Author: Andres Kabel

An English-language remake of that rousing, funny French film, La Famille Belier, “CODA” hews closely to the original but still strikes a fresh chord. CODA stands for Child of Deaf Adults, and in this telling, Ruby is the only hearing member of a four-person fishing family in Massachusetts. The three deaf family members are superbly played: the seemingly gruff father, the insular mother, the rebellious son. But it is Ruby’s movie, her love of family clashing with an instinctive love of music that finds expression with her untutored voice. Eugenio Derbez is pitch perfect as the new music teacher who takes Ruby under his wing. Of course a movie like has a familiar trajectory, and the ending is calculated to wring out a tear, but Sian Heder’s screenplay and direction are strong and intelligent enough to make it all work. In a pandemic world, CODA is an antidote, a reminder that dreams can be real.

Sebastian Faulks’s fifteenth novel, “Snow Country,” is like Wedgewood china, all poise and no life. Set mainly in Vienna and an Austrian psychiatric clinic in the mountains, and ranging from just before the hell of World War I up until just before World War II, the novel revolves around two characters, Anton, a young man determined to become a journalist, and Lena, dirt-poor and isolated in a rural village. Anton finds and loses love, Lena lurches from disaster to disaster until she ends up employed at the psych clinic, where, as we expected, she eventually meets Anton. Faulks is a wonderful stylist, able to evoke the times and the places, and the novel hums with ideas, both intellectual and poetic, but Snow Country offers a staccato plot with little tension. This reader found Lena to be a poorly scoped character, inconsistent and even silly, and although Anton looms more realistically off the page, there is little drama to his story. Overall, I estimate I have read a third of the author’s prodigious output, and Snow Country is the only one to have disappointed me.

Any new release from Mick Herron, a supremely gifted stylist, should be devoured immediately. Certainly, his Slough House spy thriller series is a genre modern classic (I raved about his previous two novels here and here). Now we are blessed with “Dolphin Junction,” a collection of eleven short stories previously found mostly in mystery magazines. The highlight is “The Last Dead Letter,” a wonderfully atmospheric tale featuring (of course) Slough House’s Jackson Lamb. Four stories star a detective duo from another Herron series, Zoë Boehm and Joe Silvermann, and these feature delightful twists as the pair deal with a stalker, a porn video, a seemingly haunted writer, and a psychotherapist’s couch. The rest are more of a mixed bag, seemingly training runs before his run of novels took off, but they all feature cunning plot revelations that will come as no surprise to Slough House fans. All up, Dolphin Junction is a clever, superior collection of crime fiction tales.

“The Final Case” is a huge departure for esteemed novelist David Guterson, marketed as a literary courtroom thriller. Plotwise, that may well be accurate, but this novel is something else entirely, a discursive, emotional journey through evil and the love of a son for his father. When a writer adrift assists his ancient lawyer father defend two conservative religious fanatics, accused of killing an Ethiopian adoptee, at first the reader sashays along with Oregon intellectual minutiae and rituals, but soon the novel heats up into a coruscating depiction of humanity’s barbarity towards itself, all the while tenderly exploring the father-son dynamics. I’m not sure I’ve ever read a novel quite like this (and I’ve read more courtroom dramas and father-son dramas than I care to remember) and it took me a while to orient my thinking, but once I was in the grip of Guterson’s spell, well, I was utterly transfixed. The writing is almost leisurely, fully happy to dwell on testimony, a setting, the Seattle ambience, our hero’s inner life, yet the urgency of the story makes for a rapid, memorable read that has stuck in my craw ever since. The Final Case is unique, essential reading.

“What Strange Paradise” is a lyrically written tale of a nine-year-old Syrian boy washed up on the shore of a Western European island (Greece? Sweden?), the only survivor of a typically hapless refugee boat, and his fraught rescue, from the clutches of vicious local police, by an outsider teenage girl. The author provides a nuanced, panoramic, and ultimately heartbreaking portrait of the travails of modern-day refugees. The cat-and-mouse struggle to escape to freedom from the island made for tense reading, and although I found a backtracking narrative of the boy’s flight and voyage less compelling, this strand boosted what I had thought was a fairly good understanding of refugee chaos. The author is a superb stylist. The son of war refugees, I was ripe for What Strange Paradise and recommend it highly.

Set in cold northern Canada, ”A Town Called Solace” intertwines the tales of Clara, a seven-year-old bereft at the disappearance of her teenage sister; newly divorced and jobless Liam, new to the town of Solace after being unexpectedly bequeathed the house next door to Clara; and Elizabeth, winding down her life in a nursing home. The novel is a gentle but forensic domestic drama, told without great urgency but in a quiet style that reveals. I found the story of Elizabeth a tad prosaic until a wonderful reveal towards the end, but Liam and Clara are unveiled with authority, and there are many enjoyable moments of subtle comedy. In the end, I felt A Town Called Solace illuminated grief and restoration. Well worth reading.