Review: Auntie Poldi and the Sicilian Lions by Mario Giordano

I went to Italy with my parents and sister this year. It was an amazing experience and I would love to go back and explore more of the country someday. We ventured all over Tuscany but we didn't make it to Sicily and our adventures were more in the line of bathroom mishaps than stumbling on a dead body but Mario Giordano's Auntie Poldi and the Sicilian Lions, the first in a series of mysteries, had me smiling and remembering our trip with great fondness. Maybe if I go back and visit Sicily, I can meet my very own Auntie Poldi.

Auntie Poldi, a sixty year old Bavarian woman, has recently retired from her job as a costume designer. Despite having lived forever in Munich, she decides that she wants to be closer to her sisters-in-law in Sicily and so she finds and purchases a crumbling home there. Her plan is to drink herself to death in the warmth of the sun near the ocean but her nephew Giordano, a frustrated writer floundering with his ever changing family history novel, is dispatched to live on and off with Poldi to keep an eye on her. More than keeping an eye on his eccentric aunt though, he narrates the story of Poldi's at first accidental and then intentional involvement in a murder with all of the chaos, theories, danger, and uncomfortable situations that accompany that involvement. As Poldi is a personable and caring woman, she collects friends and acquaintances in her new home, including the handsome, young Valentino Candela, a handyman who helps out around her dilapidated house. When Valentino goes missing, Poldi is concerned, and more so when no one else seems to blink an eye at his disappearance. Then she stumbles on his body on the beach and vows to uncover his murderer. This brings her in direct opposition to the official investigator, Vito Montana, to whom Poldi has an immediate attraction despite his seeming indifference to her and his explicit warning to her to stay out of his investigation. But Poldi has some theories and she's determined to follow them up and find out the truth.

Poldi is a quirky, feisty character. She is generally confident and self-assured both sexually and intellectually but she also has moments of definite faltering and self-doubt. She can be a figure of fun (constantly setting her wig straight) but there's never any doubt that she'll eventually find out what she wants to know. Her relationship with Montana is well developed and the personal and professional tension between them moves along at a good pace. The search for Valentino's murderer is as much a search for the motive as much as it is for the killer. The setting was very well done; the reader could easily visualize both the beauty and the seediness of Sicily and while there were occasional info dumps about the history of the island, they were ultimately significant to the search for the murderer. Giordano, the author (as opposed to the nephew narrating the story), explains the general Sicilian character nicely without resorting to cliche and then personalizes each of his carefully created characters. The story did take some time to get moving, building Poldi's past and her family's worry for her, as well as establishing the character of the town and the people in it, but once Valentino's body appears on the beach, the story picks up, even when Poldi runs into dead ends or has to reassess her theories. There is a dry humor here and the language is perhaps a little more literary than usual so it's not a book to breeze through. But the setting is sublime, the characters are engaging, and the mystery unfolds so that the reader only comes to figure out whodunit when Poldi herself does. A promising start to a series for mystery readers who like a little flamboyance and a little foreignness in their mystery reading.

Thanks to Bitter Lemon Press and Meryl Zegarek PR for sending me a copy of this book to review.

Review: Visible Empire by Hannah Pittard

John F. Kennedy was in the White House and the whole country was living in the era of Camelot. The Civil Rights Movement was going strong although racial tensions continued to boil, often hidden, especially in Southern cities. Atlanta's upper class lived just as they always had until the shocking day that an Air France plane loaded with wealthy art patrons from their city crashed in Paris, decimating the movers and shakers of white society and opened doors for outsiders brave enough to walk through them past the smoldering wreckage of life before. Hannah Pittard uses this real life crash as the starting point for her novel, Visible Empire, about those left behind in the immediate aftermath of the tragic news.

The mayor of Atlanta and his wife, a pregnant woman whose parents perished on the plane and her journalist husband, whose mistress also died that day, a young black man hoping to better himself either educationally or by whatever means necessary, and a white working class woman who takes the opportunity to impersonate the relative of a reclusive member of society all take turns narrating the novel as the days after the crash pass in a blur of heat and rising tension. The loss of so many of the city's affluent social leaders gives a sort of manic and surreal feel to the grieving city, exposing undreamed of opportunities for the suppressed, the ambitious, and the dissipated.

Pittard has drawn a wealthy Atlanta that still exists in many ways and she has captured the racism that continues to stalk its streets as well but she's done it through a collection of less than likable, not always well fleshed out characters. The narrative started out strong in the immediate aftermath of the crash with the reeling disbelief of the survivors at home but veered into melodrama and chaos. She raises provocative issues of class and race, privilege and prejudice, but doesn't really get into the deep end with them, allowing the narration to turn away before it really addresses anything deeply. The community impact is clear and the personal impact is especially well explored. Perhaps there's just too much going on to allow for one story line to dominate and really matter; there's racism, classism, grief, infidelity, and more. The novel was rather oddly unemotional as it exposed the always cracked (but skillfully hidden) and now broken veneer of Atlanta's high society. And yet, despite my reservations, I didn't dislike the book. I didn't necessarily like it either. Pittard is skilled with words but maybe needs to find a little more heart, at least in this one.

Waiting on Wednesday

This meme was 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. I'm choosing to continue the tradition even though she has stopped.

On the Same Page by N.D. Galland.

The book is being released by William Morrow Paperbacks on December 31, 2018.

The book's jacket copy says: From the critically acclaimed author of Stepdog and The Fool’s Tale comes a romantic comedy that tells the story of one journalist secretly juggling two bylines for competing newspapers on a small island.

One island, two newspapers, and the reporter who played them both

Joanna Howes is a Martha’s Vineyard native who left the Island at eighteen and moved to New York City to become a writer. Now in her thirties, she reluctantly returns to care for her cranky, injured uncle. Needing income, she freelances for one island newspaper (the one Uncle Hank likes). But that doesn’t cover her bills, so she creates an alter ego to write for the rival paper (the one Uncle Hank doesn’t like).

The Vineyard has a split personality – part elite summer resort, part working-class small town. The Island’s two papers –the Journal and the Newes – are famously at odds with each other and reflect the seasonal schism in their reporting. Everybody’s shoulder seems to have a chip on it.

Joanna gets personally ensnared in a messy situation she’s assigned to write about for both papers: a wealthy seasonal resident sues the town for the right to use his private helicopter. When Johanna agrees to a cup of coffee with the witty, handsome stranger she meets at a zoning board meeting, she has no idea she’s made a date with Orion Smith, helicopter owner. Orion, meanwhile, doesn’t realize Joanna is the niece of his political nemesis, Henry Holmes.

Joanna scrambles to keep her disparate identities separate from each other in the tiny off-season community, but everything she does just gets her into deeper trouble…and further complicates her budding romance with the exasperating charmer she’s doing her best not to fall for.

A story about the half-truths we tell ourselves – and others – especially when our hearts are on the line.

Review: The Amazing Story of the Man Who Cycled From India to Europe for Love by Per J. Andersson

In writing you want the reader to be grabbed within the first few sentences so they want to keep reading. It's pretty impressive when that intrigue happens with the title of the book before the reader even gets the cover open. A man rode a bicycle from India to Europe for love? Now that's a story I'd like to read. Unfortunately that's not exactly the bulk of the story told in Per J. Andersson's piece of long form travel journalism/history/biography here. Instead it's a blend of Indian history with a heavy emphasis on the caste system and the plight of the Dalits (untouchables) through the eyes of one man who eventually followed the woman he loved to Sweden.

Padyumna Kumar (known as PK) was born in a small village in India. His family were Dalits and this fact colored every day of his life, from school to worship to others' treatment of him in general. Despite the many, many road blocks placed in his path, PK was intelligent, artistic, and determined so he moved to New Delhi in search of a better life and perhaps also in search of the woman mentioned in the prophecy made when he was just a baby that declared he would marry a woman from far away, outside the country. Andersson tells of PK's life in the capital, occasionally veering from it to tell of a young Swedish girl, Lotta, who had a fascination with and a pull towards India. The bulk of the story, however, is not Lotta's life, it is PK's, which weaves in the injustice and inequity in the social system in India but also shows the incredible experiences and helping hands that PK found in progressive and friendly people as he eked out a living in New Delhi and as he eventually sets off on his bicycle to reunite with Lotta.

The book has a long, slow build-up that made it unfortunately easy to put aside in lieu of other reading. It also seems to be unable to decide if it is the story of a poor Dalit artist in a slowly changing India or a love story or a history or a travelogue. It has elements of all of these, leaving the book to feel unfocused and clumsy.  Perhaps this is a function of the translation but I suspect not.  This is a true story and should have all the nuance of a good non-fiction work but it doesn't really.  PK is the best fleshed out while Lotta lacks the depth to be the real person she is and their love is presented as almost fait accompli simply because it's fated. It is supposed to be such a strong love that PK chooses to hop on his bicycle to find her many thousands of miles away and yet there's little given to the reader to actually show how that love came about. There is a lot of the book to get through before PK starts out on his crazy journey but the actual journey and his life in Sweden with Lotta are given fairly short shrift in the end. I don't know whether I wanted a more sweeping love story or a deeper history or a more detailed travelogue but that is perhaps the biggest problem with the book: it gives you just a tiny bit of each and none of them stand on their own as complete in the end.

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

It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

This meme is hosted by Kathryn at Reading Date.

Books I completed this past week are:

In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd by Ana Menendez
The Spinster and the Rake by Anne Stuart
No One Can Pronounce My Name by Rakesh Satyal
The Royal We by Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan

Bookmarks are still living in the middle of:

A Hard and Heavy Thing by Matthew J. Hefti
Paint Your Wife by Lloyd Jones
Dear Fang, With Love by Rufi Thorpe
America's First Daughter by Stephanie Dray and Laura Kamoie
Metis Beach by Claudine Bourbonnais
Smoke by Dan Vyleta
Coco Chanel by Lisa Chaney
The New York Time Footsteps by various authors
The Resurrection of Joan Ashby by Cherise Wolas
The Bottom of the Sky by Rodrigo Fresan
One House Over by Mary Monroe
Burntown by Jennifer McMahon
Everything She Didn't Say by Jane Kirkpatrick
The Girl Who Never Read Noam Chomsky by Jana Casale
Surviving Paradise by Peter Rudiak-Gould
The Diary of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell
A Breath of Snow and Ashes by Diana Gabaldon

Reviews posted this week:

not one thing

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

Visible Empire by Hannah Pittard
The Garden of Small Beginnings by Abbi Waxman
Love Hate and Other Filters by Samira Ahmed
A Song for the River by Philip Connors
In the Shadow of 10,000 Hills by Jennifer Haupt
Beautiful Music by Michael Zadoorian
Still Life with Monkey by Katharine Weber
America for Beginners by Leah Franqui
Tenemental by Vikki Warner
Meet Me at the Museum by Anne Youngson
The Lido by Libby Page
The Invisible Valley by Su Wei
The Last Equation of Isaac Severy by Nova Jacobs
The Showrunner by Kim Mortishugu
I Found My Tribe by Ruth Fitzmaurice
Paris by the Book by Liam Callanan
Terra Nullius by Clare G. Coleman
Christmas in July by Alan Michael Parker
Nothing Forgotten by Jessica Levine
Housegirl by Michael Donkor
Wildwood by Elinor Florence
All Day at the Movies by Fiona Kidman
Weedeater by Robert Gipe
The Mannequin Makers by Craig Cliff
Chemistry by Weike Wang
The Summer Wives by Beatriz Williams
Come Back to the Swamp by Laura Morrison
The Animal Gazer by Edgardo Franzosini
Melmoth by Sarah Perry
Sound by Bella Bathurst
Celine by Peter Heller
In Every Moment We Are Still Alive by Tom Malmquist
The Tattooist of Auschwitz by Heather Morris
You'll Always Have Tara by Leah Marie Brown
The Taster by V.S. Alexander
Dear Mrs. Bird by AJ Pearce
Calypso by David Sedaris
A House Among the Trees by Julia Glass
Postcards from the Canyon by Lisa Gitlin
The Family Fang by Kevin Wilson
Sycamore by Bryn Chancellor
The Home for Unwanted Girls by Joanna Goodman
As Wide As the Sky by Jessica Pack
Indian Horse by Richard Wagamese
Plum Rains by Andromeda Romano-Lax
Second Wind by Nathaniel Philbrick
Leave No Trace by Mindy Mejia
Paper Is White by Hilary Zaid
Hotel Silence by Audur Ava Olafsdottir
The Vain Conversation by Anthony Grooms
The Beauty of the End by Debbie Howells
The Widows of Malabar Hill by Sujata Massey
The Last Suppers by Mandy Mikulencak
Ostrich by Matt Greene
The Mercy Seat by Elizabeth H. Winthrop
Maggie Boylan by Michael Henson
We All Love the Beautiful Girls by Joanne Proulx
Every Note Played by Lisa Genova
Shores Beyond Shores by Irene Butter
The Shakespeare Requirement by Julie Schumacher
Fiction Can Be Murder by Becky Clark
Tigerbelle by Wyomia Tyus
Wolf Season by Helen Benedict
Beasts of Extraordinary Circumstance by Ruth Emmie Lang
The Second Mrs. Hockaday by Susan Rivers
London Road by Tessa Smith McGovern
Invitation to a Bonfire by Adrienne Celt
Love, Nina by Nina Stibbe
Love Literary Style by Karin Gillespie
The Secret of the Irish Castle by Santa Montefiore
The Cactus by Sarah Haywood
The Amazing Story of the Man Who Cycled from India to Europe for Love by Per J. Andersson
A Cast of Vultures by Judith Flanders
The Governess Game by Tess Dare
In-Between Days by Teva Harrison
The Wrath and the Dawn by Renee Ahdieh
In the Heart of the Canyon by Elisabeth Hyde
Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman
Penelope Lemon by Inman Majors
I'd Rather Be Reading by Anne Bogel
Royally Screwed by Emma Chase
The Wangs Vs. the World by Jade Chang
Southern Lady Code by Helen Ellis
Country of Red Azaleas by Domnica Radulescu
The Book Lovers' Appreciation Society by assorted authors
Don't Point That Thing at Me by Kyril Bonfiglioli
Hope Has Two Daughters by Monia Mazigh
The Friend by Sigrid Nunez
The Widow Nash by Jamie Harrison
The Child Finder by Rene Denfeld
Miss Featherton's Christmas Prince by Ella Quinn
The Radium Girls by Kate Moore
Rainbirds by Clarissa Goenawan
Sassafrass, Cypress, and Indigo by Ntozake Shange
Mean by Myriam Gurba
Maeve in America by Maeve Higgins
After the Bloom by Leslie Shimotakahara
The Legendary Lord by Valerie Bowman
Someone You Love Is Gone by Gurjinder Basran
The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal
Thousand-Miler by Melanie Radzicki McManus
Christmas on the Island by Jenny Colgan
In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd by Ana Menendez
The Spinster and the Rake by Anne Stuart
No One Can Pronounce My Name by Rakesh Satyal
The Royal We by Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan

Waiting on Wednesday

This meme was 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. I'm choosing to continue the tradition even though she has stopped.

My Favorite Half-Night Stand by Christina Lauren.

The book is being released by Gallery Books on December 4, 2018.

The book's jacket copy says: Millie Morris has always been one of the guys. A UC Santa Barbara professor, she’s a female-serial-killer expert who’s quick with a deflection joke and terrible at getting personal. And she, just like her four best guy friends and fellow professors, is perma-single.

So when a routine university function turns into a black tie gala, Mille and her circle make a pact that they’ll join an online dating service to find plus-ones for the event. There’s only one hitch: after making the pact, Millie and one of the guys, Reid Campbell, secretly spend the sexiest half-night of their lives together, but mutually decide the friendship would be better off strictly platonic.

But online dating isn’t for the faint of heart. While the guys are inundated with quality matches and potential dates, Millie’s first profile attempt garners nothing but dick pics and creepers. Enter “Catherine”—Millie’s fictional profile persona, in whose make-believe shoes she can be more vulnerable than she’s ever been in person. Soon “Catherine” and Reid strike up a digital pen-pal-ship...but Millie can’t resist temptation in real life, either. Soon, Millie will have to face her worst fear—intimacy—or risk losing her best friend, forever.

Perfect for fans of Roxanne and She’s the Man, Christina Lauren’s latest romantic comedy is full of mistaken identities, hijinks, and a classic love story with a modern twist. Funny and fresh, you’ll want to swipe right on My Favorite Half-Night Stand.

The Five Stages of Preparing for a Colonoscopy

Everyone knows about the five stages of grief, right? But did you know about the five stages of preparing for a colonoscopy? Since my five year reprieve from this most unappealing of tests is over (you can read about that adventure here), I am unfortunately placed perfectly to explain this little known set for you. I am currently hovering between stages two and three and let me tell you, it's not pretty now but it will get worse.

Stage One: So hungry you want to gnaw your own arm off. You might be hangry but you are not allowed to have a Snickers to fix it, Betty White.

Stage Two: Sad from lack of calories.

Stage Three: Feral. As in you are surreptitiously sniffing the dirty dishes in the dishwasher and actually considering licking them clean like the dog. (Be warned that if the dog catches you doing this, you might have to fight to retain alpha dog status.)

Stage Four: Nauseated from the clean-out meds and subsequent Great Lakes worth of water you have to ingest in an amount of time that would give any frat boy pause.

Stage Five: Shooting skin scorching flames directly out of your colon.

I know I've made you all want to rush right out there and schedule one of these but it's a temporary discomfort to ensure your health. So if you have a family history (like me) or are over 50 (unlike me), suck it up buttercup and get it done. And the anesthesia they give you for the actual procedure itself (notice it's not in the stages--it's the reward that you get after you conquer the rest) is so lovely you might just want to propose to your anesthetist.

It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

This meme is hosted by Kathryn at Reading Date.

Books I completed this past week are:

The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal
Thousand-Miler by Melanie Radzicki McManus
Christmas on the Island by Jenny Colgan

Bookmarks are still living in the middle of:

A Hard and Heavy Thing by Matthew J. Hefti
Paint Your Wife by Lloyd Jones
No One Can Pronounce My Name by Rakesh Satyal
Dear Fang, With Love by Rufi Thorpe
America's First Daughter by Stephanie Dray and Laura Kamoie
Metis Beach by Claudine Bourbonnais
Smoke by Dan Vyleta
Coco Chanel by Lisa Chaney
The New York Time Footsteps by various authors
The Resurrection of Joan Ashby by Cherise Wolas
The Bottom of the Sky by Rodrigo Fresan
One House Over by Mary Monroe
Burntown by Jennifer McMahon
Everything She Didn't Say by Jane Kirkpatrick
The Girl Who Never Read Noam Chomsky by Jana Casale
Surviving Paradise by Peter Rudiak-Gould
The Diary of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell
A Breath of Snow and Ashes by Diana Gabaldon
The Royal We by Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan

Reviews posted this week:

Plumdog by Emma Chichester Clark
The Company They Kept edited by Robert B. Silvers and Barbara Epstein
Swimming with Elephants by Sarah Bamford Seidelmann

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

Visible Empire by Hannah Pittard
The Garden of Small Beginnings by Abbi Waxman
Love Hate and Other Filters by Samira Ahmed
A Song for the River by Philip Connors
In the Shadow of 10,000 Hills by Jennifer Haupt
Beautiful Music by Michael Zadoorian
Still Life with Monkey by Katharine Weber
America for Beginners by Leah Franqui
Tenemental by Vikki Warner
Meet Me at the Museum by Anne Youngson
The Lido by Libby Page
The Invisible Valley by Su Wei
The Last Equation of Isaac Severy by Nova Jacobs
The Showrunner by Kim Mortishugu
I Found My Tribe by Ruth Fitzmaurice
Paris by the Book by Liam Callanan
Terra Nullius by Clare G. Coleman
Christmas in July by Alan Michael Parker
Nothing Forgotten by Jessica Levine
Housegirl by Michael Donkor
Wildwood by Elinor Florence
All Day at the Movies by Fiona Kidman
Weedeater by Robert Gipe
The Mannequin Makers by Craig Cliff
Chemistry by Weike Wang
The Summer Wives by Beatriz Williams
Come Back to the Swamp by Laura Morrison
The Animal Gazer by Edgardo Franzosini
Melmoth by Sarah Perry
Sound by Bella Bathurst
Celine by Peter Heller
In Every Moment We Are Still Alive by Tom Malmquist
The Tattooist of Auschwitz by Heather Morris
You'll Always Have Tara by Leah Marie Brown
The Taster by V.S. Alexander
Dear Mrs. Bird by AJ Pearce
Calypso by David Sedaris
A House Among the Trees by Julia Glass
Postcards from the Canyon by Lisa Gitlin
The Family Fang by Kevin Wilson
Sycamore by Bryn Chancellor
The Home for Unwanted Girls by Joanna Goodman
As Wide As the Sky by Jessica Pack
Indian Horse by Richard Wagamese
Plum Rains by Andromeda Romano-Lax
Second Wind by Nathaniel Philbrick
Leave No Trace by Mindy Mejia
Paper Is White by Hilary Zaid
Hotel Silence by Audur Ava Olafsdottir
The Vain Conversation by Anthony Grooms
The Beauty of the End by Debbie Howells
The Widows of Malabar Hill by Sujata Massey
The Last Suppers by Mandy Mikulencak
Ostrich by Matt Greene
The Mercy Seat by Elizabeth H. Winthrop
Maggie Boylan by Michael Henson
We All Love the Beautiful Girls by Joanne Proulx
Every Note Played by Lisa Genova
Shores Beyond Shores by Irene Butter
The Shakespeare Requirement by Julie Schumacher
Fiction Can Be Murder by Becky Clark
Tigerbelle by Wyomia Tyus
Wolf Season by Helen Benedict
Beasts of Extraordinary Circumstance by Ruth Emmie Lang
The Second Mrs. Hockaday by Susan Rivers
London Road by Tessa Smith McGovern
Invitation to a Bonfire by Adrienne Celt
Love, Nina by Nina Stibbe
Love Literary Style by Karin Gillespie
The Secret of the Irish Castle by Santa Montefiore
The Cactus by Sarah Haywood
The Amazing Story of the Man Who Cycled from India to Europe for Love by Per J. Andersson
A Cast of Vultures by Judith Flanders
The Governess Game by Tess Dare
In-Between Days by Teva Harrison
The Wrath and the Dawn by Renee Ahdieh
In the Heart of the Canyon by Elisabeth Hyde
Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman
Penelope Lemon by Inman Majors
I'd Rather Be Reading by Anne Bogel
Royally Screwed by Emma Chase
The Wangs Vs. the World by Jade Chang
Southern Lady Code by Helen Ellis
Country of Red Azaleas by Domnica Radulescu
The Book Lovers' Appreciation Society by assorted authors
Don't Point That Thing at Me by Kyril Bonfiglioli
Hope Has Two Daughters by Monia Mazigh
The Friend by Sigrid Nunez
The Widow Nash by Jamie Harrison
The Child Finder by Rene Denfeld
Miss Featherton's Christmas Prince by Ella Quinn
The Radium Girls by Kate Moore
Rainbirds by Clarissa Goenawan
Sassafrass, Cypress, and Indigo by Ntozake Shange
Mean by Myriam Gurba
Maeve in America by Maeve Higgins
After the Bloom by Leslie Shimotakahara
The Legendary Lord by Valerie Bowman
Someone You Love Is Gone by Gurjinder Basran
The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal
Thousand-Miler by Melanie Radzicki McManus
Christmas on the Island by Jenny Colgan

Monday Mailbox

This past week's mailbox arrivals:

In Another Time by Jillian Cantor came from LibraryThing Early Reviewers and Harper Perennial.

Cantor writes really cool novels so I'm really looking forward to this one about a bookshop owner and Jewish, rising concert violinist who fall in love before WWII but who are somehow separated by the war.

Winter Garden by Kristin Hannah came from me for myself.

A book club choice for the coming year, I do have a fascination with Russia so I hope this one about mothers and daughters will hold my interest.

The Fated Sky by Mary Robinette Kowal came from me for myself.

I read the first Lady Astronaut book on my friend C.'s advice and although I generally drive a wide berth around science fiction, especially so called hard sci-fi, I loved it and couldn't wait to get my hands on the second book.

The Spinster and the Duke by Anne Stuart came from me for myself.

I like historical romance and I like to support indie presses and this one sounds like a quick, enjoyable read.

If you want 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: Searching for a Bookstore

If you're anything like me, you search out bookstores wherever you go. In fact, I not only try to leave space in my luggage for books to bring home with me, I have been known to leave extra shoes or clothes out of my packing if I think their inclusion will cut down on available book space. My family lives in fear of the day I decide it will just be easier to go naked than pack clothes that will take up room in my luggage. (And, to be honest, their fear might be justified if it ever becomes legal to saunter around in public naked.) So it is no surprise at all that the most recent vacation we took, a trip to the Bahamas with two other couples, included the quest for a bookstore. Things did not go as planned.

I had done a little online research for bookstores in Nassau but one evening when we were already monopolizing the hotel concierge, I asked where the best bookstore on the island was thinking that surely a local person would be a better source than strangers on the internet. She confidently told me "Book World," which sounded promising of course and plans were made to trek there the next day. Originally it was just going to be my long-suffering husband (probably hoping to rein in my buying) and me but one of the other couples decided that it sounded like an interesting outing so they tagged along. Our first decision was to take the local jitney for $1.25 a person instead of a taxi for $18-20.  Because who wants to be dropped directly at the door to your destination, right?  If we walked to the end of the property and went left, a bus stop would be there. Should be easy enough. Except apparently the end of the property didn't mean taking the driveway out to the road, it meant doing that and then walking and walking and walking and walking and walking (well you get the idea) along the entire length of the enormous property. We finally saw a hut similar in description to what we were looking for but it was on the other side of the road. With no other option visible, we crossed the road to it whereupon we accidentally interrupted a mother doing a Bible reading with her young son. She graciously told us that we needed to get back to the other side of the road and keep walking (more walking!) until we saw an unmissable green bus shelter. Turned out it wasn't green but it was unmissable and we finally sat down to wait for the bus.

The bus ride was uneventful and having no sense of where to get off or truly where the bus was ultimately going, we opted to get off the bus when everyone else did in downtown Nassau. (To be fair, this is where the people at the hotel told us we should get off.) GPS chided us for this, telling us that we were still 7 minutes away. We all shrugged and decided to walk. Yes, more walking. We walked out of the touristy part of town into an area with abandoned and boarded up buildings. There were no people anywhere, just trash and broken glass. But we kept walking, because, well, books. Still walking many minutes later, we consulted the GPS. Despite having walked for more than 10 minutes past the original promised 7 minute walk, GPS cheerily told us it was just 5 more minutes. I was developing large, painful blisters on both the bottoms and tops of my feet. Our friend M. asked if we could walk on the shady side of the street because he was too hot, which sounded like a reasonable request until we realized there was no shady side. He promptly started unbuttoning his shirt to try and cool off.  We weren't entirely sure how far he intended to strip, he was so overheated.  Meanwhile, looking at the map, we opted to take a shortcut in hopes that we'd cut off a minute or two. Unfortunately the shortcut dead-ended into a street that had literally no shoulder and constant traffic whipping past. Unwilling to play Frogger, we turned around and cut through a cemetery to the street we were supposed to be on, at which point GPS told us that we *still* only had 5 minutes to go to get to the bookstore. You might be wondering why we kept going but at this point there truly were no other options. We plodded on. M.'s wife T. kept telling us it was an adventure and it was all good.  I think she a little delusional and manic at this point, but whatever.  I was demoralized and grumpy and my feet hurt. M. was red as a tomato and sweating profusely. My husband was 100 yards ahead of the rest of us and on a mission to get there already (or maybe just a mission to keep enough distance between us that he didn't strangle me for suggesting this outing).

We finally did make it to Book World. Sweet relief! Except it was the worst bookstore ever. Y'all, it was an office supply store with two rows of school workbooks and one short shelf of general books. I tried my damndest to find something to buy to justify the marathon walk but I just couldn't.  An hour of walking in the heat and blazing sun only to leave empty handed.  :-(

We all agreed we had no interest in walking back so tried to call a taxi. When I heard they couldn't pick us up for an hour, I almost broke down in tears. Meanwhile I'm sure the rest of them were wondering if disposing of me would take an hour and where they could hide my body without having to walk too far. We called the hotel in desperation and they said that they could send a car for $104 or someone at the store could call us a taxi. (I'm pretty sure that the hotel just wanted to pass the problem on to someone else.) The cashier at Book World looked a bit taken aback when we asked if he knew of any taxis but a customer heard the question and directed us to walk (more walking!) up the short hill to the Super Value to see Mr. Wells, who was sometimes known to arrange rides for people. Does this sound ominous to you? Frankly, at this point we didn't care and dutifully trekked up the hill to see our own personal taxi fixer. Rather unsurprisingly, he was told that there were no taxis available for an hour. Of course, by this time, we were starving (all that walking, you know) and decided that we just wanted to be able to have lunch, preferably an authentic lunch since the rest of the trip had been a bust. Mr. Wells sent us into the Super Value to take a look at the deli offerings, assuring us that everything there was made on premises and was locally sourced. We were so demoralized by this point, we actually looked at the food even though there would have been nowhere to eat it. We didn't get anything so I can't tell you what it tasted like but it looked like the same fried and over-sauced sort of stuff we can find in grocery store deli departments here. When we got back outside, Mr. Wells had a taxi for us (and seemed disappointed we had ignored his food suggestion). Or not a taxi, but a guy who worked at the store sweeping the floor who sometimes drove people places and would take us where we wanted to go. "We trust him because he works here. He's an employee." Who were we to argue?

We told the driver where we wanted to go and the address, and piled into his car, trying not to step on what were clearly his groceries piled on the floor in the back. He agreed with our destination and set off. As we drove along, we tried to confirm the cost that Mr. Wells had quoted us. You'll be as shocked (not) as we were to discover that we were going to be charged twice that. But at least we weren't walking. Then we noticed that our driver was heading away from where we wanted to be. In fact, he was taking us to Atlantis (not the hotel we were staying at, by the way). We tried to tell him he was taking us to the wrong place and he just kept telling us "Yes." Over the bridge to not our hotel we went. We resorted to pointing in addition to telling him where we needed to be and M. kept trying to show him the GPS. Obviously the driver had been told that you shouldn't look at your phone while driving so he came to a complete stop. In the middle of the road. Commence honking behind us. He started driving again, still in the wrong direction (and now on the wrong island). M. waves the phone with map on it again. Complete stop again. Honking again. Finally he did a u-turn and we headed off in the correct direction. Each time the GPS suggested that we'd need to turn in a mile or so, he tried to turn immediately, leading M. to finally resort to hand signals to direct us. M. has a really promising career ahead of him either as a football umpire signalling first down or as the ground crew guy who directs the plane to the gate. Then, less than a mile from the restaurant, the car died at a stoplight.  More honking.  He did eventually get it going again and when we got close enough to the restaurant that even I could limp there on my blister filled feet, we paid him and piled out of the car.

Not exactly the bookstore adventure I was hoping for but probably one I won't forget even if I have nothing to show for it now that my feet have healed. We did have a nice lunch and while I'd like to say that was the end of our adventures that day, there was still the crazy taxi ride back to the hotel to get through but that's a tale for a different day. Will I still try searching out bookstores wherever I go? Probably. But I might make room in my luggage for better walking shoes even if I have to sacrifice a book or two.

Review: Swimming With Elephants by Sarah Bamford Seidelmann

I have to admit I am a skeptic. A friend told me she watched me close the shutters and completely shut down when visiting a palm reader almost in a challenge to see if she could possibly be telling the truth or was just a scam artist. I have a hard time believing it when friends tell me about their alternative medicine adventures. I do know there is a mind body connection that we don't fully understand and that it is likely going to be an important thing. In general though, I prefer to put my health eggs in the verified by science basket and tend to scoff at more "woo-woo" varieties. It is hard to suspend my disbelief. (And in certain cases, I have no interest in staying open to debate. Vaccines are science. Cancer is not cured through alternative means. Etc.) But I also try to challenge myself on occasion, to look at a belief system not my own and see if it speaks truth to me, as it clearly does to the possessor of those beliefs, hence reading Sarah Bamford Seidelmann's memoir of her journey from medical doctor with a Western mindset to a shamanistic healer open to a spiritual world not accounted for in her medical training. Short answer, I still side with observable, provable science but I don't doubt that Seidelmann fully believes in her chosen path which she has chronicled in Swimming with Elelphants.

Seidelmann was a traditionally trained medical student when she started questioning whether patients are given the best course of treatment.  Or perhaps it's more accurate to say she questioned whether patients were given enough or if their drug protocol should be supplemented by other, less tangible things.  This idea would continue to haunt her and to resurface throughout the years.  The intensity of schooling, work, parenting, and home renovation threatened Seidelmann's marriage and her well being. In fact, she was overwhelmed and unhappy. A long sabbatical and travel beyond the Western world refocused her on the direction she wanted to move in. She embraced the mystical, dreamt of animal guides, and turned towards shamanism along the way to reinventing herself as a life coach and traditional healer.

Seielmann had the support and the money to enable herself to take the time to travel, to explore the dreams she found so inspiring, to change her path and it has worked out beautifully for her.  Not everyone has that luxury even if they have the inclination.  She details not only the journey she took but many of the otherworldly signs and unconscious visions that led her where she ultimately went. The narrative of these dreams might be fascinating to someone else moving in a similar trajectory to her but they were too frequent, too lengthy, and made my skepticism hit high alert. I just couldn't connect with the book, Seidelmann's choices (whether in terms of her career or in terms of her parenting and marriage), or her mindset and so it became increasingly difficult to continue reading. I did finish the entire book, rolling my eyes much of the time so this was clearly not meant for me. If you are a searcher, maybe this will speak to you in a different way and you will benefit from it. I just didn't.

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

Review: The Company They Kept edited by Robert B. Silvers and Barbara Epstein

There was no way that I was going to be able to walk past this book without buying it. Pencils on the cover? (Yes, I'm that shallow.) The promise of writers writing about their friendship with other writers, artists, and other amazing minds culled from the pages of the New York Review of Books? (Yes, I can be a bit of an intellectual snob.) It seemed like it would be perfect for me. While it was indeed mostly what it claims on the cover, it was also boring, a cardinal sin in my book world.

This is a collection of short essays written by well known authors about their late friends and the influence those friends had on their writing. In at least one case, the subject and the author hadn't met or corresponded so weren't actually friends and in others, the pairs seem to be more acquaintances than friends. And this fact leads directly to one of the things I found so lacking. In these cases, there was no personal insight into the subject. There was nothing more here than what an introduction to their collected works or an encyclopedia would say about them. There was a discussion of their influence or their craft but not as much (and sometimes nothing at all) about the person behind the writing, music, science, etc. Certainly I'm not arguing that the essays, all of which are understandably eulogistic in tone, should lay bare the person about whom they were written but asking for a piece written by a friend would imply to me that there was a personal connection that could or should be mined a little bit, an insight the general public or a diligent scholar would not have. Those remembered by these essays were certainly lions in their fields but they were men and women first, not solely defined by their works, and that is what I was looking and hoping for here, the personal. The authors whose works I had read were no more illuminating to me than the authors whose works I had never read, nor did these pieces inspire me to search them out. There were a few pieces that defied this academic remove but they only served to highlight the missing warmth and humanity in the bulk of the pieces. The writing is, as you'd expect, quite impressive, but it's also on balance quite cold. May my own obituary (far in the future, please) be full of far more feeling than was evinced here!

Review: Plumdog by Emma Chichester Clark

If you are a dog person, you probably wonder what goes on in their doggy minds, right? Sometimes you can tell what they have to be thinking from the sheer joy they exhibit or the baleful glances they give you when you do something mean like take them to the vet or the groomer. But what about general, daily sorts of things; how do they feel about those? Readers are in luck because Emma Chichester Clark has written and illustrated a charming book about a year in the life of her dog Plum, entirely from Plum's perspective, and it will confirm all the happy, funny things you've always thought your dog was thinking.

Plum is a Whoosell, a whippet, poodle, Jack Russell mix. She likes long walks, cavorting in any body of water, visiting her sister and other canine friends, going on adventures, and cuddling up with her human. She is completely delightful and funny and entertaining and friendly (except to rare not so nice dogs she come across in her ramblings). She shares snippets of her days as well as small insights into Emma's life.

Opening with Plum's New Year Resolutions, which are "To be braver. [picture Plum on her back in a submissive pose between two bigger dogs] To catch a cat. To catch a fox. Not to unstuff my new toys immediately. To sleep in their bed every night" and ending on December 31 with "We went to stay with our friends in the country for New Year's Eve. It was just as comfy as I remembered. The chairs and sofas are for dogs, unlike in our house. While everyone was watching TV I thought about the resolutions I'd made at the beginning of the year, and I realised I had almost 100% failed--except for one thing: the middle of their bed is MINE," the book isn't really a narrative per se, but a delightfully illustrated diary chronicling small, sweet snapshots of the previous year. It's a heart warming love letter to a dog, the joy in her heart and the joy she brings Clark. And reading it will bring the same kind of uncomplicated joy to anyone lucky enough to live with a dog.

Waiting on Wednesday

This meme was 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. I'm choosing to continue the tradition even though she has stopped.

Come With Me by Helen Schulman.

The book is being released by Harper on November 27, 2018.

The book's jacket copy says: From Helen Schulman, the acclaimed author of the New York Times bestseller This Beautiful Life, comes another "gripping, potent, and blisteringly well-written story of family, dilemma, and consequence" (Elizabeth Gilbert)—a mind-bending novel set in Silicon Valley that challenges our modern constructs of attachment and love, purpose and fate.

Recommended by Vogue, the BBC, Southern Living, Pure Wow, Hey Alma, Esquire, EW, Refinery 29, Bust, and Read It or Weep

"What do you want to know?"

Amy Reed works part-time as a PR person for a tech start-up, run by her college roommate’s nineteen-year-old son, in Palo Alto, California. Donny is a baby genius, a junior at Stanford in his spare time. His play for fortune is an algorithm that may allow people access to their "multiverses"—all the planes on which their alternative life choices can be played out simultaneously—to see how the decisions they’ve made have shaped their lives.

Donny wants Amy to be his guinea pig. And even as she questions Donny’s theories and motives, Amy finds herself unable to resist the lure of the road(s) not taken. Who would she be if she had made different choices, loved different people? Where would she be now?

Amy’s husband, Dan—an unemployed, perhaps unemployable, print journalist—accepts a dare of his own, accompanying a seductive, award-winning photographer named Maryam on a trip to Fukushima, the Japanese city devastated by tsunami and meltdown. Collaborating with Maryam, Dan feels a renewed sense of excitement and possibility he hasn’t felt with his wife in a long time. But when crisis hits at home, the extent of Dan’s betrayal is exposed and, as Amy contemplates alternative lives, the couple must confront whether the distances between them in the here and now are irreconcilable.

Taking place over three non-consecutive but vitally important days for Amy, Dan, and their three sons, Come with Me is searing, entertaining, and unexpected—a dark comedy that is ultimately both a deeply romantic love story and a vivid tapestry of modern life.

It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

This meme is hosted by Kathryn at Reading Date.

Books I completed this past week are:

Family Trust by Kathy Wang
Plumdog by Emma Chichester Clark
The Legendary Lord by Valerie Bowman
The Company They Kept edited by Robert B. Silvers and Barbara Epstein
Someone You Love Is Gone by Gurjinder Basran

Bookmarks are still living in the middle of:

A Hard and Heavy Thing by Matthew J. Hefti
Paint Your Wife by Lloyd Jones
No One Can Pronounce My Name by Rakesh Satyal
Thousand-Miler by Melanie Radzicki McManus
Dear Fang, With Love by Rufi Thorpe
America's First Daughter by Stephanie Dray and Laura Kamoie
Metis Beach by Claudine Bourbonnais
Smoke by Dan Vyleta
Coco Chanel by Lisa Chaney
The New York Time Footsteps by various authors
The Resurrection of Joan Ashby by Cherise Wolas
The Bottom of the Sky by Rodrigo Fresan
One House Over by Mary Monroe
Burntown by Jennifer McMahon
Everything She Didn't Say by Jane Kirkpatrick
The Girl Who Never Read Noam Chomsky by Jana Casale
Surviving Paradise by Peter Rudiak-Gould
The Diary of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell
The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal

Reviews posted this week:

Family Trust by Kathy Wang
All the Colors We Will See by Patrice Gopo

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

Swimming with Elephants by Sarah Bamford Seidelmann
Visible Empire by Hannah Pittard
The Garden of Small Beginnings by Abbi Waxman
Love Hate and Other Filters by Samira Ahmed
A Song for the River by Philip Connors
In the Shadow of 10,000 Hills by Jennifer Haupt
Beautiful Music by Michael Zadoorian
Still Life with Monkey by Katharine Weber
America for Beginners by Leah Franqui
Tenemental by Vikki Warner
Meet Me at the Museum by Anne Youngson
The Lido by Libby Page
The Invisible Valley by Su Wei
The Last Equation of Isaac Severy by Nova Jacobs
The Showrunner by Kim Mortishugu
I Found My Tribe by Ruth Fitzmaurice
Paris by the Book by Liam Callanan
Terra Nullius by Clare G. Coleman
Christmas in July by Alan Michael Parker
Nothing Forgotten by Jessica Levine
Housegirl by Michael Donkor
Wildwood by Elinor Florence
All Day at the Movies by Fiona Kidman
Weedeater by Robert Gipe
The Mannequin Makers by Craig Cliff
Chemistry by Weike Wang
The Summer Wives by Beatriz Williams
Come Back to the Swamp by Laura Morrison
The Animal Gazer by Edgardo Franzosini
Melmoth by Sarah Perry
Sound by Bella Bathurst
Celine by Peter Heller
In Every Moment We Are Still Alive by Tom Malmquist
The Tattooist of Auschwitz by Heather Morris
You'll Always Have Tara by Leah Marie Brown
The Taster by V.S. Alexander
Dear Mrs. Bird by AJ Pearce
Calypso by David Sedaris
A House Among the Trees by Julia Glass
Postcards from the Canyon by Lisa Gitlin
The Family Fang by Kevin Wilson
Sycamore by Bryn Chancellor
The Home for Unwanted Girls by Joanna Goodman
As Wide As the Sky by Jessica Pack
Indian Horse by Richard Wagamese
Plum Rains by Andromeda Romano-Lax
Second Wind by Nathaniel Philbrick
Leave No Trace by Mindy Mejia
Paper Is White by Hilary Zaid
Hotel Silence by Audur Ava Olafsdottir
The Vain Conversation by Anthony Grooms
The Beauty of the End by Debbie Howells
The Widows of Malabar Hill by Sujata Massey
The Last Suppers by Mandy Mikulencak
Ostrich by Matt Greene
The Mercy Seat by Elizabeth H. Winthrop
Maggie Boylan by Michael Henson
We All Love the Beautiful Girls by Joanne Proulx
Every Note Played by Lisa Genova
Shores Beyond Shores by Irene Butter
The Shakespeare Requirement by Julie Schumacher
Fiction Can Be Murder by Becky Clark
Tigerbelle by Wyomia Tyus
Wolf Season by Helen Benedict
Beasts of Extraordinary Circumstance by Ruth Emmie Lang
The Second Mrs. Hockaday by Susan Rivers
London Road by Tessa Smith McGovern
Invitation to a Bonfire by Adrienne Celt
Love, Nina by Nina Stibbe
Love Literary Style by Karin Gillespie
The Secret of the Irish Castle by Santa Montefiore
The Cactus by Sarah Haywood
The Amazing Story of the Man Who Cycled from India to Europe for Love by Per J. Andersson
A Cast of Vultures by Judith Flanders
The Governess Game by Tess Dare
In-Between Days by Teva Harrison
The Wrath and the Dawn by Renee Ahdieh
In the Heart of the Canyon by Elisabeth Hyde
Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman
Penelope Lemon by Inman Majors
I'd Rather Be Reading by Anne Bogel
Royally Screwed by Emma Chase
The Wangs Vs. the World by Jade Chang
Southern Lady Code by Helen Ellis
Country of Red Azaleas by Domnica Radulescu
The Book Lovers' Appreciation Society by assorted authors
Don't Point That Thing at Me by Kyril Bonfiglioli
Hope Has Two Daughters by Monia Mazigh
The Friend by Sigrid Nunez
The Widow Nash by Jamie Harrison
The Child Finder by Rene Denfeld
Miss Featherton's Christmas Prince by Ella Quinn
The Radium Girls by Kate Moore
Rainbirds by Clarissa Goenawan
Sassafrass, Cypress, and Indigo by Ntozake Shange
Mean by Myriam Gurba
Maeve in America by Maeve Higgins
After the Bloom by Leslie Shimotakahara
Plumdog by Emma Chichester Clark
The Legendary Lord by Valerie Bowman
The Company They Kept edited by Robert B. Silvers and Barbara Epstein
Someone You Love Is Gone by Gurjinder Basran

Monday Mailbox

This past week's mailbox arrivals:

Plumdog by Emma Chichester Clark came from me for myself.

I saw this on the Litsy app. How can you resist a book with that cover, especially when it's the diary of the doggo on the cover? It looks totally charming.

Daisy Jones and the Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid came from Ballantine Books.

I have thoroughly enjoyed Reid's other books so I am fully on board for this one about a late 70s era band and its frontwoman and the truth behind why they broke up.

Christmas on the Island by Jenny Colgan came from TLC Book Tours and William Morrow for a blog tour.

I do like Colgan's books and I am looking forward to this Christmas-themed tale of a woman accidentally pregnant by her ex-boss who hasn't yet told him or her family and of a Syrian doctor/refugee spending the holiday with his sons even while his wife is still missing.

If you want 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: All the Colors We Will See by Patrice Gopo

Who are you? Probably the most important question a person can ever answer, if the question is considered seriously, it is not necessarily easy to answer. Down here in the South, the question also contains the seeds of the question "Who are your people?" Again, for some people, this is not always easy to answer although the advent of commercially available DNA tests is making this a little clearer. And while the question (at least here) is meant to pinpoint who your family is, it can be expanded to be asking who you identify with, who is your community, where do you belong? These questions and more are the big questions that Patrice Gopo is looking at, thinking about, and working through in her collection of biographical essays called All the Colors We Will See: Reflections on Barriers, Brokenness, and Finding Our Way.

Gopo grew up in Alaska, the daughter of Jamaican immigrants, her face the only brown face among a sea of white. When she went off to college at Carnegie Mellon University, she was again in a small minority, especially in her chosen field of chemical engineering. Only when she went to South Africa, where she met her Zimbabwean husband, was she not the minority, but even then she didn't feel a sense of belonging. Gopo's essays meander through her life and experiences, large and small, confronting the idea and reality of being "other," examining her cultural heritage and identity and that of her children, and exploring race and what that means in all the different places and stages of her life.

Her essays are thoughtful and introspective as they reflect her desire for belonging, acceptance, and home. The essays don't necessarily follow chronologically, some touch on all the stages of her life so far while others focus on one specific time or event or object in her life but they are all connected by the thematic threads running through them. She looks at herself not only through the lens of the personal but at who she and her family are in a larger, more universal context. Her experiences are uniquely hers but they are also broadly the experience of so many other women of color. She writes of herself as a woman of color, as a mother, as a wife, and as a daughter in this world. She writes from the perspective of a child in Alaska, of the descendant of Jamaicans and Indians, of an American in South Africa, of a mother of multicultural children in Charlotte, NC. She writes as a citizen of the world searching for belonging. Readers who identify with any piece of who she is will see at least part of themselves in her essays. Readers who don't will see a reality they probably have never considered but should. If you enjoy essays that resonate, that inspire thoughtfulness, that explore identity and culture, then you should settle in with this one.

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

Waiting on Wednesday

This meme was 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. I'm choosing to continue the tradition even though she has stopped.

Little Culinary Triumphs by Pascale Pujol.

The book is being released by Europa Editions on December 4, 2018.

The book's jacket copy says: Set in the storied Parisian quarter of Montmarte, this heartwarming, comic tale is a must for foodies, Francophiles, and lovers of a good story well told.

Made famous by artists, writers, and bon vivants of every ilk, Montmartre has been the stomping ground for bohemian celebrities through the ages and a neighborhood synonymous with transgression and innovation. Today, it is a bustling multiethnic neighborhood where cultures, cuisines, the past and the future of Europe cohabitate and collide. Here in this vibrant community, in Pujol’s charming English-language debut, a cast of endearing characters fall into increasingly comic situations as they seek to follow their often-outrageous dreams.

Sandrine works as a functionary in an employment office, but there is a lot more to her than one might suspect from her job description. With a volcanic personality and an imagination to match it, she is also a world-class cook who is waiting for the right occasion to realize her dream of opening a restaurant of her own.

With a master plan that one could only describe as Machiavellian, Sandrine ropes Antoine, an unemployed professor looking for a fresh start, into her venture. A carousel of extravagant characters follows: the giant Senegalese man, Toussaint N’Diaye; the magical chef, Vairam; the extravagantly flatulent Alsatian, Schmutz and his twelve-year-old daughter Juliette―IQ 172!; the alluring psychologist and Kama Sutra specialist, Annabelle Villemin-Dubreuil.

Plans for the restaurant proceed smoothly until Sandrine discovers a shady newspaper operation next-door that leads her to a sinister magnate manipulating the Parisian news outlets.

Review: Family Trust by Kathy Wang

Money.  And the expectation of future money. There's probably nothing else in this world more easily able to tear apart a family, at least a wealthy family. Children want their (unearned) inheritance. First wives and second wives are at odds. First (ex)wives want their children to come into the cash while second wives want compensation for the time they spent catering to the dying. It all sounds so privileged and crass. But that's what makes for such fascinating reading, right? The low, grubbiness of it all. Kathy Wang has certainly captured this, and so much more, in her new novel, Family Trust.

Stanley Huang is dying of pancreatic cancer. His ex-wife Linda, who spent more than three decades with Stanley and is the mother of his children, wants to make sure that Fred and Kate inherit Stanley's wealth, a wealth she spent a lot of time building up for Stanley through shrewd investments and the like. Mary, Stanley's second, much younger wife, has no knowledge of his financial situation other than that they have money. With Stanley actively dying, she now has to worry what she will do once he's gone. Kate and Fred want to have some idea how much they each stand to inherit so they know how much their lives will be eased, especially once those lives descend into turmoil. But Stanley's cagey, not wanting to disclose anything to anyone. He just wants everyone to be there for him, doing his bidding whenever he wants. With who knows how much money on the line, Stanley's family tries, at least half-heartedly and sometimes more than a little grudgingly, to give him what he wants in the few months he has left.

Before his diagnosis, Stanley was self-involved, possessed of a nasty temper, and desirous of being seen as a successful and smart man. First wife Linda is financially savvy, emotionally remote, and generally content in her life post-divorce, even if divorce is still a little scandalous in her group of friends. She has washed her hands of Stanley as best she can but their shared children and this terminal diagnosis mean she cannot completely walk away from him. Along with tending her garden, occasionally babysitting her grandchildren, and astutely managing her money, she is discovering the appeal of online dating for the first time. Fred is a Harvard Business School grad who bemoans his mediocrity, at least as measured by Silicon Valley culture. He is dating an attractive, blonde, Bulgarian woman who works in sales at Saks and he is generally content with her except when she pressures him about marriage and blithely spends money he can't really (or doesn't want to) afford to spend. Kate is a director at a highly successful tech company. Having gotten in on the ground floor of the business before it took off, ala Google and Apple, means that she can afford to support her husband after he quits his job to attempt his own start-up, even if his presence in his attic home office doesn't translate into a bigger role in raising their two young children. In fact, Kate doesn't have any idea what Denny does up in the attic all day anyway. She is afraid to want more for herself than the life she's settled for. Mary, Stanley's second wife, speaks very little English and her step-children don't seem to like her very much although it is clear that Stanley dotes on her. She has been devoted to his care and comfort for the nine years of their marriage but the months after his diagnosis are the most pressure filled and fraught of all as she faces her own family's interest in her future financial situation and her step-children's interests being diametrically opposed to hers.

Wang carefully draws each of these characters and all of the factors going on in their lives as the novel progresses, slowly revealing what each character's ultimate desire is. The chapters alternate between the five main characters, although Mary doesn't have a chapter from her point of view until quite late in the novel, leaving her motives murky and subject to interpretation by the others for a long time. Because the reader sees each character's circumstances, Stanley's diagnosis is almost an after thought and the greedy need to know Stanley's intentions and the size of their bequests comes across as grasping and selfish. Of course, Silicon Valley, as portrayed here doesn't come off much better, nor does the insular, wealthy Taiwanese-American community. The Huang family's strained dynamic is on full display, only complimented by professional pressure and presumed, or sometimes very real, racism, sexism, nepotism, and cronyism. The novel starts off quite slowly and somewhat less than engagingly but it does eventually pick up, with the reader interested in finding out just how much money Stanley has, what Kate's husband is doing and whether she'll finally have the push to go after what she really wants, the truth about Linda's new online beau, and how Fred is going to improve his business standing and where his relationship is headed. Yes, there really are that many plot threads, and a few more besides. None of the characters are particularly sympathetic but their status seeking, family loyalty, and reactions to cultural pressures are interesting to watch as an outsider. This is very definitely a novel of "rich people problems" but don't we all sometimes fantasize about having these sorts of problems? Spending a few hours between the covers of this one will deliver just that, and maybe an appreciation for your own problems instead.

For more information about Kathy Wang and the book, check out her webpage, like her author page on Facebook, or follow her on Twitter or Instagram. Check out the book's Goodreads page, follow the rest of the blog tour, or look at the reviews for others' thoughts and opinions on the book.

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

It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

This meme is hosted by Kathryn at Reading Date.

Books I completed this past week are:

Marilla of Green Gables by Sarah McCoy
Maeve in America by Maeve Higgins
After the Bloom by Leslie Shimotakahara

Bookmarks are still living in the middle of:

A Hard and Heavy Thing by Matthew J. Hefti
Paint Your Wife by Lloyd Jones
The Company They Kept edited by Robert B. Silvers and Barbara Epstein
No One Can Pronounce My Name by Rakesh Satyal
Thousand-Miler by Melanie Radzicki McManus
Dear Fang, With Love by Rufi Thorpe
America's First Daughter by Stephanie Dray and Laura Kamoie
Metis Beach by Claudine Bourbonnais
Smoke by Dan Vyleta
Coco Chanel by Lisa Chaney
The New York Time Footsteps by various authors
The Resurrection of Joan Ashby by Cherise Wolas
The Bottom of the Sky by Rodrigo Fresan
One House Over by Mary Monroe
Burntown by Jennifer McMahon
Everything She Didn't Say by Jane Kirkpatrick
The Girl Who Never Read Noam Chomsky by Jana Casale
Surviving Paradise by Peter Rudiak-Gould
The Diary of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell
Family Trust by Kathy Wang

Reviews posted this week:

Marilla of Green Gables by Sarah McCoy
Mothers of Sparta by Dawn Davies

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

Swimming with Elephants by Sarah Bamford Seidelmann
Visible Empire by Hannah Pittard
The Garden of Small Beginnings by Abbi Waxman
Love Hate and Other Filters by Samira Ahmed
A Song for the River by Philip Connors
In the Shadow of 10,000 Hills by Jennifer Haupt
Beautiful Music by Michael Zadoorian
Still Life with Monkey by Katharine Weber
America for Beginners by Leah Franqui
Tenemental by Vikki Warner
Meet Me at the Museum by Anne Youngson
The Lido by Libby Page
The Invisible Valley by Su Wei
The Last Equation of Isaac Severy by Nova Jacobs
The Showrunner by Kim Mortishugu
I Found My Tribe by Ruth Fitzmaurice
Paris by the Book by Liam Callanan
Terra Nullius by Clare G. Coleman
Christmas in July by Alan Michael Parker
Nothing Forgotten by Jessica Levine
Housegirl by Michael Donkor
Wildwood by Elinor Florence
All Day at the Movies by Fiona Kidman
Weedeater by Robert Gipe
The Mannequin Makers by Craig Cliff
Chemistry by Weike Wang
The Summer Wives by Beatriz Williams
Come Back to the Swamp by Laura Morrison
The Animal Gazer by Edgardo Franzosini
Melmoth by Sarah Perry
Sound by Bella Bathurst
Celine by Peter Heller
In Every Moment We Are Still Alive by Tom Malmquist
The Tattooist of Auschwitz by Heather Morris
You'll Always Have Tara by Leah Marie Brown
The Taster by V.S. Alexander
Dear Mrs. Bird by AJ Pearce
Calypso by David Sedaris
A House Among the Trees by Julia Glass
Postcards from the Canyon by Lisa Gitlin
The Family Fang by Kevin Wilson
Sycamore by Bryn Chancellor
The Home for Unwanted Girls by Joanna Goodman
As Wide As the Sky by Jessica Pack
Indian Horse by Richard Wagamese
Plum Rains by Andromeda Romano-Lax
Second Wind by Nathaniel Philbrick
Leave No Trace by Mindy Mejia
Paper Is White by Hilary Zaid
Hotel Silence by Audur Ava Olafsdottir
The Vain Conversation by Anthony Grooms
The Beauty of the End by Debbie Howells
The Widows of Malabar Hill by Sujata Massey
The Last Suppers by Mandy Mikulencak
Ostrich by Matt Greene
The Mercy Seat by Elizabeth H. Winthrop
Maggie Boylan by Michael Henson
We All Love the Beautiful Girls by Joanne Proulx
Every Note Played by Lisa Genova
Shores Beyond Shores by Irene Butter
The Shakespeare Requirement by Julie Schumacher
Fiction Can Be Murder by Becky Clark
Tigerbelle by Wyomia Tyus
Wolf Season by Helen Benedict
Beasts of Extraordinary Circumstance by Ruth Emmie Lang
The Second Mrs. Hockaday by Susan Rivers
London Road by Tessa Smith McGovern
Invitation to a Bonfire by Adrienne Celt
Love, Nina by Nina Stibbe
Love Literary Style by Karin Gillespie
The Secret of the Irish Castle by Santa Montefiore
The Cactus by Sarah Haywood
The Amazing Story of the Man Who Cycled from India to Europe for Love by Per J. Andersson
A Cast of Vultures by Judith Flanders
The Governess Game by Tess Dare
In-Between Days by Teva Harrison
The Wrath and the Dawn by Renee Ahdieh
In the Heart of the Canyon by Elisabeth Hyde
Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman
Penelope Lemon by Inman Majors
I'd Rather Be Reading by Anne Bogel
Royally Screwed by Emma Chase
The Wangs Vs. the World by Jade Chang
Southern Lady Code by Helen Ellis
Country of Red Azaleas by Domnica Radulescu
All the Colors We Will See by Patrice Gopo
The Book Lovers' Appreciation Society by assorted authors
Don't Point That Thing at Me by Kyril Bonfiglioli
Hope Has Two Daughters by Monia Mazigh
The Friend by Sigrid Nunez
The Widow Nash by Jamie Harrison
The Child Finder by Rene Denfeld
Miss Featherton's Christmas Prince by Ella Quinn
The Radium Girls by Kate Moore
Rainbirds by Clarissa Goenawan
Sassafrass, Cypress, and Indigo by Ntozake Shange
Mean by Myriam Gurba
Maeve in America by Maeve Higgins
After the Bloom by Leslie Shimotakahara

Monday Mailbox

This past week's mailbox arrival:

How to Be Alone by Lane Moore came from Atria.

I am bad at pop culture (ie: I have no idea who Lane Moore is) but I do enjoy well written essays about life so I'm looking forward to this.

If you want 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: Mothers of Sparta by Dawn Davies

Some little girls dream about being mothers when they grow up. They love babysitting and being around little kids. They coo over babies. I was not one of those little girls. In fact, my mother admitted that when I called to tell her that we were having a baby, she was thrilled but a little surprised, not certain that I'd ever want children. And in truth, to this day I really struggle with other people's children. (My kids would probably say there are days I struggle with them too.) Motherhood was never a given for me. So when I find other people who have or had a rather ambivalent feeling about becoming a mother, I am eager to see if their experience mirrors mine in any way. Dawn Davies is a mother but she didn't always want to be one, nor has her motherhood journey been an easy one. Mothers of Sparta, her "memoir in pieces," chronicles her journey, her life, and her decisions, pre- and post-motherhood.

Instead of a straight memoir, this is a collection of essays, not told chronologically. Many of the essays talk about aspects of life as a mother, divorce, blended families, and pregnancy and childbirth and its sometimes deeply unpretty aftermath. She can be funny. She can tug at heartstrings. She is fierce. She is fumbling. Above all, though, she is unfailingly honest. It is in fact this span of emotions that make this such an uneven reading experience. Thematically the essays all hang together but the tone varies wildly, as does the reader's interest in each essay. The strongest, most visceral story in here, is that of mothering her son and the toll that his mental illness takes on everyone in the family. It is a hard read, seeing how little support there is in the real world for dealing with a severely troubled child, how scary the present is and how uncertain the future. Contrast this heart deep essay with the light and frivolous essay listing of men Davies would have slept with and why and you have a sense of the wild swings contained here. When Davies is at her most raw, the writing is well done. When she is a little more removed, some of her sentences are convoluted or overwritten, reaching for emotion that comes so effortlessly in other places. As a whole this doesn't always hang together comfortably and my attention wavered at the abrupt jumps in tone so this is perhaps a better book to delve into piece by piece rather than in its entirety.