Are You Sleeping by Kathleen Barber

Are You Sleeping by Galesburg native Kathleen Barber is a compulsively readable psychological thriller. It started a little slow for me but by chapter 5 I was fully engrossed.

Narrator Josie Buhrman has changed her name and is trying to escape from her family history. Her professor father was murdered 13 years earlier. After the conviction of the teenager next door for the murder, Josie’s mother fled to join a cult and Josie suffered a terrible break with her twin sister.

But Josie can no longer escape because a journalist has brought the crime back into the news. A series of podcasts challenges the guilty verdict, suggests someone else might be to blame, and stirs up family secrets. The podcasts catch the fancy of the public and become a social media sensation. Josie leaves her home in New York to travel to her hometown in Illinois to attend a family funeral and finds herself in the middle of the controversy. Josie’s hometown, Elm Park, is a lot like Galesburg. It’s a small city in the Midwest anchored by a liberal arts college.

Are You Sleeping is not a perfect book but I rate it a solid four stars. I would never have guessed it was Barber’s first book. The narrative flows smoothly and the plot makes you want to keep reading so you can find out what happened. Josie rather foolishly thinks she can keep her past from her partner, to a point that strained credulity for me. However, Barber’s secondary characters are flawed, fleshed out, and believable. Josie's cousin Ellen is particularly both likable and unlikable and convincing. The ending didn’t stun but I was in doubt about who murdered the professor almost until the end.

The title was a good one – it had me singing Frère Jacques in my head, which kept me thinking about and wanting to get back to the book. The plot line about the podcasts and their popularity on social media was extremely believable; it made me wonder about other people whose lives have been damaged by sensational reporting.

Galesburg readers who enjoy psychological thrillers and mysteries will want to get their hands on a copy of Are You Sleeping. The book can be purchased at Stone Alley Books & Collectibles.

 Author Kathleen Barber will be at the Galesburg Public Library on Thursday, September 14 at 7:00 pm to discuss, sell, and sign copies of her book. In addition, the Tuesday/Thursday Book Clubs will discuss Are You Sleeping on Tuesday, September 12 from 1:00-2:00 pm and Thursday, September 14, from 6:00-7:00 pm. All readers are welcome to join either discussion at the library.

Kitchens of the Great Midwest by J. Ryan Stradal

Kitchens of the Great Midwest is a series of short stories set in the Midwest all loosely connected to one main character and to food. I don’t normally care for this kind of narrative, but at least Kitchens of the Great Midwest moves forward chronologically instead of jumping around in time.

I found it slow starting but really enjoyed it once I got into it. Chapters are set in Minnesota, Illinois, Iowa, and South Dakota. Sad things happen, and touching things, but there is joy as well. We see inside the heads of a variety of Midwesterners, all of whom have a deep connection to food. Some recipes are included, and the plot is very up to date with the latest foodie trends.

I was left wondering what happened to some of the characters we met in various chapters and heard little or nothing more about, but that’s a sign of a well written short story. I do wish the book had a character chart, because I’m sure I missed some of the connections in the final chapter (which brings many of the characters together).

The book serves as a sort of recipe itself – a recipe for the life of one child born in the Midwest to Midwesterners whose life is focused on food.

I recommend Kitchens of the Great Midwest most for foodies from the Midwest, but other lovers of quirky literary fiction should also give it a try.

I read an advance reader copy of Kitchens of the Great Midwest. It is available at the Galesburg Public Library in print and electronic format.

Unlike some of my friends and coworkers, I was not a huge Laura Ingalls Wilder fan growing up. I read the Little House books, but I don’t remember them having a big impact on my childhood reading. Laura Ingalls Wilder is woven into the literary mystery that is the plot of Bich Minh Nguyen’s novel Pioneer Girl.

Narrator Lee Lien is the daughter of two Vietnamese immigrants. Her father is dead; her mother and grandfather run a restaurant in the Chicago suburbs. Lee has disappointed her mother by getting a PhD in literature instead of something more practical. She continues to disappoint her mother by searching for work in her field, instead of resigning herself to the family business.

Lee is jealous of her older brother, who she sees as her mother’s favorite, and complains about her mother constantly. The family has an heirloom and a story. In 1965 a woman named Rose visited her grandfather’s café in Saigon and left behind a small gold pin. The pin sounds like a gift given to Laura Ingalls Wilder by her fiancé and described in one Wilder’s books. Lee becomes obsessed with trying to discover whether the Rose from the family story was Wilder’s daughter Rose.

There are some great passages in Pioneer Girl. There is a spot-on description of American “Chinese” buffets at the start of Chapter Three and this musing on small towns in the Midwest:

Mansfield, Missouri reminded me of how the past will not be banished. So many small, dying, basically dead towns in the Midwest looked like this. Where once-graceful, ornate courthouses and libraries – back when libraries meant something important, something civic – had been, if not torn down or boarded up, converted dozens of times over into shops and offices and apartments and barely surviving historical societies. There might even be the remains of an ambitious opera house. The nicest building in town was likely to be a funeral home.

Main Street had been built broad, to accommodate horses, buggies, and hitching posts. And surely local efforts tried to preserve the “historic downtown” area. Surely there were sad little parades on Memorial Day or the Fourth of July. In Mansfield a few local “shoppes” offered “olde-fashioned ice cream” and “sewing notions,” but it looked like most of the money was flowing in and out of the paycheck advance and pawn shops. (p. 140)

Still, I had some issues with the novel. The narrator is not very likeable. In addition to being a whiner, she is a thief. While doing research, she steals a photograph, a letter and a book. She talks about racism, ignorance about Asian culture, and stereotyping, but she herself stereotypes, and not in a self-aware manner.

A small band of researchers squinted over Hoover’s notes and newspapers, setting up cameras on tabletop tripods to record their findings. They were a standard lot – frumpy and frowning, pallid and disheveled. (p. 76)

At times I felt that the author was judging the Midwest and finding it wanting (and once the narrator refers to the University of Illinois as “UI,” something no true U of I graduate would ever do). There is a random, out-the-blue sex scene between Lee and someone she just met that seemed pointless.

However, especially in light of recent high profile cases in the U.S. of unarmed black men being killed by white police officers, the themes of this book are quite timely, and I loved the book’s cover. If you are a fan of literary mysteries or novels dealing with stereotyping and race in America, you may find Pioneer Girl an interesting read.