Stolen Lives: Twenty Years in a Desert Jail by Malika Oufkir and Michele Fitoussi, 293 pages

  The stuff of great fiction here: princesses, kings, harems, palace intrigue, treason, murder, wrongful imprisonment, struggle beyond understandable human endurance, strong relationships, escape, capture, resolution, and hope. Elements of a great story (and a compelling book), however, aren’t necessarily experiences I would wish on actual people, and certainly not in relation to this particular story. This is an autobiography.

  Through these pages, with the assistance of journalist Michele Fitoussi, almost 50-year-old Malika Oufkir (former Moroccan princess) tells about her life.

  I’m glad that Malika got to tell her family’s story to the world and that I read it. My heart hurts for humanity that the experiences in the book actually happened.

The Hour I First Believed by Wally Lamb, 752 pages

I loved I Know This Much Is True. Wally wrote that in 1998? That long ago? Well, anyway. I loved it. I don't think I caught the significance of some of the mental and social ills he wrote about then. Looking back, he was prophetic in some ways.

Lamb attributes his enormous writing success to Oprah including She’s Come Undone in her famous Book Club list in 1996. (all hail wikipedia) Before I succumbed to her list (it took librarians a while to get on board with idea that someone famous, and not a librarian, could prescribe a reading list for the entire United States, and beyond, I guess) and read I Know This Much Is True in 1998, I'd never been taken and turned around in circles until I landed in a heap of depression before like I was with that book.

Wally still writes with that sense that he knows you and that he's telling you his story over a cup of coffee at the local greasy spoon. And I expected this to be a sad story, but it wasn't as sad as it was difficult to stay with it. This time, he is Caelum Quirk. teacher, and his wife, Maureen, school nurse, is the tragedy, or so it seems, until he finds more and more out about his own family’s past.

Caelum tells about his family whose historical farm is near a fictional town of Three Rivers, Connecticut which has a correctional institution for women on it and his third wife’s tragic misfortune of being in the library at the Columbine shootings.

The prison was the result of his great-grandmother’s fight to equalize rights for women and provide incarcerated women with decent prison accommodations around the time of the American Civil War. In real life, Wally teaches a writing class for women at a correctional institution. It seemed as if I could pick out characters in the story that might be patterned after some of the women he might meet in a prison setting.

Lamb is truly gifted in the way he vividly describes the setting and the characters. When I mentioned to two friends that I was listening to Lamb's CD, they groaned. They said, "Oh why? He's so depressing." Something I happen to like, I guess.