Sukey's Favorite

Loving Che
By Ana Menendez
Highbridge, $26.95
5 hours unabridged, CD, ISBN 1565118413

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A daughter searching for the mother she never knew, a mother yearning to tell her story to the child she last saw as an infant—these are the threads that wind together in Ana Menendez's lyrical, affecting first novel, Loving Che, read by Adriana Sananes and Eileen Stevens. Now an adult, the daughter who grew up in Miami with her reclusive grandfather combs the streets of Havana hoping for news of her elusive mother. When a packet of letters arrives from Spain, she is let into her mother's memories of her marriage, the Cuban Revolution and her passionate private affair with the very public Che Guevara. Reality or fantasy? Might Che be her father? The daughter never knows; nor do we, but as we share the letters, we see Havana now, triste and struggling, and Havana then caught up in the manic mood of the early revolution. And we're left to ponder the burden and wonder of memories.

The making of a magical masterpiece

REVIEWS BY SUKEY HOWARD

Exquisite, enigmatic, the tapestries of the Lady and the Unicorn in the Musée de Cluny in Paris enthrall viewers. Now, Tracy Chevalier does for them what she did so brilliantly for a Vermeer painting in Girl with a Pearl Earring; she conjures up a wholly believable story of the creation of a masterpiece and the people involved. The Lady and the Unicorn, set in Paris and Brussels at the end of the 15th century, is told in the alternating voices and perspectives of its well-drawn characters, performed in this audio version with impeccable nuance and inflection by Robert Blumenfeld and Terry Donnelly. We hear from the talented, womanizing artist, hired by a wealthy Parisian courtier to paint the tapestries; the courtier's unhappy, pious wife; his hot-blooded adolescent daughter; and the Brussels weavers—husband, wife and daughter. Chevalier herself has created a tapestry, a romantic, well-imagined tale woven into a mille fleurs background of fascinating historical detail.


Desperate times, desperate measures

Dan Brown tackled codes and decoding before he zoomed into best-selling prominence with The Da Vinci Code. In Digital Fortress, published a few years ago and recently released on audio, Brown takes us into the clandestine depths of the National Security Agency (NSA), as its valiant cryptographers race to break a code that could disable the agency's uniquely powerful decoding machine and spread a barrier-eating virus that would make our super-secret intelligence data available to "every third grader with a modem." Most valiant of all is Susan Fletcher, the NSA's brilliant, beautiful head cryptographer who finds herself in a chilling maelstrom of murder and malice. It's a raced-paced tale, read with requisite élan by Bruce Sabath and packed with intriguing cyber-science, encryption details and passing thoughts on personal privacy. Dan Brown delivers again


Literary sleuthing

John Dunning's Bookman series is a welcome sub-genre in the burgeoning super-genre of crime fiction. Its star Cliff Janeway is an ex-cop-turned-rare-book-dealer whose hunt for valuable books and interest in ideas and history can land him in harm's way. The latest, The Bookman's Promise narrated by audio veteran George Guidall, begins when Cliff, flush with a bit of hard-earned cash, buys a pricey pristine edition of a classic by Sir Richard Burton, the legendary 19th-century adventurer. Because of that purchase, a friend of Cliff's dies, an old woman finds peace, a good man loses everything, and Cliff rediscovers himself "across the timeless, infinite world of books" and falls in love. And it's all wrapped up in a suspenseful, entertaining whodunit that manages to shed light on a little-known piece of history.


Please note: audios may be available in formats other than the ones reviewed here.

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