Arlene Sanders                                                                         BOOK REVIEWS                             My credentials (professional, academic and other) for being a book reviewer:                                                              NONE I read about 75 books a year for personal enjoyment.  If I can't get "into" a book in the first 30 or 40 pages, I quit.  Therefore, I review only books that I like, so you won't find any mean and hateful book reviews here.        My only reason for writing reviews is to share my love of books with you. These are the ones I love most of all:                                                      Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier                               Papillion, Henri Charrière                               The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James                               Gone With the Wind, Margaret Mitchell                               My Cousin Rachel, Daphne du Maurier                               Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë                               Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë                               The Onion Field, Joseph Wambaugh                               Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck                               The Postman Always Rings Twice, James M. Cain                               Holocaust, Gerald Green                               The Winds of War, War and Remembrance,                                       Herman Wouk                               The Diary of Anne Frank                               Schindler's List, Thomas Keneally                               Child of God, Cormac McCarthy                               The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje                               Out of Africa, Isak Dinesen                               The Color Purple, Alice Walker                               The Two, Irving Wallace and Amy Wallace                               The Elephant Man, Ashley Montagu                               The Stranger Beside Me, Ann Rule                               The Phantom Prince, Elizabeth Kendall                               Tomorrow They Will Kiss, Eduardo Santiago                                                              *       *       * Tomorrow They Will Kiss by Eduardo Santiago EDUARDO SANTIAGO, in my opinion, eventually will win the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished fiction by an American author, and he may be the next writer of Cuban descent to do so.  Tomorrow They Will Kiss is right up there with other Pulitzer winners.  Santiago is young, and he has talent and dedication.  And so it is, I believe, only a matter of time. Graciela, Caridad and Imperio -- Cuban women in exile -- work in a doll factory in New Jersey.  Santiago segues back to Cuba throughout the novel, so we can see the life they left during the Cuban Revolution and understand what they're up against in the U.S.  Graciela deals with her frustrations just like American women do -- by losing herself in TV soap operas. What older American has never escaped into radio soaps, including the one that asked the question, "Can this girl from the little mining town in the West find happiness as the wife of a wealthy and titled Englishman?" (Our Gal Sunday in the 1940s.)  What younger American has never lost herself in The Guiding Light, All My Children or Dallas? Like these beloved sagas, Santiago's Tomorrow They Will Kiss will capture your interest, challenge your beliefs and break your heart. Graciela's coping skills -- in Cuba -- were superb.  When she decided to marry the scholarly and recently widowed Ernesto de la Cruz, she wasted no time: "It's sort of like a shotgun wedding," Imperio said, "except in this case it's the bride who is holding the shotgun." Then we learn that: Ernesto didn't make a lot of money, and Graciela wanted things. But things were scarce and the black market was expensive. So she set herself up as a manicurist and was very successful at it, because she rendered the best Cuban half-moons in town. The Cuban half-moon was a pearly-colored crescent painted with precision exactly where the nail met the cuticle.  Graciela was masterful at it, an artist.  When she did our nails it looked as if all our fingers were smiling. But few were smiling inside Castro's Cuba.  Imperio tells us: There were those who were desperate to leave the country, those who hated the people who were leaving the country, and the rest of us, who were caught in the middle. People like me were frozen with fear and indecision.  We were not the sort of people who dreamed of a life in other parts of the country, let alone the world.  We were born in Palmagria and, in spite of its problems and defects, we expected to die there, be buried there, and spend the reset of eternity there. That's the way it had always been.  Occasionally someone ventured out, driven by some strange desire that no one could understand.  But for the most part, we stayed. It was easier for the wealthy to get out, they had always kept one foot in Cuba and another abroad.  It was not unusual for them to have a big house in Cuba and another in Miami Beach. They sent their children to universities in Spain or the United States.  They were used to entertaining foreigners who came to visit in yachts and private airplanes. For the very poor, there was no decision to be made at all. Very few had the education or even the mentality to consider going to another country and learning another language.  They could barely get along where they were born.  Besides, the new administration was all about them.  There were slogans on walls now offering them a brighter future.  There were organizations dedicated to their care.  Politicos of humble backgrounds, who had risen to prominence only after the Revolution, made fervent speeches, telling the poor that it was time to rise up out of their pitiful lives and take their rightful place in society. Every day these new saints of the people served themselves up as examples of the new success. You couldn't leave the house without running into some sort of demonstration.  Banners and flags appeared everywhere. Uniformed men and women became so common that after a while we hardly took notice of them.  They walked around rigidly, their faces set hard with responsibility.  They always saluted us as we walked by.  They demanded respect.  They were not friendly people, these rebel soldiers.  They didn't smile, they didn't dance; it was as if, suddenly, they had stopped being Cubans.  As if something hard and harsh had invaded their souls. Tomorrow They Will Kiss is a great read, and I can almost guarantee you will love it. You will love it because in this novel you will find not only yourself, but also your parents, your cousins, and the friends you grew up with.  One of the things I admire about this writer is his ability to make people from an entirely different culture (from mine) seem just like people I have always known. And ladies, you are in for a treat, because this is a novel by that rarity in the male- dominated world of great literature: a male writer who truly understands women and appreciates us in spite of the faults -- if any -- we may have. Buy this book and read it soon.  You will laugh, cry and delight in your discovery of EDUARDO SANTIAGO, a man who is becoming one of the great writers of our time. Tomorrow They Will Kiss by Eduardo Santiago, www.amazon.com                                                                              www.RockPointBooks.com                                                                    *       *       *                       The Piano Man by Marcia Preston This one, you pick it up, you won't put it down until you finish.  It's that good.  At first, the premise didn't seem promising to me: Teenaged boy dies in car crash, mother donates boy's heart, mother meets man who gets heart.   Farfetched, I grumbled until I got into the book -- and Preston can drop you into her stories with the speed of a greased guillotine. No.  The story is not farfetched.  Not futuristic.  Organ donation is a choice, for you and for me, right here and now. Marcia Preston writes with a gracefulness you rarely see anymore.  Anne Morrow Lindbergh comes to mind.  Rachel Carson.  Anita Shreve.  Margaret Atwood: Just when she thought he  must be asleep, she heard another sound, something she hadn't memorized.  A soft plucking, then a hum.  A few thin walls, like the cry of a cat. She held her breath. The silvery strain of a violin slid through the dark, the music breathing, full of grace.  Her mouth opened, airless. She pictured him laying open the black case.  Finding the three packs of cigarettes she had tucked around the curved edges of the violin. Frowning at the symphony brochure she'd slipped beneath the strings. She saw him lifting the violin with two hands, like a baby.  Tuning it. The polished wood gleaming gold in the lamplight.  She felt its coolness beneath his chin, so familiar and right.  The tautness of the strings beneath his fingers. Listening wide-eyed in the dark, her hair full of tears, she felt the pull of the bow across her hollow bones. Preston's prose is lively, too, and I like the way she counterpoints with unexpected verbs: Four cars prickled in the sun. . . She turned away from the windows and her slippers whispered down the carpeted stairs. . . Chilled air curled around her feet. . . Traffic sizzled past in four lanes and streetlights erased the darkness. I love the way she uses shadow and light: There was a shimmering, transparent at first.  It thickened like ice and took on color, until finally she could see his face. ~~~ . . .he'd tried to write a song of his own, sitting at the kitchen table with a score sheet improvised from notebook paper.  But a gray light had fallen across the lined page and suddenly he'd seen himself as if from a distance -- the failed musician, pathetic and sad. ~~~ Lightning silvered the rooftops and trees tossed in a rising wind. Through the foggy glass, Claire saw a vision of a small lake, with sunshine and willows overhead.  A man whose face she couldn't see stood beside the water. . . .  She walked toward him as if she were wading through water, and reached out her hand. ~~~ Outdoors, a pristine sunlight cast crisp shadows across his path and fractured the desert colors into a dozen subtle shades. ~~~ He often went out to the deck at night when it was abandoned and sat in a wooden chair beneath the stars.  From there he could see the mountains in the distance, their snow-dusted tops incandescent with moonlight. Tonight he lit a cigarette and leaned his forearms on the deck railing, watching the lightning that flashed in the hills. But her prose style never gets in the way of the story -- a tightrope to walk, as all of us know, and one of Preston's many fine achievements as a writer. In The Piano Man, Preston faces head-on and, with remarkable strength, deals with I imagine to be the very worst tragedy that any human being could suffer: the death of her or his own child.  And then. . .sign papers to take him off life support and donate his heart to a waiting recipient? Could I do this?  Could you? To her great credit, Preston does not present Claire O'Neal, who has lost her 17-year-old son, as a shining example of courage and grace under pressure.  (And a pox on women like that anyway.)  On the contrary, Claire falls apart and nearly gives up -- just like the rest of us would. On the first page, I was hooked, stayed hooked to the end, and left this wonderful novel eagerly looking forward to Ms. Preston's next one. The Piano Man by Marcia Preston, ISBN 0-7783-2226-2, www.MIRABooks.com                                                                                             www.RockPointBooks.com                                                               *       *       * Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier The opening line is famous, but I didn’t know that the first time I read it (I was about 14). I just remember that the magic began with that first line: Last night, I dreamt I went to Manderly again. . . . The girl is young, clumsy, exquisitely sensitive. An impoverished relative of a wealthy and boorish social climber, Mrs. Van Hopper, she makes her living as the older woman's companion.   Maxim de Winter, handsome, fabulously rich, and the owner of Manderly, one of the finest estates in England, crosses paths with the women in Monte Carlo. As the girl falls crazy in love with de Winter, revealing herself as the most flaming romantic in all of British literature, she sees him like this: He belonged to a walled city of the fifteenth century, a city of narrow, cobbled streets, and thin spires, where the inhabitants wore pointed shoes and worsted hose. His face was arresting, sensitive, medieval in some strange inexplicable way, and I was reminded of a portrait seen in a gallery I had forgotten where, of a certain Gentleman Unknown. And like this: Could one but rob him of his English tweeds, and put him in black, with lace at this throat and wrists, he would stare down at us in our new world from a long distant past—a past where men walked cloaked at night, and stood in the shadow of old doorways, a past of narrow stairways and dim dungeons, a past of whispers in the dark, of shimmering rapier blades, of silent, exquisite courtesy. (I thought I was a romantic!) However, I never saw him the way she did. Even as a teenager, I thought de Winter was a horse’s ass and a male chauvinist pig if ever there was one, and to this day, I don't understand what women see in him: “So Mrs. Van Hopper has had enough of Monte Carlo,” he said, “and now she wants to go home. So do I. She to New York and I to Manderly. Which would  you prefer? You can take your choice.” “Don’t make a joke about it, it’s unfair,” I said, “and I think I had better see about those tickets, and say good-bye now.” “If you think I’m one of the people who try to be funny at breakfast, you’re  wrong,” he said. “I’m invariably ill-tempered in the early morning. I repeat to you, the choice is open to you. Either you go to America with Mrs. Van Hopper or you come home to Manderly with me.” "Do you mean you want a secretary or something?” “No, I’m asking you to marry me, you little fool.”                                               [Prick!] Then this: "So that's settled, isn't it?" he said, going on with his toast and marmalade; "instead of being companion to Mrs. Van Hopper you become mine, and your duties will be almost exactly the same. I also like new library books, and flowers in the drawing-room, and bezique after dinner. And someone to pour out my tea. . .and you must never let me run out of my particular brand of toothpaste."                                                                                             [Prick!]                (Women certainly don't want male chauvinist swine as employers, but we accept them as husbands and lovers, because mostly that's all there is, so we have to make do.)         The spirit of Rebecca herself -- the first Mrs. de Winter -- pervades the novel like a gathering storm, a painful presence for the young woman Maxim marries after Rebecca's death.  Although du Maurier gave the second Mrs. de Winter an inner life of extraordinary richness and depth, the author did not give her a name. When I learned that she didn’t have a name, I gave her mine, and she became me. I think she is simply every romantic woman who ever read this remarkable novel.   Rebecca, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, is also my favorite film. Joan Fontaine brilliant as the second Mrs. de Winter; Laurence Olivier absolute perfection as Max. This film was released in 1940, so don't see it in a theatre filled with college students, because they will snicker in the wrong places and spoil the most poignant scenes for you. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, www.Amazon.com                                                            *        *        * The Discontinuity of Small Things by Kevin Haworth The Discontinuity of Small Things is a deeply moving and beautifully written novel, one of the best I've read in a long time.  A striking difference between Kevin Haworth’s book and other Holocaust literature is the degree of realism his work brings to readers whose lives were never directly touched by the Holocaust.   When I read some of the other novels, I felt so numbed and shocked that I could’t believe what I “saw.”  It was horrifying, but didn't seem believable. I couldn't relate to it -- not only because I'm not Jewish, but also because I've never experienced war firsthand. The Discontinuity of Small Things, which focuses not on the unspeakable horrors of the Holocaust, but on the hardships of daily life -- a preview of what was to come -- is    different.  What Haworth wrote seems real.  This I can see happening.  I can see it happening here in the U. S., too, and if it does, our experience may be much like that of the Danes during the 1940 German invasion and continuing occupation of their country.   Awareness dawns slowly for Bakman.  Nazi propaganda pamphlets rain down from the sky.  And “Bakman has heard—where he has heard he can’t quite remember...it comes like a change of weather—that there are places in Europe where Jews clean the streets.   Dragged from their shops, scrubbing the pavement on their hands and knees.  Not in Denmark, of course.  These things would never happen in Denmark.” Carl Jensen, a fisherman in the village of Gilleleje, facing economic ruin during the occupation, feels desperate: The sea smelled rich and hungry.  If that plank sprung a leak now, if the tar holding it melted or if he caught his sweater in the net and got pulled over the sea would swallow him and his body would not return to the shore.   He would disappear....  The salt water lapped against the side of the boat.  It called to him.  It would be easy. When Jette, Carl’s wife, can endure hardship no longer, she tells him she will leave on t he eleven a.m. train [to] Copenhagen: [Carl] put down his bread and its stingy trace of butter and said simply, No.                      No? No.                                                 Jette looked at him and said, No, there is no eleven a.m. [to Copenhagen] or No I will not be found on that train? No, he repeated. . . . She looked around her at their tiny house, at the small bedroom where she had slept alone six nights a week for more than twenty years while Carl was fishing in the Sound.  She had tried to explain to Carl that leaving for Copenhagen to visit her sister was not the same as leaving him, but this was a distinction he had trouble grasping even before trains began to explode all across Denmark. . . . I am going, she said.  It is time for you either to hit me until I am unconscious or get out of the way. They stood looking at each other, each of them searching for a safe route down from the precipice of that last statement. The “small things” began to pile up: [Bakman] had never felt the war so presently as today. Each moment of the war until this day had been only a small adjustment: cold water instead of lukewarm in his shower, ersatz coffee instead of real, and milk only on occasion.  A small stockpiling of incident... . But today—seeing the mound of small weaponry at a fashionable square—Bakman knows that something vital has changed....  The dream of a simpler, purer Denmark, lovely country by the sea, has passed him by. The characters seem as real as your family and friends.  They are ordinary people who find within themselves extraordinary courage.   The Discontinuity of Small Things by Kevin Haworth, www.Amazon.com