even the most beastly among them is compelling and on some level understandable - not sympathetic - but understandable.

I have few quibbles with this novel, most probably aren't worth mentioning. There is however a revelation that seems a little too easy and the happily ever after potential unrealistic (especially given the rest of the novel), but it's a smaller side plot and not the main story. As heartbreaking and some of the other side plots end, they are true to what you'd expect from the people involved even though you hate that you even expected it, and I love an author who can pull that off without disappointing.

French's novel has a lot to do with family and loyalty, and the pain that comes with both. And yet it demonstrates beautifully why even when given an escape people continue to come back for more.

Unbroken - Laura Hillenbrand

What a way to ring in the new year. So I was completely out of things to read, and owe the library enough in fees that they've temporarily suspended my borrowing privileges. So, my husband's Mom sends him Unbroken for Christmas and with nothing else to read I pick it up. Don't get me wrong, I loved Seabiscuit but I tend to avoid anything war related; however, my husband convinced me it was a book about an escape during the war, not a real war story. Boy was he wrong.

It is testament to Hillenbrand's writing that I finished the book. The first 75 pages, before you get anywhere near the war, are so compelling and the characters so masterfully brought to life that there is no way you can stop reading this book until you come to the end. You have to know what happens to Louie and the rest of the group no matter how painful, and it is very, very painful.

The story follows Louie Zamperini, delinquent turned Olympic hopeful in the opening pages of the novel. He is staggering in his success and has all the makings of a star. However, Pearl Harbor happens and the Olympics are put on hold and Louie is put in plane.

To tell the order of events for the rest of the novel would serve more as spoiler than anything else. I will warn (spoiler coming) that Louie spends no fewer than 200 pages of this book in POW camps and worse. Hillenbrand describes the events in those places with such detail that I cried through huge sections of the book and several times had to abandon it for an hour or two. She follows a pattern where just after describing the most mind numbing, painful experiences she follows with equally detailed stories of how the men maintained moral, where they found hope, how they kept breathing. For this reader it wasn't enough, but I would guess for many it will be.

This book is definitely testament to the power of the human spirit. The things those POWs overcame, the very fact that they came home and led "normal" lives after the war is nothing short of awe inspiring. When I started reading this book, I thought everyone should read this. It brings to light so many things that so many of us don't dare to think about, but having finished it I don't know if I would read it again.