Wednesday, July 31, 2013

Review: Sea Creatures by Susanna Daniel

A child changes everything. Since I've had children, I've gotten a bit more fearful about things that carry any risk, real or just perceived. As the character in Susanna Daniel's novel Sea Creatures, says, there's more at stake now. When you have a young child, you think things through more even if you weren't a reckless sort before. Someone else is dependent on you and you act accordingly. I first read Susanna Daniel's Stiltsville two years ago so when I saw that she had a new novel out about a mother who is faced with the choice of saving her young son or of saving her husband, I was immediately intrigued.

Georgia Quillian is married to Graham. They met when Georgia, who suffers from insomnia, went to a sleep clinic for help with her condition. Graham was also in "Detention" at the sleep clinic only his problem was parasomnia, which goes far beyond insomnia. And so these two people who could not sleep slowly created a life together. Georgia started a college counseling business and Graham was a professor at Northwestern. They lived in his family's cottage on a lake outside of Chicago and eventually Georgia gave birth to son Frankie. But life was not rosy. Graham's condition did not improve. Georgia's business was failing. Her mother died of cancer. Three year old Frankie stopped speaking. And then something happened with Graham because of the parasomnia, an incident so large that it made the papers and guaranteed that he'd never get tenure, pushing him out of his job. So when he is offered another job tracking weather patterns with a scientific institute in Miami, Georgia's hometown, the family pulls up stakes to go. If they're not entirely optimistic about the move, they are at least slightly hopeful that this will be a new start.

Not wanting to actually move into the house with Georgia's father, a professional musician, and her kind, motherly stepmother, Georgia and Graham buy a small, shabby houseboat and dock it at Harvey and Lidia's, giving them the illusion of their own space. But Georgia finds she is at loose ends on the tiny Lullaby so when Lidia suggests that she run errands and become a sort of personal assistant to a reclusive artist who lives out at Stiltsville, Georgia agrees. The professionally successful Charlie, whose wife was a friend of Georgia's late mother and also of her stepmother, draws amazingly intricate line drawings of sea animals. He's banished himself to Stiltsville to stay away from people but he develops a deep and real bond with the selectively mute Frankie and eventually with Georgia as well.

Meanwhile Graham has left on a ship that will be out in Hurricane Alley for weeks tracking weather conditions, leaving Georgia and Frankie behind. And it is only when he is gone that Georgia and Frankie's doctors start to get to the bottom of what has caused Frankie's complete and total silence. This revelation is a gathering storm in Georgia's life, as is her growing attachment to Charlie and her looming decision about Frankie's and her future. Mirroring the inner emotional turmoil and tension is the rising development of Hurricane Andrew far out in the ocean. Both storms will lead to terrible devastation and change Georgia's life forever.

Narrated by Georgia so that everything is from her perspective, the novel jumps from present back to Georgia's past, what made her who she is, and her understanding, as far as she she's able to understand it, of Graham's past and the demons there. Her unspooling of the past also shows her feelings about her parents, how she wants to be as a parent herself, and where she finds Graham's inattentiveness with Frankie frustrating. Daniel has done a good job capturing Georgia's worries, insecurities, and her guilt over any dangers, real or imagined, to which she has exposed Frankie. Her depiction of a mother's all consuming love, the way that the mother of a small child fits the rest of her life around the existence of that one little person, and the way that a marriage already straining can come apart at the seams because of a love and loyalty to the result of that marriage are all spot on. The narrative pacing is deceptively slow with an almost imperceptibly rising tension that culminates in lashing after lashing of breaking storms. The characters are not perfect and they make mistakes but aside from Graham, who is somehow unknowable despite all of Georgia's explanations about him, they are very real and human. There are some gut wrenching moments here and a well done picture of motherly love and protectiveness and all its flaws as well. Sea Creatures is a novel of marriage and motherhood, love and what we owe family, an emotional novel about the choices we make, the compromises we can live with, and what brings us to the breaking point.

For more information about Susanna Daniel and the book, check out her website, Facebook page, or follow her on Twitter. Follow the rest of the blog tour or look at the amazon reviews for others' thoughts and opinions on the book.

Thanks to Trish from TLC Book Tours and the publisher for sending me a copy of this book to review.

Waiting on Wednesday

This meme is hosted by Breaking the Spine and is meant to highlight some great pre-publication books we all can't wait to get our grubby little mitts on.

Confessions of a Latter-day Virgin by Nicole Hardy. The book is being released by Hyperion on August 20, 2013.

Amazon says this about the book: When Nicole Hardy's eye-opening "Modern Love" column appeared in the New York Times, the response from readers was overwhelming. Hardy's essay, which exposed the conflict between being true to herself as a woman and remaining true to her Mormon faith, struck a chord with women coast-to-coast.

Now in her funny, intimate, and thoughtful memoir, Nicole Hardy explores how she came, at the age of thirty-five, to a crossroads regarding her faith and her identity. As a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Nicole had held absolute conviction in her Mormon faith during her childhood and throughout her twenties. But as she aged out of the Church's "singles ward" and entered her thirties, she struggled to merge the life she envisioned for herself with the one the Church prescribed, wherein all women are called to be mothers and the role of homemaker is the emphatic ideal.

Confessions of a Latter-day Virgin chronicles the extraordinary lengths Nicole went to in an attempt to reconcile her human needs with her spiritual life--flying across the country for dates with LDS men, taking up salsa dancing as a source for physical contact, even moving to Grand Cayman, where the ocean and scuba diving provided some solace. But neither secular pursuits nor LDS guidance could help Nicole prepare for the dilemma she would eventually face: a crisis of faith that caused her to question everything she'd grown up believing.

In the tradition of the memoirs Devotion and Mennonite in a Little Black Dress, Confessions of a Latter-day Virgin is a mesmerizing and wholly relatable account of one woman's hard-won mission to find love, acceptance, and happiness--on her own terms.

Monday, July 29, 2013

Review: Race Across the Sky by Derek Sherman

Some people love to run. It can be a compulsion, an escape, a state of mind. For people who love to run, it is more than just exercise, more than just banging out a handful of miles. It is a necessity akin to breathing. But even people who feel this way do not often go so far as to consider a marathon; even fewer consider ultramarathons. The amount of time required to train for a simple marathon alone scuttles many peoples’ fledgling desire or fleeting thought of running so far, never mind the staggering amount of time devoted to training for 100 mile or more runs. Those who persevere devote untold hours to the sport. And those who run ultramarathons must devote their entire lives and beings to training. In Derek Sherman’s debut novel, Race Across the Sky, Caleb Oberest is an elite ultramarathoner who lives and breathes running to the exclusion of everything else, including his long-estranged biotech salesman brother, Shane, until a young woman with a baby suffering from a fatal genetic condition breaks into his world and his heart, forcing him to consider that life is more than just running.

Caleb lives in a house run by his coach and trainer, Mack, a man whose techniques are strict, unorthodox, and non-negotiable. The rest of the Oberest family considers Caleb’s living situation to be cult-like given the fact that he quit his high paying, successful career to work at a copy shop, train for hours every day, share a house and a tiny room with other runners, abide by stringent rules not of his own devising, and all but severed ties with his parents and his brother in pursuit of a goal they don’t quite understand. Shane, by contrast, lives in San Francisco with his wife, working as a successful salesman in big pharma, and expecting his first child. But he is questioning certain things in his life when he receives a letter from his brother asking him to visit. At first he resists but he loves his brother and would like nothing more than to extricate Caleb from the Happy Trails house so in the last week before his son is born and as he changes jobs from big pharma to biotechnology, he goes out to Boulder and meets with Caleb, June, and baby Lily. When Caleb asks him to look into help for Lily, whose alpha-one antitrypsin deficiency has been attacking her lungs since birth, and tells Shane he'll leave Happy Trails if it could help Lily, Shane agrees and enlists the help of an outstanding scientist at his new firm. The problem is, what they are doing is illegal, but they don't have the luxury of time to go through the proper channels, nor would the firm research this rare disorder in any case.

As Shane risks his livelihood for the older brother he has always loved, Caleb continues living and working in Mack's house and under his rules. He is, of course, breaking the cardinal rule by loving June and Lily and Mack sees his attachment to them as jeopardizing Caleb's career as an ultramarathoner, something Mack has invested a lot of time in and refuses to relinquish. He is determined that Caleb will run and win the reinstated (and Mack engineered) Yosemite Slam, a race so dangerous it had been discontinued after the death of a well-known runner. In order to intensify Caleb's focus, he is banned from June and Lily, is told to quit his job at the copy shop, and to live, eat, and breathe Mack's training methods. And he does it. Because running is his whole life, his entire being found in the clarity of hours on the trail pushing through any pain that breaks into his consciousness. As Shane and the doctor race to find a way to cure Lily's disease, Caleb is also racing for his (and her) life.

Sherman has done a fantastic job writing the experience of running. He has captured the singular focus of these elite athletes and the intensity of their vision and drive. The scenes where Caleb is running are incredibly powerful with a very realistic mental turn inward to find the reserves and the strategies that keep him putting one foot in front of the other. The scenes with Shane and Prajuk working to find a way to control the disease for one small baby are thrilling in a different way but equally compelling. Having Shane, a sales guy rather than a scientist, involved in creating a lab and learning about the process for creating a biochemical drug, means the non-scientific reader also learns with Shane without it feeling forced. This is very definitely a plot driven novel; the reader turns the pages at a good clip to see whether Shane can beat Lily's disease and break his brother's addiction to running or if time will run out for all of them. The reading is very compelling and there's an element of thriller too but there's also the fascination of an ultra sport and the promise of biotechnology not just in the future but in the now. Sherman has written a gripping novel that raises many ethical questions which he must by necessity keep unanswered but which will stay with the reader and intrigue him or her long after the last page is turned.

For more information about Derek Sherman and the book, check out his website or follow him on Twitter. Follow the rest of the blog tour or look at the amazon reviews for others' thoughts and opinions on the book.

Thanks to Lisa from TLC Book Tours and the publisher for sending me a copy of this book to review.

It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

Another typical summer week for me: reading and not reviewing. This meme is hosted by Sheila at Book Journey.

Books I completed this past week are:

Sea Creatures by Susanna Daniel
Race Across the Sky by Derek Sherman
The House Girl by Tara Conklin
Topsy by Michael Daly

Bookmarks are still living in the middle of:

Better Than Fiction edited by Don George
Billy Budd and Other Tales by Herman Melville
The Group by Mary McCarthy

Reviews posted this week:

Surprising Lord Jack by Sally MacKenzie
This Is Paradise by Kristiana Kahakauwila
Then He Ate My Boy Entrancers by Louise Rennison
Love All by Callie Wright

Books still needing to have reviews written (as opposed to the ones that are simply awaiting posting):

David by Ray Robertson
The Other Typist by Suzanne Rindell
Sinners and the Sea by Rebecca Kanner
The Silver Star by Jeannette Walls
Mary Coin by Marisa Silver
Dancing to the Flute by Manisha Jolie Amin
Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Happy Rock by Matthews Simmons
The Middlesteins by Jami Attenberg
The Purchase by Linda Spalding
Love Potion Number Ten by Betsy Woodman
Is This Tomorrow by Caroline Leavitt
Royal Bridesmaids by Stephanie Laurens, Gaelen Foley, and Loretta Chase
Letters From Skye by Jessica Brockmole
Thursday Next in First Among Sequels by Jasper Fforde
Sea Creatures by Susanna Daniel
Race Across the Sky by Derek Sherman
The House Girl by Tara Conklin
Topsy by Michael Daly

Monday Mailbox

I am still on vacation and my husband has reported that there's a huge stack of books awaiting my return home. I can't wait!!! I did ask him to send me this book as I have to read it this week so it actually arrived in my mailbox up here. This past week's mailbox arrival:

Race Across the Sky by Derek Sherman came from TLC Book Tours and Plume for a blog tour.

An ultramarathoner who is estranged from his family, Caleb, must reach out to his biotech sales rep brother for a cure for a baby with a fatal gentic disease. This premise gets my heart racing already!!!

If you'd like to see the marvelous goodies in other people's mailboxes, make sure to visit Book Obsessed as she is hosting this month's Mailbox Monday and have fun seeing how we are all doing our part to keep the USPS and delivery services viable.

Sunday, July 28, 2013

Review: Love All by Callie Wright

Families are a big ole mess. Even the best of them has conflicts, tensions, and undercurrents that outsiders can't see. But generally what holds a family together is a common history, a love, and a caring for the members that helps to overcome the not so happy moments. In Callie Wright's new novel, Love All, she's presented a family floundering under the weight of infidelity and separate lives but leaning on their shared history, strength, and love to come back together.

When the family matriarch, peace-keeper, and intermediary, Joanie Cole, dies in her sleep unexpectedly, her loss tears a hole in the fabric of the Obermeyer family. In their new family configuration, Joanie's eighty-six year old, doddering, and increasingly forgetful husband, Bob, moves in with their daughter Anne, her husband Hugh, and their teenaged children Teddy and Julia. As Bob flounders with the loss of his wife, the rest of the family continues to face the dramas, disappointments, and challenges of their everyday life. Each of the characters lives in the same house but at a remove from all the other members of the family, plugging along in parallel existences, keeping their individual secrets, not confiding in each other, neither seeking nor offering compassion. Joanie had been their bridge so with her gone, they have to figure out how to be a family again, to care for each other, and to repair their thoughtless damage.

When Anne and Hugh were newly married, they moved back to the small town of Cooperstown, NY where Anne grew up so that she could be close to her mother. They've raised their family there and Hugh started a successful preschool called Seedlings in the town. Anne works insanely long hours as an attorney in a neighboring town and she and Hugh have become ships passing in the night, their marriage withering and fading from a lack of attention. And each of them are so caught up in the stresses of their individual lives that they barely notice the lack of a life together, they don't notice how lost Bob is, nor do they notice the confusion and desires of their children's lives.

Narrated by all three generations of the family, the reader has the chance to get inside each of the characters' heads and to see what is driving each of them, how they came to the place they are, and what each of them sees as the way forward. Anne wants a marriage different from her parents' but she has no idea how to make that happen. Hugh is embroiled in an affair with a parent at the preschool and wants nothing so much as to avoid a scandal and a potential lawsuit. Bob is left with his memories of Joanie and the regrets he has over his infidelities even if they were never formally revealed in The Sex Cure, the book that once rocked the town of Cooperstown and a copy of which Joanie inexplicably kept for the rest of her life. Teddy is on the cusp of adulthood, marking time with a girlfriend he doesn't really love, looking forward to buying his own Jeep, insecure about the thought of leaving for college, and having to face certain proof that his parents, his father in particular, has secrets from him. Julia is afraid to go for the things that she really wants in life, not even trying out for the tennis team and keeping her growing feelings for one of her two best friends secret in order to preserve their tight trio.

Wright has done a good job drawing each of the characters and showing how what they are keeping hidden from each other is tearing them apart. She has created a readable, relatable family drama. And although the different narration shows the distance the characters keep from each others' truths in the beginning, when they start to come together as a family, to confront what is real and what is important to each of them, the narrations show that as well. As with life, many of the plot threads are not resolved in the end here but they have been moved forward enough that the end, although still up in the air, is hopeful and realistic. The parallel of Bob and Hugh's infidelities and their fear of exposure, Bob through the infamous book and Hugh through a negligence lawsuit against the preschool, is not as explicit as it might be but the heartache and potential destruction of family their actions provoke is definitely similar. With the perspectives of so many characters needed to fully illustrate the family dynamics, this is an intricate novel indeed. Relationship, families, and what we owe them are all carefully woven into the fabric of this engrossing, strongly character-driven novel.

Thanks to LibraryThing Early Reviewers for sending me a copy of this book for review.

Friday, July 26, 2013

Review: Then He Ate My Boy Entrancers by Louise Rennison

I discovered the Georgia Nicholson series by Louise Rennison many years ago with the first in the series, Angus, Thongs, and Full Frontal Snogging. To meet Georgia is to love her, even if she is mouthy and chock full of teenaged attitude. In this installment, Georgia is as boy crazy as ever. Robbie, the Sex God of previous books is in New Zealand so Georgia has changed her focus to Masimo, the gorgeous Italian-American boy (the Luuurve God) who can't seem to decide between Georgia and Wet Lindsay. He's visiting America and his family there when the book opens so it's terrifically exciting when Georgia's dad announces that they too are going to Hamburger-a-gogo land for a car show.

Georgia is her usual funny, snarky self on the brief trip to Memphis with her family and best friend Jas. She's as demeaning as ever towards her parents and her friends. And the secondary characters continue to let her ride roughshod over them, somewhat inexplicably. Jas is so wrapped up in boyfriend Tom and his trip to New Zealand that she is occasionally oblivious to Georgia's continual crises over Masimo and the state of their maybe relationship. Dave the Laugh is there for Georgia with friendship and advice when she needs him although she can't see what else he's offering her. Basically, Georgia's still self-centered, annoying, and a stereotypical teenager but since she's fictional, she's as entertaining as all get out. If she was real (and my child), I might have to smack her spoiled, selfish little self with a shovel. As she's not, I'm looking forward to the next installment in the series to see if she's grown up any and how she's handling the small bit of self-knowledge she comes to by the end of the story.

Wednesday, July 24, 2013

Review: This Is Paradise by Kristiana Kahakauwila


Hawai'i is all palm trees, leis, surf, and sun, right? Well, perhaps it is for the tourists who swarm its beaches but for the people who live there, it is much more layered than that. I remember going to visit my dad's aunt and cousins there when I was in high school and being fascinated by the difference between the tourist areas (where we stayed) and the neighborhood where they lived. We got the best of both worlds, seeing the shiny, perfect, picture postcard place as well as the more real, hidden part of the island. Kristiana Kahakauwila's story collection, This Is Paradise, looks at the real Hawai'i, the one that most tourists don't ever see, the one that exists with all the truth and darkness and reality that exists in places not dotted with lush tropical plants, gorgeous vistas, and the steady pounding of the ocean.

In her six powerful, thematically linked stories, Kahakauwila digs beneath the commercial, tourist impressions of Hawai'i to the tensions and the grit of real life on the islands. She expertly plumbs the depths of relationship, to each other people, to place, and to self. She captures the conflict between native Hawai'ian and tourist as well as the layers of within the native culture itself, including the tensions between those who left the island and those who have stayed as well as the island-born whites and the native Hawai'ians. She touches on the colonial heritage and its continuing impact on the culture and the overwhelming importance of family. Each of the stories is fully realized, compact, and evocative, teeming with nuance and beauty even as they are equally uncomfortable and unflinching.

The title story, "This Is Paradise,", narrated by a chorus of different native women is an examination of the darker side of paradise. Alternately told by a group of matronly hotel maids, young and fearless native surfer girls, and business women who have returned to the island armed with their degrees, the story follows a naive female tourist as she goes about her last day on the island. "Wanle" is the story of a young woman who is driven to avenge her beloved father's murder by beating his long time adversary at cockfighting even as she uncovers truths about her father she never before knew. "The Road to Hana" follows a couple, he an island-born white man and she a non-island born Hawai'ian, as they travel a sacred route and encounter a mangy native dog. "The Old Paniolo Way" is about a son who has returned to the island as his father is dying and the struggle he faces over whether to come out to his father or to let the old man die without knowing his truth. The black comedy of "Thirty-Nine Rules For Making a Hawaiian Funeral Into a Drinking Game" is equal parts entertaining and heartbreaking as a Hawai'ian woman from California feels like an outsider at her grandmother's funeral. And "Portrait of a Good Father" examines the complexity of family from the viewpoint of a woman reflecting on her disintegrating family, her place in that family, and in particular, her father's role in the disintegration and shifting shape of it.

Each of the stories is tightly written and cuts to the bone. Kahakauwila clearly loves the Hawai'i she knows, the real Hawai'i, and has created a complex and moving tribute to it rather than to the superficial dancing hula girl Hawai'i of popular culture. Short story fans will love this masterful collection that peels back the many layers of paradise to expose the people and the place as they really are, troubled and beautiful both.

For more information about Kristiana Kahakauwila and the book, check out her website or her Facebook page. Follow the rest of the blog tour or look at the amazon reviews for others' thoughts and opinions on the book.

Thanks to Lisa from TLC Book Tours and the publisher for sending me a copy of this book to review.

Waiting on Wednesday

This meme is hosted by Breaking the Spine and is meant to highlight some great pre-publication books we all can't wait to get our grubby little mitts on.

The Husband's Secret by Liane Moriarty. The book is being released by Amy Einhorn Books on July 30, 2013.

Amazon says this about the book: At the heart of The Husband’s Secret is a letter that’s not meant to be read

My darling Cecilia, if you’re reading this, then I’ve died. . . .

Imagine that your husband wrote you a letter, to be opened after his death. Imagine, too, that the letter contains his deepest, darkest secret—something with the potential to destroy not just the life you built together, but the lives of others as well. Imagine, then, that you stumble across that letter while your husband is still very much alive. . . . Cecilia Fitzpatrick has achieved it all—she’s an incredibly successful businesswoman, a pillar of her small community, and a devoted wife and mother. Her life is as orderly and spotless as her home. But that letter is about to change everything, and not just for her: Rachel and Tess barely know Cecilia—or each other—but they too are about to feel the earth-shattering repercussions of her husband’s secret.

Acclaimed author Liane Moriarty has written a gripping, thought-provoking novel about how well it is really possible to know our spouses—and, ultimately, ourselves.

Monday, July 22, 2013

Review: Surprising Lord Jack by Sally MacKenzie

Often times historical romances are fairy stories for adult women. But sometimes there are reminders that being a woman in times long since past would have been much less pleasant than now. The strictures and restrictions, the lack of choice, and the idea that women were not full citizens entitled to control their own lives remind us all how much better we have it now legally and financially. Sally MacKenzie's latest novel in the Duchess of Love series starts off with one more such reminder.

Frances Hadley has had it. After years of running her brother's estate, she overhears her money-grubbing aunt conspiring with a perfectly odious man to sell her off to him in marriage. So she decides that she'll escape to London and her wayward brother to demand control of her dowry herself. She cannot travel to London alone as a woman but she can do it disguised as a boy and so she cuts her hair, dons pants, and takes off, only to be stopped by bad weather at a small inn. Obviously young and innocent, she is given the last available room, one usually kept for members of the Valentine family. Since it is the night of the annual Valentine Ball, hosted by Venus, the Duchess of Love, no one expects a member of the family, always present for a command performance at this matchmaking ball, to need shelter. And yet, Jack Valentine, the duchess's third son, unexpectedly shows up, running away from determined debutantes looking at him with an eye to marriage. When he sees the sleeping Frances, assuming that she's a lad, he decides that he can't kick the stripling out of the room and just shares the bed.

The next morning, with Frances still in the guise of a young man heading for his brother's home in London, Jack and Frances breakfast before leaving the inn where they meet an acquaintance who might have recognized Frances as the young woman she is. But it is only on the long journey to London that the truth about Frances' sex is revealed to a very angry Jack. When her brother is no longer at the address Frances knows, Jack takes her to his home and calls in his parents, the calm Duke and Duchess of Love, to help mitigate any scandal surrounding Jack and Frances' journey. Frances is unladylike, pushy, and temperamental. She's annoyed by her inability to run her own life outside of society's dictates. Jack, meanwhile, embraces his reputation as an incorrigible rake in order to hide the fact that he funds a home for downtrodden women, children, and prostitutes to try and help them out of their horrible existence in London's poorest areas.

As the Valentine family helps Frances reconnect with her own long estranged family on the maternal side, she and Jack come to appreciate each other and the ways in which neither of them conform to what society expects of them. But in amongst all of this getting to know each other and reconnecting with family, Jack is also trying to uncover the identity of a serial killer loose in London, one who is similar to Jack the Ripper in that he targets prostitutes and those society ladies whom he has deemed immoral. And it gets personal when the rumors about Jack and Frances at the small inn come to light and Frances herself is put in danger.

Frances is an unconventional, feisty heroine and Jack is rather a paragon as a hero but they are appealing enough. The climax is not unexpected and the happily ever after is delivered just as required, making this is good book for an afternoon. However, there are some unbelievable bits given the time setting of the book. That Jack's family would immediately enfold Frances into their hearts and successfully head off the scandalous situation is pretty unlikely. There isn't a lot of dramatic tension between Jack and Frances as a couple and so the plot device of the serial killer is necessary to given the story some legs. While this may not stay with the reader long past the last page, it is a quick and enjoyable read for fans of the historical romance genre.

It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

Another typical summer week for me: reading and not reviewing. This meme is hosted by Sheila at Book Journey.

Books I completed this past week are:

Love Potion Number Ten by Betsy Woodman
Is This Tomorrow by Caroline Leavitt
Royal Bridesmaids by Stephanie Laurens, Gaelen Foley, and Loretta Chase
Then He Ate My Boy Entrancers by Louise Rennison
Letters From Skye by Jessica Brockmole
Thursday Next in First Among Sequels by Jasper Fforde

Bookmarks are still living in the middle of:

Better Than Fiction edited by Don George
Billy Budd and Other Tales by Herman Melville
The House Girl by Tara Conklin
Sea Creatures by Susanna Daniel

Reviews posted this week:

The Virgin Cure by Ami McKay
Someone by Alice McDermott
The Exiles by Ami McKay

Books still needing to have reviews written (as opposed to the ones that are simply awaiting posting):

Surprising Lord Jack by Sally MacKenzie
Love All by Callie Wright
David by Ray Robertson
The Other Typist by Suzanne Rindell
Sinners and the Sea by Rebecca Kanner
The Silver Star by Jeannette Walls
Mary Coin by Marisa Silver
Dancing to the Flute by Manisha Jolie Amin
Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Happy Rock by Matthews Simmons
The Middlesteins by Jami Attenberg
The Purchase by Linda Spalding
This Is Paradise by Kristiana Kahakauwila
Love Potion Number Ten by Betsy Woodman
Is This Tomorrow by Caroline Leavitt
Royal Bridesmaids by Stephanie Laurens, Gaelen Foley, and Loretta Chase
Letters From Skye by Jessica Brockmole
Thursday Next in First Among Sequels by Jasper Fforde Then He Ate My Boy Entrancers by Louise Rennison

Thursday, July 18, 2013

Review: The Exiles by Allison Lynn

Starting over. Generally, it has a positive connotation. You have the chance to try something new, to conquer something else, to improve upon past successes, to do something you’ve always wanted to do. But sometimes starting over is a defeat, the result of failure and it carries all of the baggage and unhappiness and negativity that defeat and failure would imply. In Allison Lynn’s new novel, The Exiles, her characters are starting over after failing but their fresh start is compounded by the secrets they’ve kept, their separate disappointments, and their dwindling resources.

Nate has traded his Wall Street investment banking career, never much to boast about, for a stable if unglamorous financial job in Newport, Rhode Island. He, girlfriend Emily, a former advertising wiz, and their 10 month old son Trevor leave the rich and ostentatious community in Manhattan into which they never quite fit. As many of their belongings as possible are packed into Nate’s prized Jeep Cherokee and they head to Newport on a long holiday weekend, exhausted and disappointed but ready to take possession of their new house and start over. But while they are closing on the house and receiving the keys from their realtor, the Jeep, loaded with the essentials to keep them going until the moving van arrives, including all of their financial information, is stolen. Now all they have for the long weekend is one empty house, the clothes on their backs, Trevor’s stroller, the diaper bag, and $84.

What they also have are their unspoken concerns and enormous secrets they need to share with each other but which they are finding it hard to acknowledge, knowing that the other will feel the revelation of the secrets to be a violation of honesty, trust, and their relationship. As they separately contemplate the hidden truths that need to come out, they ruminate about their pasts, growing up, their charmed meeting, and their early life together before they were forced to slink away from Manhattan in ignominious defeat.

Nate’s father was a famous architect but Nate’s childhood was one largely bereft of his father’s presence or of paternal love. His younger brother and his mother, both long gone, were his bedrock. What he did internalize of his father’s life lessons was to flaunt his skills, always guard his reputation, and to avoid embarrassment. He’s not certain he’s lived up to these injunctions and fears that the only thing he’s inherited from his long estranged father is the Huntington’s disease that killed his grandfather as he obsessively checks and rechecks his health.

Emily’s childhood was quite different from Nate’s. As the child of a struggling single mother, she has always striven for more rather than less financial security, something she has not found with Nate. Their friends in New York were phenomenally wealthy and Emily always noted the disparity between their life, their possessions, and hers and Nate’s.  Jealousy is not a pretty emotion.  As she struggles with their exile from the City, she must also compare the loss of their Jeep and its contents to the loss of an incredibly expensive painting by a famous author and casually owned by some of the aforementioned affluent New York friends and which is the subject of much speculation and gossip amongst their group, having disappeared after one of the last parties that Emily and Nate attended before they left for Rhode Island.

Lynn has done a wonderful job capturing the tension, unhappiness, and preoccupation between Nate and Emily as they embark on this new chapter in their lives.  The new chapter doesn’t have the smoothest of starts and the whole hardship of it, coupled with the revelation of their secrets could make or break their relationship but it will not leave them unchanged. Told over the short span of the holiday weekend before the banks open again to allow them access to money other than what they find in their wallets and pockets, the emotional line of the novel moves almost imperceptibly from a simmer to a rolling boil. The inclusion of their childhoods allows the reader to understand the effect of their early years on their decision making as adults and helps to explain, if not excuse, some otherwise inexplicable decisions.

As characters, Nate and Emily are fully rounded and quite believable in their weary, downtrodden state. Their acceptance of the Jeep’s loss, aside from a brief panic, highlights the emotional toll their exile from New York has taken on them. Their lives have a claustrophobic feel to them, perhaps because of the ways in which they remain closed off from each other, sunk in their own unshared worries for the future. While they may not be the most sympathetic characters ever, they are fighting for each other, their family, and a contentment that has eluded them thus far and that very fight makes the novel an appealing read. This is a complex and nuanced look at the realities of money, or lack thereof, for even the middle class, dreams for the future (often contingent on money), the strain of keeping up appearances, secrets and their impact on relationships, the ways in which we are so truly shaped by our previous experiences, and the ways we attempt to create a new, worthy life.

For more information about Allison Lynn and the book, check out her website or follow her on Twitter. Follow the rest of the blog tour or look at the amazon reviews for others' thoughts and opinions on the book.

Thanks to Lisa from TLC Book Tours and the publisher for sending me a copy of this book to review.

Wednesday, July 17, 2013

Review: Someone by Alice McDermott

Alice McDermott is a master at capturing the small, ordinary graces of everyday life, especially in the communities of her choice. She has an extensive backlist of amazingly beautifully written novels behind her and her newest novel, Someone, is another tour de force of the same sort. In this one, she draws an intimate and revealing portrait of Marie, an Irish Catholic girl who grows to adulthood in Brooklyn in the 1930s.

Opening with Marie as a young child sitting on the steps of her family's house waiting for her father to come home, she witnesses the evening return from her job of a clumsy young woman who will die that night , setting the tone and highlighting the dichotomy of life and death that reverberates throughout the novel. After Pegeen goes inside her house, Marie, plagued as she is by terrible eyesight, sits and myopically watches the neighborhood street scene unfold in its usual patterns. And it's this combination of wide angle view coupled with the close-up particulars of Marie's life which drive this carefully drawn tale of the unremarkable, ordinariness of life. Marie narrates the major milestones of her life: dating, a first job, marriage, pregnancy, illness, and more, as well as illuminating her older brother Gabe's life through his entrance into the priesthood, his eventual choice to leave his vocation behind, and her caring for him in his struggle in the aftermath.

The novel is not chronological but jumps back and forth in time as Marie's memories provoke other stories from her life. McDermott observes and records the complex and exceptional, yet utterly simple life of her main character. And what she has captured here in this observational novel are the highs and lows of a regular, quotidian life, love in all its unpretentiousness, and the poetry of the every day. Those who enjoy a quiet, character driven novel full of stunning and unexpected recognitions will find a finely wrought piece here. In McDermott's hands, the very nothingness of the plot is some of the magic of the tale.

Thanks to the publisher for sending me a copy of this book for review.

Waiting on Wednesday

This meme is hosted by Breaking the Spine and is meant to highlight some great pre-publication books we all can't wait to get our grubby little mitts on.

On the Noodle Road by Jen Lin-Liu. The book is being released by Riverhead Hardcover on July 25, 2013.

Amazon says this about the book: A food writer travels the Silk Road, immersing herself in a moveable feast of foods and cultures and discovering some surprising truths about commitment, independence, and love.

Feasting her way through an Italian honeymoon, Jen Lin-Liu was struck by culinary echoes of the delicacies she ate and cooked back in China, where she’d lived for more than a decade. Who really invented the noodle? she wondered, like many before her. But also: How had food and culture moved along the Silk Road, the ancient trade route linking Asia to Europe—and what could still be felt of those long-ago migrations? With her new husband’s blessing, she set out to discover the connections, both historical and personal, eating a path through western China and on into Central Asia, Iran, Turkey, and across the Mediterranean.

The journey takes Lin-Liu into the private kitchens where the headscarves come off and women not only knead and simmer but also confess and confide. The thin rounds of dough stuffed with meat that are dumplings in Beijing evolve into manti in Turkey—their tiny size the measure of a bride’s worth—and end as tortellini in Italy. And as she stirs and samples, listening to the women talk about their lives and longings, Lin-Liu gains a new appreciation of her own marriage, learning to savor the sweetness of love freely chosen.

Tuesday, July 16, 2013

Review: The Virgin Cure by Ami McKay

New York City in 1871 was a place of great contrast. There were the outrageously rich and glamorous people of Edith Wharton's New York but there were also the serving classes and the desperately poor barely existing at subsistence level. While Wharton's wealthy female society characters were constrained in their choices and paths thanks to social pressure and mores, the poor, women and children in particular, had even fewer options than the rich and their choices were far less palatable. Ami McKay's newest historical fiction, The Virgin Cure, highlights the struggle for survival and what desperation could mean.

Moth is 12 years old and living in the slums of Chrystie Street in Lower Manhattan, daughter of a fortune telling mother and a long disappeared father. She and her mother are barely scraping by, her mother resorting to sex with the landlord when she is too far behind on her rent. Moth knows that she has a limited amount of time left with her mother and she dreams of escaping her hard life, fantasizing about a large house behind an iron fence on her daily route. But before she is ready to strike out on her own, her mother wakes her in the middle of the night and bundles her belongings together so she can leave, having sold Moth into servitude to a wealthy woman as a personal lady's maid. But her life with Mrs. Wentworth is terrible, the lady being cruel and unbalanced. And so Moth, with the help of the household's larcenous butler, conspires to escape, stealing some of Mrs. Wentworth's jewelry, and going back to Chrystie Street only to find that her mother is no longer there.

Moth ends up on the street begging to survive before she is finally taken in by a young prostitute in training who takes her to Miss Everett's "Infant School," a brothel that grooms its girls into faux ladies before offering their virginity to the highest bidder and then courts the wealthiest clientele for the deflowered. As appalling as the situation appears, prostitution at Miss Everett's is a far kinder proposition than living on the street with the all the risks there and the potential for being used in the popular remedy of a "virgin cure," where syphilitic men believed that sex with a virgin would cure them of this terrible disease, but which in actuality condemned young girls to their own slow death. Miss Everett not only didn't allow for this in her house, but she also employed a doctor, Dr. Sadie, to care for her girls. When Dr. Sadie and Moth meet on Moth's first day in the "school," Dr. Sadie decides to try and rescue Moth from a life of prostitution, recognizing in this young girl an intelligence, survival instinct, and spark of life that she wants to preserve.

Narrated by Moth with only occasional interjections by Dr. Sadie, newspaper clippings, and snippets from popular songs, poems, and other writings of the time, McKay has captures the gritty desperation of the times realistically through a child's eyes. Her Moth is both an innocent and preternaturally mature, understanding some of the harsher realities of life even as she is surprised by others. The inter-textual comments, set off in the margins, sometimes further the story and other times just add more elaborate detail and flavor than Moth could possibly know about fabric, medicines, and other popular items of the times. They can be a tad distracting until the reader gets used to their appearance. The historical era is beautifully evoked, very immediate, and obviously well-researched. Moth is an engaging character and although some of her decisions seem incomprehensible to us in this day and age, they are very in character for her and era appropriate. Dr. Sadie remains a bit of a shadowy character despite tidbits about her privileged past and her being ostracized from her family because of her decision to pursue schooling, medicine, and a career being carefully dropped into the narrative at distant intervals. She is far less fleshed out as a character than Moth is even though her life choice is at least as fascinating as Moth's tale. Fans of historical fiction who have an interest in women's issues will appreciate the vivid and realistic depiction of the time and the place and will find Moth's eventual path curious, unusual, and ultimately gratifying.

For more information about Ami McKay and the book, check out her website, find her on Facebook, follow her on Twitter, and even check out her on Pinterest. Follow the rest of the blog tour or look at the amazon reviews for others' thoughts and opinions on the book.

Thanks to Trish from TLC Book Tours and the publisher for sending me a copy of this book to review.

Monday, July 15, 2013

It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

My usual great amount of summer reading and very little reviewing. Ah well. This meme is hosted by Sheila at Book Journey.

Books I completed this past week are:

Happy Rock by Matthews Simmons
The Middlesteins by Jami Attenberg
The Exiles by Allison Lynn
The Purchase by Linda Spalding
This Is Paradise by Kristiana Kahakauwila

Bookmarks are still living in the middle of:

Better Than Fiction edited by Don George
Is This Tomorrow by Caroline Leavitt
Billy Budd and Other Tales by Herman Melville
Love Potion Number Ten by Betsy Woodman

Reviews posted this week:

Stargazey Point by Shelley Noble
The Illusion of Separateness by Simon Van Booy
The Book of Someday by Dianne Dixon

Books still needing to have reviews written (as opposed to the ones that are simply awaiting posting):

Someone by Alice McDermott
Surprising Lord Jack by Sally MacKenzie
Love All by Callie Wright
David by Ray Robertson
The Other Typist by Suzanne Rindell
Sinners and the Sea by Rebecca Kanner
The Silver Star by Jeannette Walls
Mary Coin by Marisa Silver
Dancing to the Flute by Manisha Jolie Amin
Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
The Virgin Cure by Ami McKay
Happy Rock by Matthews Simmons
The Middlesteins by Jami Attenberg
The Exiles by Allison Lynn
The Purchase by Linda Spalding
This Is Paradise by Kristiana Kahakauwila

Saturday, July 13, 2013

Review: The Book of Someday by Dianne Dixon

Sometimes a book is easy to pick up and put down. It might be a good enough story but it just doesn't call you back when your reading is interrupted. Dianne Dixon's newest novel, The Book of Someday, is not a lukewarm book like this at all. Whenever I had to put it down, I found myself coming up with reasons to sneak back to its pages to read just one more chapter and to try and puzzle out where it was going, how the triple stranded narrative was finally going to come together, and just who the three women in these pages were singly and to each other.

Opening with a fearsome prologue where little Olivia endures a loveless childhood with an emotionally distant father and a nasty, fanatical stepmother, the main story quickly splits into the three narratives centered on Livvi, a successful author who is haunted by a nightmare memory of a silver lady; AnnaLee a young mother in Long Island who is having to sell her family's heirlooms to make up for her aimless husband's lethargy; and Micah, a world class photographer on a quest to right a long ago wrong. Each of the women's stories grows and expands, fleshing out the women even as they start to reveal small clues as to who each of them are in relation to the others.

The way in which the women are connected is mysterious and Dixon does a good job doling out just enough information on the women to keep the reader completely engaged and curious as to how it will all tie in together. By the time the reader realizes the connections, enticed there slowly by the author, it feels as if it's okay to have uncovered it and any remaining readerly curiousity is transferred to wondering what life altering decisions will come out of this newly revealed truth. While the mystery of the women's connections makes for compelling reading, some of the relationships portrayed in their stories are a bit too easy and convenient (Livvi's immediate and deep attachment to Grace and Grace's easy, unconditional acceptance of Livvi) and some are frustrating and cause the reader to lose some sympathy for the characters (Livvi's constant excusing of Andrew's cringing weakness and Micah's belief in divine universe-driven retribution), and some were just completely out of the blue. But despite these weaknesses, the novel will keep the reader turning pages long into the night, carried along by the cinematic tale, its hypnotizing climax, and the possibilities in its ending. A study on the past and how it shapes people for better and for worse, leaving its mark far into the future, Dixon's novel makes for engaging light reading.

Thanks to the publisher for sending me a copy of the book for review.

Wednesday, July 10, 2013

Review: The Illusion of Separateness by Simon Van Booy

Every person in the world carries a long and varied history shaped by experience and environment but also briefly touched by strangers and their actions. So many things shape us and we don't even realize them all. None of us is an island, we are all connected whether we ever know it or not. Simon Van Booy's spare, exquisite novel, The Illusion of Separateness, disproves the very idea of people alone, showing how we are all affected by each other, tied together by the invisible bonds of humanity.

Written in short intertwining vignettes, Van Booy's novel is stunning in its simplicity. Opening in 2010 in Los Angeles with Martin working at the Starlight Retirement Home and reaching back into his unknowable past as a baby orphaned in wartime and ultimately adopted by a French couple. As the home prepares for a new resident, Mr. Hugo from England, disfigured by the war, the novel spirals backwards and forwards telling the stories of a seemingly disparate group of people from WWII, into the present, and back again, connecting them together by the most gossamer of threads, tying their actions and their lives together forever.

There's a lonely Hollywood filmmaker, a schoolboy in France, a young pilot getting ready to ship out to the war, a blind woman preparing an exhibit from the war years, and all of the people who played a part, no matter how small, in their lives. This is a gorgeous meditation on the interconnectedness of the world and the people in it. And it takes as its lynchpin one intentional and fleeting but momentous act of humanity to highlight the otherwise small and important moments that reverberate throughout the characters' lives, past, present, and future. The Illusion of Separateness is a beautifully written, character driven novel, subtle and moving, truly masterful in its intimate scope.

For more information about Simon Van Booy and the book, check out his website, find him on Facebook or follow him on Twitter. Follow the rest of the blog tour or look at the amazon reviews for others' thoughts and opinions on the book.

Thanks to Trish from TLC Book Tours and the publisher for sending me a copy of this book to review.

Waiting on Wednesday

This meme is hosted by Breaking the Spine and is meant to highlight some great pre-publication books we all can't wait to get our grubby little mitts on.

The Coat Route by Meg Lukens Noonan. The book is being released by Spiegel and Grau on July 16, 2013.

Amazon says this about the book: In today’s world of fast fashion, is there a place for a handcrafted $50,000 coat?

When journalist Meg Lukens Noonan learned of an unthinkably expensive, entirely handcrafted overcoat that a fourth-generation tailor had made for one of his longtime clients, she set off on an adventure to understand its provenance, and from that impulse unspooled rich and colorful stories about its components, the centuries-old bespoke industry and its traditions, and the master craftsmen whose trade is an art form.

In The Coat Route, Noonan pieces together the creation of the coat in question, tracing its elements to their far-flung sources, from the remote mountains of Peru, where villagers shear vicunas—whose soft fleece is more coveted and rare than the finest cashmere—to the fabulous Florentine headquarters of Stefano Ricci, the world’s greatest silk designer; from the family-owned French fabric house Dormeuil, founded in 1842, which drapes kings, presidents, and movie stars to the 150-year-old English button-making firm that creates the ne plus ultra of fasteners out of Indian water-buffalo horn and the workshop of the master hand engraver who makes the eighteen-karat gold plaque that hangs inside the coat’s collar. We meet the dapper son-in-law of an Australian wine baron who commissions the coat’s creation, and we come to know John Cutler, one of the top bespoke tailors in the world, who works his magic with scissors and thread out of his Sydney shop, redolent of cedar and English wool.

Featuring a cast of offbeat, obsessed, and wildly entertaining characters, The Coat Route presents a rich tapestry of local masters, individual artisans, and family-owned companies that have stood against the tide of mass consumerism. As Noonan comes to realize, these craftsmen, some of whom find themselves on the brink of retirement with no obvious successors, have increasing reason to believe that their way is the best way—best for their customers, best for the environment, and best for the quality of life of all involved. The Coat Route is a love song to things of lasting value.

Tuesday, July 9, 2013

Review: Stargazey Point by Shelley Noble

What happens when your life takes such a turn that you are completely at sea and have no idea what to do next? When you are so devastated by the immense tragedy you've survived that you need to go some place different and quiet and healing? How do you go about living again when you are revising the very pieces of you, your good heart and your soul? How do you find purpose again? In Shelley Noble's new novel, Stargazey Point, Abbie Sinclair is facing these very questions and holding herself aloof from everyone she meets until she finds that life does have a way of giving you the answers when and how you least expect it.

Abbie worked on documentaries but after her last project ended in terrible tragedy, she's barely holding it together. Her friend Celeste suggests that she take a break in Stargazey Point, a past its prime coastal resort town in South Carolina, devastated in the last hurricane, but a place that Celeste thinks will help heal Abbie. She arranges for Abbie to stay with her elderly relatives, Marnie, Millie, and Beau Crispin in the once impressive but now distinctively down on its heels, shabby genteel Crispin House. Abbie arrives wanting nothing more than solitude and time to brood over the horrors of her past. She can't see a way forward and she can't see how this small town not far from Myrtle Beach will do anything to mitigate her regret and guilt but, being who she is, she cannot help but get involved in the lives of the people she meets as she spends time in the town.

Cabot Reynolds is a former architect who moved to Stargazey Point after he inherited an old, hurricane battered carousel from his uncle. Tired of the soullessness of the things he's asked to design, Cab is searching for a future in tune with his heart. He remembers the carousel in its prime from his own childhood and he is determined to bring it back to life and to bring Stargazey Point back with it. And he's not going to let a bunch of developers scam the people of his new town so he is very leery of Abbie's arrival and her connection to Crispin House, which sits on prime land on the coast and whose inhabitants are clearly in dire financial straits.

As Abbie comes alive to the people in the community, she and Cab start to acknowledge their attraction to each other and their shared goal for the small town. Abbie starts to care deeply for the children at the rundown community center and takes on the project of making a documentary of the town and the history of the carousel with the endearing crew of kids. She, as is the rest of the town, is captivated by Cab's loving restoration of the carousel, the once proud symbol of Stargazey Point's boardwalk. She makes friends with some of the locals and finds her heart in helping the Crispin siblings. Both Abbie and Cab were bruised by their pasts but together they restore not just the carousel but also hope in their own lives.

This is a great light summer read. There's romance, a beach, and a town slowly waking to revitalization without sacrificing the past that formed its particular character. The town of Stargazey Point is lovingly detailed and appealing. The characters really revolve around the town and aren't as fully rounded though. While they are all sympathetic, they can be a little one-dimensional and the plot in many cases is quite predictable. Abbie's coming to terms with her role in the tragedy on her last documentary is realistically slow but her immersion in the lives of those around her and her investment in their futures is surprisingly quick given how damaged she was when she arrived. In general though, this is a very leisurely summer tale, perfect for a day with sand between your toes, a sweet tea sweating at your side, and the sun glinting off the page.

If you read and enjoy Stargazey Point, Shelley Noble has an e-single called Starcazey Nights that ties into the full length story which you'll want to download.

For more information about Shelley Noble and the book, check out her website, find her on Facebook or follow her on Twitter. Follow the rest of the blog tour or look at the amazon reviews for others' thoughts and opinions on the book.

Thanks to Trish from TLC Book Tours and the publisher for sending me a copy of this book to review.

Monday, July 8, 2013

It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

It's been a travel week here. 16 hours in the car. And now that I've arrived, I have extremely limited access to a computer. This is not a bad thing! I am actually sitting over across the bay right now borrowing wifi and hoping that it won't rain and drive me back to the cottage before I'm finished. This meme is hosted by Sheila at Book Journey.

Books I completed this past week are:

Dancing to the Flute by Manisha Jolie Amin
Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
The Virgin Cure by Ami McKay

Bookmarks are still living in the middle of:

Better Than Fiction edited by Don George

Reviews posted this week:

Whistling Past the Graveyard by Susan Crandall
Together Tea by Marjan Kamali
Call Me Zelda by Erika Robuck

Books still needing to have reviews written (as opposed to the ones that are simply awaiting posting):

The Book of Someday by Dianne Dixon
Someone by Alice McDermott
Surprising Lord Jack by Sally MacKenzie
Love All by Callie Wright
David by Ray Robertson
The Other Typist by Suzanne Rindell
Sinners and the Sea by Rebecca Kanner
The Silver Star by Jeannette Walls
Stargazey Point by Shelley Noble
The Illusion of Separateness by Simon Van Booy
Mary Coin by Marisa Silver
Dancing to the Flute by Manisha Jolie Amin
Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
The Virgin Cure by Ami McKay

Monday Mailbox

As I get ready to leave for vacation, I make piles of books to take with me. And then more good stuff arrives in my mailbox and I have to add more to the teetering stacks because heaven knows I can't leave them behind! My poor car is going to be groaning on the journey. :-) This past week's mailbox arrivals:

The Cleaner of Chartres by Salley Vickers came from Viking.

I thoroughly enjoyed Miss Garnet's Angel and Instances of the Number Three by Vickers so I feel a great sense of anticipation for this novel about a woman who appears seemingly out of nowhere and ends up cleaning the cathedral.

Let Him Go by Larry Watson came from Milkweed Editions.

Larry Watson is a masterful writer and I can't wait to crack open this novel about grandparents traveling to try and convince their son's widow to bring their grandson back to them despite her new in-laws' claiming of the boy.

If you'd like to see the marvelous goodies in other people's mailboxes, make sure to visit Book Obsessed as she is hosting this month's Mailbox Monday and have fun seeing how we are all doing our part to keep the USPS and delivery services viable.

Wednesday, July 3, 2013

Review: Call Me Zelda by Erika Robuck

The famous author F. Scott Fitzgerald and his mercurial, fabulous flapper of a wife, Zelda. The "it" couple of the 1920s. Poster children for talent and excess, alcoholism and madness. And despite all we already know about them, the Fitzgeralds still exert a powerful pull on our imaginations to this day. Interestingly, the more enticing and captivating of the couple seems to be Zelda with her mix of gaiety and fragility, her strength and schizophrenia, her glamour and instability. Erika Robuck's newest novel, Call Me Zelda, is one of a new spate of books about the oh so public but somehow still enigmatic figure that was Zelda Fitzgerald.

Anna Howard is a nurse at Phipps Psychiatric Clinic in Baltimore. She has a way with her patients, calm and measured and yet very private and closed off. She truly cares for the people with whom she works but she shares little of her own sadly tragic life with them, keeping a professional distance. In the early 1930s, when Zelda Fitzgerald is committed to the hospital and placed under Anna's care, this reserve starts to slowly crumble. Anna narrates Zelda's story, sits in judgment over Scott, and becomes a necessary part of the Fitzgeralds' lives. As Zelda submits to treatment, she writes her story privately for Anna and Anna divulges the heartbreaking pain in her own background. When Zelda is released from Phipps, against medical advice, Anna leaves with her to become her private nurse, living with the Fitzgeralds and seeing firsthand the dark side of passion in their volatile and tumultuous marriage.

With Anna's close proximity to Scott and Zelda, she can see the tangled inner workings of their marriage, their co-dependence, and the battles they fought with each other over their artistic talents and their very identities. But the well-documented, true to life fireworks between the famous pair are not the only interesting plot thread here. Anna's story, the impact and damage of WWI that continues to reverberate in her life, is at least as fascinating as Zelda and Scott's tale. Both Zelda and Anna lead sad and ravaged lives and their similarities help to bond them together in a mutual friendship even as Anna struggles to maintain the perspective she needs to continue as Zelda's caretaker. It is this perspective, and the different paths that their lives will ultimately take, that eventually separates the two women, one lost and the other found.

Robuck has done a wonderful job bringing the dissipation and strife of the fading Jazz Era to life. She's captured the results of that sparkling gaiety as it dims, turning out the lights on some of those who burned fastest and brightest. Scott Fitzgerald is definitely a villain here, driven that way by his out of control drinking and fear that his talent is finite.  His selfish, grasping need for his wife, as he's created her, is always evident. On the flip side, Zelda herself feeds his egotism and then deliberately antagonizes him, driving the wheel of madness round and round. Robuck's portrayal of these two surely calls into question the thin line between genius and madness and condemns the excesses of fame. In her character of Anna, Robuck shows the effect of the times on the regular person, that brief space between the world wars, contrasting the sometimes joyful, sometimes subdued recovery with the unnecessary devastating destructiveness of the Fitzgeralds. This was a fascinating look at a broken woman whose diagnosis and whose impact on and importance to her famous husband's life scholars still disagree about. After this glimpse of her glamour and her madness, I look forward to reading more on Zelda.

Thanks to the publisher for sending me a copy of the book for review.

Waiting on Wednesday

This meme is hosted by Breaking the Spine and is meant to highlight some great pre-publication books we all can't wait to get our grubby little mitts on.

Amy Falls Down by Jincy Willett. The book is being released by Thomas Dunne Books on July 9, 2013.

Amazon says this about the book: Amy Gallup is an aging novelist and writing instructor living in Escondido, California, with her dog, Alphonse. Since recent unsettling events, she has made some progress. While she still has writer's block, she doesn't suffer from it. She's still a hermit, but she has allowed some of her class members into her life. She is no longer numb, angry, and sardonic: she is merely numb and bemused, which is as close to happy as she plans to get. Amy is calm.

So, when on New Year's morning she shuffles out to her backyard garden to plant a Norfolk pine, she is wholly unprepared for what happens next.

Amy falls down.

A simple accident, as a result of which something happens, and then something else, and then a number of different things, all as unpredictable as an eight-ball break. At first the changes are small, but as these small events carom off one another, Amy's life changes in ways that range from ridiculous to frightening to profound.

This most reluctant of adventurers is dragged and propelled by train, plane, and automobile through an outlandish series of antic media events on her way to becoming--to her horror--a kind of celebrity. And along the way, as the numbness begins to wear off, she comes up against something she has avoided all her life: her future, that "sleeping monster, not to be poked."

Amy Falls Down explores, through the experience of one character, the role that accident plays in all our lives. "You turn a corner and beasts break into arias, gunfire erupts, waking a hundred families, starting a hundred different conversations. You crack your head open and three thousand miles away a stranger with Asperger's jump-starts your career."

We are all like Amy. We are all wholly unprepared for what happens next.

Also, there's a basset hound.

Tuesday, July 2, 2013

Review: Together Tea by Marjan Kamali

Much of our knowledge of the Middle East, especially here in the US, is gleaned from tv news. This means that unless there are uprisings, terrible deaths, or atrocities, we don't know much about a place or a people outside our own country. This is certainly true of Iran. My own knowledge of Iranian or Persian culture is rather sparse. I remember when the Iraq-Iran war started and I went to high school with a girl who was Persian but I really still didn't know much beyond what the news showed. And I certainly didn't know or understand the in-between place that Iranians who emigrated to the US to escape the war occupied, that space, dash, or hyphen between Iranian-American, neither the one nor the other but somewhere  in between. Marjan Kamali's sweet novel, Together Tea, centers on a character living between these two identities, these two cultures, who is trying to be true to her heart and herself as she also tries to honor her culture.

Mina is an unmarried twenty-five year old woman in business school. She long ago tucked away her passion for art to take the educational road her parents wanted for her despite the fact that she is beyond bored with the MBA classes. She also politely endures tea with Iranian-American strangers her mother's sources tell her would be a good match for Mina. After the latest matchmaking tea fails, Mina takes a look at her life and realizes that she needs to go back to Tehran to try and make sense of her current life, to understand who she is. Surprisingly, her mother Darya decides to accompany Mina back to Tehran. Darya has never adjusted to America as completely as her husband and children and she longs to see her family and the place she was so at home in her own skin. And so mother and daughter travel back to Iran to find it familiar but changed.

The second portion of the novel jumps back in time to 1978 and what it was like for Mina and her family living in Iran during the Revolution and the start of the Iran-Iraq War. Kamali brings a real sense of the place and time to the pages of the novel and how each change of regime irrevocably altered, in large and small ways, daily life in Tehran. The flashback to the past allows the reader to see the deep connections, the family bonds, and what those who chose to leave would say goodbye to when they left. And it also explains why the longing to go home is never quite gone for the people who left, those like Mina and Darya, who spend the rest of their lives living in the hyphen of a double-barreled identity.

And with that bit of history added to the characters of Mina and Darya, the novel shifts back to 1996 and the visit to Tehran where Mina feels almost as at sea as she ever has in the US. But it is amidst the oppressive political situation, the stolen and frenetic moments of gaiety, and the ever present sense of fear that Mina will stumble across a potential match, a man who never even crossed her mother's radar, but where she will also come to peace with who she is and what the hyphen between Iranian-American means to her and in her life.

Kamali has drawn a lovely portrait of a young woman searching not only for a partner but for herself. She has captured well the pressure of representing one culture to another, both through Persian Mina in the US and through American Mina representing the US to family and friends in Tehran. She has also done a good job showing the displacement and sadness that some older emigrants carry with them always, having left a piece of themselves and their hearts behind with family and friends when they leave. Having much of the narration center on Mina allows the reader to see Iranian culture now with the same sense of surprise that Mina feels.  As she was not there to see how the culture changed, it is in some ways as foreign to her as it is to the reader. The flashback portion of the novel serves to deepen the reader's understanding of the losses suffered in war and to understand Darya a bit better. A sweet and lovely novel about the search for identity and for a partner who understands and knows the deepest part of you, this is also a charming story about resilience and love of all kinds and a sideways look at the politics and changes wrought in the venerable, old culture of Iran.

For more information about Marjan Kamali and the book check out her website, find her on Facebook or follow her on Twitter. Follow the rest of the blog tour or look at the amazon reviews for others' thoughts and opinions on the book.

Thanks to Trish from TLC Book Tours and the publisher for sending me a copy of this book to review.

Popular Posts