Author: Barbara Kingsolver
I had great luck in December with picking books that were both really intelligent and totally engrossing. I spent three hours in bed one morning last week, ignoring my kids, and getting lost in the life Harrison Shepherd, a boy whose growing-up years alternate between military schools near his American father and the kitchens of his Mexican mother's rich boyfriends. As a teenager he becomes first a plaster-mixer, then a cook, and finally a secretary for muralist Diego Rivera, and befriends Frida Kahlo. After working for Trotsky, Shepherd returns to America, where he becomes an author of historical potboilers, and finds that he can't escape his past... until he finds a lacuna.
Kingsolver must have done an inordinate amount of research in writing The Lacuna. She has an intimate knowledge of Rivera, Kahlo, Trotsky, McCarthyism, and the writing style of small-town newspapers in the 1940s and 1950s. The result is a completely enjoyable read with a satisfying, if surprising ending.
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Barbara Kingsolver is speaking at a writers' conference Mexico in February 2010. Does anyone know anything about it? Someone mentioned in a reading group that she is going to speak and lead workshops at a conference. Does anyone know anything about it? Thanks. I want to go!
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