Sukey's Favorite

Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith
By Anne Lamott
Penguin Audio, $29.95
6 hours unabridged, CD, ISBN 0143057340

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Anne Lamott is a gem, a gifted writer who has become a beacon of honesty, light and laughter and common sense and a true (at least to me) practitioner of moral values: helping the poor, praying for peace, trying to see all humanity—including politicians she can't bear—as one family and trying to love that family. Some of the language in her latest collection of essays, Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith, is colloquially irreverent, but her profound faith in God and Jesus, her willingness to talk about her far from lily-white past, admit anxieties and doubts, "acknowledge the mess" in our lives and in the world, make her easy discussion of difficult topics wonderfully relevant and meaningful in a time of real uncertainty. Lamott reads her own never-empty words, making her abiding faith seem even more powerful.

Prose by Prose

REVIEWS BY SUKEY HOWARD

Francine Prose is extraordinarily savvy about our complex world, and her writer's radar picks up more than most. In her new novel, A Changed Man, performed with pitch-perfect deftness by Eric Conger, Prose takes on a hefty subject, but does it with a deceptively light touch. When Vincent, a young neo-Nazi (tattoos and all) presents himself to the dedicated folks at World Brotherhood Watch, a human-rights foundation headed by the wonderfully Elie Wiesel-esque Meyer Maslow, a Holocaust survivor with magnetic charm, and announces that he wants to help them "save guys like me from becoming guys like me," the PR-fund-raising wheels begin to spin wildly, while everyone hopes that Vincent won't spin out. To that very end, Bonnie, the hard-working development director, divorced and mother of two teenage boys, takes him into her suburban home. What unfolds is a clever, darkly funny, insightful anatomy of "doing good." Great characters, great story, great listen.


Love in a time of strife

Another single mother with two adolescent sons accepts a stranger into her home in Brenda Rickman Vantrease's exceptional debut novel, The Illuminator, though it's a very different home in a very different time. The year is 1379 and Lady Kathryn, the willowy, aristocratic mistress of Blackingham Manor, takes in Finn, a master illuminator, and his beautiful daughter to gain protection from the local abbot. Set against a fascinating background of unrest and change, when the heretical John Wycliffe was trying to bring an English Bible to the masses, threatening the feudal order and the absolute power of the church, comes a tale of love—man for woman, parent for child, mystic for Christ—betrayal, treachery, loyalty and hope. Simon Jones reads this unabridged, richly colored amalgam of history and fiction and no one could do it better.


A fine romance

Romance novels are a thriving genre, here long before chick lit, with all its sassy sex and attitude, and hen lit, with all its divorce, trophy wives and Botox. And there's every reason to believe that a good love story will always have appeal. A good example of that enduring appeal is Led Astray by Sandra Brown, a popular practitioner of the genre, ably narrated by Karen Ziemba. Though it was originally published 20 years ago, this story of two brothers and one woman will tug at your 21st-century heartstrings. Jenny loves Hal, Hal loves his worthy causes, and his brother Cage, the black sheep of the family, has a tender passion for Jenny. It's a simmering triangle that begins to boil over after a night of loving deception, a dreamlike mistake that will change life for Jenny, ever unsuspecting, forever. Does love prevail? I can only answer that question by asking—is this a romance?


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