Book Reviews

June 22, 2011 Ann Patchett first made bestseller lists with her transcendent 2001 novel, Bel Canto, the story of an international group of businessmen, diplomats, and politicians—and one opera diva—who are held hostage by terrorists in the vice-presidential palace of an unnamed Latin American country. In State of Wonder, Patchett returns to the jungle, this time to the central Amazon basin, a vast but impenetrable landscape where the air “is heavy enough to be bitten and chewed,” and insects fly “with unimaginable velocity into the eyes and mouths and noses” of human beings. There’s a magnificent chapter set in an opera house and the kind of chaotic market scene that’s more or less required of a novel set in an equatorial country, but the real point of this book is to get its protagonist, Dr. Marina Singh, out of suburbia, away from her phone, and into “the beating heart of nowhere”—a jungle teeming with spiders, snakes, quicksand, and cannibals. Patchett will discuss State of Wonder at the Nashville Public Library on June 28, 6:15 p.m., as part of the Salon@615 series.

June 20, 2011 In The Ranger, veteran crime writer Ace Atkins brings disturbingly to life a Mississippi that is a gothic green hell of ignorance and corruption. Set in fictional Tibbehah County (think Yoknapatawpha thrust into the twenty-first century), the novel introduces Quinn Colson, on leave from yet another combat tour in Afghanistan to bury his uncle, the county sheriff. What Colson finds at home just ain’t right, and he intends to set things straight. Ace Atkins will read from The Ranger on June 21 at 6 p.m. at The Booksellers at Laurelwood in Memphis.