Table of Contents: The Sweet Relief of Missing Children

Author: Sarah Braunstein
Publisher/Year: Norton & Company, 2011
Synopsis: In New York City, a girl called Leonora vanishes without a trace. Years earlier and miles upstate, Goldie, a wild, negligent mother, searches for a man to help raise her precocious son, Paul, who later discovers that the only way to save his soul is to run away. As the narrative moves back and forth in time, we find deeper interconnections between these stories and growing clues about Leonora—this missing girl whose face looks out from telephone poles and billboards—whom one character will give anything to save.

Read an Excerpt

Reviews:

Boston Globe
"More than discomfiting, “Sweet Relief’’ is unrelenting, showing Braunstein to be a skilled writer who uses her deft pen to depict a joyless view of life in which the best that can be aspired to is anesthetized survival. She does it beautifully, working the reader in slowly to these interconnected lives. But it is empty artistry, an exercise in showy manipulation, and as heartless as Leonora’s abductors."

Booklist
"Through random encounters and elliptical dialogue, Braunstein locates the pain in these people’s lives and makes it shimmer."

The Portland Press Herald
"The book is brave and daring."

Oprah.com
"Sweet Relief is that rare book: a page-turner in which the plot is secondary to the brilliant, visceral portrayal of its characters."

Table of Contents: The History of Love

Author: Nicole Krauss
Publisher/Year: W.W. Norton & Company, 2005
Synopsis: Leo Gursky, an elderly Jewish man who survived World War II in Poland before coming to New York City. He's a terribly lonely man who missed out on the life he wanted to live and the woman he wanted to love, and he does something every day to try to get someone, anyone, to notice him. While in Poland, he wrote books where he named the female character after the woman he loved. Alma Singer is a 15-year old girl named after a character in her parents' favorite novel, The History of Love. Her father has died and her mother has been hired to translate The History of Love from its original Spanish. Alma and her brother, Bird, struggle to understand their world after their father's death, and Alma sets out to understand the story of this novel and the woman for whom she was named.

What Others Have To Say
Houston Chronicle
"The plot involves a book-within-a-book, with characters from one story invading the other one in Paul Auster-like fashion, and depends on some largely undigested globs of magical realism to move things along."

The Washington Post
"...involves several narrators and moves back and forth through the 20th century and around the world. But that's just for starters: It contains a lost, stolen, destroyed, found, translated and retranslated book called "The History of Love," characters named for other characters, cases of plagiarism and mistaken identity, and several crucial coincidences and chance meetings that are all maddeningly scrambled in an elliptical novel that shouldn't work but does."

The New York Times
"there's less of the earnest A-student striving that often mars Krauss's efforts to live up to her idols, especially when she's trying to be funny."

The Guardian
"Krauss is undoubtedly an entertaining, humane and intelligent writer, but this novel is just too neat and too sweet for her talent to fly freely."