Review Time: New Moon and North River

I’ve been busy lately, but I’m never too busy to read. I really, really enjoyed the two books I read most recently, so review time has rolled around again.

New Moon by Stephenie Meyer is the sequel to Twilight, which I only just discovered and loved. Sequels can be tricky, but I loved New Moon just as much as the first book. The story picks up a little while after the end of Twilight and just flows naturally as an extension of the world she started creating in the first book. The characters (even the supernatural ones) are so well drawn and so believable. You just connect with them. When Bella, the heroine, believes her vampire love Edward has left her, you grieve with her. This time around, Bella has to learn to adjust to life without Edward for a while. A character I particularly liked from the first book, Jacob, gets a front and center role in this story, and is even more interesting than I thought he would be.

Stephenie Meyer also excels at setting the scene. I feel like I’ve been to the town of Forks, where most of the story takes place. The books are written for teens, so the Romeo and Juliet parallels in the plot are perhaps a little more heavy handed than they would be in an adult book, but overall, the story is subtle and well told. I’ve been hopelessly sucked in to the series, and ran out and bought the next book, Eclipse in hardcover, and will no doubt buy the new one in hardcover in August as well.

North River by Pete Hamill is a completely different kind of book. The only other Pete Hamill book I’ve ever read is Forever, which was also a great story. Based on the strength of Forever and now North River, I’d say I’m going to have to take a trip through his catalog. North River is the story of a WWI vet and doctor, James Delaney, living the best life he can in New York City during the Depression. His world is populated with traumatized vets, gangsters, Tammany Hall holdovers who knew his father, bohemians and radicals, recent Italian and Irish immigrants, and the poor of New York City. Dr. Delaney meant to be a surgeon, but was wounded in the hand during the war and had to become a regular doctor instead. His wife has disappeared and no one is sure whether she is alive or dead, his painter daughter deposits his two year old Spanish-speaking grandson on his doorstep and takes off for Europe in pursuit of her husband, who may or may not be a Communist bomber, his patients can’t afford to pay him, and a psychotic gangster may be out to get him. And yet, somehow this is also the quiet story of a man finally putting his life back together and reconnecting with the world after the unexpected arrival of his little grandson.

I loved this book. I loved the people in it, even the bad ones. Pete Hamill is such a colorful writer, and you can feel his love of New York City, of the people who lived there and the city’s history on every page. Two scenes in particular stuck in my mind. First, one little detail, but the details are what make the story, right? James goes in to a store to buy his grandson a book, and when he selects Babar, the clerk says “You know that’s just Colonialist propaganda, right?”

Second, when he takes his grandson’s nanny to the Roseland Ballroom to go dancing (sidenote: watching James and Rose's relationship slowly change over the course of the book is one of the many pleasures of the story) a man gets up and starts to sing “Brother Can You Spare a Dime.” Hamill’s description of the crowd stopping their dancing and singing along, getting more and more into the song and its story of broken promises, failed dreams and hard times, perfectly reflects the anger and hopelessness that characterized American life back then. So much was changing, and so many people felt so powerless and betrayed, and well, it was just a really powerful and well written scene.

Both of these books get my highest recommendation! Two flippers up, or whatever penguin appendage seems most appropriate.