By Jim Ewing
Special to The Clarion-Ledger

On one level, The Marauders, a first novel by Tom Cooper, is the story of a treasure seeker with a metal detector looking for the buried bounty of Jean Lafitte.

Set in the fictional town of Jeanette in the Bataria region north of New Orleans where the famous pirate once roamed, it also is a realistic and detailed tale of despair among shrimpers and others who make their living from the water in the days after the twin tragedies of the Gulf Oil Spill and Hurricane Katrina.

In that way, The Marauders provides a fictional base for an all-too-real reality: the destruction of people’s homes, families, livelihoods due to natural and man-made disasters.

The plot is carried along by five sets of characters:
— Wes, a young man, and his father who lost their mother/wife to the storm surge of Katrina;
— Two felonious small-time hustlers who are seeking to rob and swindle their way to wealth;
— A set of monstrously evil twin brothers and their secret island of illegal marijuana;
— A miserable representative of the oil company trying get his former neighbors to sign on to a cut-rate settlement, hating himself for it and hating the region he has been trying to put behind him;
— The treasure-seeker, Lindquist, a one-armed man addicted to pain pills and living in the wreckage remaining from his broken marriage.

In the tradition of John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row, Cooper with The Marauders uses fiction to expose to the public the grinding inequities and institutional unfairness facing a people trying to make do with less and less in a world where every card is seemingly dealt against them.

That story, in real life, is still playing out — witness the recent news stories where BP attorneys are disputing U.S. Justice Department claims that the accident “caused serious and widespread sociocultural harm to coastal communities.”

On a more symbolic note, the one-armed man, Lindquist, is a Gulf Coast Everyman desperately trying against all odds to find something valuable and good in the muck and ruin of a world breaking bad.

But to readers The Marauders is a good read filled with believable characters of the type found in this region. The suspense builds as the lives of those characters entwine with sometimes predictable and sometimes surprising results.

There are some criticisms that can be made. The plot moves slowly as Cooper spends a great deal of time building such a relatively large cast of main characters that exemplify the various facets of circumstances and despair arising from the disasters.

Then, some readers not familiar with the region might need that amount of detail. It’s well written and only slows the pace a bit. Too, Cooper could have added some layers of depth to the characters. More accomplished authors learn to weave small details that give nuance to relationships.  But these are minor flaws that come with time, and polish.

As a first novel set in New Orleans and environs, Cooper’s Marauders shines for its local flavor, colorful characters and picturesque scenes. Let’s hope Cooper continues to write more thrillers set in this locale for many years to come By the way, The Marauders would make a dynamite movie!

Jim Ewing, a former writer and editor at The Clarion-Ledger, is the author of seven books including Conscious Food: Sustainable Growing, Spiritual Eating, and the forthcoming Redefining Manhood: A Guide for Men and Those Who Love Them, Spring 2015. Jim is a regular contributor to the Lemuria blog. 

Whatever you choose to call it- Grit Lit, Country Noir, Southern Gothic (on the wrong side of the tracks), I love it. I was thrilled to get my hands on the advance reading copy of Where All Light Tends to Go by David Joy. I am also thrilled to be able to meet tonight an author who, in my opinion, will join the ranks of Daniel Woodrell, Larry Brown, Ron Rash and Tom Franklin.

Jacob McNeely is resigned to the fact that he is stuck. He is not only stuck in the town he lives in but also the lifestyle that his family has led for generations. His family history is full of outlaws, bootleggers and currently the business of crystal methamphetamine; his father is a dealer and his mother is an addict.  The one good thing in his life is his life-long love, Maggie.  To Jacob, Maggie represents everything good in the world and he will do anything to keep her from being “stuck” in their home town.

He has worked for his father since he was young and knows the business inside and out.  One night, things go terribly wrong with a job his father sent him on and he begins to learn that things and people  aren’t always who and what they seem to be.  This a beautifully written book full of brutality and love; and I found myself cheering for Jacob to find his way.

This is a must read for 2015.

Written by Maggie

You might have noticed that things look….well, completely different. Allow me to introduce you to the new Lemuria website and blog hybrid- where the two separate entities have finally become one beautiful marriage of books waiting to be given a good home, and our (sometimes crazy and scattered) thoughts about what we’re reading. Website, meet book lover. Book lover, meet new website. We will no longer be posting on the old blog (rest in peace), so reconfigure your RSS feed, reset your bookmarks tab, or do whatever you need to in order to stick with us as we continue blogging in this awesome new space. Allons-y!

NOTE: This blog contains spoilers to the film.  Avert your eyes and go see the film before continuing.

The final chapter of the Hobbit came out in theaters and I liked this one the best out of the 3 films.  I liked it the most because it was most true to the book, but only in the sense that 90% of the film was briefly recounted to Bilbo after the battle by Gandalf.  Bilbo was knocked unconscious and slept through the entire battle in the book.  The sloppy way they added the elves to the film and a few lazy love interests (no the least of which was Bilbo and Thorin’s bedroom eyes they kept giving each other) made the Tolkien-nerd inside me angry.  The last thing I was disappointed about what the lack of Tolkien’s  songs that made it to the film.  The Dwarves singing in Bilbo’s house are the only songs in the trilogy.  I felt like cutting all of the songs from the films was a bad move especially because it made sense with the tone of the films and kids movies should always have songs in them in my opinion.

 
On to what I liked about the film: the battle with the Necromancer is great.  Watching Saruman, Elrond and Galadriel kick Sauron’s ass is great- if a little short.  I would have loved to give them some more camera time.  Finally, the death of Smaug is epic!  The way he wrecks Lake Town is beautifully done and Smaug looks exactly how I imagined him in my head.  I felt they really captured how massive and terrifying he was.  The battle of the 5 armies is well done and the Scottish dwarves riding their war pigs was awesome.   Even though they dragged this book into a trilogy I can forgive them because they brought my favorite book of my childhood to the big screen and did a good job of it.  Thank you Peter Jackson, now put the franchise down and walk away.

Written by Daniel 

A “matter of extreme emergency”: whether or not to allow a leukemic child of 17 and his parents to refuse life-saving blood transfusions is the dilemma for Fiona Maye, a Justice in Family Matters of the High Court. Heady stuff for any philosopher or writer, indeed. From the deft McEwan imagination comes our protagonist Fiona, a 59 year old intelligent, childless, still beautiful, married woman of the law who sensitively addresses the dilemma by interviewing both parents and Adam. The parents’ religion prohibits the use of blood products. Adam, rational, sensitive, and articulate, agrees with them. But the High Court can overrule Adam and his parents’ decision since Adam is not yet 18. It’s relatively easy to guess how Fiona will decide, especially for frequent readers of legal thrillers; but The Children Act is a tense story of moral conflicts that can teeter either way when life, death and religious freedom intersect. The aftermath of Fiona’s decision is where we get hooked into the narrative and befriend Fiona, who has presided over equally painful issues in her judgeship in the High Court.

This reader did balk at McEwan’s rendering of Fiona’s husband as man who would announce to his wife that he intends to have an affair but hasn’t done so yet, but the author succeeds with other strategic characters like Adam and his parents with much greater subtlety and discretion.

McEwen deals with quite a few issues in this book that, to this reader at least, require a thicker or longer narrative.  Raising children versus professional ambition, open marriage versus a stagnant monogamy, adolescent infatuation with a much older woman bordering on obsession in a story already driven by religious choice versus the state’s responsibility toward minors.  In spite of this, the book keeps us entertained, guessing and surprised because McEwan can turn ideas into literary magic just as he did in Atonement and Amsterdam, some years back.

The Children Act by Ian McEwan will be available to purchase in paperback on April 28, 2015.

Written by Pat