Two master storytellers have created recent works with strong characters, vivid settings, and engrossing mysteries. Each involves a uniquely American community of interesting, flawed people. These books aren’t just good; they’re great. I think both men and women will like them. And (hint, hint) they’d make great gift ideas for just about any reader.
“The River We Remember” by William Kent Krueger is set in 1958 in Black Earth County, Minnesota. The author opens the book with a description of the riverside, and I was immediately captured by the writing: “On quiet nights when the moon is full or nearly so and the surface of the Alabaster is mirror-still and glows pure white in the dark bottomland, to stand on a hillside and look down at this river is to fall in love. … We love this place enough to die for it. Or kill.”
A fisherman stops by the office of Sheriff Brody Dern to tell him he’s found the body of Jimmy Quinn floating in the river. It looks like suicide, but could it have been an accident — or even murder? If murder, the list of suspects is long, since nobody liked Quinn. “He was the richest man in Black Earth County. … That man had every reason to feel good, but all he ever did, every step he took, was to sow seeds of discontent.” As Brody investigates, his attitude toward the deceased darkens: “In life, Quinn was a man Brody had never much cared for. In death, he was a man Brody was beginning to hate.”
There are several kinds of bigotry thriving in the community. One such prejudice leads people to accuse the town’s only Native American of murder. And to add to their suspicion, the man has a Japanese wife. “Although the war had been over for more than a dozen years, many folks in Black Earth County still considered her one of the enemy.”
And the war still deeply affects the town’s veterans.
The mystery has several layers. The spot where Quinn supposedly died has historical and spiritual significance to the townspeople. Many characters hold secrets or tell lies. Suspects aren’t talking. Even non-suspects aren’t talking. Early on, Brody does a surprising thing that made me stop and wonder what the heck was going on with him. One of the lawmen wonders “how a man can be looking at a thing and not see at all its true nature.”
Krueger is able to tap into the yearnings of the human spirit in several interesting characters, including a newspaper publisher, a female lawyer, and a retired lawman, several with strong back stories. Some characters have a basic goodness to them, but no one is perfect. The river is practically a character itself. Among the several interwoven subplots (including a couple of low-key romances) there’s even a coming-of-age story.
It all comes back to the beautiful writing: “They came out on a little beach nestled beneath a sandstone cliff where the river curled in on itself, forming a deep, gently swirling pool. Dragonflies darted over the water and swifts shot into and out of little holes in the cliff face where they’d built nests. The pool was heavily shaded by cottonwoods, which loomed atop the high banks of the river.” Nice. My niece Katy Epling said the writing reminded her of the brilliant “Where the Crawdads Sing.” Yes, I think it does. (If you missed that one, RUN to the library!)
“The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store” by James McBride takes place in the Chicken Hill neighborhood in Pottstown, Pennsylvania. The book starts with a kind of mystery in 1972, with workers finding a decades-dead body. As the story goes on, we find out whose skeleton they found and how it ended up there.
The heart of the action is set in the 1930s. In this mostly Black neighborhood the grocery store is run by a Jewish couple. Central figures include Jewish theater manager Moshe and his wife, Chona, who suffers from an after-effect of polio. She runs the grocery store, which was established by her rabbi father, an immigrant from Europe. The whole neighborhood adores her: “The Negroes of Chicken Hill loved Chona. They saw her not as a neighbor but as an artery to freedom. … Chona, for her part, saw them not as Negroes but as neighbors with infinitely interesting lives.” They also admired Moshe: “He never hated anyone. He was always kind. He’d give away his last crumb. And here in America, he’d married a woman who was the same way. Kindness. Love. Principle. It runs the world.”
It takes a while to get to the main plot, but I enjoyed getting to know the neighborhood culture. About a third of the way through, an incident occurs, and then the book becomes hard to put down. It can get intense (“Nate … stared at the wall absently, his eyes burning with dark, murderous rage”) as the community bands together to solve a problem, going on a pretty exciting rescue mission trying to keep a deaf 12-year-old boy out of a potentially dangerous institution.
Be warned that there are some offensive (racist) words and phrases, including the “N” word, but they fit in the context of the story.
The mingling of Black and Jewish cultures is fascinating. The author is comfortable with his knowledge of both Black and Jewish culture; as we learned in McBride’s “The Color of Water,” he had a Black father and Jewish mother. (Don’t miss that book, either; it’s a beautiful, spirit-lifting tribute to his mother.)
The story features a slew of characters with colorful names such as Fatty, Big Soap, Paper, Snooks, Son of Man, Dodo, and Monkey Pants. The writing is simply excellent. (When you’ve finished the book, go back and read the introductory chapter again. It’s very satisfying!)
If you like it (and why wouldn’t you?), next try E.L. Doctorow’s “Ragtime,” an American masterpiece first published in 1975.
Happy reading!
Mary Louise Ruehr is a books columnist for The Portager. Her One for the Books column previously appeared in the Record-Courier, where she was an editor.