Review: The Correspondent by Virginia Evans

I am a huge sucker for epistolary novels under any circumstances. I have written letters off and on my whole life to friends and to pen pals I have never met, and likely will never meet. Finding something personal in the mail, as opposed to bills and junk mail, is always a thrill. So when you combine that thrilling feeling with the slightly illicit feeling of reading someone else's letters as you do in an epistolary novel, it almost guarantees a good reading experience. Virginia Evans' novel, The Correspondent, was a delightfully good reading experience.

Slightly different than other novels in letters, this tells the entire story through the letters of Sybil Van Antwerp without supplying the reader almost any of the replies (with just a couple of notable exceptions). The reader learns who Sybil is, about her relationships, what she is most proud of, what she is most ashamed by, the way her life spun out of control only to be wrested back with determination and steel, and the sorrow and guilt she feels for something that happpened a life time ago. Sybil's accomplishments were many and her correspondence impressive. The people with whom she communicates, including contemporary authors, famous people (although we are only told of these letters), her family and friends, a thoughtful neighbor, the Dean of a local college, and more show different facets of the complex character that is Sybil. This is a quiet novel, very much character driven, rich and rewarding.

Review: The Fortnight in September by R.C. Sherriff

I am packing up to head home from my annual summer vacation and I picked up R.C. Sherriff's The Fortnight in September as a final read of the season. It turns out that this gentle look at an ordinary, middle class British family's yearly seaside vacation to the sea was the perfect accompaniment to the end of my own summer, capturing as he does, the anticipation and flurry of getting ready for vacation, the pleasure of the vacation itself, and the melancholy of leaving mixed with the rightness of being once again at home.

Centered on the Stevens family of five, Mr. and Mrs. Stevens, twenty year old Mary, seventeen year old Dick, and ten year old Ernie, this charming novel shows the small pleasures of daily holiday living in a happy, familiar place, bathing in the sea, walking on the boardwalk, playing cricket, flying a kite, and so on. The Stevens go to Bognor Regis every year for two weeks in September. They stay at the same guesthouse and cheerfully follow roughly the same schedule during their time there. There are, of course, small changes each year, like choosing to splurge on renting a bathing hut this year or the increasingly noticeable shabbiness of their chosen guesthouse, but their fondness for the place, loyalty, and pleasant memories of past years keep them coming back, especially this year when there was a question of whether Mary and Dick, both out of school now and working, would join the family again or if they'd go off with their friends. There are no large dramas here, only small ones easily (and for the most part happily) navigated.

The novel is almost entirely character driven with little plot to speak of but it captures the appeal of the familiar, comfortable everyday life in a place the characters love and look forward to all year. The writing is old fashioned (although likely not so when it was published in 1931) and nostalgic feeling, and the story is warm and engaging, following each of the five family members on their own and together, giving the reader more insight into each of their thoughts and hopes both on vacation and in their usual life. It's a slow, quiet novel of annual rituals and small, contained pleasures that makes for an enjoyable reading experience.

Review: Lost in Michigan's Upper Peninsula by Mike Sonnenberg

Since I spend every summer in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, I picked this book up with the thought that I might find new places to visit around me and across the UP. Disappointingly I'm not entirely certain I found exactly what I was looking for though.

The locations highlighted here are arranged by general area in the UP and give not only street addresses but also geographical coordinates. Each place is followed by a short history of the attraction and recommendations of things to do (for example to bring jugs to fill up at a certain spring). The tone of the writing is folksy and conversational but I have to question Sonnenberg's enthusiasm for many of the sites he highlights, especially when it takes a good long time to reach a particular location and all a visitor can do is park their car and gaze at abandoned ruins. He misses including interesting information about some of the highlighted sites (at least in my area), such as unique geological features or the potential to see endangered flora. I'd have loved to see more quirky things included like the troll in Germfask (although Benny the Beard Fisher might be too new to be included in this edition, this gives a sense of the kinds of hidden gems I was hoping to find) rather than including little towns that he's deemed to be good places to get gas, sandwiches, and cell service. Honestly, reading through this didn't make me want to travel throughout the UP, which is a real shame and the exact opposite of what this book was striving to do.

Review: BIg Gay Wedding by Byron Lane

We can have hopes and dreams for our children but in the end, they are the only ones who get to choose what their lives look like. Sometimes this is hard for a parent to reconcile with what that parent wanted or had envisioned. This is especially true of Chrissy Durang, the mother in Byron Lane's novel Big Gay Wedding.

Chrissy has been running the Polite Society Ranch, a petting farm full of rescues, ever since she was widowed. She expects her only son Barnett to come home one day and take over the farm. Barnett is Chrissy's sun and moon and she can even semi-accept his homosexuality as long as he just keeps it quiet. But it turns out that Barnett's latest visit home isn't to tell his mother he's ready to take over, but to introduce her to his fiance, Ezra. And as for keeping his sexuality quiet, well, that's out too as the men want to hold the wedding on the ranch in this small Louisana town. There's a lot that will have to be overcome to make this wedding go off without a hitch, not least of which is Chrissy's and the town's homophobia.

Although the novel tackles some deep and important topics like homophobia, parental expectations, and acceptance, there is also a decidedly zany side to it as well. Barnett's grandfather, Paw Paw is a delight, loving and accepting his grandson as he is. Ezra's sister Nichole is completely over the top, especially in her wedding planning. Ezra's mother Victoria is crazy and has her own issues. Even Chrissy's constant elaborate checklists earn a giggle, with the checklist of things she doesn't like about Ezra coming back around positively in the end. Chrissy's struggle with her son's sexuality and his life choices, including not taking over the farm she's taken care of as his inheritance for so long, is hard and sometimes repugnant but realistic feeling. Seeking guidance from others on her struggle showcases the similarly misguided feelings of others in town but instead of reinforcing her feelings, seeing the homophobia in others helps her to reckon with and confront her own. Ultimately this ends up being a feel good novel with heart, even if it's not the most realistic you'll ever read and once you get past your anger at Chrissy's attitude in the beginning.

Review: The Trouble with Twins by Kathryn Siebel

What better time to read a middle grade book than during back to school season? I am not much of a middle grade reader in general but when I was cleaning out my kids' books I found a small stash that looked fun so I kept them to read myself. Kathryn Siebels' The Trouble with Twins was one of the books I saved in the last purge. It's a cute story and was a nice change of pace from my usual reads.

Twins Arabella and Henrietta are very alike, except Arabella is somehow prettier, tidier, and more popular than her sister. Arabella is unquestionably their parents' favorite. Mostly this has been fine because the girls are each other's best friends. But when Arabella gets annoyed with Henrietta, flaunting her popularity and ignoring her sister's loneliness, Henrietta decides to do something she can't take back. Banished to live with her eccentric and intimidating great aunt Priscilla, Henrietta misses her sister desperately. Back at home, Arabella too, is discovering that living without Henrietta is sad and lonely. While Henrietta is making her first friend outside of Arabella, enduring her great aunt's appalling dinners, and generally trying to make her downhearted best of everything, Arabella sets out on an adventure to reunite her with Henrietta.

The story is told in a similar manner to The Princess Bride with a mother recounting the story to her daughter and the text including the asides and brief conversations they have over the contents of the story. The parents (and nanny) here are pretty reprehensible in the way that they neglect Henrietta and favor Arabella so clearly. Most of the other adults, with the exception of Inez, the bookstore owner, come off as bumbling ding-dongs, reinforcing the quirkiness of the novel. There are a few plot lines that receive the briefest of treatments and deep, loyal relationships with others happen too quickly in many cases. As is though, this is a pleasant fairy tale-ish read that will appeal to many middle grade readers.

Review: Mrs. Lorimer's Quiet Summer by Molly Clavering

Dean Street Press is publishing some wonderful long out of print books from women writers of the early and mid-twentieth century. Molly Clavering's Mrs. Lorimer's Quiet Summer is one of these delightful reprints.

Lucy Lorimer is the middle-aged mother of four grown children and several noisy grandchildren, and a rather commercially successful writer. She is married to husband Jack, also known as the Colonel, who, at first blush, appears to leave all domestic dramas and organization to his wife. Her best friend Gray Douglas lives across the village from Lucy and is also a writer. The novel opens as Mrs. Lorimer is preparing to have her whole family descend on her for a visit and the logistics of where everyone will sleep is the biggest of her concerns. Of course, as the summer goes on, the adult children's problems, a health scare, and the unexpected reappearance of an old flame will complicate Lucy's life, leaving her to have anything but a quiet summer.

The novel really centers on Lucy and Gray's supportive friendship and the comfortable, respectful marriage between Lucy and Jack in this gossipy, quaint Scottish village. The stakes aren't terribly high, the worries and domestic difficulties small in the scheme of things, but they give just enough drama to keep the story moving forward. The result is an enjoyable and comfortable read with characters you can't help but smile over.

Review: Last Days of Summer by Steve Kluger

If you ask me, I will tell you that I am more than a little tired of books set around World War II. I will also tell you that baseball bores me silly. And yet somehow, I picked up Steve Kluger's Last Days of Summer this summer (I've had it untouched long enough that I discovered Borders bookmarks in the front) and thoroughly enjoyed this warm, delightful, hilarious, and ultimately heartbreaking epistolary novel.

It's 1940, and twelve-year-old Joey Margolis lives in Brooklyn with his mother and his aunt, his father having remarried and abandoned his son. Joey is the only Jewish kid on the block and he's bullied pretty badly so he and his best friend Craig Nakamura cook up a way to get the bullies off Joey's (and Craig's) back. Joey sstarts writing to Charlie Banks, an up-and-coming star third baseman, albeit a hot-headed one, on the New York Giants asking him to hit a home run for Joey. But Joey doesn't just ask for the home run, he claims to be dying of every malady under the sun as each of his letters to Banks only gets him a signed photo of the slugger rather than a radio broadcast home run dedication. Finally Charlie snaps and writes back telling Joey to cut it out with the letters. And somehow thus is born one of the most entertaining letter-writing relationships ever. Joey is precocious and highly amusing (and smart and Machiavellian) and no adult who comes into his orbit can resist him for long, not President Roosevelt's press secretary, not Charlie's teammate Stuke, not Charlie's singer girlfriend Hazel, not the rabbi in charge of Joey's Bar Mitzvah, not even his principal (although he might give his teacher a nervous breakdown). The letters that Joey sends and receives are priceless and his correspondence gives the reader a close look at what a boy his age was thinking and worrying about in the run up to WWII. In addition to hounding Charlie, he watches and interprets the situation in Europe writing to advise the president based on his deductions, and he and Craig keep eyes on their elderly German neighbor, convinced she's a spy.

All of the characters here are written convincingly and the reader will be as taken in by Joey's charm as all the other characters are. The news clippings score cards, school papers, and other ephemera included in and amongst the letters add to the period detail. Kluger includes difficult subjects here, such as the Japanese internment camps and Hitler's unchecked military advances in Europe, with a light touch but doesn't minimize them. And while the reader can see the ending coming many pages before it actually arrives, the book has to end that way. This is a book of both laughter and tears, each completely earned. You'll be touched by both Joey and Charlie and will continue to giggle when you think of them and their relationship long after you close the cover.

Review: Little Weirds by Jenny Slate

What happens when you have a reader who is almost completely unaware of pop culture who picks up a book written by a comedian and actress she has actually never heard of, one who apparently is celebrated for her whimsy and oddness? Well, you get one seriously disappointed reader who wonders if she should have taken the title of Little Weirds more seriously. Although this reader would argue that these are more than little; they are outsized weirds, potentially dreamed up under the influence of something mind altering that was never going to be as profound to someone not on the same trip as the author.

This collection of (semi?) autobiographical essays and strange imagined short fictions are often written in stream of consciousness or in choppy prose poem form. It was honestly exhausting to try and follow Slate's random trains of thought within each piece, never mind reading multiple pieces back to back. The pieces themselves feel as if they are trying too hard to be as quirky as possible, forcing the weird of the title, overwhelming the organic flow of the stories she's ostensibly trying to tell. This is billed as feminist and funny and universal and I have to wonder about the critics and readers claiming this. I missed the humor entirely (admittedly this could be a me thing rather than a her thing). I found some of her rage at the patriarchy manufactured simply for the sake of rage (and I say this as a woman who is not blind to the many faults of the patriarchy). And there was not one universal thing here as compared to my life (could I be too old to relate?). I am trying to give this book the benefit of the doubt with my parenthetical comments but to be completely honest, the reading experience was tedious and I was bored throughout.

Review: Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy

Several years ago, I reluctantly picked up Charlotte McConaghy's debut novel, Migrations. It just didn't seem like the sort of novel I wanted to read. How incredibly wrong I was. Fast forward to this year when, despite Migrations being one of my top ten books for the year when I read it, I was conflicted by the idea of Wild Dark Shore. I bought it but then read everything else but it until finally, something pushed me to pick it up. And once again, I wondered why I hadn't devoured this tense and gripping novel immediately.

Opening with an injured woman rescued from the freezing water around Shearwater Island, this is cli-fi, a thriller, a warning, and a beautifully written literary novel all wrapped in one. Rowan is badly injured and nursed back to health by Dominic Salt, the island and former research base's caretaker, and his three children, Raff, Fen, and Orly. Dominic doesn't trust Rowan. Why would she be coming to Shearwater, this remote island near Antarctica? Rowan doesn't trust Dominic either. She's asking questions about the now abandoned research base and is skeptical about his assertion that all their communications equipment has been destroyed, severing their connection to mainland Australia. While Rowan and Dominic might be wary of each other and the secrets each senses the other is keeping, the Salt children are much more open to this enigmatic woman who has arrived on their shores, especially the youngest child, nine-year-old Orly who has a keen interest in the seeds kept in the seed vault on the island, a vault which is now in danger of imminent collapse due to encroaching sea water. As the sea water continues to rise and the characters have no choice but to wait six weeks for the scheduled arrival of the ship coming to evacuate them and the most vital of the banked seeds, so does the tension in the novel. All five of the characters narrate their own stories, giving glimpses of their pasts, fleshing out their characters, and sharing their tragic losses with the reader.

McConaghy's evocation of a windswept island being inexorably consumed by the sea, the wild life that makes their home on its shores, and the plants that survive in such an inhospitable environment made even more inhospitable by climate change is beautiful. Her slow reveals of each character's secrets, even as they forge deeper relationships to each other keep the reader turning the pages. There is an otherworldly feel to the novel but also a sense of reckoning, both for the characters and for the reader who must acknowledge that this apocalyptic version of the world could be scarily prescient. And although this is a novel grappling with the damage that human beings do to the earth, to the animals and plants around us, to each other, it is also a novel about love and hope and perseverence. Grief winds its way throughout the narrative but so does deep love. This is a stunning read.

Wave by Sonali Deraniyagala

I chose this book for my book club this summer, mainly because I wanted to read it myself and decided that I was going to drag others along on what was guaranteed to be a difficult read. The first response I got, long before the meeting, was "Why on earth would you choose this book for us. It's terrible!" And by terrible, the reader/commenter meant not that it wasn't well written but that it was horrific to be reading about the sudden, unexpected, and gut wrenching deaths of almost an entire family and the subsequent grief and despair of the lone survivor, daughter, wife, mother. Luckily this reader kept pushing through and ultimately appreciated the book and we all went on to have a deep, if somber, discussion.

In 2004, economist Sonali Deraniyagala was on holiday in Sri Lanka with her husband and their two school aged sons, spending Christmas with her parents at a seaside resort she'd been visiting since she was a child growing up in the country, when in an instant everything changed. As Deraniyagala stood and watched, a tumbling white wave came rushing toward their room. She and her husband grabbed both of their boys and ran, finding a Jeep to climb into to try and escape the onslaught of the ocean. But the Jeep couldn't outrun the wave and it was upended, with Deraniyagala losing sight of her family while fighting for her own life. Miraculously surviving the tsunami and in shock, she then faced the darkest time of her entire life, fearing and then knowing for sure that Steve, their boys Vik and Malli, and both of her parents were missing and had lost their lives while she had not.

This memoir is not just the account of the terrible wave that swept into her life and devastated it, but also of the aftermath, of her desperate madness, the overwhelming desire for her own death, the stark grief she suffered, and her own soul stripped bare. She shied away from looking too closely at such an all-encompassing loss until she could no longer avoid it, protecting her mind from the personal remembrances that could derail her, and yet she had to go on living, go on in a world without her most beloved people in it. She writes beautifully and movingly of the natural world, shares the intense and harrowing feelings that grief engendered in her, and gives glimpses of who her husband, her sons, and her parents were and how she continues to navigate a world without them so many years on from her loss. The book is raw and unfiltered, emotional and crushing. It is also a powerful testament to love.

Review: Train Go Sorry by Leah Hager Cohen

Once upon a time, I thought it would be wonderful to learn sign language. I never really got beyond the alphabet in the Girl Scout Handbook, aside from learning some quite rude signs from Instagram, but I remain fascinated by the language. Because of that fascination, somewhere along the way I picked up Train Go Sorry: Inside a Deaf World by Leah Hager Cohen, thinking to read and learn more about the deaf community but I let the book languish on my shelves for ages. While some of it is unfortunately quite dated now (published in 1994), it still gives an interesting and thought-provoking look into a community and culture I've read very little about, and interacted with even less.

At the time of her writing of the book, Cohen's father Oscar was the superintendent of the Lexington School for the Deaf in New York so Cohen herself spent quite a lot of time in or adjacent to the deaf community, although as a hearing child she didn't attend the school or learn ASL herself until adulthood. She had a unique entre into the deaf community via her father and via her paternal grandparents, both of whom were deaf. The book jumps around touching on a variety of topics, from the politics, debates, and discussions within the deaf community (students and staff at Gallaudet University had just successfully protested against a hearing president) to the fears that things like the pressure to mainstream deaf children instead of maintaining dedicated schools and the push towards cochlear implants would lead to an erasure of deaf culture. She presents the arguments for and against ASL, signed exact English, and vocalization without offering a value judgment on any of them as options in the world. She discusses sign language interpreting, including her own experience learning to interpret, and considers how interpreters are not native speakers of sign language, presenting challenges that most hearing people wouldn't ever have thought about (I sure hadn't!). She shares tales of her own deaf grandparents, telling of both the difficulties (and tragedies) and the joys in their lives in a hearing world. And finally, she weaves stories of two students at the school throughout the rest of her narrative, sharing the extra challenges that James, whose family is economically disadvantaged, and Sophia, whose family is non-native English speaking, face as they work toward their high school degrees and toward a future that they are just starting to envision.

The book hops back and forth between all of Cohen's focuses, which can be a bit choppy but the information she presents is consistently interesting. She draws the attention of hearing readers to issues and concerns that they've probably never spared even one second of time thinking about, and has presented the needs and wants of the deaf community, which is not a monolith, in a balanced and thoughtful manner. There's history and personal stories both in this detailed and engaging non-fiction book. People who want insight into a people and community they probably don't have much knowledge about will learn a lot from this book, and yet leave it with a lot to think about.

Review: That Quail, Robert by Margaret A. Stanger

If you're an animal lover, this sweet little 1960s book written by Margaret Stanger and based on the true story of Robert the quail is for you.

Tommy and Mildred Kienzle watch a small quail build a nest in their yard. After mama quail and her twelve hatchlings leave the nest, the Kienzles eventually go to examine the abandoned nest and discover two remaining eggs. One is cracked but one is tiny and perfect. Imagine their surprise when the small egg shows signs of hatching. Imprinting on the humans whose house she hatched in, Robert (initially thought to be a male, he turned out to be female) joined the family as a dearly cherished little bird. Stanger, a close friend of the Kienzles, had a front row seat watching this little feathered ball of personality grow up and captivate so many people, both near and far. She also quail-sat when her friends needed to be out of town or out of the country. Robert was entertaining, quirky, and very particular about her routines. She was a good ambassador of her species and the stories recounted of the little quail are endearing. The book is quite short but charming, with reproduction drawings scattered through it. The language is very much of its time and often feels like reportage. Readers looking for a quick feel good book will certainly find it here.

Review: Women Discoverers: Top Women in Science by Marie Moinard and Christelle Pecout

Graphic novels, memoirs, and biographies are good inital ways to introduce readers to people, places, and things. This particular book, written by Marie Moinard and illustrated by Christelle Pecout is a nice introduction to a diverse set of women in science, both well known and a quite a few whose accomplishments should be better remembered or acknowledged than they are. The women in the collection are from all over the world and are from varied scientific disciplines. Some are still living while others are long since dead. The more well known women, Marie Curie, Ada Lovelace, Hedy Lamarr, Rosalind Franklin, and Mae Jemison, are given full comics, several pages long, depicting their lives while the less well known are given very brief one page biographies. The information on each woman is simple and easy to understand. The art is in the realistic style and shows not only a head shot of each woman but also each woman at work with her notable discovery. This is very much an introductory book, one that will hopefully inspire interested girls and women (and boys and men) to dive deeper into these impressive women.

Review: This Is Not a Game by Kelly Mullen

When I saw that Kelly Mullen's debut novel, This Is Not a Game, was a locked room mystery set on Mackinac Island, I couldn't hand over my credit card fast enough. I spend my summers on an island near Mackinac, have visited every summer, and have friends who live there year round. It is a beautiful and unique place and the perfect setting for a mystery so I was disappointed that this didn't really land for me.

Addie has not only been dumped by her fiance but he is taking full credit for the wildly successful, both in terms of popularity and monetarily, video game that they developed together (although Addie really did the lion's share of the work). Addie is unhappy and flailing, suing Brian and searching for proof that the game is at least as much hers as his when her widowed grandmother Mimi, who lives on Mackinac Island, a small, quaint island in Lake Huron, calls to request that Addie come to visit. Mimi and Addie have had a bit of a strained relationship over the ex-fiance so the request is unusual. It turns out that Mimi has been invited to the island socialite's charity auction and commanded, via a blackmail letter, to bid on and win a particular piece of memorabilia. Mimi needs Addie's support at the gala, although she doesn't want to tell Addie she's being blackmailed, and certainly doesn't want to reveal what she's done to warrant said blackmail. At the event itself, there's a large cast of characters, all of whom seem uncomfortable and unhappy. Strange atmosphere for a party. When a fierce winter storm comes through, trapping them all in the mansion, the hostess is murdered and almost everyone there had a motive. She is not the last to die though. With the weather forcing the police to stay on the mainland rather than risk coming to the island, Mimi and Addie decide to do some sleuthing of their own.

The plot itself is fairly complex with not only the murders, the blackmail mystery, but also with what is going on with Addie's video game dispute. The characters are quirky but only a small handful are fleshed out enough to be actual suspects. Mimi is meant to be an irrascible but fun character but just misses the mark and Addie is rather colorless as her grandmother's sidekick. Not connecting with either main character didn't help when I also wanted (and didn't get) more of Mackinac island itself. There was a distinct lack of the flavor of the island, perhaps due to the timing of the book (it is difficult for outsiders to get to the island in the off season, as so many of the auction guests must do), or perhaps because the island seems chosen only because it can be cut off from the mainland, not for its unique characteristics, or perhaps because the majority of the story takes place inside an elaborate mansion that could have been built anywhere (incidentally, the geology of the island is all wrong for the deep and forbidding moat around the house). Then, despite the title declaring this not a game, uncovering the mysteries, murders and blackmail, is in fact treated as a game, with references to Murderscape, Addie's game, helping to make sense of the clues rather often. All of this added up to me being disappointed and I wish I had enjoyed this more than I ultimately did.

Review: In Castle and Court House: Being Reminiscences of 30 Years in Ireland by Ramsay Colles

I like to buy books about the places I've traveled and if I can do so while in that place, at a local bookshop, even better. So I picked up this reprint of Ramsay Colles' work while in Dublin, thinking that it would be an interesting read about a long disappeared Ireland and of Colles' experiences there. Clearly I didn't examine the book closely enough before I brought it home because this was quite possibly the driest and most boring thing I've ever read about this fascinating and beautiful country full of a million stories worth telling.

Colles spends an inordinate amount of time recounting his own (and his family's) importance by name dropping and patting himself on the back for his own intelligence. He talks of his role in the politics of the day, diving into minutia that has not stood the test of time, extolls his connections and details his letter writing. Colles writes of people he has known, many of whom have since become much more obscure than they must have been in his day, and he feels compelled to share any actual or quasi-notable thing that relations, no matter how distant, of his have accomplished not only in Ireland but around the globe. He may well have been an important figure in Ireland's history (this ignorant American had never heard of him before) but even after reading this reminiscence of his own, I still couldn't say whether he was actually important or merely puffed up by a feeling of his own importance. I can, however, say unreservedly that he is an insufferable bore, as is this book. Did I miss kernels of interesting things? Perhaps. But when your eyes are so glazed over that you can hardly see the words, you might be forgiven for this possible failing.

Review: Daughters of Shandong by Eve J. Chung

There is so much history in the world that we often aren't familiar with unless it is the history of our own country or of our own family, the former taught in schools and the latter passed down through the generations, often incomplete. I did learn a bit about the Chinese Civil War between Communist Mao Zedong and Nationalist Chiang Kai-shek in school but certainly didn't learn it in depth, especially the atrocities that accompanied this brutal war. Author Eve J. Chung was also unaware of the whole of this history and of the extent of the suffering that her own grandmother faced during this period in her life. Daughters of Shandong is Chung's attempt at giving a fictionalized voice to the grandmother who survived so much and never shared the full extent of the trauma that marked her life.

Hai Ang is a child, the oldest daughter of the Ang heir. That she is a daughter makes her less than in the eyes of the family, especially her cruel grandmother. She tries hard to be a dutiful daughter, even as she watches her mother be cruelly abused and denigrated for not producing a male heir for the next generation, birthing only daughter after daughter. Although her family is wealthy and land-owning, Hai, her younger sisters, and their mother are treated poorly, akin to the peasants who work the Ang land. Hai suffers throughout much of the story, first as a "worthless" daughter in a family that only valued sons, then at the hands of the Communists intent on punishing this young girl for the landowner sins of her father and grandfather since the men had disappeared and couldn't be tried in person, and finally as a refugee fleeing almost certain death and enduring extreme hardship with her mother and sisters as they sought to find and be reunited in Taiwan with the family who left them behind without a second thought. The trials and tribulations that these women endure over the years are almost unbelievable; they move from harrowing experience to harrowing experience with only small tokens of hope or kindness between them. Hai is a fully sympathetic character, her mother is part downtrodden and submissive and part strength. Younger sister Di is the least likeable of the women (aside from the truly evil grandmother), retaining her selfishness despite the unceasing love and care she receives from Hai and their mother.

The story of the women's experiences and journey is a compelling one, at least until they are reunited with the family that discarded them. It is at this point that the narrative timeline compresses and wraps up each of the women's fates quickly and incompletely. I'd speculate that this is where the fictional Hai's story converges with what Chung knows for certain about her grandmother's story. It certainly feels like she had full creative control over the first three quarters of the novel but felt constrained to stay within the bounds of reality for the last quarter, making it impossible to fully flesh out a satisfying ending. Despite this shortcoming, this is an interesting tale of survival and the resilience of women and one that the majority of my book club thoroughly enjoyed.

Review: The Princess by Wendy Holden

When I was ten, Prince Charles and Princess Diana got married. There was very little that was more romantic to a ten year old me than what appeared to be a fairy tale marriage happening. That it later went so very wrong was quite sad and the rest of the world has never stopped speculating about everything that happened, even though we all know (or think we know) all of the mitigating factors and where the bulk of the blame lies. In Wendy Holden’s novel, The Princess, she looks at Diana’s life through the eyes of a fictional childhood friend and then allows Diana to tell this friend the story of her courtship with the Prince.

Perhaps I should have expected a bit of a hagiography, given that the narrator of the novel remembers the youthful Diana with love, and recognizing that this is fictionalized (albeit based on books written by others who had access to Diana and to existing interviews), it was still disappointing to have such a saintly picture of the princess, rather than a picture of a fully human, flawed, but still much loved woman who lived every little girl’s dream once upon a time, even if that dream didn’t turn out to be the reality. In addition to the young, naive, and sainted Diana, there are chapters from the Queen Mums perspective as she plots to marry Charles off to someone suitable, and from Charles' own perspective as he initially tries to avoid this marriage and later capitulates to his duty. Charles does not come off as sympathetic as Diana but he is also drawn as a pawn to a large extent. Diana's unrealistic expectations and her deep desire to be loved the way she saw in romance novels (in spite of witnessing her own parents' terrible marriage) make her seem much younger than her 19 years. This is probably only a novel for diehard royal fans as it is quite frothy and light but it also doesn't add much dimension to Diana or truly imagine what this doomed marriage was like so fans might also feel as if they already know this fictionalized story from primary sources.

Review: Memorial Days by Geraldine Brooks

Geraldine Brooks is an award winning journalist and Pulitzer Prize winning novelist. She had a many decades long, happy marriage to author and celebrated journalist Tony Horwitz with whom she had two sons. Her beautiful and moving memoir, Memorial Days, is her account of Horwitz’s sudden, unexpected death while he was on book tour, her days of shock navigating ridiculous bureaucracy immediately following his death, and then four years later on the sparsely populated island of Flinders off the coast of Australia when she finally took the time and space to go and be fully immersed in her grief.

She weaves her narrative back and forth between that terrible Memorial Day weekend in 2019 and her 2023 remote sojourn in a couple of small cottages far from people and civilization to reflect back on her shared life and love with Horwitz. She recounts the news of her husband’s death and the aftermath in a straightforward, objective way, reporting her reactions, the logistics of a last minute flight from their home in Martha’s Vineyard to DC on a holiday weekend, trying the convince medical professionals she wants and needs to see her husband’s body, telling her sons about their father’s death—preferably before they heard about it thanks to the speed of our current news cycle, having to face and/or learn the marital tasks that were always Horwitz’s purview, and more, all while trying to finish the novel that would become Horse. The 2023 chapters are more contemplative and emotional, examining her deep loss, finding solace in nature and aloneness, and allowing herself to stop trying to move forward and just to feel whatever it is she needs to feel. Brooks is a gorgeous writer and this is an intimate, honest, and personal look into what it is to lose a beloved spouse.

Review: Barking Up the Right Tree by Leigh Russell

I have only recently started reading mysteries and since I’m a complete and total coward, I tend to gravitate to those that won’t scare me or give me nightmares. Usually that means golden age mysteries (or current iterations) or ones that are more caper than mystery. It sounds like cozy mysteries should work well for me but somehow they don’t. There’s something just a little light weight about them that turns me off. That doesn’t stop me from trying them periodically though. Unfortunately, Leigh Russell’s Barking Up the Right Tree, the first in a new cozy series, didn’t change my opinion on these types of mysteries.

When Emily loses her job and then gets dumped by her boyfriend, she has no idea what to do with her life. Then Emily discovers her long lost great aunt has died and left her a picturesque cottage in rural Ashton Mead. In order to properly inherit, she must take care of any pets that her great aunt pre-deceased and so after thinking that she’d only be taking care of a goldfish, she agrees to the terms. But in fact the pet is a loveable dog named Poppy. Poppy wants desperately to dig under the metal fence between the cottage and the garden next door, the owner of whom is not friendly at all. This escalates quickly into Emily deciding that next door’s daughter is missing. And it’s a short step from there for her to decide that her great aunt’s fatal fall was not an accident.

Emily is a completely insipid, and rather stupid character who doesn’t understand why her new friends think she’s over the top and can’t see that her boyfriend’s reappearance after she inherits the cottage is a huge issue. She makes snap judgments about people but then flip flops on her unearned judgments like she's going pro at it. The mystery itself stutters along until the very end, when it makes such a sharp left turn that it leaves the reader wondering if 2/3 of a cozy mystery was uncomfortably grafted onto 1/3 of a horror story with obviously visible Frankenstein stitches. The meshing of the two pieces of the plot is not well done, the main character is annoying, and the writing is unfortunately repetitious. I won't be reading further in this series.

Review: Under the Henfluence by Tove Danovich

I have no interest in having chickens myself but I am fascinated by them in theory. Plus I’m always happy to learn about new things so I can be that irritating person at dinner parties boring everyone with facts that I think are interesting and everyone else is over hearing about. I do, however, think that the facts in Tove Danovich’s non-fiction book about her own adventures with backyard chickens, and all the things that she learned about the hobby chicken industry along the way would be interesting to everyone.

When Danovich and her husband moved to Portland, she was able to start her long wished for backyard flock of chickens. She was enchanted with the fluffy little chicks she raised, and curious about the industry that brought the little peepers to her. Weaving anecdotes from her own girls with what she learns by interviewing people in the chicken industry, including people who show chickens, those who run a rooster rescue, own the hatchery, and more. While she celebrates the love of chickens and backyard flocks, she is not insensible to the terrible conditions that currently exist, especially at the industrial level, contrasting it with a far gentler history of chicken husbandry practiced by past generations. The horrors are hard to read (and might convince some to stop eating chicken altogether) but they are tempered by the delight of things like chicken training classes and the realistic, if somewhat sobering, picture surrounding the conservation of feral chickens in Hawaii.

The book is well researched and fact-filled. Danovich’s own experiences with her backyard flock are engaging. When she loses a chicken, the reader is crushed along with her. And both the personal and journalistic pieces are integrated together well, making this a fun and informative read. Those with a love for or fascination with chickens will definitely enjoy the read but those who just have a natural curiosity about the world will also be happily satisfied.