Emma's War, Deborah Scroggins

I haven't made Africa a research topic, but I've nonetheless done a lot of reading abou the hopeless, heartrending situations there. I wasn't sure if I could stand another trip down "Feel Bad Lane," but my dad recommended this book to me so it ended up on the must-read list. Scroggins writes knowledgely about Africa, though with a sense of desperation and hopeslessness that wears you down. Her subject is primarily Africa, but through the lens of aid-worker turned (second) wife of a warlord, Emma McCune. McCune, an English artist attracted very young to Africa, arrived first as an aid worker who started schools. She wore mini-skirts, flirted and slept with locals, and cut an unusual and colorful figure in southern Sudan. She was became controversial when she married Riek Machar, a rebel war leader, becoming his second wife. McCune's relationship impacted her aid work, and didn't earn her favor among Machar's men, whose trust in Machar's judgment was undermined. The marriage occurred just before several years of bloody fighting, and McCune quickly lost any objectivity she might have had. She died shortly into the conflict, in a car accident.

Scroggins knew McCune first-hand, though not intimately, and she knew most of those that were part of McCune's life in southern Sudan. Though not a personal look at McCune's life, the book still conveys some of the attitudes and motivations that take aid workers into Africa and send them home again. Scroggins portrays McCune as smart, energetic and compelling, while still managing to convey that ultimately she was misguided, delusional and -- in the end -- insignificant.

Troll: A Love Story, Johanna Sinisalo

Troll is a semi-sweet taste of Finnish fiction. Handsome, gay, advertising photographer Michael comes home late one night to find a group of teens teasing a young troll cub in his courtyard. Beguiled by the troll, Michael takes it in, hiding it from others even as he tries to learn what to feed it. As his involvement with the troll, Pessi, intensifies, Michael's relationships with others start to warp. Sinisalo's writing, through the filter of translation, is slightly awkward but fast-paced. Action is interspersed with excerpts from scholarly and literary works about trolls. A quick read, a sweet book, but nothing special.