Chicago Author Month: A Long, Long Time Ago And Essentially True by Brigid Pasulka

I have no idea how A Long, Long Time Ago & Essentially True escaped my attention for so long. Somehow it made it onto The Bookstore shelves, both in hardcover and paperback, without finding a champion among our booksellers. Only recently did I learn that the author was from Chicago, an English Teacher at Whitney Young Magnet School, and the winner of last year's PEN/Hemingway Award.

What a perfect book to add to my list for Chicago Author Month. Especially because this book is set in Poland and is written by a descendant of Polish immigrants -- and Chicago just happens to have the largest population of Polish-speaking people living outside of Poland.

I am now utterly devoted to this book. I've already been raving about it to my friends and customers, and I've tucked one of our blue staff recommendation cards between its pages. I feel like I've just found a new go-to recommendation in paperback. I'm just sorry I'm so late to the game.

For our customers who haven't yet discovered this book's charms, it's a two-part story: one told like an enchanted fairytale, beginning with a love story in a small Polish village on the eve of World War II, and the other told 50 years later, as the lovers' granddaughter comes of age in modern Krakow, searching for her past and her future at the same time. The elders' experiences during the German occupation, such as hiding in the forest with the Polish resistance, brought to mind some of the things I enjoyed about the movie Defiance. The granddaughter's quest reminded me a little of Jonathon Safran Foer's Everything Is Illuminated.

In a video interview on her own website, Brigid Pasulka explained that Long, Long Time Ago was based on a combination of "essentially true" stories that she gathered from her own experiences while on post-college visits to Krakow. She tells how she used to sit down and ask older Poles to tell her stories, and they did. In that way, Brigid bears some resemblance to the granddaughter in the book, who realizes that the often heartbreaking stories of her grandparents' generation should be preserved and savored.

There were times when the modern story, which features a "lost generation" of young people in post-Communist Poland of the 1990's, didn't seem able to hold its own weight against the intensity, romance and magic of the older tale. However, the book eventually wove the two stories together, giving the granddaughter a sense of purpose, identity and history. What a nice ending. Highly recommended, with a special thumbs up for our book clubs.

Please stop in and check out Brigid Pasulka's book on our Chicago Author Shelf next time you're in downtown Glen Ellyn. In the meantime, you might enjoy exploring her website.



A Long, Long Time Ago & Essentially True by Brigid Pasulka (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $13.95)

Chicago Author Month: Long Way Home by Laura Caldwell

Long Way Home by Laura Caldwell (Free Press Books)

When Jen at Devourer of Books told me about her plan to dedicate the month of October to Chicago area authors, I said I would be happy to join her. She had gathered a list of Chicago authors with upcoming books, and there was a new one by Laura Caldwell that caught my eye.

Long Way Home is the remarkable story of Laura Caldwell's pro bono work on behalf of Jovan Mosley, a young Chicago man who gave a false confession to the Chicago police, and then sat in prison for nearly six years awaiting trial for first-degree murder.

Caldwell was a civil litigation attorney in Chicago before she quit to be a full-time writer. She calls herself a "lapsed lawyer" although she is a Distinguished Scholar in Residence at the University of Loyola School of Law. I knew she wrote a detective series with a high-heeled heroine, but I'd never read any of her books before.

I picked up Long Way Home expecting an interesting journalistic piece, but I was wrong. It was so much more. While the book does provide all of the details of a tragic murder on Chicago's South Side and exposes the shocking flaws in the criminal justice system at 26th and California, this is no dry tale. This book has the pace and suspense of a well plotted courtroom drama, with the heart and soul of the best memoirs. I was in tears by the time the verdict was announced.


I had expected to be a harsh critic. Before I read this book I was skeptical about the notion of false confessions, at least in the absence of outright fraud or torture. Isn't a "false confession" just a confession that the accused later regrets? Back in my law school days, I worked both sides of the fence, first as an intern in a public defender's office and then in a D.A.'s office. Call it bias, cynicism or just plain reality, most of the defendants I met had the opposite problem: false claims of innocence. The jury in Caldwell's story had to struggle with these same doubts.

Jovan Mosley's story changed my mind. There were overzealous cops, missing police reports, delayed Miranda warnings and false promises of leniency. Add to that the problem of Chicago's outrageously overburdened criminal court system, and a nice, innocent kid, and you have a six year nightmare that never should have happened.

But Laura Caldwell's book isn't necessarily about blame and tragedy. It's an old-fashioned, big-hearted story about truth and justice and the courage to believe that good things can happen to good people in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds. There's laughter and humor along the way, as Caldwell and Mosley's lead attorney Catharine O'Daniel work to keep Mosley's spirits up through the ordeal. Long hours of trial preparation turn the trial partners into punch-drunk girlfriends. Caldwell does a great job of capturing the surprising collegiality among the judges, cops and attorneys who work in the courtrooms at 26th and California. I would have to agree that the practice of criminal law seems way more "civil" than civil law in Chicago. And best of all, the courtroom scenes and jury deliberations are as well drafted and dramatic as those in a Scott Turow novel.

Long Way Home was a wonderful discovery for Chicago Author Month. I've already put Caldwell's detective novels on my reading list, especially the Rome Affair. As Caldwell explains, it was the research for The Rome Affair that led her to Jovan Mosley. And it's Jovan Mosley's story that will lead me to Caldwell's other fiction.