Do you know where you came from?

"Disguise,"

by Hugo Hamilton

What's your earliest memory?

You've heard from parents and extended family stories from that part of your life for which you have no memory because you were just too young to remember.

But what if you discovered that maybe you hadn't been told the complete truth about those early years?

What if there was evidence that the people who call themselves your parents may not be your parents at all?

Hugo Hamilton gets inside the mind of a character in that very scenario. It's a novel that traps you into reading to the end.

Who are we, really?

The setting is Germany, and the story starts during World War II and flips back and forth between the generations and decades after the war and 50 some years later. Hamilton offers us a wonderful sense of place in every one of the locales he takes us to.

And as much as "Disguise" offers plot as a main device, it's really character that is in the spotlight, and not just for the family whose story is drawing us in.

How is who we are and where we come from -- and who we come from -- important to what we become?

What impact is there on our psyche in knowing our ancestry, or, more to the point, of not knowing? What does it do to you when you can't trust -- or don't know if you can trust -- your own parents? If you don't belong in a place, where do you belong?

How do you know when you're home?

No formulaic ending

"Disguise" isn't a book I'd jump up and down to recommend. By grade, maybe it's a "B+" thanks to the absolute beauty of the prose.

But I do recommend this Harper title (www.HarperCollins.com).

We need to read literature that doesn't have the formulaic endings of best-selling novels where you know before you start that the hero will conquer evil. -- bz

Know D-Day like never before

"THE STEEL WAVE,"
by Jeff Shaara

You'll feel like you're in on the planning of the Normandy invasion with Ike and Monty.
You'll ride the landing craft with the foot soldiers as they near Omaha Beach.
You'll drop from the sky with the paratroopers of the 82nd Airborne.
And you be there as so many of the men who landed in France on June 6, 1944 died in order to free the world from tyranny.

The middle novel of Jeff Shaara's three-part World War II saga rivals the film "Saving Private Ryan" for realism. War is hell, as we've heard, but Shaara pounds in the point.

His reader-gripping fiction puts you right in the violence of the battles, the mental strain of those leading the attack that started the end of Hitler's Third Reich, the political hurdles that challenged Eisenhower and his foe across the English Channel, Field Marshall Erwin Rommel.

So much has been written about D-Day, so much known through film, that Shaara's work in a couple of instances seemed less than original. In fact, when they made those great war epics, good screen writers may have been using some of the same source material that Shaara did for "The Steel Wave." Insight into Rommel may be the most enlightening chapters.

But where this book is at its best is jumping from the plane and walking in the boot steps of Sgt. Jesse Adams, a real-life soldier whose ordeal leading a platoon as it fights its way across the hedgerow country of France is what brings drama and punch to "The Steel Wave." Finding out what happens to Sgt. Adams and many of the other players in the Normandy invasion is a fitting end to a very nice read. -- bz