Review: The Future for Curious People by Gregory Sherl

How many times have you looked back at the past and thought, "If I'd only known then what I know now?" How often have you wished you could tell the future so you could be assured of making the right decision? This could explain the appeal of time machines in science fiction, a chance to change our decisions and make a different future for ourselves. Even without this imaginary technology, very frequently we live a life of "if only" or "what if."  In Gregory Sherl's inventive new novel, The Future for Curious People, there is a way to see what your future is going to look like. You can choose to move ahead or to take a different path. In the world of Sherl's novel, you can see what your life with one person or another is going to be. The question is, if you can see the future, what do you do about it?

Evelyn Shiner is breaking up with her musician boyfriend because their future together is petty and small. She actually knows this, having gone to an envisionist and watched a scene from their future together where they sing happy birthday to a Chihuahua and argue over cheese. This is not the romantic future she wants and so she must say goodbye to Adrian.  Her obsession then becomes, who should she be with? And it's only by continuing to see her envisionist, Dr. Chin, that that question can be answered satisfactorily. Godfrey Burkes has proposed to his girlfriend Madge but she's unwilling to give him an answer or wear his ring until they consult an envisionist about their future together. So Godfrey, despite many reservations, goes to visit Dr. Chin to see how his life with Madge will turn out. While in line, he helps Evelyn briefly and in that moment, she somehow becomes imprinted on his unconscious and the two of them are permanently linked.

Told in first person with chapters alternating between Evelyn's story and Godfrey's story, the novel is a technological fantasy, a romance, an examination of the pitfalls of knowing the future, and a charming look at what we are all searching for: happiness, contentment, companionship, and true love. Evelyn is a librarian who loves her job. She is a "ghost child," a child only conceived after the tragic death of her older sister and she's always felt that she could never live up to this golden child who came before her in her parents' eyes; she's never felt fully loved or valued. So she's becoming just a little bit addicted to envisioning her future, looking for her happily ever after. Evelyn is such a romantic and so wants to believe in the happily ever after that, even as a volunteer reader recording books for the blind, she is changing the endings of classic books. Gatsby doesn't die. Nor does Anna Karenina. Everyone gets a happy ending. Godfrey is a bit of a forgetful bumbler, forever leaving his cell phone and his wallet behind. He is trying hard to make his life with Madge work, not only going to the envisionist she wants him to consult but also to another professional to try and change the pitiful future they see into one in which they are happy together. He worries about his inborn nature, having cast his biological father in the role of a womanizing animal and fearing that he has inherited this tendency to polygamy and thoughtlessness. As he worries about what unpleasant traits he might have inherited and tries each and every thing that Madge requests of him to save their future together, he also can't stop seeing an unknown woman whenever he looks to that future, a woman who turns out to be Evelyn.

Both characters are very likable and watching them navigate their lives and try to find their way to a deserved happiness is delightful. Each of them is completely vulnerable but still open and hopeful. The technology that allows them to meet each other isn't really described in terms of how it works, it just exists. But this is okay, leaving the emphasis on the human aspect of the story rather than the technological potential. In fact, there is even a warning that in cases of true love, there can be malfunctions and odd happenings. And of course, in Evelyn and Godfrey's cases, there are plenty of strange complications where current life inadvertently integrates into the brief snapshots of the future that they see. The premise of the novel is charming and the presentation quirky and appealing. Sherl has created well-rounded characters who come alive on the page and make us all think about our present, our future, and the ways in which both of these are shaped by the past as well as the here and now. Not a romance in the traditional sense, this is a thoughtful and humorous look at the utter unpredictability of love.

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

Review: The Death of Fidel Perez by Elizabeth Huergo

Although Cuba is only 90 miles off the coast of Key West, because of tense relations between the two countries, the lack of diplomatic relations, the travel ban, and the economic embargo, there is a sort of mystery about the island nation that remains in place, at least partially, to this day. And everything that we hear about Cuba in the US is colored by this long and uncomfortable political history and the picture we've imagined. Elizabeth Huergo's novel, The Death of Fidel Perez, takes us into Havana of the last decade and to the real people and their ghosts that live there now.

The novel opens with a drunk and voluble Fidel Perez keening over the inaccessibility of his married lover, Isabella, and his deep love for her. He shouts and slurs his love, misheard by those within earshot as his love for isla (the island), on his brother's rusted and decaying balcony. When the balcony gives way, his brother tries to save him but both men plunge to their deaths on the concrete below, leading eye witnesses to shout that Fidel and his brother have fallen. The gathering crowd, who didn't witness the fall, hears this lamentation, "Fidel cayo y Fidel callo," and a rapidly spreading political rumor wends its way through the city.

Occurring on the 50th anniversary of the Moncada Army Barracks Raid, this silencing and fall of Fidel Perez and his brother is quickly mistaken for the fall of Castro and his brother, taking on massive importance. As the rumor spreads, it is passed first from an aged homeless woman named Saturnina who lives very much in the wilds of her mind. She was broken after the death of her son at the hands of the Batista regime, continuing to believe that Tomas will return to her when Castro too is gone, so she looks at this event and the blood from the Perez brothers that stains her skirts as the omen foretelling her son's return. She wanders her city sharing the news of Fidel's fall, spreading it widely. Elderly professor Pedro Valle has also heard the rumor. He too has a ghost in his past, having spent many years speaking to his old friend Mario, the lost friend whom Pedro betrayed and named during interrogations so long ago. As he too walks through a strangely transformed Havana, this crumbling city which is hesitant to believe the news but timidly hopeful at the same time, lugging his unfinished manuscript about the Cuban Revolution, he keeps counsel with Mario, asking for forgiveness and for direction and guidance. Valle's student Camillo, a taxi driver, finds meaning and a future in the hope he sees burgeoning in the crowd gathering at La Plaza de la Revolucion, rising up as a leader of men. Aging pedi-cab driver, Justicio, meanwhile, who was the one to close the eyes of the Perez brothers, sees the inevitable futility of this convergence.

Occurring over the span of less than one day, this novel is the picture of a broken people, tortured and held fast by a past over which they have never had any control. It details both the corruption of the Batista regime and the lost promise of the revolution led by Castro. It shows a populace crumbling under the weight of poverty, foreign punishment, and a government they are afraid to criticize. The Fidel who falls to his death is mistaken for proclaiming his love for Cuba as well as for the dictator who runs the island, a clear and obvious metaphor. The pace of the novel is slow, wandering through the troubled minds of Saturnina and Pedro Valle just as the rumor makes its way slowly through the streets of Havana. Huergo draws heavily on Cuban history, inserting it seamlessly into the story through the imagined ghosts of her main characters, through the landmarks and places in the novel, and in the date on which she has chosen to set it. The writing is, at times, dreamlike and unreal and the characters, ungrounded in reality as Saturnina and Pedro Valle are, are also sort of wavery feeling. This gives the whole novel a chimerical feel. For those who have a great interest in Cuba and a knowledge of some of the important history, this will probably be worth reading; for others, it may be a little slow and meandering.

Review: The World of Rae English by Lucy Rosenthal

We are not only the person that our life and experiences have made but we are also a construct of ourselves, donning the garb that we want the world to view us as. Rarely are we uncovered and exposed in our true selves. We create a façade, a persona, which we are comfortable allowing people to assume is the real us. But we hide behind this façade, holding so much close, hidden, and not sharing it with anyone. In Lucy Rosenthal's novel The World of Rae English, readers can peel back a layer or two on the main character as the pages turn but she ultimately still remains crouched behind more layers, perhaps hidden even to herself.

Rae English wants to tell her story, to unveil who she is. She is the ex-wife of a once rising politician who went to prison for mail fraud. She's fled New York for university life in Iowa City, a newly minted student trying to write a novel. She's the daughter of secretive parents, a remote father who died young and a preoccupied mother.  She's the the former friend of an unsuitable, callous girl who haunts her even into adulthood. In Iowa City, she can remake herself, suppress the information of her ex-husband's existence and everything else in her past, and just be the loving girlfriend of the rather bland atheist religion professor. She can look for love and try to break her attraction to liars and to those who hold their secrets possessively to their chests. She can feign openness as she ignores her own issues of abandonment. But she, like Persephone, after whom she has named her buried novel, will spend half of her time in the open and half crouched in a hell of her own devising, wanting what she has lost.

Telling the story of Rae's life and the abandonment she endured from a young age, from the defection of her best friend to her father's death and her husband's sudden arrest, the novel jumps back and forth in time examining Rae's character. Most of the story is set in Iowa City and centers on her relationship with Ted, the atheist religion professor. Rae cleaves to him, adopting his own back story and failed marriage but without sharing her own. But it is still a betrayal of the worst sort when, like all the others before him, he too leaves her.  Her downward spiral continues apace as she grasps at something she herself may not even understand. In the end, it is only through a hard learned letting go, in practice and in fact, that both she and the reader are able to understand a little bit more about the world of Rae English.   This is ultimately a confounding book: an unknowable main character narrating the story and a plot riddled with omissions never quite addressed, much as Rae herself is presented.  She's a stand-offish character and is incapable of seeing the people around her completely as well, making it hard for the reader to see them either.  And while the plot itself is pretty straightforward and the writing is probably admirable, I find myself still uncertain about the book as a whole, wondering what I missed.

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.

Funny Girl by Nick Hornby. The book is being released by Plume on February 3, 2015.

Amazon says this about the book: From the bestselling author of High Fidelity, About a Boy, and A Long Way Down comes a highly anticipated new novel.

Set in 1960's London, Funny Girl is a lively account of the adventures of the intrepid young Sophie Straw as she navigates her transformation from provincial ingénue to television starlet amid a constellation of delightful characters. Insightful and humorous, Nick Hornby's latest does what he does best: endears us to a cast of characters who are funny if flawed, and forces us to examine ourselves in the process.

It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

This meme is hosted by Sheila at Book Journey.

Books I completed this past week are:

The Death of Fidel Perez by Elizabeth Huergo
Girl Runner by Carrie Snyder
The Future for Curious People by Gregory Sherl
The Tell-Tale Heart by Jill Dawson

Bookmarks are still living in the middle of:

Admission by Jean Hanff Korelitz

Reviews posted this week:

The Cleaner of Chartres by Salley Vickers
The Daring Ladies of Lowell by Kate Alcott
My Father's Wives by Mike Greenberg
Getting In by James Finney Boylan

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

The World of Rae English by Lucy Rosenthal
The Death of Fidel Perez by Elizabeth Huergo
Girl Runner by Carrie Snyder
The Future for Curious People by Gregory Sherl
The Tell-Tale Heart by Jill Dawson

Monday Mailbox

Another of the odd couple pairings that often arrive together joined my bookshelves this week. This past week's mailbox arrivals:

The Tell-Tale Heart by Jill Dawson came from Harper Perennial.

Centered on a fifty year old university professor who receives a heart transplant from a teenager involved in a tragic accident, this examination of life, death, organ donation, and the soul should raise interesting and difficult questions.

Not Without My Father by Andra Watkins came from Word Hermit Press.

Who do you ask to walk 444 miles with you when everyone you'd rather choose says no? Why, your elderly father, of course. This sounds like a hilarious look at both a major accomplishment and at father-daughter relationships.

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

Sunday Salon

I spent 4 hours yesterday reading in the first National Readathon Day. I didn't ask anyone to sponsor me but I think I may fire them off a check myself since it's a great cause, one that clearly resonates with me. If you want to send one in my honor, in between puttering around with a bit of other stuff, I read 326 pages which meant finishing one book and reading almost half of another. The book I finished was the one I chose to read since my book club didn't pick it and the book I picked up after that was the one that happened to be closest to hand when I put the first one down. So I'm doing pretty well on the reading more randomly idea I cooked up. Now, just because I like to inject a little nuttiness into my world, I thought it would be fun to try and read a sentence. Yes, yes, books are made up of many sentences. I know. But that's not what I mean. I mean that, with the possible exception of the review books I already have on the calendar, it might be fun to pick a sentence and then find a book in my tbr mountain range that has one of the words in the title and read it. Obviously that means that I (or you, since I'm going to ask you to come up with the sentence) need to pick an unusual sentence. But let's not get too crazy. I mean, I don't think I have any books with the word xylophone or armadillo in the title and I am going to restrict the books to those I already have here. Note that this is not as much of a restriction as you might think (check my LibraryThing profile if you are worried about being too limited). So, any suggestions for sentences?

P.S. No idea how I'll choose a sentence if I get more than one suggestion but maybe I'll read them all. If I get too distracted to follow through, on one or more, you have my apologies in advance. ;-)

In my reading week, I started out in Iowa City with a woman who is searching for love and belonging. Then I traveled to Cuba where the name of a man who plunged to his death makes many of the inhabitants of Havana think that Castro is dead. After that, I went to Canada where the first woman to win an Olympic gold medal for Canada is now 104, confined to a wheelchair, and being filmed for a movie documentary by a young marathoner and her brother. Then I hurried off to Baltimore where two people try to see their romantic futures with odd results. Now I am in England in the Fens where a fifty year old man has received the heart of a sixteen year old boy and has another chance at life. Where have you gone on your reading travels this week?

Review: Getting In by James Finney Boylan

I have a senior and a junior in high school. Besides the fact that this means I am far older than I think I am, it also means that we are sunk deep in the college application and admissions process. And it's a far different process now than it was 25 years ago. In view of that, I wouldn't be me if I didn't look to books to validate my current experience, wondering where we might have gone right or gone wrong so far and how to change that for children two and three. James Finney Boylan's quirky novel Getting In won't really help me figure that out but it did offer me some needed entertainment as I followed along with a dysfunctional and eccentric blended family on college visits to many of the schools I myself once looked at attending.

Dylan and his father Ben are joining Juddy and his father Lefty, Ben's brother; Lefty's second wife Chloe and her daughter Allison; and Allison's boyfriend Polo on a college tour to visit Yale, Harvard, Bowdoin, Colby, Dartmouth, Middlebury, Williams, Amherst, and Wesleyan. They are all crowded into a huge Winnebago as they drive through New England and weigh the choices in front of the kids for next year. Dylan is self-effacing and terrified he won't get into college. He skipped a line on his SATs and his scores are dismal, not that he's told his father this. His father, on the other hand, is hiding the news that his start-up has gone belly-up and he has no idea how he'll even pay for Dylan to go to school next year. Juddy, while seemingly not so bright, is a confident, sought after jock type and Lefty is a very successful car salesman although he's always felt a little inferior to and jealous of his younger brother. Wife Chloe is quite attractive, something of a trophy wife, who married Lefty for the financial security it gives her and her daughter. Allison is a talented musician and she spends much of the trip fending off boyfriend Polo's sexual pressures. Polo is a pretentious little prat who exudes entitlement and who is not accepting Allison's stance on sex with very good grace.  Add all of these people together in one tight space for days at a time and there are bound to be conflicts and high entertainment for the outsider looking in.

As the family drives around visiting school after school, the already existing tensions between them are rubbed raw and the secrets they all harbor bubble up to the surface and threaten to spill out. Most of the story focuses on Dylan and his worries but each of the characters faces an unsettled future. It's not just the high school kids who are facing rejection and agonize over being found worthy, but the adults as well. Each and every one of them is looking for acceptance in some way or another. There are scenes that are hilarious and scenes that are poignant and some that are both at once. The train wreck that is poor, nice guy Dylan, as he interviews badly, fumbling for even one good thing to say about himself, will just break your heart, especially when he recognizes his incompetence. Each of the characters here are well drawn and all, with the possible exception of Polo, are sympathetic despite their sometimes unpleasant flaws. Boylan has captured beautifully the angst of the college-aged child, the worries of the parents, the cautious optimism of both as they tour schools, and the stress of the entire process. The novel is a bit dated, taking place in the 1990s but this tale of growing up and facing the future, perhaps the closest our culture comes to a rite of passage to adulthood, is still highly entertaining. And if you are in the midst of this yourself, it will give you the chance to step back and laugh at the whole thing a little bit, and a little levity never hurt anyone, especially when so much seems to be riding on the outcome.

Review: My Father's Wives by Mike Greenberg

When you see things on the news about people who are on their umpty-umpth marriage, you wonder a little bit about them, don't you? What drives them to continue to marry person after person when their previous marriages have ended unhappily? What do they expect to find in their latest marriage that they haven't found yet? And when there is a child or children involved, how does this serial monogamy affect them? In Mike Greenberg's newest novel, main character Jonathan Sweetwater's father was a person like this, marrying six wives in total, and being too busy in those relationships to be in his son's life. It is the quest to learn who his father is, coupled with a staggering blow to his idea of what his own marriage is that drives the novel onwards.

Jonathan is a high powered banker type who lives quite well. He has the perfect wife, the perfect children, and the perfect life. He is not only successful in what he does, being a favorite of the boss, but he comes from money and is the only child of the famous, liberal, late Senator Percival Sweetwater III. But being the Senator's child has left emotional scars and a strong desire to be a better father and husband than his own father was. Percy, you see, walked out of his son's life on his ninth birthday, when he left Jonathan's mother, wife number one, for wife number two in the eventual line of six. Mostly Jonathan doesn't pay any attention to this sad past but when he comes home from work early one day and catches a glimpse of a naked man in his guest room with a woman who can only be his wife, thinking that his life is shattered, rather than confront his wife, he is suddenly obsessed with tracking down his father's former wives and trying to learn from them who Percival Sweetwater III really was behind the legend and how that has formed Jonathan's own character.

The connection between his wife's infidelity and his father's lifelong search for the perfect woman is tough to make. In all of his searching for explanations about his father, Jonathan doesn't really seem to find any answers and he waffles between worries he's too like his father or not at all like his father. His encounters with Percy's ex-wives all seem to follow a similar pattern and do little to shed light on the real man.  Interestingly, none of the ex-wives seem particularly surprised by Jonathan's appearance in their lives despite his never being a presence while they were married to his father nor do they have much personal or revealing to say.  They certainly can't speak to how Percy's behaviour might have formed Jonathan's character or why that would lead to his wife having an affair.  At the end of his quest, he thinks he can explain why his father married each of the women but that still doesn't really connect to his own marriage and relationship.

In between searching out Percy's ex-wives, Jonathan occasionally returns home and agonizes over his own marriage and the mystery of how he could have seen what he saw. The mystery of this is actually not a mystery at all to the reader, who has easily sussed out the ending long before Jonathan has a clue. As a result, the novel's outcome is completely predictable. The secondary characters, especially his wife and kids, are one dimensional. His billionaire, hard-partying, basketball playing boss is more well-rounded than they are. And his father's wives are not terribly well distinguished from each other. So when he draws conclusions about why his father married each of them, we just have to take his word for it that this one worshipped him but wasn't bright enough and that one was too intelligent and not worshipful enough, etc. because his brief interactions with the women don't show that to the reader. The concept, what we each look for in marriage, what perfect really means, and whether or not it is even possible, is interesting but I'm not sure it quite got there in the end.

For more information about Mike Greenberg and the book, take a look at the book's web page, follow him at Twitter, or check out the book's Goodreads page. 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 the book for review.

Review: The Daring Ladies of Lowell by Kate Alcott

When I think of the Industrial Revolution, I tend to think of England, the Luddites, and the pictures of peppered moths from science textbooks illustrating evolution at work. (You remember those moth pictures, right? The ones where peppered moths were typically white speckled with black before the industrial revolution but became almost entirely black so they blended in with the soot covered leaves.) I rarely think of the mills and factories in this country but occasionally it does creep into my consciousness. There's Ford's assembly line and the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, both of which date to the early 1900s but even before that there were factories and mills operating in the US. They were both great economic opportunities and potentially dangerous and deadly for the workers employed there. Kate Alcott's latest novel, The Daring Ladies of Lowell, offers up the story of one such fictional mill and the opposing political ideas about mills and mill workers that swirled around even as early as the 1830s.

Alice Barrow is newly arrived in Lowell, eager to find work as a mill girl, to forever escape her father's farm and become independent. She finds a room in a boarding house with several other mill girls who quickly become her closest friends, especially the cheerful and occasionally reckless Lovey. As she settles into her work at the looms, she sees firsthand the dangers that abound in the mill: dangerous machinery, unavoidable inhalation of cotton fibers, and appallingly long work hours that make workers careless out of fatigue to name just a few. Alice quickly becomes a voice in defense of the mill girls and the problems with their working conditions, even as she worries about Lovey's sudden secretiveness and tries to stop herself from being drawn to Samuel Fiske, the mill owner's son. When she returns from a futile dinner at the Fiske's Boston home where she was meant to be an emissary between the mill workers and the Fiskes but where her ideas were roundly dismissed or ignored, it is to find Lovey missing. And the following morning, there is the horrifying discovery of Lovey's hanged body. First ruled a suicide because she was pregnant, her death is later considered a homicide and the ensuing trial accusing a magnetic itinerant preacher of her murder becomes both a referendum on the character of the mill girls and a way in which the Fiske family hopes to turn prevalent political opinion on the mills to their side.

Based on an actual crime committed against a mill girl, the story highlights the need for reform and the fact that to the owner-class the dollar is mightier than the well-being and health of the workers. The novel really only skimmed the surface of these issues though, uncertain if it wanted to be about the labor movement and opportunity cost of mill work, if it wanted to be about the death of Lovey and the questions of morality and right that it raised, or if it wanted to be a forbidden romance between Alice and Samuel. In the end, it touched on all three things but didn't really delve very deeply into any of them. The trial portion of the story and the hidden reason for its outcome are probably the most engaging parts of the novel. The characters, aside from Alice, Lovey, and Samuel, are hard to tell apart even if they are initially described as being very different, blending together as one amorphous character after the initial introduction. The novel's resolution is just a shade too easy and unrealistic to be completely satisfying and seems unlikely given all that went before it.  Even so, this was a generally interesting tale, raising some worthy points about the history of industrialization in this country.

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

A Memory of Violets by Hazel Gaynor. The book is being released by William Morrow Paperbacks on February 3, 2015.

Amazon says this about the book: The author of the USA Today and New York Times bestselling novel The Girl Who Came Home has once again created an unforgettable historical novel. Step into the world of Victorian London, where the wealth and poverty exist side by side. This is the story of two long-lost sisters, whose lives take different paths, and the young woman who will be transformed by their experiences.

In 1912, twenty-year-old Tilly Harper leaves the peace and beauty of her native Lake District for London, to become assistant housemother at Mr. Shaw’s Home for Watercress and Flower Girls. For years, the home has cared for London’s flower girls—orphaned and crippled children living on the grimy streets and selling posies of violets and watercress to survive.

Soon after she arrives, Tilly discovers a diary written by an orphan named Florrie—a young Irish flower girl who died of a broken heart after she and her sister, Rosie, were separated. Moved by Florrie’s pain and all she endured in her brief life, Tilly sets out to discover what happened to Rosie. But the search will not be easy. Full of twists and surprises, it leads the caring and determined young woman into unexpected places, including the depths of her own heart.

Review: The Cleaner of Chartres by Salley Vickers

I have thoroughly enjoyed the fluid way that Salley Vickers creates her novels, first in Miss Garnet's Angel, and then in Instances of the Number Three, so I was looking forward to her newest novel, The Cleaner of Chartres. This novel has all of the hallmarks of her past novels: the same beautiful writing, the same unpretentious insight into human beings in all their frailty, and the same kind of seamless, unadorned story.

Agnes Morel is a quiet and unassuming woman who has lived in Chartres for twenty years. She was discovered sleeping on the cathedral porch as a very young woman and took on small, varied jobs around the town until the cathedral cleaner retired and Agnes was offered the position herself. She is conscientious and meticulous, going deliberately about her cleaning job in the cathedral and in the private homes where she works as well. She is very much a common and accepted, if slightly enigmatic, part of the community around the cathedral and she has never harmed or spoken ill of anyone in Chartres. So it is a bit of a surprise when the unhappy and poisonous Madam Beck starts trying to blacken her name, spreading rumors and untruths, even going so far as to use suddenly accessible information about Agnes' heretofore unknown past against the woman. But Agnes' calm presence has won her a number of friends who stand by her.

The novel is told in alternating chapters focused on Agnes' life in Chartres and on her sad and unhappy past. Having been discovered in a basket in the woods and given to nuns, none of whom were particularly maternal, to raise, Agnes missed out on the acceptance and love that she might otherwise have learned. That she was considered too stupid to learn to read and was forced to give up the baby she bore as a young girl herself only added to the tragedy of her early life. All of her past history spools out between present day chapters that show her simple, unadorned, good heart and the ways in which she labors quietly in this community that knows nothing about her past. But the past is never quite forgotten, not in the way it continues to live on in Agnes herself but also more obviously in the way in which one of the nuns from her former life offers a misrepresented piece of her past to the woman who will be least mindful of its power.

All of the secondary characters here, the kindly Abbe Paul, the disorganized Professor Jones, Alain the cathedral restorer, the guilt-ridden psychiatrist Dr. Deman, the maliciously gossipy and mean spirited Mother Veronique, Philippe who, with his sister, was one of many children Agnes used to babysit, the tortured and increasingly senile Abbe Bernard who has lost his faith and fears his dreams of his deceased mother, and the farmer, Jean Dupere, who discovered Agnes in the basket in the wood are fully realized and delicately drawn. The slow growth of their relationships with each other and with Agnes strengthen the very weave of the novel. Each character is vital to the over all story and to a complete understanding of Agnes' character.

The novel itself is very subtle and restrained, character driven rather than reliant on plot although there are small mysteries and revelations that come as surprises. The pace is quite measured, beautifully mirroring the circling of the labyrinth at the heart of the cathedral and the slow deliberateness with which Agnes spends her life. As the narrative winds in on itself, revealing the heart of the story, Vickers draws the readers into a search for the truth and how important that truth is as versus compassion and understanding. There are definitely secrets here that add to the narrative tension and fine-wrought, nuanced threads about the dangers of judging others, about sin and forgiveness, responsibility and resilience, perception and reality. Vickers manages to incorporate history and psychology, and religion and myth into this quiet and strong novel. Her writing, as usual, is lovely and understated and if you've liked her previous books, you'll find yourself settled into and engaged by this one as well.

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

It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

This meme is hosted by Sheila at Book Journey.

Books I completed this past week are:

The Cleaner of Chartres by Salley Vickers
The Daring Ladies of Lowell by Kate Alcott
My Father's Wives by Mike Greenberg
Getting In by James Finney Boylan
The World of Rae English by Lucy Rosenthal

Bookmarks are still living in the middle of:

The Death of Fidel Perez by Elizabeth Huergo

Reviews posted this week:

A Summer Bird-Cage by Margaret Drabble
An Untamed State by Roxane Gay
The Divorce Diet by Ellen Hawley
The Wednesday Daughters by Meg Waite Clayton
The Viscount Who Lived Down the Lane by Elizabeth Boyle

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

The Cleaner of Chartres by Salley Vickers
The Daring Ladies of Lowell by Kate Alcott
My Father's Wives by Mike Greenberg
Getting In by James Finney Boylan
The World of Rae English by Lucy Rosenthal

Sunday Salon: The College Process

I have a senior and a junior in high school. This means that we are deep in both the beginning and the end of the college application process. We've suffered through PSATs, SATs, PLANs, and ACTs (with another bout of the latter to come in 2 months for the younger of the two). We nagged the heck out of the oldest to figure out where he wanted to apply. Then we nagged him more to finish up his applications. We even hired someone else to nag him. We sat him down and had a come to Jesus meeting after he told us one day that he was done with college things for the rest of the week well before he had hit submit on his applications. We angsted over his grades. We breathed a sigh of relief over his test scores. We visited schools, including ones that will send him many long hours away from us. We practically broke out the champagne when an envelope arrived telling him (and us), right on the outside of it, that he had been accepted. We are still anxiously waiting to hear from the other schools and to listen to him as he talks through his decision. And having done all of this, lucky us,we are starting all over again. We are in the nagging to figure out which schools the child has an interest in exploring further stage with his sister. I think she may be waiting to see where he goes so she can strike that off her list definitively but I'm just guessing. Can't wait to move through all of the above stages again. Not!

It's a completely and totally high stakes process. Kids are pressured to find the "right" school. They feel like they are expected to know what they want to be when they grow up, long before they are actually grown up. They worry about making a mistake and choosing wrongly. It's not easy or comforting to be a kid going through the process these days. In contrast, parents know that no choice is permanent. They know that the odds of a kid actually knowing what they want to do with their lives (and then sticking with it for the duration of their work life) are pretty low. They don't worry about that stuff as much. Instead, parents are stressed about paying for whichever school takes their child's fancy. They wonder how their child is going to do without them around to help and care and nag. They wonder how often their child will remember to do laundry and change sheets and if the alarm clock will ever be enough to get the kid out of bed. Or maybe these last ones are only my worries. Parents worry about whether or not their kid will get into the college of their choice, or get into college at all. They worry about hurt feelings when/if a "No" comes winging its way through the mail or across the internet because those "No" letters come just as surely as the "Yes" letters. It's not easy or comforting being a parent with a child going through this process these days either.

But you are not alone in all of this. Sure, there are the actual kids and parents you know who are also going through it at the same time but we all know that comparisons between real situations never makes you feel any better (unless your kid happens to be the valedictorian or something). And so I turn to books. Some of them make you a little bit panicky, some of them make you feel like you and your child have a reasonably decent grasp on this crazy situation--or at least as much of one as you can have if you aren't financially blessed enough to build a building or endow a chair in order to get your kid into the school of his or her choice, and some of them make you laugh. At least I'm fairly certain there are some of the latter kind out there. I may be a little too immersed in the process right now to really appreciate over the top, ridiculous college application humor.

Over the years I have read and enjoyed a lot of fiction set on college campuses. There are some amazing writers out there who skewer academia beautifully. But I was less familiar with books on the process of getting to the campus in the first place. I like to read books about places I have been and places I am going to be traveling to so why wouldn't I want to read about the place my children and I are in in life right now? One reason not to is, of course, the panic factor. And I wouldn't be honest if I didn't admit that the books I've read so far have increased my anxiety a little (or a lot) but they've been good and interesting reads, engaging and even sometimes funny. They may not make the actual process here any easier but they do assure me I'm not alone, and it could be worse, and oh my gosh, we didn't do that and maybe we should!

Here's the reading list I have so far but please feel free to add more to my stack if you know of one that I'll be able to read without a brown paper bag sitting beside me to help with the hyperventilating:

Getting In by James Finney Boylan
Early Decision: Based on a True Frenzy by Lacey Crawford
Acceptance by Susan Coll
The Gatekeepers: Inside the Admissions Process of a Premier College by Jacques Steinberg
The Perfect Score Project: Uncovering the Secrets of the SAT by Debbie Stier
Crazy U: One Dad's Crash Course on Getting His Kid into College by Andrew Ferguson
Admission by Jean Hanff Korelitz)

I'll probably have all of the above read by the time the 7th grader forces me back through the process again several years from now. And maybe by then I will feel like an expert and worry about all of it less. Maybe pigs will fly too, right?

In other reading news, my reading this past week took me to France where a woman who cleans the cathedral of Chartres is confronted by an unpleasant older woman in town and by the past she thought she'd long since put behind her. I went to Lowell, Massachusetts where a young mill girl advocates for her rights and those of her fellow mill workers despite her growing feelings for the mill owner's son. I traveled all over with a man who is in search of the truth of who his deceased father was really and thinks he can only find it in his father's five ex-wives. And as the above suggests, I went on college visits in the northeast riding around in a Winnebago with a kooky and dysfunctional extended family and I'm just off to Iowa City with the ex-wife of a disgraced former politician as she enters an MFA program. Where have your reading travels taken you this past week?

Review: The Viscount Who Lived Down the Lane by Elizabeth Boyle

Days upon days filled with rain and then finishing a heavy and disturbing book prior to this one called for lighter fare with a guaranteed happily ever after. Elizabeth Boyle writes charming characters and entertaining situations in her Regency set Rhymes With Love series, the latest of which is The Viscount Who Lived Down the Lane. And that was just exactly what the doctor ordered.

Miss Louisa Tempest and her twin sister Lavinia are headed to London from their village of Kempton to have a season sponsored by their godmother, Lady Charleton. Louisa has no interest in tempting fate in the form of the curse against the women of Kempton marrying but her sister wants very much to have a season and so Louisa is determined to support her.  Their visit gets off on the worst possible foot right from the get go. First, Louisa's mangy looking cat, Hannibal, breaks out of his basket and streaks into the house next door to Charleton's. When Louisa goes post haste to retrieve him, she not only finds a path of broken things in his wake, but she encounters the very angry and disheveled Viscount Wakefield who is beyond annoyed that the cat and this miss have disturbed his peace.  Second, she discovers that Lady Charleton has been dead for some time and that the still grieving Lord Charleton had no knowledge of their impending arrival. But he is loathe to turn away the girls because his late wife wanted it and so he arranges to have them brought out anyway to the delight of Lavinia and the consternation of Louisa.

Since Louisa is not interested in the season and all of the fripperies that accompany it, she instead decides to make amends for Hannibal, who continues to make forays over to Wakefield's home. She fires his thieving cook and then hires him a new, much more competent one. Then she delves into his linen closet to organize it. And finally, banned from the house, she tackles the overgrown mess of his garden. Piers, Lord Wakefield, cannot believe the audacity of the meddling woman, finding himself alternately frustrated and attracted to her. He has been a recluse since he came back from the war badly wounded and devastated by the loss of his dear friend but now Louisa's tempting little behind is forcing him to leave his house and quit brooding all the time.

Louisa is a determined character and her intention of making life a little smoother for the gruff and blustering neighbor is sweetly stubborn. She knows her own shortcomings and forgives herself, generally comfortable in her own skin, and she is very good at looking beyond the exterior to see into the heart of a person or creature. Piers is definitely tortured by what he sees as his role in his friend Poldie's death but his innate kindness is still clear. He might shout and fume and insult but that's just a shield for his own hurting heart. The chemistry between Louisa and Piers is good and the plot moves along at a steady clip. The secondary characters help move the story without intruding too much but they remain interesting enough to warrant reading the next in the series. The ending has a few obviously dangling threads that will be picked up in the next book and there was at least one plot thread in the novel that seemed a dropped opportunity here but will hopefully be addressed later. Boyle knows her time period and manages to create likable and realistic characters who deserve the love and happiness that they inevitably find with each other and this reimaging of the Beauty and the Beast tale shows it.

Review: The Wednesday Daughters by Meg Waite Clayton

I have a wonderful group of friends, of whom I could ask anything. Many of us live in the same neighborhood and we all have children. Our children, with only a few exceptions, are not really friends. Perhaps this is because the kids' ages are so wildly varied. Perhaps it's because we mothers met when the kids were old enough to have friendships of their own independent of us. Perhaps there's another reason altogether, one that I am missing. It interests me when I hear of kids who are friends because their parents are friends, probably because I definitely don't see that in my own life at all. In Meg Waite Clayton's book, The Wednesday Daughters, there is this kind of relationship, at least between three of the adult daughters of the women she wrote about in The Wednesday Sisters. I enjoyed the first book and was curious to see where the second would take me. Unfortunately, it was less engaging than the first.

Hope has enlisted the help of fellow Wednesday Daughters (their mothers were all dear friends of decades long standing), Julie and Anna Page, to help her go to empty out the tiny writing cottage her mother kept in England's Lake District after her mother Ally's unexpected death. Hope wants to understand why her mother was so attracted to the place and what it meant to her, knowing only that her own grandmother, who cut off all relations with Ally when she married an Indian husband, was originally from around there and that Ally herself loved Beatrix Potter and was writing a biography of sorts of Potter when she died.

Because the group is so close, each of the three women is dealing with Ally's death but Julie is also dealing with her twin sister Jamie's death from breast cancer a year prior as well as a failed marriage, Hope is facing the possible breakdown of her marriage over the issue of children and race, and Anna Page is forever unwilling to open herself up to emotional intimacy in a relationship, always choosing awful men for herself and busying herself making the good matches for her friends.  While the three women are obviously close enough to be clearing out Ally's cottage together, by choice, they also have tensions and disapprovals of each other pervading the atmosphere as well. When they first arrive, they are rowed over to the cottage by Robbie, a boatman who tells them of the legends and old scandals in the area and Anna Page immediately tags him as someone for Julie. Then they meet Graham, the local lord, who they originally assume that Ally had been having an affair with but who turns out to have more complicated connections to her than that, being, perhaps, a key to the mystery of why Ally's mother was so horrified by her marriage to Jim. As they tramp around the Lake District countryside together, Hope carrying Ally's ashes in her pocket, each of the three women is looking for a way to heal her own wounded heart.

As a sequel, the reader is expected to dive right into the relationships with these women, remembering the tight friendships of their mothers. The problem is that the daughters weren't a huge part of the first book and it can be hard to remember which daughter belongs to which Wednesday Sister and why that would be significant in forming their personalities. The only Wednesday Sister who makes an appearance here, aside from Ally in memory and in the brief pages of her journal, is Kath, who seems quirkier, more full of southern colloquialisms than ever before, and completely out of place in England. The novel is told both from Hope's first person perspective and from a third person omniscient narration as well, blending the two of them together in a somewhat uneasy mix. Added to that already jumbled narration is the fact of Ally's journals, which seem to be the seed of her unpublished work on Beatrix Potter. These felt unnecessary and odd given that they are presented as journal entries but have animated Potter's ghost, who has conversations with Ally. It is an awkward and distracting construct when simple, unvarnished journal entries would have shown her feelings and experiences just fine. Also, the focus of the novel isn't tight enough, trying to incorporate too many major plot threads at once and then tying them up very neatly in the end. The physical descriptions of the Lake District were lovely and definitely contributed to the healing that needed to occur though. This wasn't a bad book but it just wasn't everything I had hoped either.

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

Review: The Divorce Diet by Ellen Hawley

I still carry baby weight from all three of my babies. Too bad they are 17, 16 and 12 years old respectively. That means it's probably not legitimate to call it baby weight anymore but that doesn't mean I don't still have hopes of it coming off, eventually. Abigail, the main character in Ellen Hawley's novel, The Divorce Diet, really can call her excess weight baby weight, and while losing the 170 pounds of lying, cheating husband is not what she had in mind when she decided to lose the weight, it is in fact what happens.

Abigail is going to start a diet to finally lose the weight she is still carrying from her pregnancy with 7 months old Rosie. She's certain this will help bring some action back into her marriage. As she cooks an amazing dinner and a decadent cake for husband Thad's birthday, she delves into her new diet book for the first time, making an alternate, plasticky meal for herself. But when Thad comes home late and only picks at the food, it is clear that something is wrong. Apparently the whole marriage thing isn't working for him and he wants out. Abigail is completely gutted. Without Thad and her marriage, she is penniless and doesn't know who she is so she takes baby Rosie, the shining sun in her world, and moves back home to her parents' house.

Unwilling to give up the diet, ahem "lifestyle plan," she's started because she doesn't want the diet to have been for Thad, she continues consulting the book and even having long conversations and discussions with the invisible diet guru she imagines to have written it. This guru keeps feeding her advice to make her the best, new, thin Abigail she can be while Abigail complains about the ghastly meals and the woe-filled life she's inadvertently come to inhabit. Before she met Thad, Abigail had worked at a gourmet kitchen store and hosted underground dinners to showcase her culinary skills. With Thad, she used only the finest ingredients and tinkered with gourmet recipes. After Thad, at her parents' house, she is faced with frozen meals and bland, flavorless, processed foods while she does the only work she can find, and even that she isn't even qualified for: being a waitress at a chain restaurant. She sees her life having taken the same disheartening trajectory and spends a lot of time wallowing in her unhappiness and vowing to change. It's only when she really examines her past life objectively and sees it for what it was rather than for what she thought it was, that she can move towards becoming the person she wants to be and to find happiness again.

This is very much a novel of reinvention. Abigail is forced to make a change she doesn't see coming nor which she wants but in weathering it, she becomes a much stronger woman. In fact, she moves from being a whiny teenager type to being a fulfilled woman in charge of her own life and directing her own destiny. Her character starts the book off with little to no self-esteem, finding her self-worth in her husband and the upwardly mobile life that they lead. Once he shatters this world for her and moves his girlfriend into Abigail's very bed, she must learn to rely on herself and to be capable on her own. Although living with her parents allows her to regress, it also gives her a bit of breathing room and a safe place in which to tentatively learn independence and self-sufficiency.

Most chapters cover one day in Abigail's life following Thad's dismissal of their marriage and are set up in a sort of diary format. Abigail records her food intake and her daily exercise as well as mocking the largely inedible recipes offered up by her diet book. Her tone is snarky and the exercise entries, in particular, are fairly entertaining. She is clearly depressed though as there is a flavoring of guilt threaded throughout the entries as well, such as when she eats half a tasteless Pop Tart and discards the other half on her passenger seat day after day after day or when she separates the clothes scattered across her floor into clean on one side and dirty on the other, unmotivated to pick them up, wash the dirties, and hang up the clean. In fact, Abigail is just treading water for much of the novel, barely keeping her head above water emotionally. She's helped in the latter by arguing with her invisible guru and by the wonderful babysitter, Dell, she finds to watch Rosie for her and who selflessly provides Abigail with a sympathetic ear and sometimes even some gentle advice every day after work.

The diary entry format of the novel is a bit choppy and can be repetitive although sometimes that repetition is intentional to highlight the joyless drudgery of Abigail's life. Abigail, as a character, is incredibly immature and naïve for a twenty-five year old woman.  Seeing the other characters only through her eyes makes them rather one dimensional. Thad is a jerk all the way around and her parents, while allowing her to move home without much conversation, are strangely uninvolved in her life, content to sit unspeaking in front of the tv every night. Dell, although providing a necessary outlet for Abigail, never becomes much of a character. And aside from being cautionary, Abigail's fellow waitresses are simply types. The majority of the novel tracks the days and weeks immediately following the breakup of the marriage but once Abigail starts to consider who she really wants to be and what would bring her happiness, the pace goes from slow to blazing fast, wrapping up a much changed Abigail's life in just a short chapter or three. There's definitely humor woven throughout Abigail's struggle, especially in reference to her weight, which helps to lighten the over all mood of the story a fair bit. A quick and easy book to read, a nice tale about change, reinvention and finding the joy in life, it was generally enjoyable although some of the repetition could have been dispensed with for the reader's sake.

For more information about Ellen Hawley and the book, take a look at her web page, follow her at Twitter, read her blog, or check out the book's Goodreads 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 the book for review.

Review: An Untamed State by Roxane Gay

Savage. Brutal. Horrifying. Graphic. When you use adjectives like this to describe a book, it can be hard to convince people to read it. And when you add in the fact that there is terrible violence, repeated rape, kidnapping, and PTSD too, well, you'd be forgiven for giving the book a wide berth indeed. But do you still skip the book if it also tackles important issues of classism and inequity, entitlement and the social divide, and the reality of life in modern day Haiti?  All of this is very much what you find between the covers of Roxane Gay's debut novel, An Untamed State. It is difficult to read, jarring in the force of terrible happenings, and devastating in consequences but it is not a glorification or whitewashing of torture or poverty, nor of either America or Haiti. It is powerful and affecting and impressive.

Mireille, her husband Michael, and their baby Christophe have come to Haiti to visit Miri's extraordinarily wealthy parents. The small family is heading out for a day at the beach when Miri is snatched from their car and held for a million dollar ransom. Her initial concern is for her baby and her husband, assuming that she will be held relatively unscathed and eventually returned to her family. But when her father, a self-made man who will not relinquish his moral values for anything, refuses to pay the ransom and Miri herself disobeys her captors, mouthing off and refusing to tell her father she is being mistreated, hell on earth is released. Miri is beaten, gang raped, cut, burned with cigarettes, and tortured repeatedly to the point that she must mentally detach from her physical self, completely disassociating from herself in order to survive. For thirteen days, Miri endures, only because she must and because her body refuses to die like her mind has already done. And once she is returned to her family, her suffering is not at an end. She will live with the horror for her whole life.

The bulk of the novel is told in the first person by Mireille, giving the reader an inside view of the evil being done to her. But she also offers tidbits of her past life, her childhood with a loving but driven father, her genesis of her relationship with her Midwestern farmer's son husband, their misunderstandings and his passionate refusal to give up on her, and her brusque relationship with her mother-in-law. This backstory builds Miri's character beyond the broken and unstable women who survives unspeakable acts of violence, highlighting the ways in which she is indelibly marked by a malevolent Haiti she's never before experienced, cocooned in affluence as her family has always been in Miri's lifetime. The brief respite every now and again from the constant brutality is striking but it doesn't necessarily paint a very positive picture of Mireille. She comes across as volatile, contrary, and rather spoiled. Despite it seeming as if she is constantly testing Michael to see if he's good enough for her and the various way she is an unlikeable character, there is no question that she doesn't deserve to experience what she is forced to endure; no one does.  In addition, there are a few short third person chapters that take the focus from Miri and give the reader a glimpse of how her family, both her Haitian born parents and her American husband, are handling her kidnapping, completely ignorant of what she is actually experiencing.

Fully two thirds of the novel centers on the thirteen days in which Miri was captive with the final third detailing her difficulties afterwards. Those first two thirds are incredibly difficult to read, horror piling on top of horror to the point that the reader almost disassociates from the violence just as Miri does. But even the final third is painful to read as Miri tries to climb out of the dark and terrible place she has pushed her consciousness in order to survive. None of the characters come off well, not the wealthy and not the poor. The Commander, the leader of the kidnappers, is warped and evil. TiPierre, another of the kidnappers, desperately poor, offers Miri gentleness only because he wants her compliant and willing, enslaved to him because of his grotesque kindness to her. Miri's father is cold and uncaring, turning a blind eye not only to Miri's plight but to his extended family and the greater world around him in Haiti. Michael is ineffectual and suffering in his own way in this very foreign place. Interestingly, despite Mireille being angered by Michael's negative perception of Haiti having been formed solely by the US news, the book as a whole reinforces and strengthens this impression of Haiti as a terrible, lawless, and desperate place, a conclusion that Gay might not have fully intended. The prose is direct, the images confrontational and bald.  In the end, this was a book that I had to set down and walk away from, only coming back to it to read it through in a rush to get to the end and away from the brutality and brokenness, ultimately following it with a read as different as possible from it as an antidote to the lingering horror of the story. This wild and frightening, untamed state is definitely not for everyone.

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.

Lost and Found by Brooke Davis. The book is being released by Dutton Adult on January 27, 2015.

Amazon says this about the book: An irresistible debut novel about the wisdom of the very young, the mischief of the very old, and the magic that happens when no one else is looking

Millie Bird, seven years old and ever hopeful, always wears red gumboots to match her curly hair. Her struggling mother, grieving the death of Millie’s father, leaves her in the big ladies’ underwear department of a local store and never returns.

Agatha Pantha, eighty-two, has not left her house—or spoken to another human being—since she was widowed seven years ago. She fills the silence by yelling at passersby, watching loud static on TV, and maintaining a strict daily schedule.

Karl the Touch Typist, eighty-seven, once used his fingers to type out love notes on his wife’s skin. Now that she’s gone, he types his words out into the air as he speaks. Karl’s been committed to a nursing home, but in a moment of clarity and joy, he escapes. Now he’s on the lam.

Brought together at a fateful moment, the three embark upon a road trip across Western Australia to find Millie’s mother. Along the way, Karl wants to find out how to be a man again; Agatha just wants everything to go back to how it was.

Together they will discover that old age is not the same as death, that the young can be wise, and that letting yourself feel sad once in a while just might be the key to a happy life.

Review: A Summer Bird-Cage by Margaret Drabble

I have a weakness for quiet books set in England that shine a light--a piercing light for all the quietness of the text--on society. Luckily there are a number of authors through the years who have done this: Jane Austen, Angela Thirkell, and Barbara Pym, among others. This half a century old first novel of Margaret Drabble's fits in this same tradition of socially revealing character driven novels infused with moments of sly wit.

Sarah is recently graduated from Oxford and living in Paris as an English tutor when she is summoned home to act as a bridesmaid for her stunning older sister Louise's wedding. Sarah does not understand how her sister can be marrying Stephen, even if he is rich and a semi-famous author. He is snobbish and unappealing but Louise is determined to marry him, accepting the reality of a rather cold-blooded, loveless marriage. After the wedding, Sarah continues to drift along in her own life, taking an uninspired job, living with a friend who is getting divorced, and occasionally running into people who report back to her about her sister's apparent loneliness in her new marriage. And then she sees Louise again herself and witnesses what people have been whispering all along, that Louise married Stephen for money and keeps his best friend, a famous theater actor, on the side for fulfillment.  As she watches her sister, Sarah wonders what shape her own life will take.

Sarah is perceived by others as a bubbly bon vivant of sorts but that's a very superficial view of her character. She is casually and thoughtlessly intelligent, well-educated and a member of the socially advantageous middle class. She's acerbic and astute about the society around her, even if she is a card-carrying member of it as well. Neither she nor Louise seem particularly happy and the pervading feeling of the novel is of a mild dissatisfaction with life. The social dynamic is changing, allowing more opportunity for women but it hasn't quite gotten there entirely by the time the novel opens in early 1960s London and the questioning of the limited choices available to women was still not terribly common. Sarah tells the novel in the first person, giving the reader her perspective of not only the strained relationship between the sisters but also her mocking, yet envious, derision of Louise and Stephen's pretentious affluence as well as about her own weary and unfulfilled days. There is a thread of existential angst that runs through the narrative and a sharp social commentary as well. This is an astute character study, both literate and literary. There's not much of a plot running through it so those looking for action will be better served elsewhere. As I already knew from later works, Drabble writes beautifully and she has captured the idle beauty of a certain class of women trying to find her best path in life.

It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

This meme is hosted by Sheila at Book Journey.

Books I completed this past week are:

An Untamed State by Roxane Gay
The Wednesday Daughters by Meg Waite Clayton
The Divorce Diet by Ellen Hawley
The Viscount Who Lived Down the Lane by Elizabeth Boyle

Bookmarks are still living in the middle of:

The Cleaner of Chartres by Salley Vickers
The Daring Ladies of Lowell by Kate Alcott

Reviews posted this week:

Animal Madness by Laurel Braitman
Wild by Cheryl Strayed

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

A Summer Bird-Cage by Margaret Drabble
An Untamed State by Roxane Gay
The Wednesday Daughters by Meg Waite Clayton
The Divorce Diet by Ellen Hawley
The Viscount Who Lived Down the Lane by Elizabeth Boyle

Monday Mailbox

A delightful looking pair of novels hit my house this week. I must already be teeing up for Valentine's Day or something. Then again, so are the stores and I did already buy my husband his Valentine's card the other day. (Shhh! Don't tell him.) This past week's mailbox arrivals:

The Love Book by Nina Solomon came from Kaylie Jones Books and LibraryThing Early Reviewers.

If you found a book that directed you on a search for a soul mate, wouldn't you give it a whirl? This novel about a single mom journalist and friends who discover a book that promises just that, even as it sends them in unexpected directions, is incredibly appealing to me.

Heartbreak Hotel by Deborah Moggach came from The Overlook Press for a blog tour.

About a ladies man who needs to fill his slightly tired B&B in rural Wales and the collection of beaten down by love guests that arrive to inhabit the place, this sounds like a delightful and wonderful romantic, comedic read.

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

Sunday Salon: The Turning of the Year Makes Me Crazy (As Usual)

We're more than a week into the new year now and if you made resolutions (I don't), you might have already broken them. You might, also, have stuck them out so far. There is, of course, the usual weight loss resolution that sees gyms fill up beyond capacity these first few weeks of the year. And while I want to lose weight (again), I never make it a resolution. Bookish people like me like to set forth the idea that they will read more in the coming year or wider diversity or, or, or. Again, I don't. This isn't to say that I am complacent or unaffected by the change of date. Because I am. I think there must be something in our very souls that thrills to specific, outside of ourselves, starting points. And I am not immune to that thrill at all. But rather than resolutions, I tend to find strange little projects that pique my interest and embark on those. So far this year, I have turned all of the hangers in my closet backwards so that I can figure out which clothes I actually wear during the year and donate the rest. It's a delayed closet purge. I've organized all of the recipes I've torn out of magazine to try over the years. I grabbed folders that were still in decent shape after my children finished with them for school, labeled them with categories that work for me, and filed all untried recipes accordingly. I took a toothpick and ran it under the rim of my stove where all sorts of tiny crumby cooking detritus manages to fester throughout the year. (I don't necessarily recommend this gross option, by the way.). I have other mini projects like this that I'd love to accomplish before the motivation of the first leaves me (and it will). One of those is to finish rearranging my bookshelves so that all of the books I've bought over the past year will fit in. I'm not holding out much hope though. That's okay though. In the meantime, I'll just read.

This week my reading journey took me to Haiti with a kidnapped woman, to the English Lake District with three women who are struggling with love in their lives, to the guest room in a character's parents house after her husband leaves her, and to Regency London where a meddling next door neighbor and her mangy cat pull a reclusive former soldier out of the self-imposed prison he's created. I'm also visiting Chartres with a woman who cleans the cathedral and becomes indispensable to several of the people around the area and Lowell, Massachusetts with factory girls. Where have your reading journeys taken you this past week?

Review: Wild by Cheryl Strayed

Yes, I know. I am the last person on the planet to have read Cheryl Strayed's book, Wild, especially since the movie is out and garnering praise. I had planned to read it long ago but never got around to it. After all, I am completely intrigued by the idea of hiking long distances alone in the wilderness, not that I am terribly likely to ever get around to it myself (and a good thing too, as it would be a huge folly for me to attempt). So when I went to a New Year's Eve party and most of the women there had read the book, gone to see the movie, and were discussing both, it inspired me to finally pick this off the shelf and read it.

Strayed was in a self-destructive spiral, sleeping around and cheating on her husband, getting divorced despite still loving him, shooting heroin, grieving the loss of her mother four years before, and crushed by the realization that her siblings and step-father had no interest in maintaining the family connections that were so important to her when she decided to hike the Pacific Crest Trail alone as an attempt to find her center and to become the person she really wanted to be. Being out in the wild nature of the trail offered her a way to be with herself without all the noise and distraction of the world butting in on her. It is this solitude that she craves in order to take an honest look at her life.

So she sets out, completely and woefully unprepared for the rigors and reality of a hike of the magnitude she's chosen. Thanks to the chance encounters with kind and giving people on the trail, she does make it though. Her account of her time on the trail is peppered with flashbacks to her pre-hike life, to the grief she still carries, heavy as the oversized pack on her back. These insights into the events that drove her onto the trail do mean that there's not as much about the hike itself or nature as might be expected but then this isn't really a hiking memoir so much as it is about getting to the core of who she was as a person.

Written from the perspective of twenty years on from the hike, it is interesting what Strayed has chosen to include. She is brutally honest about her many mistakes and she offers up raw emotion for sure. But she is strangely concerned with how she looks (her lost toenails, poor blistered and abused feet, scaly skin on her hips, ratty hair, grubby and unwashed appearance) whenever she has one of her chance encounters with other hikers or people in the towns she has come down to and whether or not she will have sex with selected folks, returning to these concerns again and again. She clearly remembers the kindness of others who save her from herself and her poor planning, time after time, and the luck that saves her just as frequently. She does face real challenges, both physical and mental, and overcomes them as she gets back to the basics of survival and pure existence but she isn't as alone in this overcoming as she had intended. The backstory at the beginning of the book is rather slow going, albeit generally necessary, and not as engaging as her struggles, dogged perseverance, and soul searching on the trail, so the narrative is unevenly paced and the ending is extremely rushed.

Strayed apparently did come to some peace with the loss of her mother and with her past through her hike but most of that peace seems to be a simple acceptance of who she is rather than anything more insightful or profound than that.  She hasn't really changed, just come to love herself as she already is, which is a bit problematic given the destructive, poor choices that lead her to the trail in the first place.  The book was a generally engaging read despite these problems and although it should be a caution against following in her footsteps rather than an endorsement, it does also show that nature can in fact heal us and help us center ourselves in ways that our chaotic, babble-ridden world cannot.

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 Grown Ups by Robin Antalek. The book is being released by William Morrow Paperbacks on January 27, 2015.

Amazon says this about the book: From the author of The Summer We Fell Apart, an evocative and emotionally resonant coming-of-age novel involving three friends that explores what it means to be happy, what it means to grow up, and how difficult it is to do both together.

The summer he’s fifteen, Sam enjoys, for a few secret months, the unexpected attention of Suzie Epstein. For reasons Sam doesn’t entirely understand, he and Suzie keep their budding relationship hidden from their close knit group of friends. But as the summer ends, Sam’s world unexpectedly shatters twice: Suzie’s parents are moving to a new city to save their marriage, and his own mother has suddenly left the house, leaving Sam’s father alone to raise two sons.

Watching as her parents’ marital troubles escalate, Suzie takes on the responsibility of raising her two younger brothers and plans an early escape to college and independence. Though she thinks of Sam, she deeply misses her closest friend Bella, but makes no attempt to reconnect, embarrassed by the destructive wake of her parents as they left the only place Suzie called home. Years later, a chance meeting with Sam’s older brother will reunite her with both Sam and Bella—and force her to confront her past and her friends.

After losing Suzie, Bella finds her first real love in Sam. But Sam’s inability to commit to her or even his own future eventually drives them apart. In contrast, Bella’s old friend Suzie—and Sam’s older brother, Michael—seem to have worked it all out, leaving Bella to wonder where she went wrong.

Spanning over a decade, told in alternating voices, The Grown Ups explores the indelible bonds between friends and family and the challenges that threaten to divide them.

Review: Animal Madness by Laurel Braitman

Those of us who are pet owners and consider our animals to be a part of the family have no trouble believing that animals do possess the consciousness that means they are capable of independent thought and the ability to feel emotions. But this also means that we believe that they possess the capability to suffer from mental illness, much in the way that human beings do. It is this sad idea that Laurel Braitman explores in her book, Animal Madness.

Braitman and her then husband adopted a Bernese Mountain dog named Oliver. He was being surrendered by his current family but Braitman was given little information about why. It turned out that Oliver suffered terribly when left alone, even going so far as to jump out of a closed window in their apartment, plummeting to the cement below. Miraculously, he survived his fall but his anxiety and terror didn't abate at all. Although they tried everything to help Oliver, nothing worked to calm him. His clear, unmanageable, life long distress sent Braitman on a search into the origins and treatments of mental illness in animals.

In addition to her own dog and other canines, Braitman looked at whales, dolphins, elephants, birds, horses, and primates, among others, and the documented problems they suffer as domesticated or captive animals. Taking newspaper reports, interviews with keepers, and communications with experts in the fields of animal behavior, veterinary medicine, and mental health, Braitman discusses the problem of diagnosing animals without anthropomorphizing them, the ways in which their diagnoses parallel human mental health biases of the time, the option of medicating or changing the behavior of the animals, and the ways in which human interference with wild animals has led to so many of the atypical, extreme behaviors we need to control or alleviate.

Using anecdotal stories to support the wider neurological theory underpinning her conclusions, Braitman covers animals suffering from mental illnesses like depression, anxiety, OCD, and PTSD and even discusses the idea of whether or not animals can be suicidal. Although the book purports to suggest that understanding animals will help us understand ourselves, there is only a very tenuous link to that idea. Since animals cannot tell us what they are feeling, human beings must extrapolate solely from observations what is going on. It is therefore not surprising that it is all framed in the same terms that human mental illness is described.

All of these observations have, by necessity, taken place on animals either living in captivity or that have been domesticated to one extent or another rather than factoring in any animals in the wild who manifest the same behaviors. Is this because they don't have these issues in the wild? Is it because it is too hard to study the same wild animals over extended amounts of time? Is it because these animals don't survive long in the wild? These are questions that Braitman doesn't address or acknowledge, making the book less complete than it should be for the conclusions it draws. There is certainly no doubt that the ways in which we bend animals to be what we want and expect of them, in zoos, parks, and our homes, does them no favors mentally and her indictment of our role in animals' mental anguish is not without basis for sure but as she cautioned in the very opening pages of the book, she seems to be anthropomorphizing quite a bit herself. It is sad to read about the variety of ways that animals harm themselves and others of their species and interesting to read about the ways, some more palatable than others, that we people try to help them conquer these atypical behaviors. Over all, the book opens a small window into the discussion about the well being of animals, specifically those under human care, living lives we don't recognize as normal, rich, and satisfying for them.

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