Review: The Love Book by Nina Solomon

I don't read self-help books. Not those that tell you how to be happier, nor those that tell you how to improve your life, nor those that purport to tell you how to attract the relationship you want. But a lot of people do read these sorts of books, as is shown by their massive sales and enormous wave of word of mouth.  What is truly impressive is how many of those readers try to incorporate the book's advice into their own lives. Nina Solomon's new novel, The Love Book, is not a self-help book, but it has a self-help book of sorts at its core and its impact on the lives of the four women in the novel is indeed transformational.

Emily, Cathy, Max, and Beatrice meet in France on a Flaubert singles bike tour. They are quite different from each other and despite appearances, they are all on the tour for different reasons. Emily is a divorced single mother who is trying to make a go of freelance writing before her alimony payments stop and she's on the tour in order to write about it. Cathy is an earnest and chipper special education teacher whose fiancé left her at the altar and who truly wants to find her soul mate. Max is an incredibly fit, rather cynical personal trainer who was gifted the trip by a client. And Beatrice is a smart, elegant, older woman who had a years long affair with a married man and who still maintains that she is not looking for the settled comfort of an exclusive relationship. None of the women seem like they would become friends with each other and yet the trip and a rainy stay at a French auberge throws them together to make unexpected connections even in the face of so many differences. And perhaps they don't exactly become friends, having such varying outlooks on life, but when Cathy finds a copy of The Love Book, a book to help you find your soul mate, at the auberge, and it makes its way back to the states with the women, they stay connected.

Although the other women want to disappear back into their usual lives once they get home to the states, Cathy is determined to help everyone follow The Love Book's advice and find their soul mate. She sends each of the women their own copy of the book and organizes gatherings to check in on everyone's progress. The narrative flips from woman to woman as she faces the challenges and stumbling blocks in her own regular and romantic life at home. It is interesting to watch as each of the women pursues what she thinks she wants (or doesn't want) in her romantic life and as each of them face the mistakes they've made and the regrets they've had along the way. Emily is sort of the centerpiece of the ensemble cast of characters and her realizations are bittersweet. Cathy is the only one who truly wants to find the man she's meant to be with, taking the advice of the book but still misreading situations all over the place. But all of the women, in searching for, or shutting out, men, discover quite a lot about themselves and the ways their hearts work. In fact, it is not only predictable who the soul mates will be, but they aren't all that fleshed out as characters, being generally incidental in this story about the women's fears, insecurities, and small snobberies.

Solomon has written the antithesis of a traditional romance and poked a little bit of sly fun at these mega popular self-help books with their insubstantial, interpret-it-any-which-way advice. There are witty bits of writing that will make the reader snicker in appreciation and everyone should be able to find at least one of the four women sympathetic even if they each can be incredibly frustrating as well. As in classic works of romantic fiction, the women all suffer from unearned prejudices and first impressions that miss the mark, a nice nod to the literature that precedes Solomon's own work. The beginning of the novel takes a little work but then it find its groove and rolls smoothly along from there. And although the end is quickly wrapped up, it has a finished enough feel to it that the speed with which the pages end can be mostly forgiven. Over all, this is a lighthearted and entertaining look at the realities, in all their bumbling incarnations, of romance in the twenty-first century.

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

It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

Big reading week again. And per usual, the reviewing didn't keep pace. Story of my life. ;-) This meme is hosted by Sheila at Book Journey.

Books I completed this past week are:

The Precious One by Marisa de Los Santos
Hausfrau by Jill Alexander Essbaum
Wide-Open World by John Marshall
Children of the Jacaranda Tree by Sahar Delijani
The Year My Mother Came Back by Alice Eve Cohen

Bookmarks are still living in the middle of:

A Reunion of Ghosts by Judith Claire Mitchell

Reviews posted this week:

Splinters of Light by Rachael Herron
The Godforsaken Daughter by Christina McKenna
Hausfrau by Jill Alexander Essbaum

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

The Love Book by Nina Solomon
Head Case by Cole Cohen
The Precious One by Marisa de Los Santos
Wide-Open World by John Marshall
Children of the Jacaranda Tree by Sahar Delijani
The Year My Mother Came Back by Alice Eve Cohen

Monday Mailbox

Just one this week but it's one that my book club is wildly jealous about. ;-) This past week's mailbox arrival:

A God in Ruins by Kate Atkinson came from Little, Brown.

I listened to Life After Life in the car with my kids on a long trip last summer so when I saw that Atkinson had written a companion book centered on Teddy, I couldn't resist.

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.

Review: Hausfrau by Jill Alexander Essbaum

I have been a housewife for almost 18 years now, giving up a job I really enjoyed to stay home with first one, and then eventually three, babies. This is not the life for everyone. Some people would be overwhelmed by boredom and view their lives at home as nothing but drudgery. But some of us, those who find outside interests and keep our physical and intellectual lives alive even through the mundanity of laundry and carpool and dinner on the table every night, can certainly thrive and be happy in this traditional role. Jill Alexander Essbaum's novel, Hausfrau, does not have a happy housewife though. Instead the novel highlights the isolation and stultifying ennui that some people feel when staying at home.

The opening line: "Anna was a good wife, mostly," is an ironic one. Yes, Anna Benz is an American ex-pat married to a Swiss banker, living outside Zurich, and mother to three small children. She is, in fact, the housewife of the title. But she only becomes vibrant or shows any spark when she is sneaking off to have trysts with her various lovers. She frequently leaves the children in the care of her suspicious mother-in-law while she heads into the city to take German lessons (after almost a decade in Switzerland, she still can't really speak the language) and to meet with various men. She wanders through her own life apathetic and depressed. She only has two friends, neither of whom she really gives access to her life, leaving her completely isolated and alone. She has no outside interests other than illicit (although oddly perfunctory) sex. And even her affairs are arrived at passively, with the men pursuing and Anna simply acquiescing out of compliance and passivity.

The novel's narration is interesting. There is little chronological flow the story, episodes from the past and present jumbling together with bits of the language lessons Anna takes as well as excerpts from her therapy sessions. But strangely, this works. The pacing, however, doesn't work quite as well. The beginning, establishing Anna's automaton-like character is quite extended, with the consequences of this narcissistic half-life only being revealed in the last sixth of the novel. Even when the tension does ratchet up, there's still an emotional remove to the narration that make it difficult for the reader to connect to Anna, either in disapproving of her constant infidelities or by feeling sympathy for her tragedy or for her clearly overwhelming depression. As a character, Anna is frustrating in her lack of affect. She generally comes off as unlikable and detached even when the reader is told that she is in the depths of an emotional breakdown. Neither her husband nor her lovers come off as complex characters either, instead being merely indifferent or cold. And the suggestion that her friend who also conducts an extramarital affair is happy and charged up while the friend who is a loyal, non-cheating wife is naïve and immature is mildly offensive. The novel is disturbing on many levels, pervaded by an impending sense of doom and discovery, yet remains detached feeling despite some gorgeous turns of phrase. There are obvious parallels here to Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary but this does not carry with it the greater depth of cultural critique and import that those two novels did. Essbaum can write but this was ultimately a disappointment.

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.

The Real Doctor Will See You Shortly by Matt McCarthy. The book is being released by Crown on April 7, 2015.

Amazon says this about the book: In medical school, Matt McCarthy dreamed of being a different kind of doctor—the sort of mythical, unflappable physician who could reach unreachable patients. But when a new admission to the critical care unit almost died his first night on call, he found himself scrambling. Visions of mastery quickly gave way to hopes of simply surviving hospital life, where confidence was hard to come by and no amount of med school training could dispel the terror of facing actual patients.

This funny, candid memoir of McCarthy’s intern year at a New York hospital provides a scorchingly frank look at how doctors are made, taking readers into patients’ rooms and doctors’ conferences to witness a physician's journey from ineptitude to competence. McCarthy's one stroke of luck paired him with a brilliant second-year adviser he called “Baio” (owing to his resemblance to the Charles in Charge star), who proved to be a remarkable teacher with a wicked sense of humor. McCarthy would learn even more from the people he cared for, including a man named Benny, who was living in the hospital for months at a time awaiting a heart transplant. But no teacher could help McCarthy when an accident put his own health at risk, and showed him all too painfully the thin line between doctor and patient.

The Real Doctor Will See You Shortly offers a window on to hospital life that dispenses with sanctimony and self-seriousness while emphasizing the black-comic paradox of becoming a doctor: How do you learn to save lives in a job where there is no practice?

Review: The Godforsaken Daughter by Christina McKenna

There's something so very appealing about rural Ireland and the people who populate it, at least to this American. Combine that with a Cinderella story of sorts, and I am guaranteed to be hooked. Christina McKenna's newest novel, the third in her Tailorstown series, The Godforsaken Daughter, is a pleasing example of just this kind of story.

Ruby Clare is in her thirties and unmarried. She lives at home where she was the apple of her father Vinny's eye, helping him with the farming, until his sudden and unexpected death in the field outside the kitchen window. Now with her beloved father gone, her mother Martha has rented out the land and insists on Ruby staying in the house with her, knitting tea cozies, cooking and cleaning, and generally being her mother's whipping post. Ruby's existence has gotten smaller and far unhappier than it ever was when her father was alive. Her nasty, self-centered younger sisters, May and June, come home from Belfast some weekends and treat Ruby as if she is their own personal drudge. Whenever she exhibits any sign of a backbone, her mother and sisters threaten her with St. Ita's, the local mental institution. So it seems as if Ruby is destined to live out her life lonely, unhappy, and cowed by these three inexplicably cruel and unloving women. But when she discovers the case in the attic that was left behind by her paternal grandmother, with its contents that smack of the occult, her life changes forever, not least because of the confident voice she starts to hear in her own head.

Dr. Henry Shevlin is a psychologist who has relocated to small Tailorstown to be a temporary doctor. It is he who has say over who continues treatment with him and who needs to be committed to St. Ita's. In his capacity as doctor, he sees several patients who use different coping mechanisms to escape the sadness and tragedy in their lives. His own method of coping with the sadness and desperation he felt when his wife disappeared over a year prior was to leave his home, to stop looking for her, especially once his discoveries started to turn up very troubling and potentially dangerous political connections. But leaving Belfast has never meant that he's stopped wishing for her safe return.

All of the characters here are cradling secrets of some kind, unable to share their sorrow or shame to lighten the load. But as they each find a voice, they discover love and forgiveness, if not from others, at least towards themselves. Although the plot threads following Ruby and Henry are the most major in the novel, Ruby's stands out more. As the novel progresses, her grandmother's belongings allow her to find the confidence to stand up for herself, to seek her own happiness, and to find the courage to break free of the mousy, doormat role in which her mother and sisters have long defined her. The two major plot lines were very different and really only glanced off of each other very briefly although the history of Henry's search for his wife does ground the story in the 1980s and the midst of the troubles in Northern Ireland much more so than Ruby's story does. The secondary characters are quirky and delightful and as the story progresses you can't help but root for Ruby to break free of her family and find happiness and for Henry to solve the puzzle of his wife's disappearance. Although this is the third in the series, it is easily read without having read the others first but if they are anything like this heartwarming, pastoral novel, they will be worth a look too.

For more information about Christina McKenna and the book, take a look at her website, like her Facebook page 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: Splinters of Light by Rachael Herron

Just this week in the news there was an article about a potentially promising new treatment for Alzheimer's Disease. It hasn't made it up the chain to testing in humans yet but initial findings are incredibly promising, showing that it helps slow the creation of the plaques that cause memory loss. This is hopeful news for the many friends and family members who love someone suffering from this terrible, sneaky thief of a disease. I can't begin to imagine being diagnosed with a disease that you know will rob you of your memories and your entire sense of self. It must be terrifying at any age but especially so for those who have the genetic marker that means they will not only develop the disease but develop it early, right in the prime of their lives. For these people with what is called Early Onset Alzheimer's Disease or EOAD, the diagnosis only comes after they have started noticing the slow erosion of their faculties already and can no longer blame their symptoms on stress or forgetfulness any longer. Rachael Herron's new novel, Splinters of Light, tackles the helpless and scary feeling of being diagnosed with EOAD in a novel about a writer, her teenaged daughter, and her fraternal twin sister.

Nora Glass is a 44 year old single mother to Ellie, the teenaged daughter who has been the frequent subject of her writings for many years. Her life isn't perfect but it is generally happy. Her twin sister Mariana is in a good relationship and the meditation app she's designed is taking off so she's on the verge of shedding her reputation as the screw-up sister.  Nora's next door neighbor Nick has always been a good friend to both Nora and Ellie and he's teetering on the verge of something more. But she's started to notice that her memory isn't what it used to be and despite figuring that it is nothing, these lapses send her to the doctor's office, where she gets the life altering diagnosis of Early Onset Alzheimer's Disease. She doesn't know how to tell the people she loves about this death sentence and she can't even begin to imagine how to tie up the loose ends in her life. Who will take care of Ellie? Certainly not Ellie's uninvolved and essentially worthless father. Mariana has a history of having to be bailed out by Nora the perfectionist so how can she possibly take over as the responsible adult in the teenaged Ellie's life? And what on earth will Mariana do without her sister as a safety net? All of these questions consume Nora, even after she has told her sister, her daughter, and Nick about the grim prognosis she's facing.

As much as this is a novel about a woman struggling with a devastating disease, it is also a novel about love and family. Nora and Mariana have an especially close relationship as twins. Ellie feels left out of her mother's world, assuming that there's only room for two in it and that that the second person is Mariana, not her. And Ellie is not only dealing with these feelings of exclusion and the idea of losing her mother, she's also dealing with everything that goes along with being a sixteen and seventeen year old girl in her first relationship and thinking about leaving for college as well. The moments where each of the three women are unguarded and honest are touching and highlight their deep bonds with each other. Herron has drawn the changes in Nora, the way her personality has changed, the anger and frustration, the small losses that add up to something much greater and scarier, and the encroaching fear of it all, very well. Nora and Ellie's mother daughter dynamic is equal parts contentious and close. There are some parts of their relationship that don't ring entirely true (like Ellie texting her mother to tell her she's going to have sex) for most mother daughter relationships though. The twin plot line is definitely an important one but it is a bit clichéd to draw twins as more connected to each other than anyone else. In fact, it helps the plot a lot when Nora is forced to reconcile to the idea that she might not know her sister quite like she thought. The thread with Nick is eventually dropped as the relationship between the three Glass women is meant to be the central piece of the novel but it was enough of an issue throughout the book that it is a little frustrating to have it ignominiously ignored in the end. All of the characters are very much in their own heads and very emotional, as would be expected of people trying to process what all of this means, but their feelings start to become repetitious and the book feels a tad overlong, with the sharp, distressing edges of EOAD worn off and smoothed away just as on the pieces of beach glass that reoccur throughout the novel. In the end, the book isn't so much about dying as it is about hope and holding onto it tightly for the ones you love more than anything else in the world no matter how short the future is.

Thanks to the publisher for sending me a copy of this book for review as a part of a blog tour.

It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

Thought I was catching up on the reviewing after last week but I should have known how optimistic it was to think that. ;-) This past week was a busy one, as usual but I got in a decent amount of reading anyway, in and amongst fixing sparkly combat boots (again) for my daughter's competition team large group tap, playing two tennis matches myself, watching my son play in several, celebrating the third college acceptance for the oldest, celebrating my birthday yesterday, and doing the usual driving around to ferry kids where they needed to be. This meme is hosted by Sheila at Book Journey.

Books I completed this past week are:

The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin
Splinters of Light by Rachael Herron
The Godforsaken Daughter by Christina McKenna
The Love Book by Nina Solomon
Head Case by Cole Cohen

Bookmarks are still living in the middle of:

Hausfrau by Jill Alexander Essbaum
The Precious One by Marisa de Los Santos

Reviews posted this week:

The Tusk That Did the Damage by Tania James
Dog Crazy by Meg Donohue
The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin

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

Splinters of Light by Rachael Herron
The Godforsaken Daughter by Christina McKenna
The Love Book by Nina Solomon
Head Case by Cole Cohen

Monday Mailbox

Another intriguing pair arrived this past week and I am waiting impatiently for the right time to crack them open (well not really crack since I don't break the spines of my books, but you know what I mean). This past week's mailbox arrivals:

Trail of Broken Wings by Sejal Badani came from Lake Union and TLC Book Tours for a blog tour.

After many years away, a young woman has to return home and confront her family and their history when her father falls into a coma. This looks like an intense and powerful read.

Read Bottom Up by Neel Shah and Skye Chatham came from Dey St. and TLC Book Tours for a blog tour.

A novel about falling in love in our digital age, this one looks fun and quirky since you read it like you'd read an email stream: from the bottom up.

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.

Review: The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin

I worked in a bookstore after I got out of school. I'd thought it would be the best place in the world for me, a crazy book lover, to work. I mean, how could working with books make me unhappy? But I didn't reckon on the public and all of the things that were not about books, like vacuuming the store, tidying the children's section (yet again), counting down the cash drawer at night, and dealing with the public (it really does deserve a second mention). But if I am not cut out for working at a bookstore, I do still enjoy reading about them and the book obsessed folk who populate them. Gabrielle Zevin has grounded her newest novel, The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry, in a small independent bookstore, filled it with book lovers, and peppered it with literary references.

A.J. Fikry owns Island Books on Alice Island. He's a crusty and particular widower whose beloved, friendly wife took care of the community side of the bookstore before she was killed in a car accident. He only continues to live because he has no other choice but he keeps everyone at arms length, snapping at Amelia, the publisher's rep sent to work with him, and planning to sell his pristine copy of Poe's Tamerlane in order to close the store and retire into his much-deserved unhappiness. But after a drunken binge, Tamerlane disappears, scuttling those plans, and shortly thereafter everything in Fikry's life is upended.

This novel is very much a love letter to book lovers and to independent bookstore owners. It celebrates the power of story and the importance of books and bookstores. Zevin has sprinkled it with literary references and allusions, from the notes A.J. writes to Maya about his favorite short stories which preface each chapter to smaller, more hidden bits within the text itself. And for this gentle paean to books, the novel feels a bit like home. But it is also overly sentimental about love and loss, many of the characters are formulaic, there are big jumps in the timeline, and the ending is predictable. I so wanted to love this like everyone else has but while I found it sweet, I didn't love it. Yes, it is about hope and rebirth of sorts and the ways in which love for a person or people can change even the hardest heart but the Grinch did it better. If it wasn't for the setting of the book and the literary bent, I don't think it would have gotten all the accolades that it has gotten from the book community. It was a easy and charming powder puff of a read if you don't look too closely, floating happily along admiring the concept behind it rather than examining the actual content too deeply. It just could have been so much more.

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 Porcelain Thief by Huan Hsu. The book is being released by Crown on March 24, 2015.

Amazon says this about the book: A journalist travels throughout mainland China and Taiwan in search of his family’s hidden treasure and comes to understand his ancestry as he never has before.

In 1938, when the Japanese arrived in Huan Hsu’s great-great-grandfather Liu’s Yangtze River hometown of Xingang, Liu was forced to bury his valuables, including a vast collection of prized antique porcelain, and undertake a decades-long trek that would splinter the family over thousands of miles. Many years and upheavals later, Hsu, raised in Salt Lake City and armed only with curiosity, moves to China to work in his uncle’s semiconductor chip business. Once there, a conversation with his grandmother, his last living link to dynastic China, ignites a desire to learn more about not only his lost ancestral heirlooms but also porcelain itself. Mastering the language enough to venture into the countryside, Hsu sets out to separate the layers of fact and fiction that have obscured both China and his heritage and finally complete his family’s long march back home.

Melding memoir, travelogue, and social and political history, The Porcelain Thief offers an intimate and unforgettable way to understand the complicated events that have defined China over the past two hundred years and provides a revealing, lively perspective on contemporary Chinese society from the point of view of a Chinese American coming to terms with his hyphenated identity.

Review: Dog Crazy by Meg Donohue

If you've ever had a beloved dog in your life, you know the worst thing about them is that their life expectancy is so much shorter than our own. This almost guarantees that you will one day have to say goodbye to the creature who has loved you unconditionally, who accepted you even at your worst, and who will forever leave paw prints on your heart.  As Marjorie Garber said: "If you have a dog, you will most likely outlive it; to get a dog is to open yourself to profound joy and, prospectively, to equally profound sadness." Meg Donohue shows this to be absolutely true in her charming, newest novel, Dog Crazy.

Maggie Brennan moved to San Francisco to start a new life. She's renting the bottom floor apartment in her best friend Lourdes' home and she's got a fledgling business started as a pet bereavement counselor. She helps people grieve and accept the loss of their dogs and she's empathetic and quite good at what she does. But Maggie has major problems of her own. It's been 100 days since her own beloved dog, Toby, died of cancer and she has not been able to go further than the gate at the sidewalk without suffering a panic attack since then. Her agoraphobia is becoming increasingly problematic when a difficult and prickly young woman arrives at her door for counseling. Anya is only there to appease her older brother Henry, who wants her to accept the loss of her dog Billy and to be able to move on in her life. But Anya is convinced that Billy isn't dead nor that he ran away. She's certain he's been stolen. Maggie doesn't know if she believes Anya but she is drawn to this desperate woman and wants to help her. The catch is that Anya is only willing to talk to Maggie if she accompanies Anya around the city looking for any trace of Billy. Using Lourdes' lovely dog Giselle to help her conquer the agoraphobia and as a touchstone when her fear of heights or a panic attack comes upon on her, Maggie ventures out with Anya, quickly becoming emotionally invested in her, her caring older brother, and the rest of her quirky but loving family.

The story is a heartwarming one for anyone who has ever loved an animal. Donohue captures the depth of love we feel for our furry family members and the way in which the world feels less overwhelming and as if everything in it is good when we have our pet by our side. She also delicately handles the swamping grief that their loss brings. All of the characters are sympathetic, appealing, and fully fleshed out. The plot is fairly predictable but Donohue peppers fun little details into the story to give it some variety. Maggie's work on the web pages for adoptable dogs at SuperMutt, the dog rescue organization she volunteers at, where she likens each dog to a celebrity is one such small detail. The descriptions of Anya's photos of dogs is another. The dogs in the novel, from Giselle to Toby to Billy to neurotic, scared Seymour are all unique and their presence shines in the lives of their people and in the story. The end of this sweet tale of love and loss, both human and canine, is never in doubt but it is a delightful, hopeful story that leaves the reader with a good feeling. Animal lovers in particular will enjoy it but anyone who has loved and lost and had to face the future anyway will appreciate this ultimately uplifting story.

For more information about Meg Donohue and the book, take a look at her website, like her Facebook page, follow her on 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 Tusk That Did the Damage by Tania James

I remember when the spotted owl and Pacific Coast loggers were in the news many years ago. Conservationists wanted to stop loggers cutting down the old growth habitat of the spotted owls; they were horrified that lumber companies were being allowed to drive the spotted owl that much closer to the brink of extinction. Loggers contended that their livelihoods depended on the timbering and were outraged that owls were generating so much more sympathy than human beings. Human beings in conflict with nature occurs all over the world. Sometimes the argument is over the fate of habitats and sometimes the argument is over the killing of particular creatures for profit. Elephants, an example of the latter, are under siege by poachers who want to harvest their tusks for the lucrative black market ivory trade. Tania James' new novel, The Tusk That Did the Damage, centers around the casualties of poaching, the elephants, the conservationists, and the poachers themselves.

The triple stranded novel opens on a baby elephant who is still dependent on his mother. When poachers track the elephant herd and kill one of the two older males for his tusks, the baby's mother is also killed and her tail, the tail that the baby held onto while walking, the tail that the baby knew as a connection to his mother, is cut off to be sold as a totem or talisman. The tiny elephant, traumatized by the loss of his mother, is subsequently raised by humans, trained, and used in ceremonies. Eventually breaking free of his chains and escaping his captors, the few who understood him as well as those who abused him, he becomes the feared elephant known as the Gravedigger, randomly killing people but then burying them reverently.

Manu is a young man in Southern India living close to poverty on the edge of the Kanavar Wildlife Park. He is the son of a farmer, expected to excel in school and be more than his father, who struggled to scrape a living from their land. His cousin died when the hut he was staying in to guard the fields from the elephants who would devastate the crops was trampled by the famous and feared Gravedigger. Manu feels incredibly guilty over his cousin's death because he should have been in the hut too, sharing the watch. Generally a responsible young man, Manu regrets what he sees as his failure and so he takes his mother's request to watch out for his older brother Jayan very seriously after she discovers that Jayan is involved in unsavory business. That business turns out to be poaching and Manu will become a reluctant participant in it as well as he tries to do right by his brother.

Emma is a documentary filmmaker who, with her best friend and fellow filmmaker, Teddy, has come to India to try and make her name creating a film about Dr. Ravi Varma, an elephant and wildlife veterinarian. As Emma and Teddy take footage of orphan elephants being raised at the Wildlife Rescue and Rehabilitation Center and of Ravi at work, Emma finds herself developing a crush on Ravi while Teddy is interested in Emma, both emotional situations risking the integrity and objectivity of the film with Emma's being the greater risk.

Emma and Manu tell their strands of the story in first person while the chapters centered on the Gravedigger are in third person limited omniscient. The different plot lines seem only marginally connected to start but they eventually twine themselves together in a tightly written and focused tale. This is not a story that demonizes, offering a balanced approach to the terrible problem of the lucrative ivory trade and to the horrific lives that elephants in captivity lead. The reader feels empathy for both the mentally scarred Gravedigger and for the poor and loyal Manu. The anthropomorphizing of the Gravedigger allows the reader to see firsthand the effect of poaching and a life in captivity on an elephant. Manu's chapters offer insight into the dire financial considerations behind poaching, at least at a low level, and the suffering that the local people endure when the elephants are driven out of their traditional habitat and forced to forage through the scant crops meant to sustain the villagers. Emma's fervent beliefs about conservation and the hero worship of those who work in the field come from the perspective of a complete outsider who isn't aware of the conflict between man and nature; she's a person who sees things entirely in black and white. But her relationship with Ravi allows her access to the surprising and sometimes morally suspect trade-offs that come in real life, adding yet another dimension to the tale.

The novel is a short one but powerful for all that. The chapters rotating between the three different narrations allow the plot to start slowly and build to a frantic crescendo. The issue of conservation is far more complicated than it seems on the surface, a fact that James has captured beautifully here. Imbuing the Gravedigger with human-like emotions and motivations allows her to suppose similar feelings of loyalty and betrayal in both humans and mammal, tugging at the readers' heartstrings. As the tension rises, the stories of the three main characters come together resulting in an inevitable confrontation. There can be no hopeful conclusion to the tale, not while corruption and conservation are bedfellows and not while man and beast fight for their own survival at the expense of the other. But James' novel can document the carnage and mourn the casualties of the ongoing battle.  This is a novel that will make the reader think long after the last page is turned.

For more information about Tania James and the book, take a look at her website, like her Facebook page, follow him on 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 Lisa from TLC Book Tours and the publisher for sending me a copy of the book for review.

It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

It was a crazy busy week for me this past week. I had a tennis match one day (we lost but actually won the same number of games that our opponents did, which only tennis people will understand). My oldest son had three high school matches himself, one of which was canceled only after they got part of the way there and had the skies open up. My youngest son's middle school show choir won Regionals and advanced on to States. My daughter had a dance competition and all of her dances earned Platinum awards. On the way home from the dance competition, we were rear ended, which looks like it is going to result in me being carless for a time while. ::sigh:: And my youngest also had a birthday, making me officially the mom of three teenagers. So I guess it's understandable why I didn't get so very much reading done. It's hard to read in auditoriums, plus you look like a bad mom if you don't watch your kid perform because you are too engrossed in your book. Reviewing was slightly better but... This meme is hosted by Sheila at Book Journey.

Books I completed this past week are:

Bettyville by George Hodgman
The Lovers Set Down Their Spoons by Heather A. Slomski

Bookmarks are still living in the middle of:

Hausfrau by Jill Alexander Essbaum
Splinters of Light by Rachael Herron
The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin

Reviews posted this week:

The Girls of Mischief Bay by Susan Mallery
Bettyville by George Hodgman
The Lovers Set Down Their Spoons by Heather A. Slomski

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

Dog Crazy by Meg Donohue

Monday Mailbox

A nice looking pair of books, don't you agree? This past week's mailbox arrivals:

A Small Indiscretion by Jan Ellison came from Random House.

Desire and obsession make for such interesting motivations, don't they? This book about a woman whose hidden past careens into her present unexpectedly looks fantastic.

Five Night Stand by Richard J. Alley came from Lake Union and TLC Book Tours for a blog tour.

Not musically inclined myself, I am completely intrigued by books that have music as a major part of their plot and this one about three people facing uncertain futures who bond over the very last five night stand of one of them looks really good.

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.

Review: The Lovers Set Down Their Spoons by Heather A. Slomski

Short stories are hard. There is such a small window of words for them to shine. They have to capture the same truth a novel does in so many fewer pages, sometimes even just a page or two instead of hundreds. The best short stories can do this and make it look easy. Heather Slomski has a couple of gems in this well-written collection, The Lovers Set Down Their Spoons, but the collection, like so many collections, is a bit uneven.

The fifteen stories presented here vary wildly in length and they use different narrative techniques, including the very difficult to pull off second person narration, but each of them is pervaded by a sense of melancholy and loss. The two best stories bookend the collection (the eponymous The Lovers Set Down Their Spoons and Before the Story Ends). Many of the stories feel emotionally reserved, both in terms of the characters and the writing and some of them veer into the decidely odd, like Iris and the Inevitable Sorrow, or the Knock at the Door, which inexplicably ends in a surreal and strange Kafkaesque scenario. Most of the stories touch the everyday realities of love and relationship and the ways in which we lose a little of ourselves in the mundane reality of living. Often the stories peter out or just fade off, as do the relationships they chronicle. In the case of Correction, this is done masterfully and perfectly finishes the story. In other stories it is more frustrating than successful. Slomski's is definitely a good writer but some of the chances she took in this sometimes experimental collection make it a very mixed bag. The bones are there but there's still a bit of tarnish on these spoons.

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 Lost Boys Symphony by Mark Ferguson. The book is being released by Little, Brown and Company on March 24, 2015.

Amazon says this about the book: A STARTLINGLY ORIGINAL, GENRE-BENDING LITERARY DEBUT IN WHICH A LOVESICK COLLEGE STUDENT IS ABDUCTED BY HIS FUTURE SELVES.

After Henry's girlfriend Val leaves him and transfers to another school, his grief begins to manifest itself in bizarre and horrifying ways. Cause and effect, once so reliable, no longer appear to be related in any recognizable manner. Either he's hallucinating, or the strength of his heartbreak over Val has unhinged reality itself.

After weeks of sleepless nights and sick delusions, Henry decides to run away. If he can only find Val, he thinks, everything will make sense again. So he leaves his mother's home in the suburbs and marches toward the city and the woman who he thinks will save him. Once on the George Washington Bridge, however, a powerful hallucination knocks him out cold. When he awakens, he finds himself kidnapped by two strangers--one old, one middle-aged--who claim to be future versions of Henry himself. Val is the love of your life, they tell him. We've lost her, but you don't have to.

In the meantime, Henry's best friend Gabe is on the verge of breakdown of his own. Convinced he is somehow to blame for Henry's deterioration and eventual disappearance, Gabe is consumed by a potent mix of guilt and sadness. When he is approached by an enigmatic stranger who bears a striking resemblance to his lost friend, Gabe begins to fear for his own sanity. With nowhere else to turn, he reaches out to the only person who can possibly help him make sense of it all: Val.

The Lost Boys Symphony is a beautiful reminder of what it's like to be young, lost, and in and out of love for the very first time. By turns heartfelt and heartbreaking, Ferguson's debut novel boldly announces the arrival of a spellbinding new talent on the literary stage, in a master feat of empathy and multilayered storytelling that takes adventurous literary fiction to dizzying new heights.

Review: Bettyville by George Hodgman

As people age, they often need more care, especially if they want to continue to live in their own home. Communities and families used to rally around the elderly. Now those homely, caring communities are dying and families are spread all over the country. Options are limited for the aging. There's assisted living, home care, bringing an elderly relative into your own home, or moving in with them. None of the options are easy. For George Hodgman, the right answer for his mother was for her only son to move back from New York City to tiny Paris, Missouri to take care of the once indomitable but now failing Betty.

As he cares for his mother, Hodgman tells of the life she lived, capturing the disappearing way of life in their small town. He interweaves his own recollections of the past in with hers, writing honestly of his feeling of being different, his long unacknowledged homosexuality, his drug addiction, and the low self worth he camouflages with humor. The Betty that Hodgman is caring for is very frequently not the Betty he remembers from his childhood. That younger Betty was vibrant and active and a vital part of her community. The Betty of ninety plus years is still colorful and can be a pistol, but she is also sad and stubborn as those things that once defined her become too hard for her anymore. Hodgman captures perfectly the repetitive arguments about seemingly petty things that pepper life with an aged parent and the poignancy of these small battles over things like wanting to wear tatty sandals everyday because that is one area in which the elderly Betty can still exercise some control.

Reflecting on his own life and what he is or is not losing by choosing to stay with Betty, Hodgman has the chance to reflect on his relationship with parents and make an exploration into himself, who he has been, and who he has fought to become. As a gay man growing up in a small town, he knew he was different and he long felt like a disappointment to his parents. Uncomfortable with his sexuality, he was as silent on the subject as they were. He learned to be self-effacing in a funny way as a way to combat his social awkwardness and because he didn't necessarily like who he was. And while it would have been easy to blame his parents for this because of their upbringing and beliefs, he doesn't do that. In fact, this beautiful memoir shows a lot of love, undemonstrative perhaps, but love nonetheless.

The narrative is made up of non-linear remembrances as he returns to different times in Betty's or his own past, weaving them adroitly amongst the present of taking care of Betty. The memoir is very personal in that he opens up his own truest self in it but it is also universal and recognizable for anyone who has cared for an elderly relative, felt different, struggled with meeting people, etc. Hodgman drops some very entertaining and witty bits into the book, which mitigates some of the heartbreaking truths about getting old. The respect he shows his mother even as she drives him round the bend is lovely and moving. His revelations about himself are candid and there's a strong vein of nostalgia, even though he didn't, and still doesn't always, find complete acceptance for who he is in the town or in his extended family. An exquisite tale of family ties, love, and aging, this is a wonderful and personal journey back home, back to the mother he loves and we are lucky to be along for the ride.

Thanks to the folks at Bookreporter.com for running the contest I won and for sending me this book as my prize.

Review: The Girls of Mischief Bay by Susan Mallery

In this day and age, it's easy to say you have a million friends. Just look at your Facebook account and the number of people who ostensibly want to follow along in your life. But most of these people are more properly acquaintances or just casual friends. And that's okay. But deep down, true friends are gold. And they are much rarer. They don't need Facebook to know what is going on in your life because they are already there for you for all of the good and the bad. The three women in Susan Mallery's newest novel, The Girls of Mischief Bay, have this kind of friendship.

Nicole, Shannon, and Pam are very different women. They met when the latter two started taking classes at Nicole's Pilates studio and as the most dedicated and regular of all Nicole's clients, they've forged a friendship that goes well beyond their fitness class. Shannon and Pam are trying their hardest to support Nicole through a difficult time in her marriage. Her husband Eric decided to quit his job and follow his dream to write a screenplay, leaving Nicole not only the sole breadwinner for the family but still the one in charge of all the housework and childcare for their young son. Nicole is doing her best to support him but the increasing emotional distance between them, the lack of communication or sharing, and her flat out exhaustion are taking their toll. Shannon is approaching 40 and she looks at Nicole, even in the midst of an imperfect marriage, and at Pam, who is married to John, the love of her life and has raised a family with him, and she wonders if she was right in sacrificing a personal life for her very successful career. When she meets Adam, the perfect guy, thoughtful and not intimidated by her intelligence and success, she starts to think that maybe she can have it all. Pam, the oldest of the trio, has a good life but her marriage has become routine and she decides to find a way to jazz it back up, especially now that her daughter is expecting a baby and Pam is struggling a bit with the idea of becoming a grandmother and with aging. From these apparent minor issues, each of the women will have a major bombshell explode in her life, causing them to turn to each other and the genuine, caring friendship that they have created together, as they face the new directions their lives must now go.

This is the first in a new series of women's fiction, set in an imagined small coastal California town not too far from Los Angeles. In building the setting, Mallery has added in a few too many unnecessary details, like the names of the restaurants the women have lunch at or where they get their lattes. These things might be pertinent in later books but they jump out to the reader as just a touch too much here. She does a good job building complete and realistic characters though, as each of the women are unique and believable, as are their situations and the choices they face. The support they offer to one another feels right and certain scenes are completely spot on in their emotional depth as each of the women faces grief over the loss of the life she thought she was going to lead. The narration is third person but it shifts focus from one character to the next, sometimes from paragraph to paragraph giving the story a bit of a choppy feel. The latter part of the book focuses mainly on Pam and the sudden, unexpected way in which her life changes. This focus makes it easiest to identify with her as a character. While Shannon and Nicole are also blindsided by things in their lives, the depth of exploration of these blows is much more shallow than in Pam's case. The novel looks like a light read but in fact it is a serious and oftentimes depressing tale with only the women's friendship offering any hope and light. Mallery's legion of fans will likely adore this as it is very much stamped with her aesthetic, even if it is not a traditional romance and leaves a few threads untied for future books in the series.

For more information about Susan Mallery and the book, take a look at her website, like her Facebook page, follow her on 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 Lisa from TLC Book Tours and 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:

Sacre Bleu by Christopher Moore
The Tusk That Did the Damage by Tania James
The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters

Bookmarks are still living in the middle of:

Hausfrau by Jill Alexander Essbaum
Bettyville by George Hodgman

Reviews posted this week:

The Snow Globe by Judith Kinghorn
Heartbreak Hotel by Deborah Moggach
Sacre Bleu by Christopher Moore
The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters

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

The Girls of Mischief Bay by Susan Mallery
Dog Crazy by Meg Donohue
The Tusk That Did the Damage by Tania James

Monday Mailbox

An embarrassment of riches for me This past week's mailbox arrivals:

About a Girl by Lindsey Kelk came from Harper and TLC Book Tours for a blog tour.

This tale of a woman who takes on a persona not her own when her own life is in the dumper only to find herself in over her head sounds like a lot of fun.

Head Case by Cole Cohen came from Henry Holt and LibraryThing Early Reviewers.

I thoroughly enjoy memoirs about unique situations and this one about a woman who looks for answers to her struggle with learning disabilities and finds that there's a hole in her brain sounds like a fascinating one.

The Year My Mother Came Back by Alice Eve Cohen came from Algonquin.

A memoir about a very difficult year in Cohen's life, one which brings her mother, dead for thirty years back to her, this really appeals to me.

My Chinese-America by Allen Gee came from Santa Fe Writers Project and Poetic Book Tours for a blog tour.

I did an independent study on Asian-American literature way back in graduate school after taking a fascinating class in college so this collection of essays should bring me back to that time and offer me a window into how the writing about being Asian-American has changed in the past twenty years. I am terribly curious and can't wait to dive in and see.

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: Quick Takes On The Week

Headache this morning...caused by daylight savings time messing with my sleep pattern or the nasty slingshot weather going from cold and unpleasant to gorgeous and back again? You tell me.

Mixed doubles tennis practice this afternoon. Flashback to the first (and last season) hubby and I played together many years ago. Then: he hit me hard in the back with a serve. I was black and blue for weeks. Now: He hit me hard in the back of the calf with a serve. I am already black and blue and if I end up with varicose veins as a result of this, he's in big trouble.

Speaking of tennis, the oldest son played in his first high school match as a senior. They won. (Hubby and I split sets despite him trying to pull a Tonya Harding on me.) Came home to find cap and gown pictures of this child in the mail. They are not good. I have a hard enough time believing that he's graduating but these photos capture a pained rictus that doesn't even look like him.

Middle child drove herself to dance rehearsal and parked in an actual parking spot near other cars. It was such an accomplishment, she felt compelled to text me a picture.

Youngest child went to a friend's bat mitzvah last night. He came home with a hat that had "I'm awesome" air sprayed on it. He also came home with a shirt that had "Hey Ladies" air sprayed on it. He asked for both of these things; they were not standard. I do not understand this child at all. But this is another thing I have a picture of on my phone. I think someone should have to try and write a story based solely on the oddball pictures in my iCloud. It would be a doozy for sure.

Started several books. It's like throwing spaghetti at a wall and seeing what sticks. I think I'm settling with George Hodgman's Bettyville. So far, I am finding it sad and beautiful and wonderfully written.

This past week in my reading travels, I was in Paris with the Post-Impressionists, a magical Colorman, and the muse Bleu on a crazy romp. I went to South India into the heart of the ivory trade as seen through the eyes of a poacher, a western documentary film maker, and an elephant known as the Gravedigger. I eavesdropped on 1922 London as a spinster's life is changed dramatically by the decision to take in paying guests. I am currently in Switzerland with a discontented ex-pat housewife and in a small Missouri town as a gay man takes care of his failing mother. Where have your reading travels taken you this week?

Review: The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters

"Oh what a tangled web we weave, When first we practice to deceive." --Sir Walter Scott

London, 1922. Frances Wray and her mother are reduced to taking lodgers into their once gracious, now shabby home. The two Wray sons died in the War and Frances' father died not long after, leaving behind a pile of debts and dubious investments. Servants had to be let go and Frances has taken on all the housework in order to economize but even that is not enough, hence the "paying guests," a euphemism designed to take some of the shame out of the necessity of finding some income. Their new tenants, Leonard and Lilian Barber, are brash and loud and slightly off-color, and their arrival in Champion Hill will change the quiet and narrow life in the house forever.

As the Barbers settle into life in the Wrays' house, there are small irritations and adjustments. There is an enforced intimacy and an uncomfortable window into someone else's life, not just in large ways like overhearing arguments but also in small ways like hearing Leonard take his indigestion medicine and follow it with a belch. Although Frances and her mother are sliding into a kind of genteel poverty, they are still of a higher class than the Barbers, who are most assuredly of the clerk class, and there are definite instances of snobbery and condescension that Waters captures beautifully. Frances' life is drawn to a tee in all its constrained smallness. Her future, as a spinster and the only surviving child of her widowed mother, looks like one long slog of polishing the floor and deciding which bills are most urgent to pay first. It is in these small domestic details, captured with perfect pitch, that Waters shines. But the arrival of the Barbers, Frances' life twining with theirs, will put paid to this dreary, unexciting future.

Right from the start, there is a slight rising menace to the story, letting the reader know that this will change quite a bit from the domestic drama it starts as to something much bigger and more terrible. The story is told in third person limited narration with the focus on Frances. While this allows us to see into Frances' head, there is too much repetition of her internal musings and agonizing as she swerves one way, then another, and then back again. The characters of Frances, Lilian, and Leonard, are not all that appealing on whole and so it is hard to get invested in their fates. The story is split into thirds and it is only toward the end of the middle third that the pace, drama, and tension of the book picks up, only to judder back to an overly long and drawn-out ending. In fact, by the time it came, I wish I had felt half as nervous as Frances about the anticipated outcome. Instead, the book sputtered to an unresolved and overwrought stop. Waters has captured the difficult transition from traditional to modern and the quiet desperation of the time financially as she examines appearances and facades in this novel of truth and secrets, love and class. The writing is smooth and adept but somehow the story remains unfortunately dull. Fingersmith is a much better novel if you are coming to Waters for the first time.

Review: Sacre Bleu by Christopher Moore

One of my college roommates was an art history major. What she studied always seemed so fascinating. And yet I never did take art history myself. I don't know whether it just didn't fit my schedule time-wise or if there was another reason, equally weak. But since then, I have often found myself reading about famous artists and their muses, their crazy (sometimes literally) and tortured lives, and the times that they lived in so Sacre Bleu was a no brainer for me to read. That I generally love Christopher Moore's works made it all that more certain that this book would come to live on my shelves. Somehow, though, despite the subject matter and the author wielding it, I didn't love this one.

Opening right after the news of Van Gogh's death, his friends Lucien Lessard and Henri Toulouse-Lautrec decide to investigate the somewhat suspicious suicide: shooting himself in the chest and then walking a mile to a doctor. They are caught by his fear of the color blue and a comment about the Colorman which will send them off on a romp through the world of Post-Impressionism, the production of ultramarine, and the roots of creative inspiration. Lucien is a baker and painter whose father introduced him into the art world and to the coterie of artists in Montmartre in the late 1800s. As Lucien and Toulouse-Lautrec try to uncover the identity of the Colorman and the secret behind his sacred blue color, Lucien, like so many artists before him, is captured by the muse in the form of a woman, Juliette. He is obsessed with her, painting an enormous blue nude and falling sick, almost to death of it. His experience, coupled with Toulouse-Lautrec's and their combined knowledge of other painters' experiences painting as well start to reveal the secret of the Colorman. To say more would be to reveal too much.

Like a typical Moore, there is much off-color bawdy humor and a zany, zigzagging plot. There is plenty of his signature absurdity and irreverence and the book is incredibly well-researched. Those with any art history knowledge will see much true history shining through the otherwise absurd story. Those who are not familiar with the big names of the Post-Impressionist movement might have a more difficult time untangling the fanciful from that based on reality. Moore plays with the idea of the creative muse, madness, and the idea of immortality through art. He takes the concept of an artist infusing his own love and pain into the very paint on the canvas and warps it in a very Moore-ish kind of way. And of course, as any reader expects of Moore's books, there are all sorts of penis jokes, a reanimated corpse, a slowing or stopping of time, and a fair bit of debauchery included here. But somehow, despite the hallmarks of his work being fully present, this novel was still surprisingly slow and plodding. The narrative jumped back and forth in time--sometimes quite far back--in not only Lucien's life but also the Colorman's and the elusive Bleu's. It wandered far and wide, touching on artists of every stripe. Perhaps the idea was too broad, examining the origins of a single color or perhaps the real lives of the artists were already too close to a Christopher Moore book, but this was missing the wonderful spark that has so infused his other novels.

Review: Heartbreak Hotel by Deborah Moggach

There's something charming about the idea of bed and breakfasts as opposed to hotels. Since most owners live in the B and B and take care of all aspects of their guests' stays, they have a personal and homely feel to them that you don't find in a larger hotel. And if you have a garrulous innkeeper, you have an automatic friend, someone who, like a bartender, is willing to listen to the stories and circumstances of your life and sometimes even offer advice. In Deborah Moggach's newest novel, Heartbreak Hotel, there is one such innkeeper in the shabby but still perfectly appealing Myrtle House.

Russell Buffery, called Buffy, is a retired actor living in London. He has three ex-wives, a couple of ex-mistresses, and children and stepchildren.  Amazingly, he maintains a cordial relationship of some sort with most of them. When an old friend dies and leaves him a bed and breakfast just over the border in Wales, he surprises everyone (including himself) by deciding to move to Knockton and take on the running of the place. It is a bit run down at the heels and despite not having enough money to do much more than patch, Buffy finds that he rather likes being the friendly, welcoming host. But he needs to fill his rooms on more than just the weekends. Then he has the bright idea to offer instructional weekends for those who have just gotten out of a relationship. The classes are intended to teach the newly single to do all of the things that their spouse or partner used to do for them, like gardening, car maintenance, cooking, basic home repair, and Buffy's own course: how to talk to women. The classes are a moderate success and they bring in a wide cast of characters, among them Harold, a blocked writer whose wife has left him for a woman; Monica, a driven businesswoman who finally realizes that her affair with her married lover meant very little to him and cost her almost a decade of her life; Amy, a movie makeup artist whose long term, rather lackluster, live-in lover surprised her by leaving one day; and Andy, the handsome postman whose marriage to a woman he never really knew well has fizzled out. Add in Buffy's children; Voda, who cooks and cleans for the hotel; and Nolan, still living with his mother and made redundant at his job until he's hired to run the car maintenance course, and you have a whole stew of lonelyhearts trying to learn livable skills, how to be in charge of everything in their own lives, and even how to love or find happiness in the world again.

The characters are pitiable but loveable and each one is grappling with a unique heartbreak situation. Their tenure at Myrtle House will change all of them. Buffy himself will be changed too as he looks back at the past failures in his interpersonal relationships and learns new ways of being with people from his guests. All of the disappointed in love are given extensive backstories, detailing the failed relationships that sent them to Buffy's to learn some heretofore unneeded life skill. While the in-depth information on each of the characters is, in fact, necessary to the story, the way that they are interspersed with Buffy's story, and oftentimes quite removed from their appearance at the bed and breakfast, can make it hard to remember which person at the hotel belongs to which backstory.  But the story is engaging and sweet and Moggach is great at getting the reader to appreciate the myriad of quirky characters. There are moments of biting humor that help keep this from becoming over the top and Moggach seems to have a sure sense of when to use a light hand and when to push reality a bit more. While the characters may not learn what they intended to learn when they signed up for their course at Myrtle House, they do learn important things about the power of reinvention and change in this inviting and ultimately heartwarming novel.

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.

Dead Wake by Erik Larson. The book is being released by Crown on March 10, 2015.

Amazon says this about the book: On May 1, 1915, with WWI entering its tenth month, a luxury ocean liner as richly appointed as an English country house sailed out of New York, bound for Liverpool, carrying a record number of children and infants. The passengers were surprisingly at ease, even though Germany had declared the seas around Britain to be a war zone. For months, German U-boats had brought terror to the North Atlantic. But the Lusitania was one of the era’s great transatlantic “Greyhounds”—the fastest liner then in service—and her captain, William Thomas Turner, placed tremendous faith in the gentlemanly strictures of warfare that for a century had kept civilian ships safe from attack.

Germany, however, was determined to change the rules of the game, and Walther Schwieger, the captain of Unterseeboot-20, was happy to oblige. Meanwhile, an ultra-secret British intelligence unit tracked Schwieger’s U-boat, but told no one. As U-20 and the Lusitania made their way toward Liverpool, an array of forces both grand and achingly small—hubris, a chance fog, a closely guarded secret, and more—all converged to produce one of the great disasters of history.

It is a story that many of us think we know but don’t, and Erik Larson tells it thrillingly, switching between hunter and hunted while painting a larger portrait of America at the height of the Progressive Era. Full of glamour and suspense, Dead Wake brings to life a cast of evocative characters, from famed Boston bookseller Charles Lauriat to pioneering female architect Theodate Pope to President Woodrow Wilson, a man lost to grief, dreading the widening war but also captivated by the prospect of new love.

Gripping and important, Dead Wake captures the sheer drama and emotional power of a disaster whose intimate details and true meaning have long been obscured by history.

Review: The Snow Globe by Judith Kinghorn

Snow globes are pretty and peaceful. They capture an idealized miniature scene of perfection within their glass orbs. But they aren't reality, no matter how much the world looks like them, especially when snow is drifting down outside the windows.  Reality, unlike the inside of a snow globe, has imperfections, secrets, and disappointments. Judith Kinghorn's newest novel, The Snow Globe, shows just how unlike the quiet, encapsulated scene, life can be.

It is Christmas 1926, that exciting time between the World Wars, and Daisy Forbes is looking forward to celebrating with her family, especially the father she reveres. She is on the verge of adulthood and only hopes that she can find a man as worthy as her father when she comes to marry. But when she overhears a conversation about her father Howard's not so secret indiscretions, her faith in his integrity shatters. Not only does she have to process her father's fallibility, but she is horrified to find that her mother, Mabel, has invited her father's mistress and his mistress' son Valentine, in the guise of Margot Vincent's longstanding friendship with the family, to join the family at Eden Hall this Christmas time. As Daisy grapples with this newfound knowledge of her father, she is also faced with three very different men in her life: the steady and rather stodgy Ben, who works with her father; the dashing and fast Valentine, for whom she should feel only disdain given his mother's role in her father's life; and Stephen, the family chauffeur who is the companion of her childhood and still her best friend. Daisy, like the time in which she is growing up, is being bombarded with change. Her family and her life both move in ways she never could have predicted before Christmas.

Kinghorn has used many of her characters to reflect the way in which the world was speeding through change in the interlude between the wars. Women, like Daisy's older sister Iris, had secured far more freedoms than the generation before them. Social classes were more fluid and there was far more opportunity to better oneself for a person willing to work. But there were still those who hewed to the old traditions as well. Daisy is torn between the two options, trying both on for size as she comes of age and she is an endearing character even as she makes mistakes. In fact, it is her recognition and acceptance of imperfections in others that show how she's changed and matured over the span of the novel. This has a sweeping, elegant feel to it. It is realistically romantic, tapping into the concepts of both love and loyalty in a well researched and authentic historical setting.

Thanks to Kayleigh at Berkley/NAL for sending me a copy of this book to 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 Sunlit Night by Rebecca Dinerstein
The Girls of Mischief Bay by Susan Mallery
Dog Crazy by Meg Donohue

Bookmarks are still living in the middle of:

Sacre Bleu by Christopher Moore
The Tusk That Did the Damage by Tania James

Reviews posted this week:

I Regret Everything by Seth Greenland
Peace Like a River by Leif Enger
The Sunlit Night by Rebecca Dinerstein
Burial Rites by Hannah Kent
Lady Mercy Danforthe Flirts With Scandal by Jayne Fresina

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

The Snow Globe by Judith Kinghorn
Heartbreak Hotel by Deborah Moggach
The Girls of Mischief Bay by Susan Mallery
Dog Crazy by Meg Donohue

Monday Mailbox

Just one but an interesting looking one for sure. This past week's mailbox arrival:

The Godforsaken Daughter by Christina McKenna came from Lake Union and TLC Book Tours for a blog tour.

This Irish set novel features a woman reeling from the loss of her father who finds, among her late grandmother's things, that helps her to find confidence and to connect with other people. I do love Irish settings and stories of oddballs coming into their own like this one appears to have.

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.