Short Takes
Here If You Need Me: A True Story
By Kate Braestrup
Little, Brown, 211 pp., $23.99
When Kate Braestrup's husband, a Maine state trooper, was killed in a crash, leaving her the single parent of four lively children, she decided to adopt the hopes he had entertained for his own second career: She became a Unitarian minister, assigned as chaplain to the state's Warden Service, which swings into action whenever someone goes missing around the deep woods and frozen ponds of northern Maine.
Scenes of search and rescue as gripping as any police thriller are juxtaposed here with tender, revealing sketches of domestic life in a family shaken but not shattered by sorrow. On the job, Braestrup, "a sort of generic, ecumenical clergyperson," serves as a comforting sounding board for men and women in a stressful profession. While they search, she rescues, holding everyone together with her warmhearted common sense and offering a modest prayer whether the crisis ends well or ill. Her role as both memoirist and minister is to ponder why bad things happen to good people and, as a grieving widow, to accept that death comes for its own reasons and on its own schedule. This she does affectingly, with style and grace.
The Headmaster Ritual
By Taylor Antrim
Mariner, 309 pp., paperback, $13.95
The most sympathetic figure in this debut novel is James Wolfe, a shy and studious prep-school senior who bears the additional burden of being the headmaster's son. Through James's eyes, Taylor Antrim evokes unmercifully the miasma of adolescence: the dumb misery of parental discord, the teenage squalor of dorm life, the paralyzing crush on a girl who has hooked up with someone else, and the sadistic persecution by jocks and overprivileged bullies, which has a strangely Nietzschean effect on James's character development.
If only the author had left it at that. Unfortunately, for mysterious reasons he felt compelled not just to gild the lily but to aluminum-side it with discordant shards borrowed from other experience, other genres altogether. There is the new history teacher, troubled Dyer Martin, in search of a career and a relationship to replace the ones he blows up in the novel's prologue. And there is James's headmaster father, a onetime student radical who harbors an unhealthy obsession with North Korea, which, by the way, hovers on the brink of nuclear apocalypse with the West. Holy Holden Caulfield!
Less is more, Mr. Antrim. There is actually a noteworthy coming-of-age novel hidden somewhere in here, buried under all the potboiling melodrama.
A Year Without "Made In China": One Family's True Life Adventure in the Global Economy
By Sara Bongiorni
Wiley, 235 pp., $24.95
A couple of years ago Sara Bongiorni noticed that a lot of what she was buying came from China. In a spirit of experimentation spliced with exasperation, she decided to impose a ban. For a full year, she and her family would purchase nothing made in China. This turned out to be harder than it sounds. China, a.k.a. the world's factory, makes an awful lot of stuff Americans want: not just the toys and sneakers Bongiorni's kids lusted after, but even the replacement parts to make everything from the printer to the coffeemaker functional.
This account of her fractious family's yearlong and fairly porous embargo is reminiscent of those "reality" TV shows in which people agree to live like castaways or pioneers and then go all Euripidean when they realize that this means no microwave popcorn. The lack of a coherent purpose -- this was before product safety issues ballooned -- was transparent even to Bongiorni's 4-year-old son. "Do we not like China?" he asked her. "Are they not nice to people?"
Bongiorni offers this book as a lesson in globalization, though she's the one who needed the remedial education: Throughout most of her boycott she cheerfully bought products made in Hong Kong, thinking it was still British.
Amanda Heller is a critic and editor who lives in Newton. 
