BUTTERFLY'S CHILD * BIUTIFUL

Butterfly's Child by Angela Davis-Gardner - This is the story of what happened to the players in the story M. Butterfly, after the geisha, Butterfly, kills herself at the end of the story. She leaves a letter asking the boy's American father and the father's new wife to take the little boy and give him a good life in America. The boy, Benji, is brought to a farm in Illinois, and raised as an American, but he harbors a dream to return to Japan to find his mother's family. I loved this book. It's wonderfully written, and is a good snapshot of a time and place in middle America at the turn of the 20th century. I've loved the newer fiction written about the old far east, and this story spins around that genre. Rather than a female character in the small world of the geisha house, we've got a male character in the larger world of America and it works beautifully. At the end of the book, I recognized the name of a friend, also a noted author, Christina Askounis in the author credits, and realized that it was Christina's recommendation (ages ago on her Facebook page) to read Butterfly's Child. Thank you Christina, and thank you Angela, for writing a story in which a reader can lose herself. Those are the very best ones.

Biutiful - I wasn't sure what to expect with Biutiful, since I'd skimmed the reviews ages ago, and saw that it was highly praised and recommended. I thought I was getting something if not cheerful, then at least bright, but instead, there is much darkness in this story. It's about a guy living on the fringes in Barcelona. Javier Bardem is an amazing actor, and he plays a man who has a great need to save people. He's a complicated person with a complicated life, all the more so because he's trying to hold together other complicated lives as well. Although the story is about Uxbal, there are many other stories going on at the same time. I didn't like it at first, but as the stories developed and I became comfortable with the characters, it grew on me to the point where I'm going to read more about it today.