THE SPEED OF FALLING OBJECTS by Nancy Richardson Fischer

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Would you travel through the Amazon as part of a survivalist TV show in order to reconnect with your Dad and learn his truth? Well that’s what Danger Danielle (Danny) Warren does in The Speed of Falling Objects. This YA book is a fun and fast read that’s an adventure with a romance subplot. It’s a coming-of-age story filled with courage, the will to survive, love, family, friendship, bullying, and living with a disability.

The first sentence pulled me right in and the second sentence kept me there.

I don’t remember impact. There’s silence, followed by by individual sounds, like someone conducting a nature symphony - first birds with different songs, then the deep vibration of frogs, the buzz of myriad insects and an undercurrent of slithering that might be my imagination.

I could not put this book down. The suspense and the survivalist angle kept me turning the pages, as did the romantic angle. Fischer uses vivid imagery to paint a picture of the rainforest and all of its “inhabitants.” A lot of research went into this book and it shows.

At its essence, the story is about Danny coming into her own. Danny has lived with a disability since she was 7, when she lost an eye in an accident. Not surprisingly, this disability had a major impact on her life - her father disappeared shortly thereafter, she was subjected to bullying in school and she suffered from numerous psychological issues.

..came up with their own dance. It was called “The Pigeon.” They stood in a circle flapping their arms like wings and poked their heads left and right, imitating me. I’d never realized that was how I looked. I was just trying to see better because having only one working eye makes judging depth and the speed of moving objects, like people dancing with abandon, a bitch.  Until then, though, I’d thought I was doing a pretty good job. Funny how a single moment changed my self-perception forever.

Danny admits to being scared of “everything” now because of her disability, the exact opposite of who she was before. While the trip is a scary proposition because of all these fears, it is more important to Danny to get to know her Father and prove to him that she is worthy of his attention and love.

...this is my chance to prove to my dad that I can be the kid he used to love.

Tomorrow will be the first step to getting back to the Danny before the accident. Someone my dad will be proud to call his daughter.

As a way to have some sort of connection to her Dad a.k.a. Cougar, Danny has watched all the episodes of his TV show, some even multiple times. Granted it was a one-sided relationship but It was her only way to know him.

I’ve seen every one of my dad’s shows, watched when my mom isn’t home. Cougar eats snakes, bugs, raw eggs and maggots to survive. He suffers in extreme heat, cold and torrential rainstorms that make his skin blister, pucker, crack, bleed. In one episode. My dad almost died from a killer bee attack. In another, he was charged by a grizzly bear.

We really get to know Danny well and witness her personal development while she gets to know her Father and has to face some of her fears.  It becomes an even greater challenge because Cougar is a dislikable person. The reader will easily root for Danny every time.  In this way, it is a story of surviving the rainforest as well as surviving her father’s dysfunction.

THE DUTCH HOUSE by Ann Patchett

Ann Patchett is a master storyteller and she lives up to this reputation with her latest work - The Dutch House. Her writing is superb and the stories she tells invite you in and before you know it, you’ve developed deep relationships with the characters.  This is a story about abandonment, love, family, loyalty, loss, and forgiveness. It is also about growing up and letting go of the past.

There are three main characters - Danny, the narrator and younger brother of Maeve, our second character and the House. The Dutch House was first built by the VanHoebeeks, who decorated it in Dutch style and lived there until they died.  In fact, all of their possessions had remained there after they had left this world. Life-sized portraits of Mr. and Mrs. VanHoebeeks adorned the walls of the drawing room and paintings of other relatives hung on walls throughout the house. It was a grand estate with glass in the front that saw all the way through to the flowers in the back. Patchett skillfully gives the House life with vivid imagery and detailed descriptions that you will almost feel like you are there.

The VanHoebeeks weren’t the story, but in a sense the house was the story, and it was their house.

The Dutch House, as it came to be known in Elkins Park and Jenkintown and Glenside and all the way to Philadelphia, referred not to the house’s architecture but to its inhabitants. The Dutch House was the place where those Dutch people with the unpronounceable name lived.

When they were young, Danny and Maeve’s mother abandoned them and Maeve stepped into that role. Danny expressed concern that no one could do the same for Maeve. The two siblings grew incredibly close and stayed that way throughout their lives. Their relationship was very touching and a very appealing aspect of the story. 

Several years after their Mother left, their Father married Andrea, who was the epitome of the evil stepmother.  Their dislike of her further united them, if that was even possible.

We ate the cookies and dredged up every awful memory of Andrea we had. We traded them between us like baseball cards, exclaiming over every piece of information one of us didn’t already know.

                

We dug a pit and roasted her.

The Dutch House figures prominently in the story. It drove Maeve’s and Danny’s Mother away — it symbolized to her luxurious excess in a world where others went starving. For their Father, it represented success. The house is what ultimately brought Andrea into their family — she married their Father in order to get it.

For Danny and Maeve, the house was a place to grow up as well as to return. It represented their memories and their pasts. A dominant theme in The Dutch House is the siblings’ inability to let go of the past and their emotional baggage of anger as well as regret. The house physically drew them back time and time again, like a magnet. Whenever Danny returned to town, he and Maeve would end up parked across the street from the Dutch House, watching for any activity or news. 

There was no extra time in those days and I didn’t want to spend the little of it I had sitting in front of the goddamn house, but that’s where we wound up...

...like swallows, like salmon, we were the helpless captives of our migratory patterns.

Looking and watching the house, they would reminisce about the past and wonder if one can ever truly contemplate the past objectively.

But we overlay the present onto the past. We look back through the lens of what we know now, so we’re not seeing it as the people we were, we’re seeing it as the people we are, and that means the past has been radically altered.

I didn’t even know they were sisters, meaning I was a toad. But that’s me layering the present onto the past.

Ann Patchett weaves together emotional stories, which capture your heart. She is a fabulous writer: here are a few examples of her masterful use of imagery and metaphors/similes.

Whatever romantic notions I might have harbored, whatever excuses or allowances my heart had ever made on her behalf, blew out like a match.

There are a few times in life when you leap up and the past that you’d been standing on falls away behind you, and the future you mean to land on is not yet in place, and for a moment you’re suspended, knowing nothing and no one, not even yourself.

That was it. Fluffy, who had not stopped talking since I walked in the door, shut down like a mechanical horse in need of another nickel.

THE WORLD THAT WE KNEW by Alice Hoffman

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I loved this thought-provoking, beautifully written work about survival and the Holocaust. The story is captivating with engaging characters that will find their way into your heart. Hoffman, a well-known prolific writer with 30+ books to her credit, effectively utilizes Jewish mysticism and folklore to drive the story. The World That We Knew is about the lengths a mother will go to protect her child and it is also about love, loyalty, loss, survival, and hope.

In order to protect her daughter from the Nazis, Hanni enlists the help of a rabbi’s daughter to create a golem whose sole purpose is to ensure that her young daughter Lea stays alive while she makes her way traveling to safety. The World That We Knew is primarily about three women — Ettie (a Rabbi’s daughter), Lea (a young girl), Marianne (a young housemaid and farm girl).  There is also a fourth “women” — Ava the golem. The lives of these three (or four) women are interconnected and for the backbone of the narrative. These characters are strong, complex and well-developed, even the “soulless” golem. The reader cannot help but emotionally connect with these characters and fear for their safety. 

This book raises many important questions that are left for the reader to ponder. How do you fight evil? Is evil necessary to fight evil? What does it mean to be human? What does it mean to have a soul? How do you cope with loss?

...perhaps a demon was needed to fight demons. Perhaps some sins were prayers sent up to the Almighty.

If a soul was formed by meaning and purpose, did not every blade of grass have a soul, for each had a purpose.

This is what grief was, she understood that now. It was never-ending and you carried it with you. You could not stop it or regret it, you could only keep it close to your heart.

While there is sadness and a sense of tragedy that seeps through the words time and time again, there is also hope and love. Good/kindness and evil are juxtaposed throughout the story. Furthermore, love is the thread that connects these characters and their stories - love of life, love of nature, love of animals, a mother’s love, romantic love, and love for others trapped in hell.

The magical realism makes this book special and its presence helps the reader somewhat to get through some of the tragic, gut-wrenching and heartbreaking moments. Furthermore, it sets this book apart from many of the other Holocaust-related historical fiction stories. Note that the presence of mysticism does not diminish the atrocities and horrors of the Holocaust and the Nazis.

The writing itself is lyrical and magical, making me savor every word. The imagery is wonderful and the story flows beautifully.

That was how evil spoke. It made its own corrupt sense; it swore that the good were evil, and that evil had come to save mankind. It brought up ancient fears and scattered them on the street like pearls. To fight what was wicked, magic and faith were needed. This was what one must turn to when there was no other option.

He could not claim to know what a soul was, or who possessed it. But he knew that a dove mourned its young, and a dog yearned for its master, and a man who lost his wife never truly recovered, and love that was given was never thrown away.

This was how life was, tragic and unexplainable. When you were young you were afraid of ghosts, and when you were aged you called them to you.

CHASING MY CURE by David Fajgenbaum

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...“will” is that extra fight that emerges when there seems to be no more hope.

Chasing My Cure: A Doctor’s Race to Turn Hope Into Action is an inspirational memoir that follows a medical student’s harrowing deterioration from healthy athlete to a person with multiple system organ failure. Chasing My Cure reads like a medical thriller and I could not put it down. There is also a love story that I found especially moving. 

This book is an emotional roller-coaster ride that is a heart-wrenching account of a heroic and courageous man’s intense will to live that knows no bounds. David Fajgenbaum is afflicted with Castleman’s disease, described as a cross between cancer and an auto-immune illness.

I could no longer just hope that my treatment would work. I could no longer rely on the previous research. I could no longer hope someone else, somewhere would perform research that would lead to breakthroughs that could save my life. If I were to survive again—and to survive long term—I had to get off the sidelines and act. If I didn’t start fighting back to cure this disease, no one else would and I would soon die.

Frustrated with the lack of an effective treatment, David Fajgenbaum took it upon himself to find a cure.  He began by studying his charts and testing blood samples.  He also reached out to other patients, physicians and researchers and discovered that work was being done in silos, with no or little communication or collaboration.  For example, no one knew if something didn’t work because such occurrences do not make it into medical journals. 

With the benefit of a newly acquired M.B.A., Dr. Fajgenbaum forged a new path and turned the current approach to scientific inquiry and research on its head, with the goal of making it more efficient and effective. He established the Castleman Disease Collaborative Network, which brought the silos together and centralized as well as integrated all the learning and data.

Dr. Fajgenbaum successfully developed diagnostic criteria with the result that people could be more quickly diagnosed compared to the months it took in his case. This was also a major victory for drug research and clinical trials because it would remove patients that were not diagnosed correctly, thereby making the drug-testing data more reliable.

In his newly created framework for scientific research, he crowdsourced ideas and recruited the best and most competent researchers to investigate them. If only we could clone Dr. Fajgenbaum to head up research for all rare diseases. Hopefully others will adapt his framework and advance their work in a more collaborative system.