According to the saying, March goes out like a lamb. I don’t know about that, because yesterday as I looked out the window on the 18th floor of a Chicago high-rise I saw low-lying gray clouds obscuring the tops of skyscrapers, cold waves crashing dangerously close to Lake Shore Drive, and rain blowing sideways. Today, on April 1, the sun is shining and runners are once again crowding the sidewalks and paths, so maybe spring is on its way. I’m going to take a “spring break” from blogging for a few weeks, but here are a few books I enjoyed that have just hit the shelves.

You’ve probably heard about two of this spring’s “big books”, The Women in the Castle and The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane.

I loved Lisa See’s breakout novel, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, but didn’t think her subsequent books were quite as good. The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane is on a par with Snow Flower. The story, centered on a Chinese peasant woman and the daughter she’s forced to abandon, who is adopted by an American family, is terrific — and the novel is packed with interesting information about Chinese hill tribes and the tea industry. When I started the book I assumed it was set in the past, and was shocked when I realized the tribal culture See describes so well has only recently faded away as modernization has entered the most remote areas of China.  (By the way,  On Gold Mountain, the chronicle of the See family’s history in the United States, reads like a novel and might be my favorite of all See’s books.)

Jessica Shattuck’s debut novel, The Women in the Castle, has received a lot of pre-publication hype — deservedly so. If you think you’ve read more than your share of World War II novels, think again, because The Women in the Castle provides a fascinating perspective unfamiliar to most readers. The “women” of the title are the widows of three conspirators who plotted to assassinate Hitler. I’ll post a full review on April 20.

I’d like to recommend a smaller novel you may not have heard about — The Devil and Webster by Jean Hanff Korelitz. (For those who are wondering, the author is a cousin of Helene Hanff, author of 84 Charing Cross Road.) I read this book almost without stopping, and when I reached the very satisfying ending, I actually wished the book were longer. Often, when I finish a book, I think, Didn’t anyone edit this book? I could have cut out a third of it.

Not only is Korelitz a marvelous writer, whose sentences inspire admiration, she’s spun a clever tale about a topic of great interest to me: political correctness and dissent on college campuses. Readers of The Sabbathday River, a thriller Korelitz published almost twenty years ago, may remember the character of Naomi Roth — I actually did, which says a lot about the strength of Korelitz’s writing. Naomi Roth reappears in The Devil and Webster, this time as the president of a prestigious liberal arts college in western Massachusetts, struggling with a student protest that threatens both her career and her relationship with her daughter.

The student protestors are irate that a popular professor, whose field of study is “folklore” and is known for his entertaining lectures and easy A’s, has been denied tenure. What they don’t know, and the college administration can’t legally share with them, is that he is guilty of academic dishonesty:

Plagiarism, plagiarism, Naomi thought, scanning the printout from the website, which Kinikini had brought for her. It was an ugly word, ugly to anyone who’d ever attempted the delicate but gut-wrenching task of setting words onto paper (or its technological equivalents). Words might feel universal, but they were not, because when they were put together they made patterns, and those patterns were as personally composed as any line of music or labored-over pigment on a canvas.

Anyone who’s a fan of campus novels or social satire will love The Devil and Webster. I’ve enjoyed all of Korelitz’s earlier books (unlike her famous cousin, Helene Hanff, whose response to Korelitz’s first effort was “Why would you write this?”), particularly Admission and You Should Have Known (read my review here). Please let me know what’s on your reading list this spring!