Park Hill Community Bookstore suggests wartime drama, dark humor

Each week as part of SunLit — The Sun’s literature section — we feature staff recommendations from book stores across Colorado. This week, the staff from the Park Hill Community Bookstore in Denver recommends tales of unsung WWII heroes, comic Western assassins and a family of cannibals.

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From the publisher: Bletchley Park was a well-kept secret during World War II, operating under the code name Station X. The critical work of code-cracking Nazi missives that went on behind its closed doors could determine a victory or loss against Hitler’s army. Amidst the brilliant cryptographers, flamboyant debutantes, and absent-minded professors working there, it was teenaged girls who kept Station X running. Some could do advanced math, while others spoke a second language. They ran the unwieldy bombe machines, made sense of wireless sound waves, and sorted the decoded messages. They were expected to excel in their fields and most importantly: know how to keep a secret.

From Linda Baie, volunteer coordinator: Fleming follows 10 specific girls as they arrive, find challenges in their billets and in their work, some working in codes and ciphers, some working with the later “bombe” machines, and well into the war, the newly created “colossus” machines. Each one is 20 or younger. One is a debutante who took the invitation as a chance to skip her debutante coming out! One young woman, through constant work beside another worker, a man, eventually married him, though each never revealed all of their secret work. 

The book is tension-filled as the workers rush as quickly as possible to solve messages and to help those in power improve their plans of attack when learning about the enemies’ plans, right up to Hitler’s orders. Although all were proud to be helpful, they often realized that any attack, even successful, meant lives lost. Parts of the London Blitz felt especially sad to read about. Many photos are added within the text that illuminate the telling.

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From the publisher: Hermann Kermit Warm is going to die. The enigmatic and powerful man known only as the Commodore has ordered it, and his henchmen, Eli and Charlie Sisters, will make sure of it. Though Eli doesn’t share his brother’s appetite for whiskey and killing, he’s never known anything else. But their prey isn’t an easy mark, and on the road from Oregon City to Warm’s gold-mining claim outside Sacramento, Eli begins to question what he does for a living — and whom he does it for.

With “The Sisters Brothers,” Patrick deWitt pays homage to the classic Western, transforming it into an unforgettable comic tour de force. Filled with a remarkable cast of characters-losers, cheaters, and ne’er-do-wells from all stripes of life — and told by a complex and compelling narrator — it is a violent, lustful odyssey through the underworld of the 1850s frontier that beautifully captures the humor, melancholy, and grit of the Old West and two brothers bound by blood, violence, and love.

From Sheryl Hartmann, volunteer:  I normally avoid western-themed books — probably because I had to watch episode after episode of “Gunsmoke” with my grandparents when I was growing up. In any case, “The Sisters Brothers” is unlike any book I’ve read. It’s a western yes, but the protagonists are exceptionally literate and capable of stunning moral insights. Apparently the author was inspired by a Time-Life book on the California Gold Rush that he found at a yard sale. In 2018 the book was made into a movie starring John C. Reilly and Joaquin Phoenix as the Sisters brothers. It was directed by the well-known French director Jacques Audiard. If the movie had been directed by the Coen brothers I might be tempted to watch it because it seems to me that they’re the only directors who could do justice to the characters and the mood of the narrative.

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From the publisher: Seventh Seltzer has done everything he can to break from the past, but in his overbearing, narcissistic mother’s last moments he is drawn back into the life he left behind. At her deathbed, she whispers in his ear the two words he always knew she would: “Eat me.”

This is not unusual, as the Seltzers are Cannibal-Americans, a once proud and thriving ethnic group, but for Seventh, it raises some serious questions, both practical and emotional. Of practical concern, his dead mother is six-foot-two and weighs about four hundred and fifty pounds. Even divided up between Seventh and his eleven brothers, that’s a lot of red meat. Plus Second keeps kosher, Ninth is vegan, First hated her, and Sixth is dead. To make matters worse, even if he can wrangle his brothers together for a feast, the Can-Am people have assimilated, and the only living Cannibal who knows how to perform the ancient ritual is their Uncle Ishmael, whose erratic understanding of their traditions leads to conflict.

Irreverent and written with Auslander’s incomparable humor, “Mother for Dinner” is an exploration of legacy, assimilation, the things we owe our families, and the things we owe ourselves.

From Sheryl Hartmann, volunteer: I first heard about Shalom Auslander when I read his article in The Jewish Chronicle entitled “The 10 classic types of Jew, and how to decide which one you are.” Since I love humor about cultural stereotypes I decided to read some of Auslander’s fiction. “Mother for Dinner” is gruesome and hilarious; irreverent and yet poignant; satirical and, in some places, quite sincere. The arguments Seventh has with Ninth (who is a vegan) about what counts as “eating” provoked convulsive laughter.

I read “Mother for Dinner” before Auslander’s new book “Feh” came out. He’s been on a book tour lately and I’ve heard him interviewed on “Fresh Air” and on Yascha Mounk’s “The Good Fight.” It’s on my hold list at the library.

Type of Story: Review

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