BookNAround

It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

2012-01-30T03:06:00.000-08:00

The Russian classic has been vanquished; hear me roar! Now back to my regularly scheduled reading. This meme is hosted by Sheila at Book Journey.

Books I completed this past week are:

Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
Foreign Correspondence by Geraldine Brooks

Bookmarks are still living in the middle of:

Let the Great World Spin by Colm McCann
Tantra Goddess by Caroline Muir
Late for Tea at the Deer Palace by Tamara Chalabi

Reviews posted this week:

Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
Tempted Again by Cathie Linz
Foreign Correspondence by Geraldine Brooks

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

None for this year. Look to the sidebar for previous years' books missing reviews if you must!

Monday Mailbox

2012-01-30T00:09:00.000-08:00

A multiple book week. I think of these as the universe's way to reward me for sticking it out with Doctor Zhivago. This past week's mailbox arrival:

Other Waters by Eleni Gage came from St. Martin's Press.
Just the cover of this one makes me swoon. But the story, the story! Its premise grabs me too: an ancient curse sends Maya from her happy Manhattan life back to India.

The Pioneer Woman by Ree Drummond came from Willim Morrow for a book tour.
Ree Drummond sure can cook. I'm looking forward to reading about how she went from city girl to cow girl who cooks.

Walter's Muse by Jean Davies Okimoto came from Endicott and Hugh Books for a book tour.
Another cover that makes me swoon; be still my water-loving heart. And count me in for anything set on an island!

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

Review: Foreign Correspondence by Geraldine Brooks

2012-01-28T02:13:00.000-08:00

The internet and e-mail have really taken a toll on letter writing. Now that we have instant gratification, we are losing out on the simple joy of opening the mailbox to find an unexpected or conversely eagerly awaited missive from a far away friend. Now we mostly find bills instead of handwritten personal thoughts. The closest we often get anymore is the fake "handwriting" font on some junk mail envelopes. This is such a shame. Letter writing is careful and slow and often brings great delight to the recipient. I know, because I still write letters (although not nearly as often as I used to) and I had many, many penpals from all over the world as I was growing up. I even still keep in touch with several of them, having been writing to them for almost 30 years now. Hearing from them way back when opened a new world to me, one that I didn't encounter in the many suburban neighborhoods we lived in throughout my childhood.

Australian Geraldine Brooks grew up in a Sydney that she feared was provincial. Her lower middle class neighborhood was mocked as a representation of all that was boring and backwards about Australia. In order to broaden her horizons, taking after the example of her father, she started to write letters. Her first penpal, Sonny, was only just across town but could have lived a world away. After Sonny, Brooks chose penpals in countries that interested her. She wrote Joannie in America, intrigued by the country of her father's birth. She wrote Mishal in Israel because she was fascinated by Judaism. When she found out that Mishal was an Israeli Arab, she found another Israeli, this time a Jewish Israeli, Cohen, to add to her collection of penpals. And finally, enamoured of the student upheavals in France, she also wrote to Janine. Through all of these penpals, she learned more of the world. Twenty years later, during her father's final illness, she discovers the letters of these penpals and wonders where life has taken them. Like the journalist she is, she determines to discover their stories.

Brooks has drawn the Australia of her childhood precisely and lovingly. She chronicles her own political awakening and leanings and their genesis very well. And she has created a full and extensive portrait of her correspondence with Joannie and with the social consciousness that both girls developed as they wrote back and forth. Her letters from the others are either less illuminating or she wasn't given permission to use as much from them since the sections about these penpals are not as full and lack the sprightly, in-depth personality that the portion about Joannie has. Once Brooks goes on her search for her lost penpals, she has an amazingly easy time of it finding them. The fact that all of them ultimately welcomed her in to see their lives now (well, ten years ago when the book was written anyway) is wonderful.

I thoroughly enjoyed this memoir both for its portrayal of the disappeared Australia of Brooks' childhood and adolescence and for the tale of tracking down her former penpals to see where their lives had taken them. I had an Australian penpal as a child and young adult, a couple of decades after Brooks, and I'd love the chance to do as Brooks did and find her. Michelle Ennor, are you out there somewhere? In any case, Brooks's memoir captures the innocence of a younger Australia, uncovers the seeds of her own life choices, and shows how our early life shapes us as well as the ways in which we find ourselves yearning for a different future than we had ever envisioned.

Review: Tempted Again by Cathie Linz

2012-01-27T02:12:00.000-08:00

Marissa Bennett is going home. She's just been through an emotionally devastating divorce so she's headed to the small Ohio college town she once couldn't wait to leave and where she is the new YA librarian. She arrives home in the middle of one of the town's many parades, literally right in the middle. Having taken a wrong turn, she is now a part of the parade until the sheriff waves her off the route and chastizes her. Worse than the embarrassment, it turns out that the sheriff is Connor Doyle, the first boy she ever loved and to whom she gave her virginity when she was in high school and he was at the local college.

Much as Marissa would like to avoid Connor, there's no way that she can. She ends up getting an apartment next door to his and then her pet project to connect with youth at risk is combined with a similar outreach Connor has developed. The two of them fight their attraction to each other despite their enforced proximity. Connor is haunted by the demons that drove him from his law enforcement job in Chicago to this tiny bucolic Ohio town. He still has nightmares about having a child die in his arms after gang related violence in Chicago. Marissa, on the other hand, is still reeling from the death of her less than one year old marriage to a cheating husband. She signed the divorce papers on what should have been her first wedding anniversary. Neither of them feels safe committing to anything close to a relationship and yet as they work together with the kids in their program, they draw ever closer.

In addition to Marissa and Connor, there are quite a few minor characters, including Connor's loony mother and grandmother, determined to marry him off, Marissa's menopausal and emotional mother, Marissa's self-absorbed and oblivious father, her irritating sister, and assorted townsfolk. Some of the characters are colorful and add entertainment value to the book while others serve less purpose. Marissa as a character is a bit annoying. She's got the self-esteem of a field mouse. Her divorce, while the catalyst for her return home, seems to have affected her less than the family dynamics between her parents, her sister, and herself despite the fact that much of the chaos of this situation is chalked up to her mother's menopause and is supposed to be a recent development. As for Connor, he supposedly doesn't recognize Marissa when he first sees her despite noting the unusual color of her eyes. This is a woman with whom he carried on a secret relationship and with whom he worked at a pizza place for a year and he's back in her home town. Odd.

The chemistry between Marissa and Connor was a little on the light side but given how reluctant either of them are to be together, it works fine. Some of the plot threads are given very short shrift and either should have been developed more or not included even to the extent that they were. Marissa's antagonistic relationship with her sister was not well-examined (or really explained at all). And the interactions with the youth group on both Marissa and Connor's part were few and far between. Given that a situation with the kids is pivotal to the story, the kids themselves and their relationship with the adult authorities (Marissa and Connor) aren't all that well handled. The resolution to this situation is also summed up too quickly for satisfaction. Over all a light and decent modern romance, this one won't wow the socks off of you but it's not a bad effort.

Review: Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak

2012-01-26T10:23:00.000-08:00

Last year my book club chose The Clan of the Cave Bear by Jean Auel as our classic pick. Obviously we have a rather broad and inclusive sense of classics. While I enjoyed that novel way back when, this year, I wanted to read something that had been on my list for a long time, had in fact stood the test of time, and was fairly universally recognized as a classic. So I lobbied hard for Doctor Zhivago. I pointed out the newly done translation. I highlighted the love story aspect. And pushy me, I won the day. So much the worse! Book club is tonight and I'm afraid they are going to lynch me for my choice. Frankly, if I was anyone else but me, I might lynch me too. I have read many other Russian and Societ writers and have never quite felt the dread about returning to their works after putting them down as I did with this one. It was truly a chore.

Ostensibly the story of Yuri Zhivago and Larissa (Lara) Antipova, this a sweeping tale of the early stages of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath shot through with a doomed love story. Zhivago is a physician and a poet (his poetry follows the text of the novel). He is of the priviledged class but initially feels great sympathy with the proletariot. He volunteers to serve in WWI and it is while working as a medic there that he first meets Lara although he had glimpsed her once before in Moscow. Lara, born to wealth, lived through financial struggles with her mother after her father's death and suffered a Lolita-like relationship with the older man who posed as her mother's benefactor. As these two, both already married to others, continue to find each other after the war, through the revolution and then during the hardships and paranoia afterwards, they grow ever closer and eventually unable to resist any longer, fall into an all-consuming affair. But Yuri and Lara's love story is only a minor thread when compared to the sweeping and all-encompassing story of Russia's changes of the time, politically and socially.

The tenor of the Revolution changes in the course of the novel, as do Yuri's feelings about it and its potential. There are long and complicated musings on the philosophical ideology underpinning the Communist Party as versus those underpinning the White Party. Detailed and extensive descriptions of the Russian-Soviet countryside abound as well, with the weather sweeping through it frequently reflecting the desperation and despair accompanying the new regime's policies. It is no surprise, given the criticisms and even just the ambivalences toward the Revolution spelled out in the character of Yuri Zhivago that this was not allowed to be published in Russia and that there was subsequently a "request" by the government that Pasternak not accept the Nobel Prize.

For many unfamiliar with (or not avidly interested in) the details of the Russian Revolution, the story of Yuri and Lara is not enough to counterbalance the heavy political commentary. Even though I do have a decent working knowledge of the time, I found it tedious. Yuri and Lara as characters were flat and uninspired. The number of secondary and incidental characters was enormous and there was far too much information about each of them, especially when their background or views were not necessary to the plot in any way shape or form and their appearance in the tale was as fleeting as possible. Excessive is the word that springs to mind when I think of the novel as a whole, followed closely by boring. As much as I wanted to thrill to it as I did to Tolstoy's works so many years ago, I just couldn't. It's hard for me to say whether the translation had anything to do with the dry, unappealing nature of the novel for me but I don't plan to pick up another version to find out. Quite a disappointment.

Waiting on Wednesday

2012-01-25T00:54:00.000-08:00

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

The Art of Hearing Heartbeats by Jan-Philipp Sendker. The book is being released by Other Press on January 31, 2012.

Amazon says this about the book: A poignant and inspirational love story set in Burma, The Art of Hearing Heartbeats spans the decades between the 1950s and the present. When a successful New York lawyer suddenly disappears without a trace, neither his wife nor his daughter Julia has any idea where he might be…until they find a love letter he wrote many years ago, to a Burmese woman they have never heard of. Intent on solving the mystery and coming to terms with her father’s past, Julia decides to travel to the village where the woman lived. There she uncovers a tale of unimaginable hardship, resilience, and passion that will reaffirm the reader’s belief in the power of love to move mountains.

It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

2012-01-23T02:22:00.000-08:00

I am still wading my way through Doctor Zhivago and so didn't get much other reading in this week. When I haven't been fighting with this Russian classic, I have been finally undecorating the Christmas tree so that it will be gone before the workmen come on Tuesday. Terrible that I am only motivated by strangers seeing what a slacker I am! And so once this is done and Pasternak's novel is finally put to bed, I will get back to being able to spend my usual amount of time on books, reading and reviewing. At least I hope so (although with the number of tasks still on my to do now that it's the new year list, I can't guarantee that). This meme is hosted by Sheila at Book Journey.

Books I completed this past week are:

Invisible River by Helena McEwen
Tempted Again by Cathie Linz

Bookmarks are still living in the middle of:

Let the Great World Spin by Colm McCann
Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
Tantra Goddess by Caroline Muir

Reviews posted this week:

The Uncoupling by Meg Wolitzer
Invisible River by Helena McEwen
Dance Lessons by Aine Greaney

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

Tempted Again by Cathie Linz

Monday Mailbox

2012-01-22T21:51:00.000-08:00

Only one book this week but it looks fantastic. Don't you agree?! This past week's mailbox arrival:

The Baker's Daughter by Sarah McCoy came from Crown for a book tour.
A young girl who, with her family, is protected from the worst of WWII by the high ranking Nazi who wants to marry her and her story as she tells it to a reporter with a troubled past sixty years after that fateful final year of the war when Elsie made a decision that changed everything. How delectable this sounds!

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

Review: Dance Lessons by Aine Greaney

2012-01-22T20:39:00.000-08:00

How well can you ever know someone? How well can you especially know someone who intentionally keeps the past a secret, lying and hiding the truth? And what do you do once that person is gone and the truth comes out?

Ellen's Irish husband, Fintan, always maintained that he was an orphan but after his accidental death, Ellen runs into an old acquaintance who knew him back in Ireland and finds out that he lied to her for years. His mother is in fact alive. As Ellen struggles with her feelings about Fintan's unexpected death, their troubled marriage, and his obvious desire to close her out of his past, she decides that she should go to Ireland uncertain of her own reasons for making a pilgrimage that Fintan obviously would not have wanted or approved.

Once in Ireland, she meets Fintan's crotchety mother and discovers that there was quite a lot she never knew about her husband, much of which explains their fraught and unhappy marriage. Jo Dowd, Ellen's mother-in-law, is an unhappy, tough-as-nails farm woman who mostly keeps to herself. In fact, she doesn't even want a home nurse despite the fact that she has terminal cancer. But despite having only just met Ellen, she is willing to have her daughter-in-law move in and care for her.

As Ellen comes to know Jo and the others in the village, and to hear of more of Fintan's buried past, she comes to learn about forgiveness, how to move forward, how the future can hinge on the smallest of actions and past secrets. As she uncovers the bitter past, the hurts, and the betrayals, her finds sometimes makes the narrative bleed with despair, anger, and hopelessness. Told from the perspectives of multiple narrators and using interspersed flashbacks, there are multiple plot threads weaving through the book that at first seem unconnected but which come to create a complete tapestry by the end of the novel. The writing itself is very visceral and the characters' emotions, while spare seeming actually strike deeply but the over all feeling of the novel is one of hurt, wrongs, resentment, and regret. It has a desolate and anguished tone and even the faintly hopeful ending couldn't change that.

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

Review: Invisible River by Helena McEwen

2012-01-19T00:28:00.000-08:00

Authors come at writing from many different walks of life. Oftentimes they have had another career first or they have taken another path before realizing that writing is where their passion lies. And sometimes it is easy to guess where authors have come from through their writing. McEwen was an artist before turning her hand to writing and it clearly shows in her incredibly visual, composed, and artistic description in the novel Invisible River.

Opening with Eve on the verge of moving to London to pursue her studies as an art student, she is leaving her worn-down, sad, and alcoholic father, who has cared for her since her mother's death when she was small and she worries about his future knowing that she must break free and pursue her own life. She soon finds a close group of friends at school and starts painting jewel bright London cityscapes in celebration of the vibrant city in which she now lives. Eve also develops a friendship and a secret crush on a second year sculpture student, Zeb, who is already in a relationship.

When she chooses not to go home for Christmas, Eve makes the difficult decision to stay away from her needy father, anxious to conceal from herself just how poorly he is coping on his own. But he comes to find her in London, landing on her doorstep drunk and devastated. Frustrated by his embarrassing presence in her flat and his inability to face his demons, especially his alcoholism, she tells him to leave only to find herself consumed with worry and despair when he actually does disappear. Her cityscapes become riddled with nightmare characters and the colors are muddied and terrible as she embarks on a desperate quest to find him even as she knows he is lost to her, beyond saving.

The imagery in the novel is simply overwhelming and startlingly present. McEwen draws beautiful mental pictures of Eve's paintings, her friends' works, and Zeb's intricate and enchanting sculptures. Certain of her paragraphs are love letters to color and to technique. The art is detailed and full. The characters are not quite as vivid as their works although Eve's nightmares are lucid and phantasmagoric. The actual plot is really just a bildungsroman, Eve's coming of age and straining to break free of the past that she eventually comes to understand will be a part of her forever. The secondary characters' chosen subjects illuminate them as much as any description of them does. And Eve's artistic progression clearly highlights her inner turmoil and struggle. The middle section of the book, the search for Eve's father, overwhelms the framing sections a bit and makes the tone of the ending feel dreamily unearned. Over all though, there is some gorgeous and poetic writing here and McEwen can certainly paint a word picture.

I won a copy of this book through the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program.

Waiting on Wednesday

2012-01-18T00:25:00.000-08:00

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

The Odds by Stewart O'Nan. The book is being released by Viking Adult on January 19, 2012 (yes, that's tomorrow).

Amazon says this about the book: Stewart O'Nan's thirteenth novel is another wildly original, bittersweet gem like his celebrated Last Night at the Lobster. Valentine's weekend, Art and Marion Fowler flee their Cleveland suburb for Niagara Falls, desperate to recoup their losses. Jobless, with their home approaching foreclosure and their marriage on the brink of collapse, Art and Marion liquidate their savings account and book a bridal suite at the Falls' ritziest casino for a second honeymoon. While they sightsee like tourists during the day, at night they risk it all at the roulette wheel to fix their finances-and save their marriage. A tender yet honest exploration of faith, forgiveness and last chances, The Odds is a reminder that love, like life, is always a gamble.

Review: The Uncoupling by Meg Wolitzer

2012-01-17T00:02:00.000-08:00

It's been about a hundred years since I read Lysistrata in college and I remember very little about it now but the idea of the play causing modern women, young and old, in suburban Stellar Plains, New Jersey to eschew sex with their husbands and boyfriends, is certainly an intriguing one. In the play, Lysistrata exhorts the women of the town to forgo sex as a way to force the men to stop a war but here, the girls and women affected by the play's spell don't consciously choose to stop sleeping with their men, they are overcome with a disturbing lack of desire.

Opening with a glimpse into the contented, long-term, and still quite sexually active marriage of Dory and Robby Lang, two high school English teachers with a teenaged daughter, the novel lays out their history together and takes them to the brink of the moment that Dory, overcome by the cold wind of the play's spell, first denies Robby in bed, lying about her sudden lack of desire. As the spell blows through the town, whistling through the lives of the women and stealing away any desire for intimacy they have, no one discusses this strange phenomenon. And no woman connected to the high school and the play escapes the unsettled discontent that accompanies this sudden lack in interest in the opposite sex except the new drama teacher.

Some women, like Dory, attribute it to their age and the diminished sexual drive that comes with it. Others, like Leanne, the guidance counselor who is in several relationships at once, chalk it up to worry about others considering her promiscuous. Marissa, the girl cast as Lysistrata, decides that since sex has never been all that interesting to her, she's done with boys. Bev, the college counselor, hurt by her husband's comment about her weight, backs away from him in bed. Willa, Dory and Robby's daughter, breaks up with Eli, her boyfriend, knowing that the excitement and desire they have as high schoolers will never last given their different trajectories in life. And there are more. But these revelations about why they are no longer interested in sex are all driven not by self-awareness, but by the magic of the Lysistrata play's cold wind spell.

Intended to be an examination of women's body image, desirability, control of themselves, complacency, and social perceptions using Lysistrata, the novel gives short shrift to the idea of political activism as personal also put forward in the play. The men's reactions to the dry spell instigated by the women are not well explored; in fact, they seem almost incidental. While the underlying idea of the novel is appealing, in practice, it didn't quite come off. The initial look at relationships, in their different intensities and stages, was entertaining but then they dragged on a bit too long without giving any particularly new insights into women's sexuality or desire. And the end of the novel is abrupt and oddly unsatisfying. Perhaps trying to balance the philosophical ideas contained in the idea of abstinence and self-worth and still keep the story fairly light in tone was just too much. Not Wolitzer's best but not bad either; a quick read, the novel was just a bit flat, unfortunately missing that spark that makes for a fantastic tale.

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

It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

2012-01-16T03:59:00.000-08:00

Just putzing about this week and not reading much but I have been on rather a good reviewing kick. This meme is hosted by Sheila at Book Journey.

Books I completed this past week are:

What You See in the Dark by Manuel Munoz
The Uncoupling by Meg Wolitzer

Bookmarks are still living in the middle of:

Let the Great World Spin by Colm McCann
Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
Tantra Goddess by Caroline Muir
Invisible River by Helena McEwan

Reviews posted this week:

Georgia's Kitchen by Jenny Nelson
Little Princes by Conor Grennan
Promises to Keep by Jane Green
After the Fall by Kylie Ladd
What You See in the Dark by Manuel Munoz

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

Nothing for this year! If you must, look at the sidebar for past years' unreviewed books.

Mailbox Monday

2012-01-16T00:06:00.000-08:00

This past week has been dreary and rainy yucky here so it was really lovely to open my mailbx and find a book in it twice. Amazing how one little thing can make the day that much brighter. This past week's mailbox arrivals:

Gillespie and I by Jane Harris came from Harper Perennial for a book tour.
An elderly woman decides to tell the story of her friendship with a long dead artist who never achieved the fame she thought he was due. I do love to read about creative people and their relationships or muses.

Spin by Catherine McKenzie came from William Morrow for a book tour.
Showing up for the job interview of a lifetime still drunk from the previous night's celebrations and landing a different job that will test your loyalty as a result? What a great sounding start to a book!

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

Review: What You See in the Dark by Manuel Munoz

2012-01-15T12:34:00.000-08:00

Brooding, atmospheric, and with the feel of film noir threading its pages, Manuel Munoz's novel What You See in the Dark is unlike my normal reads, edging close to claustrophobia and hinting of menace. A multi-stranded narrative weaving the tale of a solitary, poor girl, Teresa, and her developing relationship with the town's golden boy, with the spare and unfulfilling, disappearing and seemingly irrelevant life of his mother Mrs. Watson, and the arrival in the town of Bakersfield of a famous Actress and Director (Janet Leigh and Alfred Hitchcock) as they start work on Psycho.

When the narrative focuses on Teresa and Dan, the narration is addressed to the reader as if s/he is a woman in the town whose jealousy over the developing relationship remains palpable even as she pursues her own boyfriend giving that thread of the novel a slightly prurient feel and keeping the reader distant from both Teresa and Dan themselves as characters.

The narration of Arlene Watson's portion of the novel focuses on her feelings, her past and the way in which life has passed her by, leaving her invisible and unable to grasp life and accept the future. There is a resigned inevitability to her character and to her life that bows her head and weighs down her shoulders, manifesting in the story of her abandonment by her husband and in the way in which she cannot see that the motel she owns is going to be obsolete, lonely, and as empty as her bitter life once the new freeway bypasses it.

The portions of the novel concentrating on the Actress and Director take their lead from the reality of movie making. There are technical bits, concerns over character motivation, and the delicate work of creating realistic artifice. The Actress wonders about her role and the trajectory of her career. The Director, exacting and controlled, looks to create art, pushing the boundaries of reality in film only to come up short against these exponentially expanded boundaries in the future.

As all three of the parallel stories wind together, there is a terrifying inevitability and a hopelessness that pervades the novel and the shocking act of violence at its core is neither unexpected nor anticipated. The writing is visually rich and symbolic. Munoz keeps a steady tension throughout the novel, slowly pulling back the shower curtain to show the blood mixing with water and swirling down the drain, disappearing. Quietly desperate and terrible, this forbidding and complex novel tapers off in the end neither embracing the change coming nor eschewing it.

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

Review: After the Fall by Kylie Ladd

2012-01-14T02:29:00.000-08:00

A tale of adultery that manages to withhold judgment as it traces the impact on all four people touched by an affair, Kylie Ladd's After the Fall is a fascinating glimpse into all sides of a story. Couples Kate and Cary and Luke and Cressida are good friends but when Kate and Luke cross the line with a very public kiss, things start to spiral out of control. And instead of backing off from each other, they are irresistibly drawn together in a full blown affair.

Told in short chapters alternating mainly from the four major characters' first person points of view, these psychological snapshots allow the reader deeply into the heads and hearts of each of the characters. Kate, Cary, Luke, and Cressida each start their narration in the aftermath of the affair and their anger, sorrow, guilt, and despair sound almost like notes made for a therapy session. From there, they work backwards, giving the background of their own marriages as well as of their connections to each other and the way that they reached the harmful and hurting place that each of them came to inhabit.

Certainly it would be easy to demonize Kate and Luke for devastating Cary and Cressida and having their affair but Ladd offers no such easy moralizing. Each of her characters is human, flawed and to be pitied. Although the novel opens after the end of the affair, there is still a palpable tension as Kate and Luke move towards each other and and the feeling of breath being held as Cary and Cressida stumble on the truth. The end is a realistic unraveling surprising for its truth. Ladd's training as a psychologist is clearly evident in her deep mining for motivation and explanation in each of her characters and she has drawn a taut, intense read.

I won this book from LibraryThing Early Reviewers.

Review: Promises to Keep by Jane Green

2012-01-13T01:40:00.000-08:00

Jane Green's characters are growing up. Sure, some of them are still looking for love, but many of them are now older and settled and facing the curveballs that life throws us all. In this wonderful, affecting tale of women, families, and friendship, she tackles that most heartrending of all curveballs: terminal illness.

Callie is a sought after photographer, happily married to the love of her life, and the mother of two young children. She is also a breast cancer survivor on the brink of her five years cancer-free. Her younger sister Steffi is becoming a celebrated vegan chef in NYC. She is a bit of a free spirit who has no desire to settle down and who has an instant attraction to the bad boys of the world, musicians, artists, etc. Lila, Callie's college roommate, has become an honorary sister to the Tollemache girls. She's very different from the radiantly happy Callie and the go-with-the-flow Steffi but she is finally in a relationship that fulfills her and allows her to be herself, even if her boyfriend is not a Jewish doctor but a Protestant Brit with a nasty ex-wife.

Callie's husband Reece travels often for work but when he is home, he and Callie have an incredibly strong and loving marriage. They live a fairly typical suburban existence, enjoying their friends, supporting their kids, and going about the daily life of living. Steffi, meanwhile is starting to get restless with her rock musician boyfriend so she offers to dog sit for Mason while he and his family spend a year in London. She knows that her boyfriend loathes dogs so she also knows that she is ending their relationship with this choice. Luckily Mason has a country home sitting untenanted only a few towns from Callie's that Steffi can use. This affords her the opportunity to change her life entirely, quitting her job and finding out what she really wants out of life, which surprisingly appears to include a quiet country life. Lila is moving on and committing whole heartedly to Ed and their future although she must decide whether her objection to motherhood or his desire to have more children (he has a son with his ex) will win out.

As all of their lives are moving forward, Callie starts to suffer from an intense headache that will not go away ultimately ending up in the hospital. When she is diagnosed with a recurrence of her cancer, this time contracting the rare leptomeningeal carcinomatosis, her family and friends circle around her as she travels a road that only she can travel.

Green has created likable, charming characters with whom the reader can identify. Even her minor characters like Walter and Honor, Callie and Steffi's incredibly mismatched parents, are well-rounded and realistic. And she has captured the devastation a terminal diagnosis has on everyone in this poignant and yet ultimately celebratory novel. As one life winds down, other lives must by definition continue forward despite the grief and uncertainty of the future and Green has illustrated this beautifully in the swirl of characters around Callie. There is some unecessarily heavy-handed foreshadowing of Callie's fate in the beginning of the book with reiterations of how happy and blessed she is in her life but overall, the whole of the gentle and loving narrative make this a minor flaw. The recipes following each chapter, are quite appealing even if sometimes a bit forced to fit with the narrative.

A look at abiding love and the constancy of family, this novel will probably appeal most to fans of women's fiction. And those who read the author's note about her friend Heidi will appreciate what a lovely tribute this is to a dear friend's memory.

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

Review: Little Princes by Conor Grennan

2012-01-12T00:29:00.000-08:00

I have read a number of books over the years, both fiction and non-fiction, set in Asian countries close to the Himalayas. The majesty of this area of the world has me in thrall without me ever leaving my chair. The magnificence of nature here sometimes overshadows the human element but in the hands of the right writer, I can be equally captured by the reality of the people who live in these rugged, remote, and often terribly poor countries. But I didn't really have a good sense of the turmoil and poverty in the midst of all the grandeur, especially in Nepal. This book has changed that a bit for me and certainly put a human face (or faces) on the sad and desperate social situation facing this small mountainous country sandwiched between India and China.

After eight years working for the EastWest think tank, Conor Grennan decided that he wanted to spend a year going around the world. To make his trip seem less frivolous, he signed up to start his journey in Nepal, volunteering at an orphange for 3 months. He didn't really have any experience with children and had very little idea what to expect at the Little Princes Children's Home. But working at an orphanage was certainly admirable and staved off criticism for his around the world year. At the outset, Grennan had no concept of how much the first three months of his journey would change him and how the children at the orphanage would burrow into his heart.

Coming back to Nepal after his year in the world, he discovered, quite by accident, that the children at Little Princes (named for the St. Exupery character) were not in fact orphans. They had been rescued from child traffickers. And it was the desperate, unsuccessful race to pluck seven more trafficked children from the dire situation in which they were living, even as the civil war escalated throughout the country, that drove Grennan and his colleague Farid to create the NGO Next Generation Nepal. Their initial vow to find these seven children, stop the abomination of child trafficking, and find the families of all the lost children remains a driving force behind the organization.

Ten years of civil war in Nepal caused more casualties than just among those fighting. When men went through remote villages and offered parents the opportunity to send their children to safety in Kathmandu, away from Maoist rebels who would forcibly conscript the children into their armies, to a place with abundant food, to a place where their children could receive an education, the parents gave everything they had to these men in return for the promise of a better life for the children. Unfortunately, the truth was that they paid these child traffickers who only turned around and sold the children into slavery, abandoned them to starve, or worse. It is these stolen children that Next Generation Nepal seeks to find and reunite with their families.

Part travelogue, part coming of age tale, part love story, part social conscience, part crusade, part call to action, this tale is wonderfully told and completely engrossing. Grennan is honest about the hard realities of Nepalese life, the corruption found there, and the oftentimes ineffectual politics. But he writes beautifully, affectionately, and from the heart about the people, the place, and the children he carries in his heart forever. His self-deprecating humor shines throughout the narrative making for a highly entertaining read. As Grennan experiences life, learns and changes personally, searches nearly inaccessible villages for parents of the lost children, celebrates successes, and agonizes over failures in this struggling and impoverished country, the reader is swept into the childrens' lives as well as into Grennan's own developing personal life. I dare anyone turning these pages not to fall in love with the enchanting imps at Little Princes and invite them to root for Grennan as he makes the world a better place, one child, one family at a time.

A portion of the proceeds from the sale of each copy of Little Princes will be donated to Next Generation Nepal and will help go towards getting more of these lost children out of the hands of child traffickers and home again.

For more information about Conor Grennan and the book visit his webpage, Facebook, or follow him on Twitter. For information on Next Generation Nepal, the NGO set-up to help the lost children of Nepal, check out their website. Follow the rest of the blog tour or look at the amazon reviews for others' thoughts and opinions on the book.

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

Review: Georgia's Kitchen by Jenny Nelson

2012-01-11T14:05:00.000-08:00

I love to cook and enjoy hearing people tell me I am good at it. The reality is that I follow a recipe with the best of them. The fact that I need to follow someone else's directions in the kitchen has not stopped me from the occasional daydream about working as a chef in a restaurant. Luckily there are creative, wonderful, impeccably trained chefs out there who can actually indulge their dream.

Georgia, the main character in Georgia's Kitchen, is a rising star in the restaurant world, working as head chef in the kitchen of another chef's eponymously named restaurant. She is engaged to a successful lawyer whom her mother adores. She has dreams of one day opening her own restaurant. It seems like her life is charmed. But then her life comes crashing down around her ears: a poor review unfairly blamed on her, fired from her job, and dumped by her fiance. So she reevaluates her life and heads to Italy to refresh her skills and work in a rustic Italian kitchen in a brand new restaurant. Once she arrives in Tuscany, she discovers that the amazing job she's come for isn't exactly what she's expected. And what Italian-set novel would be complete without a gorgeous neighbor? Gianni owns the vineyard next door to the restaurant and he is completely tempting to Georgia. But the focus here is really on Georgia and the life she is creating, learning, and testing.

Nelson captures the allure of Tuscany and does a wonderful job evoking the place. While the plot is romantic and charming, Nelson does a good job creating Georgia as a main character who learns to be true to herself rather than writing a standard "woman handed life-long dream thanks to intervention of gorgeous man" novel. In fact, all of the characters do a pretty good job of defying stereotype and come off as entertaining and sympathetic to the reader. There's a feeling of gentle insistence as the plot unspools toward Georgia's ultimate decision. The supporting characters are well drawn and the tale, while occasionally predictable, is ultimately delightfully feel-good. There's enough meat here to make this a winner for book clubs although you might run into the problem of everyone liking it too much to have a varied discussion. Not necessarily a bad problem to have. A fun and mouth-watering read, I thoroughly enjoyed Georgia and want her to come and cook for me.

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

Waiting on Wednesday

2012-01-11T12:19:00.000-08:00

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

Other Waters by Eleni Gage. The book is being released by St. Martin's Press on February 14, 2012.

Amazon says this about the book: Maya is an accomplished psychiatry resident with a terrific boyfriend, loving family, and bustling New York social life. When her grandmother dies in India, a family squabble over property results in a curse that drifts across continents and threatens Maya's life. Or so her father says-- Maya (being a modern woman, an American, and a doctor) doesn't believe in curses, Brahman, or otherwise. But when her father suffers a heart attack, her sister miscarries, and her career and relationship both start to falter, Maya starts to worry. A trip back to India with her best friend Heidi, Maya reasons, will be just what's needed to remove the curse, save her family, and to put her own life back in order. Thus begins a journey into Maya's parallel world-- an India filled with loving and annoying relatives, vivid colors, and superstitious customs--a cross-cultural, transcontinental search to for a chance to find real love.

It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

2012-01-09T04:05:00.001-08:00

I had a very busy week this past week what with trying to accomplish some of the organizational stuff on my new years' list. My pantry and several other areas that no one else in the world will ever see now look great but focusing on those spaces that were driving me nuts (and I won't admit how many of them there still are left to tackle!) left me not so much time to read or review. Still, a reasonable amount accomplished in this first week of the year. This meme is hosted by Sheila at Book Journey.

Books I completed this past week are:

All the Flowers in Shanghai by Duncan Jepson
Little Princes by Conor Grennan
Promises to Keep by Jane Green

Bookmarks are still living in the middle of:

Let the Great World Spin by Colm McCann
Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak

Reviews posted this week:

All the Flowers in Shanghai by Duncan Jepson
The Wedding Cake War by Lynna Banning

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

Little Princes by Conor Grennan
Promises to Keep by Jane Green

Review: The Wedding Cake War by Lynna Banning

2012-01-06T04:28:00.000-08:00

I do enjoy the occasional romance but I don't tend to read western-set historical romances. Unlike some readers, cowboys don't really appeal to me so I generally avoid the whole sub-genre. But I was challenged to read a romance out of my comfort zone so I scoured my stacks and found The Wedding Cake Wars. It is western-set and as a bonus, there's not a cowboy in sight.

The novel opens with Lolly Mayfield on a train arriving in tiny Maple Falls, Oregon from Kansas to marry a complete stranger. She's having second (and third) thoughts about her impetuosity in agreeing to be a mail order bride when she discovers that she is in fact going to be in a contest with two other women to win the groom, former Confederate soldier, Kellen Macready. She agrees, with misgivings, to the contest.

Kellen Macready is getting older and is willing to get married; he's just not willing to lose his heart in the process. So he agrees to the charity scheme cooked up by the Ladies of Maple Falls Helpful Society to raise money for a new schoolhouse. Three "brides" will compete to marry the Colonel, participating in various contests, including a treasure hunt, a kiss, and a wedding cake bake-off.

Aside from Lolly, the potential brides are a southern belle from New Orleans and a local woman who has been in love with the Colonel since she was a tiny girl. Each of them is determined to be the winner but sparks really start to fly between Lolly and Kellen. Neither of them is comfortable with their reaction to the other. Their attraction and the comfort he feels with Lolly scares Kellen and Lolly's father fought and died for the Union while Kellen was a Confederate officer. But the sparks mean nothing if Lolly doesn't win the contest.

The whole concept of a competition to get married is fun and offers comical situations. The contests themselves are entertaining and the characters are all likable, even Lolly's co-competitors. The major conflict threatening to keep Kellen and Lolly apart is overcome a bit too easily but overall this is a delightful romp for romance lovers.

Review: All the Flowers in Shanghai by Duncan Jepson

2012-01-05T03:55:00.000-08:00

China has long enchanted me (all of Asia does, actually) and the historic family dynamics with several generations living under one roof in harmony and in discord in this largest of all countries have long seemed exotic to me. The long history and the unknowns of a society so long closed to the West have always been appealing to learn about. The desire for a son and heir and the lack of worth of daughters is completely foreign but still fascinating to me. So this novel had all the hallmarks of a book I would thoroughly enjoy. Much to my surprise, I was left with a lukewarm reaction.

In 1930's Shanghai, in a world on the verge of massive change, Feng lives with her mother, father, older sister, and grandfather. Her sister is the major focus of her mother's energies, leaving Feng, who, it is assumed, will care for her parents in their old age, to the love and company of her grandfather. While her sister, selfish, spoiled, and unfeeling, commands every bit of attention on herself and her upcoming marriage into a socially superior family, seventeen year old Feng wanders in the next door gardens with her grandfather, meeting a boy, Bi, from a distant village. As she starts to fantasize about life with Bi, she is only partially cognizant of the looming disaster in her own home. And when she, as a dutiful Chinese daughter, must step in and marry the unappealing suitor chosen for her sister, relinquishing all hopes of a quiet country life, she does so unhesitatingly.

When she marries into the Sang family, Feng is young and clumsy, not the polished, slick young woman her sister was, and she suffers scorn and cruelty at the hands of her new in-laws. Her husband is kind enough but he is a dutiful son and under his parents' thumb so does as he is commanded without a thought to his fearful wife's wants or well-being. Feng is miserable having only her maid Yan in whom to confide and to trust for guidance and friendship. And it her maid Yan to whom she confide the terrible act of revenge she plots against her situation and all those who surround her. It is Yan who must carry out her mistress' awful plan, the plan that will haunt Feng for the rest of her life.

Feng is an unlikable character, growing from a naive, uncomplicated young woman drifting through life into a bitter, nasty, warped, and hateful woman. Having been forced to live her sister's life, she finally becomes her cruel sister. Were this dislike on the reader's part intentionally incurred on the author's part, it would perhaps be acceptable but I suspect that in actual fact, we are to view Feng's changed character with sympathy given her situation. Maybe the cultural divide is too great or our experiences too different but I found myself unable to feel any sympathy and this colored how I felt about the novel as a whole. Certainly Feng had a neglectful upbringing, knowing that she was of no worth to her parents. Certainly she was in a loveless arranged marriage. Certainly she was ill-treated by her in-laws, holding no value to them except as a vessel to produce an heir. But the way in which she stewed over the injustices done to her and the life-altering revenge she chose to deny everyone who had wronged her what they had so hoped for (but which she never divulged so only she tasted the bitterness of her horrible, and ultimately regretted triumph) was beyond the pale.

The writing itself is very evocative and draws the rarified world of upper class Shanghai well. As a domestic drama set mainly in the constrained world of women, there is little intrusion from the outside world. Surely there should have been though, as China suffered a brutal occupation and lengthy war with Japan, including the bloody Battle of Shanghai, a civil war between the Nationalists and the Communists, and the rise of Mao Zedong and his harsh policies. There is little mention of these massive changes during the narrative despite the fact that the Sang family, as part of Shanghai's wealthy ruling elite, would have been gravely (and likely very adversely) affected by each of these historical instances. And their passing references glossed over the brutality and hardship that would have accompanied these events.

The characters in the novel are quite simple with only Feng and her husband showing any growth or dimensionality. The setting is interesting but given short shrift and the historical is all but ignored until the very end of the story. There are a few coincidences too fantastic, just a bit too deus ex machina in the plot and the great leap forward in time after Feng's son is born is slightly disorienting. This was a good enough read, spoiled a bit by Feng's character, but it missed out on being so much more given the time and the setting.

For more information about Duncan Jepson and the book visit his webpage. Follow the rest of the blog tour or look at the amazon reviews for others' thoughts and opinions on the book.

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

It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

2012-01-02T11:30:00.001-08:00

A new year, a new start. I'm not carrying over the books that still haven't been reviewed from last year although I will most likely go back to many (all?) of them eventually. But I like the idea of a completely clean slate so here's the first edition of 2012. This meme is hosted by Sheila at Book Journey.

Books I completed this past week are:

More Than Words Can Say by Robert Barclay
The Juliet Spell by Douglas Rees
Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens

Bookmarks are still living in the middle of:

Let the Great World Spin by Colm McCann
All the Flowers in Shanghai by Duncan Jepson

Reviews posted this week:

More Than Words Can Say by Robert Barclay
The Juliet Spell by Douglas Rees

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

See the sidebars for past year's books needing this if you must!

Monday Mailbox

2012-01-02T09:54:00.000-08:00

It has been quite a long time since I did one of these posts and I've gotten some great looking books in the mail that should have their own shot at being highlighted. So I'm going to go ahead and list them all, despite this being far more than a week's worth of arrivals. This past several month's mailbox arrivals:

All the Flowers in Shanghai by Duncan Jepson came from William Morrow for a book tour.
In 1930's Shanghai, Feng must be a dutiful daughter and marry the wealthy man her parents have chosen even though she will lead a life of misery and unhappiness, leading to an act of revenge that will resonate throughout her entire life. Set during major upheavals in 20th century China, this looks fascinating.

Me Before You by Jojo Moyes came from Katya at Penguin.
A woman about to lose her job and a man whose will to live was crushed by his motorcycle accident come together and change each other forever. I suspect I'm going to need tissues with this one.

Queen Elizabeth in the Garden by Trea Martyn came from Meryl Zegarek Public Relations.
A look at the way that the two most important men in Queen Elizabeth I's life, Dudley and Cecil, used their elaborate gardens to appeal to their Queen. A completely different angle on history, despite my less than green thumb, I am looking forward to this one.

Little Princes by Conor Grennan came from William Morrow for a book tour.
The account of an American who worked in an orphanage in Nepal and ultimately vowed to save these little boys, this should be a lovely and inspirational book.

More Than Words Can Say by Robert Barclay came from William Morrow for a book tour.
My review can be found here.

A Partial History of Lost Causes by Jennifer DuBois came from The Dial Press for a book tour.
Combining a former Russian world chess champion turned politician with a young woman facing a diagnosis of Huntington's Disease, the same fatal disease that claimed her father's life, this double stranded narrative sounds very different and enticing.

You're (Not) the One by Alexandra Potter came from Plume.
A woman who once wished to be with her boyfriend forever and sealed that wish with a kiss under the Bridge of Sighs in Venice, is now unable to be shed of him no matter how much she might want it. Looks like frothy fun.

Camp Nine by Vivienne Schiffer came from University of Arkansas Press for a book tour.
My review can be found here.

The Dressmaker by Kate Alcott came from Doubleday.
A young woman hired to be Lady Duff Gordon's dressmaker on the Titanic who survives the sinking is caught up in the media frenzy after the accident. Aside from the fact that the cover is delectable, it sounds riveting.

The Rescuer's Path by Paula Friedman came from Meryl Zegarek Public Relations.
A fantasy set in Nixon-era DC and highlighting a fight against injustice, this is quite a bit outside my comfort zone.

Proof of Heaven by Mary Curran Hackett came from William Morrow for a book tour.
My review can be found here.

A Watershed Year by Susan Schoenberger came from Guidepost Books.
My review can be found here.

MWF Seeking BFF by Rachel Bertsche came from Random House.
Bertsche spends one year looking for a best friend like the ones she left behind when she moved from New York to Chicago.

Girl on the Cliff by Lucinda Riley came from Penguin.
A woman reeling from a miscarriage comes back to her family in rural Ireland, befriends a lonely little girl in the big house on the cliff, and uncovers a family secret that changes the course of her life.

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

Sunday Salon: Yearly Wrap-up

2012-01-01T09:28:00.000-08:00

The start of a new year and the end of the old one. I could make some New Year's Resolutions like wanting to lose weight (duh) and wanting to exercise more (double duh). I could make some reading resolutions like wanting to read more books from my own shelves, purging my enormous cookbook collection, tidying my shelves, and keeping up to date on all my reviews. And I do want to do all of this. Are they official resolutions? Probably not. If they happen, fantastic. If not, well, there's always another year (provided the ancient Mayans aren't wrong). But since the new year is yet to be discovered and the old one is complete, a few thoughts on this past year's reading seem in order.

I read 180 books in 2011. Of those, 132 were fiction and 46 were non-fiction. (Yes, I am aware the numbers don't add up. This is why I am a bookish person and not a numbers person.) I didn't further break the books out into genre or YA as versus adult mostly because I was lazy. My thought in scanning the list is that I read more YA than usual and less genre fiction than I have in the past. Ah, the foibles of mood reading! 180 is fewer than I read last year by 40+ books. Not sure why that is the case and a glimpse of my last year's calendar doesn't enlighten me either. I guess I just read slower. My final book of this year was Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens which I have been reading on and off for several years now. Actually, I think I may have started it in 2009. I am definitely happy to be finished with it. I started two books before the year was out and they carry over into 2012. With luck I will get back to them faster than I did to Our Mutual Friend. That, of course, remains to be seen.

Generally speaking I had a good 2011 and I traveled to many different places and times through the pages of my books. I read some that I loved and some that I definitely didn't. Some of them are pop into my head whenever people ask for a recommendation and probably will for a long time to come. I don't love putting together a year's top ten list because it could be different on any given day that I go to write it but I'm going to give it a whirl anyway. As I sit here on the couch curled up with one of my dogs, listening to overloud tv with my football obsessed husband as lentil and sausage stew burbles on the stove on this January 1, my top ten for 2011 in no particular order would be:

1. When She Woke by Hillary Jordan
2. Major Pettigrew's Last Stand by Helen Simonson
3. The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa
4. Shadow Divers by Robert Kurson
5. The Weird Sisters by Eleanor Brown
6. The Beauty of Humanity Movement by Camilla Gibb
7. Let's Take the Long Way Home by Gail Caldwell
8. The Watery Part of the World by Michael Parker
9. The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka
10. The Arrivals by Meg Mitchell Moore

Here's to another wonderful year of adventures on the page and beyond (and maybe a little weight loss too)!

Review: The Juliet Spell by Douglas Rees

2011-12-31T15:05:00.000-08:00

Because I am such a sucker for books and I want my children to find the same joy and escape in them that I do, I spend an inordinate amount of time trying to find books that I think they'll enjoy when I am in the bookstore. Most of the time, I fail miserably. I saw this book on the shelf and after reading the cover copy, wasn't sure my daughter would appreciate it. But the idea of a modern day reworking of the Romeo and Juliet tale caught my own fancy and I regretted not buying it for myself. I told my daughter the premise and she said she'd be willing to read it so immediately back to the bookstore we went. If I had bought it without asking her, odds are she never would have read it but because I wanted to read it too, she zipped through it, enjoyed it, and cheerfully passed it along to me. Obviously I was predisposed to like it and happily, it turned out to be a cute and fun young adult read.

Miranda is a high school theater geek who is trying out for the part of Juliet in the joint high school/community production. She desperately wants the part not only for herself but because her mother, who as an actress before she met Miranda's father, never got to play the part. Miranda thinks it would be lovely to be able to dedicate her performance to her mother, who has been a hard working single mother for the several years since Miranda's father left them to "find himself." Because Miranda wants the part so badly, she goes home and casts a spell to become famous. No, she's not a witch. She's just a teenaged girl desperately wishing, by any means possible, to be cast in the part she wants. But Miranda's spell does work. Sort of. At least when the smoke clears, it appears that Miranda has summoned a real Elizabethan actor into her kitchen. Best yet, his name is Edmund Shakeshank and he is William Shakespeare's younger brother. As Miranda helps him adjust to being plunked down in the twenty-first century, he helps her with her acting and together they run through some of the more entertaining Shakespeare plots all while the play in which they are both players runs into some significant road blocks.

The story over all is charming and fun and the Shakespeare references are entertaining. The novel is not without problems though. It is patently unbelievable and much of it was too easy. No one seems to blink much of an eye that Edmund was inadvertantly transported from his century to ours. And he, in turn, is only incredulous of a few major things rather than completely overwhelmed as any true Elizabethan would be in the same situation. Most of the plot is fairly predictable but there are a few delightful twists that keep the narrative tension from going slack. As a love story, it definitely captures immature high school relationships, as opposed to ones fully realized. The characters are pretty transparent but likable enough. The plot with Miranda's absent father is a false note and was certainly less enjoyable than the rest. While not high literature, the novel was goofy, frothy, entertaining fluff that continues to appeal despite its weaknesses; it left me smiling.

Review: More Than Words Can Say by Robert Barclay

2011-12-28T05:55:00.000-08:00

My family is lucky enough to have a summer cottage that I have been spending time at every summer for my entire 40 years. It is a place deeply ingrained in my soul. It is my la querencia (roughly translated as the place of my heart). I could no more contemplate not going up there as I could fly to the moon. So when I read the premise of More Than Words Can Say, I was immediately captured. And I so wish that it had lived up to my expectations, offering me the same warm and wonderful feelings that being at the cottage always evokes in me. Instead it fell short.

Opening immediately following the death of Brooke Bartlett, her granddaughter Chelsea discovers, somewhat to her surprise, that she has inherited the family cottage, the one that her grandmother closed in 1942 and never re-opened, about which she was unwilling to speak, but which she paid to maintain ever since she left it so abruptly and without explanation. Chelsea's first reaction is to sell it sight unseen but when a letter from her grandmother tells her of the existence and location of a hidden journal, she opts to go to the cottage and look for answers to the mystery of why Brooke never again returned to Lake Evergreen.

Upon her arrival, she falls in love with the lake and the cottage, changing a short stay into a full summer in the Adirondacks. It doesn't hurt that her next door neighbor is a handsome, single doctor who is clearly exactly the sort of man for whom Chelsea has been looking unsuccessfully back home in Syracuse's social elite. She finds her grandmother's journal and together with Dr. Brandon Yale, she slowly reads through the pages, learning the secrets of that summer so long ago. As she reads of her grandmother's life, she starts to fall for Brandon, who has his own past demons to face.

The narrative flips back and forth from Chelsea and Brandon's growing relationship to the journal and the growing conundrum faced by Brooke. Each journal entry tails off into scenes from that summer of 1942, giving far more detail than the journal itself ostensibly would. The intertwining plotlines work together but their coincidences can be too numerous to be believable. The revelation of Brooke's secret is anti-climatic and the grief it seems to cause Chelsea is completely out of proportion to the secret itself. The fact that the secret is predictable and that both plots were telegraphed within pages of chief characters' introduction fed into this reaction.

The characterization of Chelsea and Brandon, Chelsea's mother and father, Brooke, Gregory, and all of the townspeople can't help rescue the plot from its failings either, as they are almost all one-dimensional and rather cliched. Dialogue between any of the characters is stilted and unbelievable. And the fact that Chelsea and Brandon feel the need to reiterate in only marginally different language what the journal has just clearly laid out for the reader caused this reader to become irrationally annoyed with these fictional characters. This isn't the only instance of clunky writing either. Little is done in the book without a qualifying adverb, leading to an overabundance of words ending in "ly" which only serve to point out the poor choice of verb they are so necessary to modify. And on a smaller scale, there are portions of the book, especially including those centered around the 1941 Chris Craft (one of which my grandfather owned when I was younger), that are not well researched or realistic.

As much as I wanted to like this book, I just didn't. Overall, it was too melodramatic, too predictable. If the plot had been more engaging or the ending more momentous, I might have been able to overlook the problems with the writing but in this case, I wasn't drawn into the story enough to look past the other stumbling blocks.

For more information about Robert Barclay and the book visit his publisher webpage. Follow the rest of the blog tour or look at the amazon reviews for dissenting opinions and a few who agree with me too.

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

Merry Christmas from our chaos to yours

2011-12-25T00:01:00.000-08:00

One of these years we’re going to shock you all by skipping the letter and just sending a picture of us looking all perfect and shiny. That’s when you’ll know we’ve jumped the shark (or just plain gotten lazier than usual). Luckily for you, that year is not yet to be so you can thoroughly enjoy another year of our misadventures. Without further ado, the 2011 Knox year in review.

January: In the interest of starting the year off rather stupidly, Kristen ran the Disney half marathon with her sister, without training for it. Actually, if we’re going with full disclosure, Kristen ran (and walked rather a lot) of the half well behind her sister.

February: T. managed to fall twice this month and ended up with a soft cast on his right arm after the second time. Thankfully the final verdict was not broken but for the several days it took to hear that, Kristen had to struggle with fourth grade math. I mean she had to write out all his homework for him.

March: Kristen turned 40 this month. Remember when 40 was old? Yeah. It still is. Her parents took her with D. and without kids to Panama to celebrate. Three of the days there were spent learning to scuba dive, which Kristen took to like a fish to water (I know, big groan!) and was sorry to resurface each day. D. had a little more trouble adjusting his buoyancy but Kristen found it greatly entertaining to watch him float up towards the surface while the instructors chased after him to tug him back down.

April: The kids had spring break this month and we all traveled to Atlanta to watch Kristen’s dad scuba dive at the Atlanta Aquarium. The trip reminded us why we don’t love staying in hotels as a family given the arguments over the beds and the tv and the pullout. Good quality family time.

May: As the school year started to wind down, we found ourselves all over Charlotte and surrounding towns/states with dance competitions, tennis tournaments, and soccer games for the kids. Kristen and D. rarely saw each other because in order to make it all work, divide and conquer had to be the month’s game plan. We tend to split down gender lines but Kristen thinks next year it’s D.’s turn to do the dance hair and make-up and she’ll go burn, I mean bask, in the sun at an outdoor game/match.

June: We finally decided to acknowledge that we have three children and re-wrote our wills to include T. (He’s not even in double digits yet so we’re right on top of it!) The kids will be pleased to find that we have left them all of our debts. And one lucky family member will be less pleased to find we’ve left her our children for the duration. Perhaps we shouldn’t tell her that the lawyer says she can always turn the responsibility down as he made us give him a lengthy back-up list of guardians. And he hasn’t even met our kids!

July: As is usual, after R.’s dance nationals in Tampa, we headed to the cottage for vacation. Nothing like adding 8 driving hours to our usual 15. W. came down with the creeping crud this summer. After stumping the ER doctor, the dermatologist declared it the worst case of impetigo she’d seen in a long time. A cartload of drugs later, he was left only slightly polka dotted across his entire torso, a highly fashionable look for a 14 year old boy. D. was unable to make the cottage this year, spending his time traveling for work instead. Good thing he likes his job. And at least he got to avoid the contagious cooties flying around up north.

August: R. got braces on right before starting her last year in middle school. Luckily she is generally unfazed by them and usually resists ugly rubber band color combinations. W. started high school this month even though we’re pretty sure we’re not old enough to have a kid this old. Also, once home from Michigan, the kid activities ramped up again rather quickly. Tennis for W., dance for R., soccer for T., and gassing up the minivan for Kristen.

September: R. hit 13 this month. Yes, that makes two teenagers in one house at the same time. Pretty sure that should garner us a very fancy pity party or something.

October: D. was awarded the Microsoft Greater Southeastern Division Services Executive of the Year. This is really code for “the guy who knows the most people in any given bar in the greater southeastern US.” And anyone who knows him knows that he truly deserves this award!

November: W. got his braces off this month. D. turned 40 and had to stop teasing Kristen about being old. Kristen ran the Savannah half-marathon with friends and despite not training for the race again (bad habit, anyone?), she did actually run the entire way this time. Then, just to make her sound sportier than she really is, her tennis team went to states in Wilmington, NC the following weekend and ended up taking fourth place.

December: Kristen, belying her mature age, ruptured her ear drum this month, just like she used to do when she was four. She might have whined about it a bit more now though. Also this month, T, earned his very first tournament medal for soccer (2nd place). Kristen is now busy trying to get him to throw away all those stupid and meaningless dust-collecting “participation” trophies. He’s not on board yet but she’s determined to sway him eventually (or just slowly chuck them while he’s at school and can’t argue—because, after all, she’s the mom and can do evil things like this).

As 2011 comes to a close, we hope that all of you are surrounded by family, peace, love, and happiness now and throughout the coming year.

Review: Amaryllis in Blueberry by Christina Meldrum

2011-12-06T09:51:00.000-08:00

I am a complete sucker for the color blue and for flowers so the cover of this book grabbed me from the get go. I was less enchanted by the idea of a missionary story centered around a family with four daughters since unlike the rest of the world, I didn't love Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible. (I loathed it, actually.) And while there were quite a few echoes of the aforementioned book, Meldrum's novel was gripping enough to keep the pages turning so that I could uncover the whole story here.

Opening with the imminent trial of mother Seena for the death of her husband Dick, this tale of family, relationships, religion, and race set in both Michigan and a small village in West Africa, takes turns both expected and unexpected. Dick and Seena's marriage is increasingly broken and showing cracks when Dick, a very devout Catholic, decides with the help of the local parish priest that the family, including all four daughters, Mary Grace, Mary Tessa, Mary Catherine, and Amaryllis, should go to Africa as missionaries. This ill-fated decision will change so much in all of their lives.

Dick Slepy is a pathologist whose obsession with his wife has manifested itself by him becoming more and more controlling and possessive. Seena gave up her schooling to marry Dick and she becomes more and more distant to both her husband and her daughters as her regrets mount. The Marys are all very different from one another. Mary Grace is a beautiful boy magnet while Mary Catherine is extremely pious. Mary Tessa questions everything around her in life and Amaryllis, the different one, is a synesthete who views everything, observes everything, and notices everything almost from an outsider's perspective. These six people are on a collision course with everything they know and believe as Africa distills their truest beings.

The novel is chock full of betrayal, dysfunction, and forbidden love. Each of the characters keeps secrets from the others and they all stay mostly aloof from one another. Even Seena's decided preference for Amaryllis over her other daughters comes off as a convenience in her mostly detached life. The novel's narration changes from chapter to chapter so that each of the Slepys has a chance as the major focus. And yet none of the characters come off as particularly appealing. They are all, with the possible exception of Amaryllis, so self-involved as to be blind to anything outside of themselves. Meldrum's writing is well done but somehow never quite drew me in. There was so much going on, so much of different significance in each character, the loaded history of the Slepy family, as well as the cultural differences and incorrect assumptions once they are in Africa that it was hard to settle where to place my attention. And the back and forth in time allowed the narrative tension to wax and wane a bit too much for my liking. Well written and complex, it is proving difficult to explain why this just didn't strike a cord with me but it didn't.

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

Be Thankful

2011-11-24T05:17:00.000-08:00

Things I am thankful for today:

1. that the bag of rock hard brown sugar was only half full so it only raised an egg-sized lump and bruise when it fell on my foot from the top shelf in the pantry. (Nevermind that a friend of a friend is convinced I broke the stupid foot again.)

2. that Ocean Spray makes tasty cranberry sauce in a can so I don't have to make that in addition to everything else. (And they decorate it with those nice ridges too--so thoughtful.)

3. that I remembered to take the giblets and neck out of the turkey before I stuffed it. (And that it thawed in enough time to go in the oven this morning before I left to run the Turkey Trot.)

4. that I managed to (slowly) run the entire 5 miles of the Turkey Trot and still have control over my legs lo these many hours later.

5. that the kitchen shears that went missing long ago have somehow miraculously reappeared. (Yes, Virginia. There is a Santa Claus. Oh wait... that's the next holiday.)

6. that some side dishes can survive being served at room temperature. (I'd ask for chafing dishes for Christmas but where the heck would I store them?)

7. that turkey contains tryptophan and therefore offers the perfect excuse for mid-afternoon napping.

8. that this year's yeast rolls were not like last year's inadvertent hockey pucks.

9. that no one argued with me about the timing of the meal based on their team's game time. (Going postal on Thanksgiving is not pretty.)

10. that all dishes and counters have been cleaned and the meal portion of the holiday is over for another year even if I did have to do it all myself. (The price of not listening to grumbling about the meal timing seems to be complete solitude in the kitchen after the meal while the rest of the family is glued to some dull as dirt football game.)

Happy Thanksgiving to all of you and don't forget to count your many blessings today and every day.

Review: A Watershed Year by Susan Schoenberger

2011-11-22T03:35:00.000-08:00

When someone dies, it seems there are always things left to say. The ones left behind want to pick up a phone and tell their loved one something only to realize anew that the person is gone. But what if the same is true for the one who has died? What if there was more to say but there wasn't time to say it? What if those things that stayed unsaid could be said and could change the course of a life? A Watershed Year imagines just that scenario in a wonderful and credible way.

Lucy McVie has spent the past year of her life caring for her beloved friend Harlan as he fights cancer. Now a 38 year old college religion professor with an affinity for the saints, Lucy has known Harlan since they were in graduate school. She has also secretly been in love with him almost from the moment they met and so she thinks nothing of giving up time to care for him as he goes through treatment and then dies. After Harlan's death, Lucy must pick up the pieces of her neglected life. And then she receives an e-mail from Harlan that changes everything. He set up a program to send Lucy pre-written e-mails once a month starting several months after his death because he hasn't told her everything; he had more to say. The first e-mail hits on one of Lucy's unspoken, long-held wishes: to become a mother. Harlan tells her that he is certain that she will be a mother someday and that she will in fact be wonderful at it.

Once the e-mail opens Lucy to the possibility, she starts to make her way down the path to adopting. Things start to fall into place as she finds an agency specializing in Russian adoptions and is fast tracked to adopt 4 year old Mat whose eyes melt Lucy's heart when she sees his picture. At the same time, a colleague shows an interest in her romantically and her teaching career is only just hanging on by a thread. With so much going on in her life, it is not surprising that Lucy chooses to ignore the warning signs that everything may not be above board with the adoption. As in so much of her life, when she commits her heart, she does it fully and without reservation but also without understanding the emotional repercussions of such a commitment.

Lucy's year after losing Harlan is indeed a watershed year for her. She learns about herself and her capacity for love. She makes some tough decisions; some that bring her joy and some that bring her sadness. She might not yet be as strong as Harlan says she can be but she struggles through and comes out stronger for it. As a character, she is lovely and realistic. The secondary characters are less fleshed out but this is, after all, Lucy's watershed year and so the focus is fittingly on her. The monthly e-mails from Harlan act as the catalyst for her adopting Mat but they also help her to come to a better understanding of who she really is inside, the person for whom Harlan cared so deeply. And the flashbacks to her relationship with Harlan offer a sweet glimpse into the past, helping to round out and explain Lucy as a character but also offering insight into the core nature of their realtionship.

Schoenberger has written a deeply moving tale, a wonderful and rich novel, one that packs many different emotional punches. Touching on grief and love and motherhood, she has created a true and touching story. Adoption is not easy. In fact, it is fraught with frustration, uncertainty, and hopelessness, even after Lucy brings Mat home. Grief is not simple. It is consuming and sneaky and constant. Love is not immediate or safe or perfect. It is hard won but all the sweeter for that. All of these things and more are true and Schoenberger has shown them to be so beautifully.

For more information about Susan Schoenberger and the book visit her webpage, her Facebook page, or follow her on Twitter.

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

Review: Camp Nine by Vivienne Schiffer

2011-11-15T04:28:00.000-08:00

Interning Japanese-Americans in "relocation camps" during World War II is a shameful, and often ignored, part of US history. We imprisoned our own citizens based solely on their racial and cultural history and whether it was out of ignorance, fear, or greed, it was a terrible wrong. There are now increasing numbers of wonderful books, fiction and non-fiction, that have grown out of the internment experience but almost all of them are from the perspective of the Japanese-Americans. Schiffer has written the first book that I've come across that examines the effect of one of these camps on a young white girl in the area. I knew about the camps and have read extensively on the subject of them but I was unaware that such a camp was opened in the south where racial tensions were already simmering.

When the novel opens, Chess Morton is headed to the site of the former Camp Nine to meet David Matsui, a famous musician she knew 20 years prior when he was interned there as a boy with his family during the war. The intervening years separated them but his imminent return takes her back to that time when she was still so innocent and questioning. Then a 13 year old girl from the area's wealthiest family, she lived with her widowed mother just across from her paternal grandparents. Set apart from the community because of her family, her mother's progressiveness, and her own curiousity, Chess senses the underlying tensions swirling through tiny Rook, Arkansas. And when her grandfather, as her guardian, sells the land called Camp Nine to the government for a supposed prisoner of war camp, Chess will see the tensions come to a head and change her view of the world.

Rook is a farming community, traditional and strictly segregated, where interactions between whites and the blacks who serve them are rigidly codified and constrained. And it is into this world that the US government thrusts thousands of disenfranchised Japanese-Americans. Carolina March Morton, Chess's mother, is the daughter of Italian immigrants who married into the locally important Morton family but not before she went to college in California. When the Japanese-Americans arrive from California, Carolina sees in them not people who are enemies or suspect but simply people who lived where she was once so happy and with whom she can reminisce. She takes Chess with her to the camp, against Chess' wishes, so that she too can see the truth and shame of the situation, even at her young age. While Carolina teaches art classes at Camp Nine, Chess becomes friends with Henry and David Matsui. Henry is asked to answer yes to the "Loyalty Oath" and to go and fight for the country that has imprisoned him while David, slightly younger, sneaks out of camp to hone his musical skills with Uncle Willie, a blind blues player who lives in a cabin close to the camp.

There are many disparate plot lines threading through the narrative but their thematic similarity ties them together to form a coherent whole. Schiffer has a light touch when writing about very freighted topics and maintains the novel's tensions well but allows the reader to draw his or her own conclusions and judgements about the characters and their actions rather than heavy-handedly forcing an understanding. Her choice of Chess as narrator, an innocent who is nevertheless an insider by virtue of birth, is an interesting one and ultimately quite successful. That Chess doesn't fully understand the events of that time until her meeting twenty years later with David makes her narration just that much more authentic. As much as this novel is about the effects of the Japanese-American internment, it is equally about Chess' coming of age and the ways in which her understanding of the world, colored by the presence of the camp, matures and widens. Race, class, tolerance, and the prevailing power structure all play enormous roles in the novel. A different perspective on a shameful piece of our history, Schiffer has written a very readable and poignant tale.

For more information about Vivienne Schiffer and the book visit her webpage.

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

Savannah Rock and Roll Half Marathon

2011-11-08T14:59:00.000-08:00

Remember how, I posted about my last 5K and mentioned that I was going to get serious about trying to train decently for my upcoming half marathons? Yeah, I lied. The two 5K's I did in the last couple of months are the farthest I've run since last January's Disney half. Yup, the same half where I vowed never to do an untrained half again. Apparently I am nothing but a big fat liar. Because this past weekend, I hopped in a car with two friends and headed to my parents' in Savannah to run yet another half for which I was woefully unprepared.

As convenient as it was to be able to stay at mom and dad's house, not being downtown in a hotel meant that we had to catch a shuttle to the race. This was a bit of a problem. We arrived at Savannah Mall, the shuttle location, at just past 6am. The race was scheduled to start at 7:30am. You'd have thought that surely that was enough time. Unfortunately it was not. We stood in lines at the mall, freezing our poor tail ends off waiting for buses for an inordinate amount of time. K., C., and I considered tackling some guys near us who were smart enough to be dressed for the weather in sweat pants. We figured that they could probably take us though, especially given that our hands had frozen into clenched up claws. At least the buses were heated but the shuttle location meant we had a lengthy drive into the city to the race. At 7:30, when the gun was ostensibly sounding at Bull and Bay Streets, we were still on the highway making our way into the city. For those of us with late starting corrals (ie the really slow pokes like me), this was not a big deal at all but it led to us being passed by much faster runners who had missed their scheduled start for more miles than we would have expected.

I really lucked out in that K. also fell down on the job as far as training was concerned so we were equally unprepared and could run together the entire way. Since I had gone 3 miles and she had gone 6, my big goal was to get past those two mile markers still running. I'm probably a colossal pain in the butt to run with because it's like I'm people watching at the mall. Poor K. had to endure me pointing out every oddity, every entertaining shirt, and every fun poster that passed us or that we passed. We had a good old time pointing out people who clearly tried to wear clothing that was 3 or more sizes too small for them. K. found one woman who had shorts so far up her bum it looked almost as if she was running in a thong. I pointed out the woman whose running skirt was so short that it was really more a scarf around her waist. I thought about taking some pictures of people from the rear (and not just these two) to show the incredible variety of shapes of people who run marathons and half marathons but then realized that I'd be highly annoyed if some stranger snapped a picture of my jiggly butt on a run without my permission. I'd probably think they were a bit of a pervert. So I refrained. (You should all breathe a sigh of relief since I had intended to post those pictures here too.)

Some of the most entertaining sights during the race were the backs of people's t-shirts. Now, the mass produced ones can be quite entertaining and pithy but my personal favorites are the homemade shirts. An older man ran past us at one point and he had a laminated card pinned to the back of his shirt. It said, "Estimated finish time: Tuesday around noon." The fact that I was seeing this from behind and watching it get smaller and smaller in the distance tells you a little bit about how fast untrained runners run a half marathon. Another one that made me chuckle was ironed on to the back of a woman (also going faster than us) which said "If a marathon was easy, it'd be called Yo Mama." There was the "I could be wearing that" kind of shirt that said "Muffin Tops 13.1." And then there was the truly inspirational: "Proof that all things are possible, -160 lbs." It does not need to be said that all of these people were running faster than we poky little puppies were since I was reading their backs.

The other place you find entertainment during a long and painful run you haven't trained for (are you sensing how important this training thing is yet?) is looking at the signs along the route. People make lots of encouraging signs for their loved ones. My family doesn't but hey, I only hold that slightly against them. Since I never get signs specifically encouraging me (and co-opting any encouragement intended for other Kristens doesn't count, especially when so many of them spell our name incorrectly--it's an EN, not an IN at the end), I love the funny ones. There was a guy under an overpass holding a sign that said "GO COMPLETE STRANGER GO." I think I fell a little bit in love with him when I saw it. The best was that some anonymous voice behind me shouted to him "Thanks complete stranger!" Another one I poked K. to check out said "Do it longer. Do it faster. Do it harder. (That's what she said.)" Yes, sexual humor is never out of place during an endurance run.

Pointing shirts and posters and people out to K. as we ran helped keep my mind off the fact that we were actually stupid enough to try to run that 13.1 miles. Because, in case you are under the impression that it's not far, you're wrong. Map out some of the routes you normally drive and you'll be shocked at how far 13 miles will actually get you. In any case, marathons always seem to bring out some interesting characters. There are, of course, the folks in costume. We had wonder woman on our bus to the race. And I saw 4 Where's Waldos posing for a picture after the race. But it's the characters you stumble across during the run who divert your attention best.

There was a guy just ahead of us who had a doggie squeak toy in his pocket. Any time there were people cheering on the course, he squeaked that toy for all he was worth. There was a barefoot runner. (Given the bloody stumps and blisters I generally have at the end of the race, barefoot running appeals to me not at all.) There was the young guy wearing a pink race shirt, pink knee high socks, and a black running skirt. I asked K. if she thought he'd lost a bet. She said she thought it was a choice and I suspect she was correct. In any case, he had the good sense to get a skirt that was the proper size, unlike the woman I'd seen earlier. There was a woman who must be a religious fundamentalist of some stripe as she was wearing a long black skirt to mid shin, stripey rainbow socks pulled up to cover what the skirt didn't, a long sleeved blouse type shirt, and had her hair in a braid that stretched below her bottom. There was a Marine running with a full pack, the Marine flag, and an American flag. Oo-rah to him! Personally I carry my extra 50 pounds around daily, evenly distributed over my entire body so I don't know what the big deal was but everyone else seemed impressed. ;-) One guy zipped past us singing at the top of his lungs to his music. A woman running beside us shouted to him, "That's right! You go! You'll never see us again." It's kind of hard to giggle and run at the same time. One guy was running with his girlfriend/wife and he was obviously trying to encourage her. She was just as obviously pretty much out of gas. If she hadn't been and I'd been her, I think I might have run faster for a minute just so I could catch him and kick him. He would run ahead of her a ways and then turn around and run backwards trying to convince her to catch him. I told K. that I thought that was incredibly annoying and I'd want to strangle him. Apparently I was a bit louder than I realized as a woman running next to them turned around and yelled back to me "I would too." Good to know I can be a judgmental big mouth even in the midst of a run. The worst person we saw though was a woman who had pooped her pants. She was running just slightly faster than we were so we had the benefit of the hideous smell (and unpleasant sight) for longer than we would have liked. I should add that each and every one of these people I mentioned was running faster than we were. Although we did pass the annoying boyfriend/husband and his clearly wiped out significant other walking towards the end of the race and she hadn't given him a black eye yet so she really must have loved him.

Although I hope I won't do another race so unprepared, I was really pleased that K. and I managed to run the entire 13.1 miles. We crossed the finish with a chip time of 2:39:29. Definitely slow but upright and running the whole way! Once we were finished, I needed a porta-potty rather desperately. A big greasy hamburger the night before the race was yet another of my poorer decisions and my body was about to extract revenge. You know it's a sad day when you look with pleasure on a porta-john. It's even sadder when your thigh muscles are incapable of allowing you to hover over the grungy seat but you don't care and only let out a moan of pleasure at finally sitting down. The moment of truth comes, of course, when you are finished and should really leave the john but find that standing up is last on your list of friendly options. Knees protesting madly, I made my way back to K. where we heard the overall awards being given out. When they started off by saying that third place in the women's half marathon went to someone from Charlotte, NC, I just knew they meant me. Um...no. I'm just a bit older and slower than Alana Hadley. But only a bit. (And my son, hearing about her amazing performance, said "Our track team is dead!")

Since I wasn't going to be getting any awards, we headed back to the shuttle line to catch a bus back to the mall. I swear we walked another mile to get the shuttle ("How best should we mess with these runners who've just run a gajillion miles? Let's make the shuttle stops be forever away from the finish and see how long it takes them to hobble over to them. Yeah, that sounds like fun!") And once back to the mall, we had to make the equally long trek to my car. Being smarter than the average bear, we cut through the mall in all our stinky glory instead of going around the outside. K. needed a bathroom break on our way so I loitered outside near several other people who obviously had also just finished the run. As one girl came out of the bathroom, her waiting friend told her that she'd found out what the word they didn't know meant. Word geek that I am, I leaned in to hear her ask which word it was. Apparently the word "inaugural," as in "The Inaugural Savannah Rock and Roll Marathon" had stumped all three girls. I swear I weep for the youth of today.

All in all, a fun time. New things I learned from this run: I learned that stashing your phone up your sleeve during a long run is a bad plan. It now makes a sound like I am getting a text every minute or so even though I'm not. I thinking having it bang against my elbow for so long short-circuited something in it. It makes me sound really popular though! I also learned that stiffness sets in in different ways depending on your lack of training. For instance, having gone to the bathroom while out for dinner that night, I found that there was no way on God's green Earth than I was going to be able to raise my leg high enough to flush the toilet. Just another little indignity I never knew about before. And I learned that there are very good reasons to flash your father a rude gesture in church. I went with mom and dad to the Saturday night service after the race while K. and C. napped or rested back at their house. I'm pretty sure I moaned audibly when we had to stand to sing and again when we sat back down. I know I had to grab the chair in front of me for balance since I felt like someone had knee-capped me. It was at this point that dad pointed out an older gentleman in the row across from us who had also run the half that morning. This man was rising and sitting without any apparent discomfort. Show-off! And yes, I made a rather rude gesture in dad's general direction. The people behind us were probably horrified but I figure they were already distracted by my moaning and groaning so they weren't surprised when I turned out to be an impertinent and rude piece of baggage too.

Now we need to see if I have learned the most important lesson of all: TRAIN FOR THE BLASTED RACES! (But not until after the state tennis tournament is over as I wouldn't want to over train for that. ::grin::)

Review: Proof of Heaven by Mary Curran Hackett

2011-11-08T03:35:00.000-08:00

As a mother, I can't begin to imagine the terror of hearing that your child has a terminal illness of ideopathic (unknown) origin and that you will most certainly lose him no matter what lengths you go to to save him. I do, however, know the terror of having your child collapse as we are a family riddled with vasovagal syncope problems and my two oldest have had EMS called for them at school. I would say there's nothing worse than running into a building past an ambulance with flashing lights to find your sweet child surrounded by medical personnel. But, of course, there is something far worse as the plot of this novel makes clear.

Cathleen Magee is a single mother who has spent all but the first six months of her precious son Colm's life trying to find out the underlying cause of Colm's collapses. Terrifyingly, during his collapses, he stops breathing and his heart stops. When the book opens, Colm has another of his episodes and he and his mother end up in the office of the doctor who finally diagnoses what is causing the problem. And it's not harmless. Although Colm has thus far always come back from the empty blackness he experiences when he is technically dead, Dr. Basu has to tell Cathleen that what Colm is suffering from is in fact a progressive and ultimately terminal illness. But such a diagnosis does not deter Cathleen, a devout Catholic, from her continued quest to find a cure for Colm, whether by means of medicine or miracle.

While Cathleen prays for a miracle, even taking Colm to Assisi, Italy in search of a miracle healing, Colm himself, although only 7, recognizes that his time is short and that there will be no miracle. He also knows that there is no heaven because when he collapses, he descends into a dark nothingness. Reluctant to destroy his mother's hope, he confides in Dr. Basu, who has fallen hard for Cathleen and her small doomed son, despite the terrible tragedy in his own background. What Colm most wants, once he is assured that Dr. Basu and his uncle Sean will be there to support his mother when he is gone, is to find the father who abandoned him before he was born. Although wise beyond his years in so many ways, Colm is still searching for a complete family, in spite of the family he has gathered to himself and who all love him desperately.

The characters here are all lost and searching. They are searching for family, for completeness, for a sense of peace, for love, for faith, and for the certainty of an afterlife. Cathleen's need for hope and her desperate search for it anywhere she sees a glimmer is well done. She has wrapped her whole being into Colm's small failing body and if strength of will alone could keep him alive, she would be able to ensure he lives forever. Colm, while certainly more prescient than most children his age, comes across as too old. There is little about him of a child, making his character feel less authentic than his mother's. The additional storyline of uncle Sean's alcoholism is perhaps a bit too much. Obviously Sean is searching just as much as any of the other characters here but because he is not the focus of the story, his struggle and addiction take a backseat to the rest, almost minimizing the terrible toll alcoholism has on a family.

Since each of the characters' internal dialogues are revealed, the reader can see just what is driving each of them individually. This has benefits but it also has the drawback of sometimes being too easily laid out for the reader. Just as the existence of heaven and even faith itself is a mystery, the characters should not have explained all of their actions, leaving the actions themselves to speak for them. There was a lot of emotion packed into the pages here, as you would expect from a book that addresses the death (or potential death) or a child. The tension of wondering if Colm was going to finish his quest or if Cathleen would come to terms with his disagnosis ran consistently throughout the narrative. And yet when the end of the novel came, it was somehow a letdown, and left me feeling confused. I certainly understand what happened at the end but there were so many unfinished threads that I was astonished to find there was nothing further to read. It felt more like a full stop ending than a resolution, even one that deliberately left things unexplained. An interesting premise about facing the unknowable and unthinkable, sometimes with grace and other times with rage, it fell just slightly short of the promise for me.

For more information about Mary Curran Hackett and the book visit her webpage, her Facebook page, or follow her on Twitter.

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

Review: When She Woke by Hillary Jordan

2011-11-04T05:31:00.000-07:00

Everyone judges a book by the cover, whether they consciously admit it or not. This simple but startling black and red cover drew me from the start. It is powerful and clean and haunting. And so I admired it aesthetically but gave the book itself a wide berth. After all, it was too science-fictiony for my tastes. But the raves for this novel, a retelling of The Scarlet Letter possessing elements of The Handmaid's Tale, continued to pour in. And the cover continued to be oddly compelling to me. Finally giving in to this superficial appeal, I rationalized that I had liked both the Hawthorne and Atwood books. Not the best reason to read a book but I am so glad that everything combined to drive me to this amazing, chilling story.

In the dystopian future, the United States is a fundamentalist theocracy. Freedoms have been strictly curtailed and transgressions are punished harshly. Hannah Payne wakes up in the first pages of the book not wearing a scarlet letter but dyed entirely and completely scarlet aside from the whites of her eyes and her teeth. She has been thus "chromed" to brand her with the generic details of her crime: murder. Chroming is the new regime's solution to prison crowding. Rather than incarcerate any but the most violent criminals, the powers that be change the very appearance of criminals and release them to live as best they can in normal society. Although Hannah's crime of murder is indeed violent, the murder she has committed is of her unborn baby, rendering her safe to be released to the general public. She has terminated her pregnancy rather than implicate in adultery or politically destroy her beloved minister, Reverend Dale, now the national Minister of Faith.

After her initial and brief imprisonment to adjust to her chroming, Hannah is released back into an unforgiving public rife with zealous Christian vigilantes to make her way as best she can. Although her father and Reverend Dale try to ease her way a bit from afar, and in the latter's case, without implicating himself in her crime, she is quickly exposed to the worst that a rigid, unbending fundamentalist society offers. Before her crime she questioned the strictures by which her society required her to live as a woman, uneducated, and with an uncritical acceptance of religion as taught to her. But after her crime, out of self-preservation as much as anything, she comes to reject her naive, unquestioning self and starts to rely on critical thinking in order to survive. Her new situation challenges her previously blind belief in religion, the place of women in society, and love. But what place does a society which would chrome someone for an abortion and condemn her more harshly for withholding the name of her unborn baby's father have for a woman such as Hannah is becoming?

Jordan writes skillfully in creating her terrifying vision of the future. The panic Hannah, newly red, feels is beautifully conveyed to the reader and the threads of this panic combined with a determined resiliency weave throughout the narrative, draws the reader along in Hannah's extended ordeal. The pacing of the novel is incredibly well balanced, never allowing the reader to relax, forcing vigilance with each turn of the page. The novel addresses many controversial topics, abortion, religion, homosexuality, politics, etc. and may (will?) cause some readers outrage. But in truth, it should cause all readers outrage. Because the curtailing of rights is something that should never be taken lightly. A cautionary tale retaining the morality issues of Hawthorne and the political issues of the Atwood, this is its own worthy entry into the ranks of the terrifying dystopian tale.

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

Schadenfreude or you think you've had a bad day?

2011-10-27T13:56:00.000-07:00

You know those days you want to declare a do-over? Or even worse, those days where you just want to move on and never acknowledge that they happened? The sort of day where the only potential it holds is to rival the worst day ever? Yeah. I had one of those days. Not a catastrophic day, but one designed to leave the participant (in this case me) weeping in her drink.

It all started out so very well. I got up and popped dinner in the crockpot. I remembered to unlock the door for the handyman. And I headed off to my tennis match. We lost. Then I walked out to the parking lot and ran across one of the pros. Now M.'s never been known for his warm and fuzzy motivational style. But today he was more like a warm fuzzy softball to the gut than ever. Since he had been giving a lesson on the next court over from our match, I teasingly asked him if he saw any of the good shots or if he only caught the bad ones. Then I joked that he made my partner and me nervous standing there watching (he did actually). He sort of shook his head at me so I laughed and said that yes, we were easily rattled. He kind of did a half laugh and started to walk off. Then he whirled around and delivered a rather scathing comment about my backhand and stumped off while I was still digesting. It was almost as if he was personally affronted that I cannot seem to pull myself together and execute what he wants me to do. He can't possibly be more frustrated with my playing than I am. :-P

On that positive note, I hopped in my car, still sweaty and gross, and noticed I was going to be late to my doctor's appointment. Have you ever noticed that when you are late, everyone on the road is determined to drive in the wrong lane and at speeds that would make a turtle dissolve into hysterical laughter? Yeah. So I called and let them know I was running late. They were not best pleased. Meanwhile, the phone rang again. The handyman's wife was calling because he was locked out of the house. Remember I said I'd unlocked the door? Well, I apparently unlocked the deadbolt and not the handle. Figures! And given that I was 30 minutes into an hour drive (and already late to boot), there was no way to go home and let him in. ::sigh:: Huge apologies given and accepted (at least until we need him for the next thing and he decides I'm too much of a flake to deal with).

I got to doctor's and after signing in, discover that I had an e-mail from dance essentially accusing me of being delinquent on my bill. Took a deep breath and e-mailed back that I had indeed paid and included check number and all pertinent details. Received response that asserted that I couldn't be more wrong. Took several more calming breaths and politely re-asserted correctness. Heard no more from them. Saw doctor and headed home. I decided that I had enough time to sneak home for a shower before picking R. up at school to take her to dance. When I walked into my house, it was clear there was something wrong. No smell of dinner perking along greeted me at the door. I detoured into the kitchen to find that although I had turned the crockpot on, I had not plugged it in. Makes it sort of hard to cook that way. Mind you, it is now 2:30pm and there's no prayer in hell that my beef burritos would be coocked in time for dinner. Weep quietly in the shower.

I picked R. up and got her to dance early so I could follow-up on the missing check. They now remember me writing it so I am officially not a deadbeat but they can't find the check itself. (I no longer care at this point.) I start home from South Carolina (not the state we live in, incidentally) and have the presence of mind to call W. and tell him to remember he has tennis clinic and that I won't make it home in time to take him given the rush hour traffic. Luckily he can bike there. Unluckily, the phone rang again and it was him letting me know that I had driven off with his tennis racquet. Par for the course today!

Day's tally? Lost tennis match. Absorbed hurtful criticism from tennis pro. Late to doctor's appointment. Locked out the handyman. Dance lost my check. Didn't plug in the crockpot. Took W.'s tennis racquet with me to SC. And the day is not over yet. Really, it's been enough to piss off the Good Humor Man today. Now don't you all feel better about your day?

Review: Jane Austen Made Me Do It edited by Laurel Ann Nattress

2011-10-27T05:45:00.001-07:00

I freely admit I am a bit of a Jane Austen addict. And that addiction happily extends to sequels, prequels, and other Austen inspired writings. My shelves groan under the weight of books written by other Austen lovers. So when I saw this book was being published, I knew it had to find a home on my shelves.

This is a varied and entertaining collection of stories, many of which are written by the biggest names in Austen sequel writing. The stories are linked thematically by their Austen inspiration but they range a wide gamut aside from that initial similarity. There are stories that use Austen characters, some that use Austen (or her ghost) herself, and some that are modern retellings of classic Austen. They run from mysteries, to romance, to paranormal, and everything in between. As is the case in collections, there were stories I enjoyed more than others but even those that I expected to find less than appealing kept my attention and made me smile. Never once did I want to walk away from the book, reading voraciously through each story, enchanted by the so many differing and wildly inventive ways in which the authors had imagined their Austen inspirations. A fun and pleasurable read, this certainly earned its spot on my keeper shelves amongst the other Jane Austen related writings.

Thanks to Laurel Ann for sending me a copy for review.

Review: Holy Ghost Girl by Donna Johnson

2011-10-24T02:29:00.000-07:00

I always thought tent revivals were the stuff of movies or of a time long since disappeared. And in some ways, I'm not wrong. Charismatic Holy Roller preachers are not terribly common any more, their ministries smaller. This memoir is the story of a woman who grew up in the shadow of one of the remaining tents, whose mother chose to follow the magnetic David Terrell around the country, and who has written a clear-eyed, compassionate, balanced story of her life growing up in this world set apart.

Johnson was only three when her mother, a gifted musician, packed Donna and her younger brother into a car and followed David Terrell as the revival organist. Johnson details her early years traveling with their evangelical family, falling asleep against her mother in the back of a car as they drove from one town to another. She captures the moments of childish rebellion, the sliding into sleep as the prayers lasted for hours into the night, the amalgam of people who formed the inner circle, and the wonderment and love that she felt towards Terrell. She chronicles faith healings and an exorcism. She describes the faithful evenhandedly. And she shares the heartwrenching moment when she and her brother and Terrell's children are left behind with a follower while the adults continued on the circuit.

As Terrell's fame as a preacher and faith healer grows and her mother's affair with him (which resulted in three children) becomes more intense, their lives change from the open hardscrabble existence that they once knew to a more secretive but fixed and financially secure lifestyle. Less visceral than her early childhood experiences and not as comprehensive about her experiences, Johnson chronicles this time in her life when she loses much of her faith, marries at the age of fifteen, and leaves her family for the first time. Despite her ultimate questioning about the paradoxes between Terrell's ministry and life of affluence, she never declares him a charlatan.

Her upbringing was unusual and despite the fact that she lives a life outside the one that she knew when she was young, this is not a complete repudiation memoir. The chasm between the life that Terrell leads on the back of his followers' assets and the lives that they lead, destitute after giving him their money, is a huge one. But Johnson manages not to demonize Terrell. She questions his morality and confronts his obvious sins but she also acknowledges the great draw of the miracles he's performed and does not dismiss them as manufactured for the revival believers. All in all a fascinating and balanced look at an unusual childhood and the ministry that pervaded every aspect of it.

For more information about Donna Johnson and the book visit her webpage.

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

Sunday Salon: Book Fair

2011-10-23T07:05:00.000-07:00

I am coming to the end of my reign as middle school book fair queen. This past week marked my very last fall book fair. And I only have the spring book fair to get through before I pass the mantle to another ~~sucker~~ mom.

I have learned a lot chairing the book fair. I've learned about the kids. I've learned about the school staff. And I've learned valuable life lessons (more on these later).

The kids:

1. Middle school kids start out enthusiastic about the book fair. By the time they hit 8th grade though, all they want to buy (if anything), is a barnyard animal eraser. Even my own daughter (an 8th grader to be sure) does her book fair shopping under cover. She shops when we arrive to open the fair before the other kids are allowed in the building.

2. Flirting and hormones make everyone awkward. Book fair is prime time to flip hair enticingly, giggle breathlessly, and bat eyelashes. And that's just the boys.

3. Within 5 seconds of the class' arrival, it is possible to pick out the kid who will be loudest and most obnoxious during their stay at the fair. It is not possible to backhand this child (usually a boy) as deserved but he will accelerate your eye twitch in no time flat.

4. All middle schoolers have a maid. This is the only explanation I can come up with for their complete disregard for the mess they leave in their wakes.

5. No middle schooler ever listens. Again, this is the only way I can understand how multiple children ask me how much a certain poster costs less than a minute after I annouce to the assembled class that all posters cost $4.50.

The school staff:

1. You will learn things about staff that you should never know if you are sitting quietly and minding your own business. And what you learn will drive you closer to homeschooling than anything else in this world ever has. (For instance, there's the school's literacy coordinator who not only uses the work "like" every 5 seconds but who also heaps scorn on people "who use big words." Yes, I wanted to cry.)

2. A certain teacher must apply her make-up in the dark because she ends up having green skin. OK for Elphaba but rather disconcerting under plain, old, unflattering enough fluorescent lighting.

3. Some teachers have zero control over their classes. Others rule with an iron fist. This has no bearing on whether the kids like the teachers or not but as the book fair mom I can certainly tell you which ones I appreciate more.

4. The new librarian listens as well as the middle schoolers (see above). When asked to leave certain rooms unlocked so we can pack up and put things away at the end of the fair, she will blithely lock all doors and bug out for the weekend.

General life lessons:

1. Threats work. When I started threatening classes if they so much as poked one person with the hand pointers, they did not even try to poke each other again on the sly. (Perhaps the lesson is actually that I am scary. I prefer to think it's the threats work thing but I'm not ruling out scary.)

2. Boys don't want their purchases handed to them in a Justice bag or a Jewel box bag or any other girlie bag. They would prefer you bag their erasers and pokers in a Gamestop bag. Much cooler, thank you very much!

3. It's probably politic to leave all Total Wine bags at home regardless of how sturdy they are for holding books.

4. Eating out for lunch every day not only affects the number on the scale, it affects the amount of money you've actually spent at the bookfair. And by all rights neither number should be anywhere close to that large!

5. Sitting on your butt with nothing to do all day will make you more tired than an honest day's work.

6. Buying a book called The Worst Case Scenario Survival Handbook Gross Junior Addition will add immeasurably to your children's poop vocabulary and you have no one to blame but yourself when one of them announces to you that he is henceforth going to call poops "butt biscuits." Just another proud mom moment brought to you specially by the book fair.

Although book fair week is a long one, I have to admit I was pleased to see just how many books the kids did ultimately end up buying (and I don't just mean my kids). I got some quality reading time in myself (finished three books) in between classes. And I've done my volunteer duty towards the school for the first semester, allowing me to be completely guiltless when declining other thrilling opportunities. Win win all the way around.

Sunday Salon: Parenting and books, in short

2011-10-16T01:01:00.000-07:00

Parenting and books. Not parenting books. My babies didn't read the latter, ergo neither did I. So this isn't about those kinds of books. This is more about various unclassified books. Random books and kids, really.

You know how you fail daily at this parenting thing? OK, well, I fail daily even if others don't. But occasionally there are moments that tell me I sometimes, when the moon is blue and the stars are aligned and the force is with me, really succeed at it too. The moments when the waiter compliments one (or more) of my kids for being so polite, when we all have a dinner that is filled with teasing and laughter, and when we go to the bookstore. (Please don't tell my husband that I took the kids to the bookstore! Let Mastercard tell him in their own way and their own time. It'll give me a chance to flee the country before he sees the bill.)

It might be self-evident that a reading mom would have great bonding time with her kids over books but I know plenty of readers whose kids won't read at all. However, I got lucky and my kids are readers. They begged to go to the bookstore because it was flat painful that the newest Rick Riordan had been out for over a week and we didn't own it yet. They had already decided on the family reading order (some pretty intense, hotly contested bouts of Rock, Paper, Scissors determined this) and they were like addicts needing their fix. Best yet they knew I would never say no to a bookstore trip--or a book for that matter. What can I say, I'm easy! Amongst us, I do believe we've driven B&N stock up for this quarter, buying 3 books, 3 books, 5 books, and 7 books each. Shockingly, the 7 booker was not me. I'm so proud!

But that moment you know you've done something right? That moment you are certain they will never have to re-enact during lengthy therapy sessions? The drive home from the store. 2 of the 3 immediately opened their books and started reading. The third didn't simply because she already has 3 books on the go at home and didn't want to add a fourth (yet). The car was silent all. the. way. home. It was the most blissed out silence ever. And I, occupied by driving as I was, was a little jealous. Now they're each draped over a couch or chair, deep into their books, deep into different worlds, deep into their own imaginations. So the only thing left to say about today? And we all lived happily ever after, no parenting book necessary. :-)

5K race thoughts

2011-10-08T06:25:00.000-07:00

My current half marathon training plan is not just limited to sitting on the couch thinking I can run 13.1 miles or playing tennis (which includes running so it's legitimate, right?!) although both of these are indeed a vital part of my current training. I have also started running a few of the local 5K races, especially when they benefit good causes, to judge just how brutal this half next month is going to be. Last month I ran the Rock and Read 5K to benefit local libraries. It taught me that not running at all to train was about the dumbest idea I've had in a long time, probably since I decided that 3 kids was a good idea. So yeah, it ranks right up there amongst the dumbest ideas ever. It was also the slowest 5K I've ever run in my life. On the plus side, it lit a bit of a fire under my rapidly expanding butt. So this morning I ran another 5K to see how the latest change in exercise habits was treating me. The Big South 5K benefits middle school sports and although neither of the two older kids have played middle school sports (they prefer to do things that involve us having to pay large sums of money rather than the token amount school sports require), it's a good cause and better yet, it was close and I knew much of the route from my marathon training 3 years ago when I wasn't so fat and out of shape.

When I first woke up this morning, I have to admit I was not pleased to think I was going to have to drag myself out of bed and actually run. In fact, I laid in my toasty bed and seriously considered ditching the race. After all, I had paid the money and picked up my packet already. Who on earth would it hurt if I didn't run? Furthermore, this particular race didn't have shoe timing chips that would ultimately need to be returned to the timing folks; it had strips across the back of the race numbers and that strip is mine to keep forever. So I wouldn't even have to have forked over the postage to return the chip if I chose to luxuriate in my cocoon of blankets. It was a tough call, let me tell you! But I did eventually roll out of bed and head out into the chill morning.

The event was well set-up and there were 1000 runners; not bad for a two year old race. A flash mob of cheerleaders from one of the local middle schools busted out in a dance before the start. Runners as a group seem to be singularly unimpressed with such stuff right before the start of a race. I personally don't do perky in the morning. Ok, I don't do perky ever, but definitely not in the morning. But good for those girls getting out and doing that. My children didn't budge from their cozy beds to come out and run, walk, or cheer (they are mine after all). The race itself was through neighborhoods and very pleasant and after the first mile, slow starter that I am, I actually felt good. I managed to feel good through the entire race. So a definite improvement on last month (and my time was over a minute faster this time too).

I enjoy listening/eavesdropping on other people both before and during short races like this one. When parents are running with children and offering them encouragement, it helps me. But there are just some truly entertaining comments that I'd chuckle over if I wasn't breathing too hard to laugh. As we headed down the first slight downhill, a guy with good legs but a beer belly told his young daughter, "Pick up the pace downhill. When you're fat, you have to roll down as fast as you can." They sped off and left me in the dust. I was still plugging along at my usual pace when I came up behind two young boys, maybe 9 or 10 years old, who were walking together. The one turned to the other and said, "OK, let's run to the front now." And they took off and left me in the dust too (probably did make it to the front too, the little buggers). My favorite though (and it's only my favorite because it was said as I was passing them instead of the other way around) was the two teen/pre-teen girls in goofy stripey socks who stopped to walk at about 2.5 miles. The one said to the other as they were being passed by people behind them "Look at all the people we're going to have to catch now." I can't swear to it, but I'm pretty sure those stripey socks never did end up passing me. :-)

Casual races like this can be fun provided you don't get run over by a runner pushing a jogging stroller. I used to be impressed by these people but over time, I've noticed that they are all incredibly fit and thin. So pushing a jogging stroller is really no big deal for them. It's the roly poly runners like me who have to lug the weight around *all the time* who should be more impressive. Fit running mom or dad can ultimately hand that kid off to someone else and revert to their gazelle like nature while we hippos have no choice. I've got it way harder. Of course, they probably don't carb load the night before the race on mint Oreo cookies either, but I'm just trying to honor the spirit of the thing on my own terms. And I never did claim to be a real runner. Jogger, shuffler, dilettante, occasional slug, yes. Real runner, in my dreams.

I did feel good for the majority of the race (minus the amount of time that it takes me to get into my stride) and I managed to average under 10 minute miles so I'm doing better than I was. I still run with the heavy runners at the back of the pack: heavy as in weight, heavy as in heavy on their feet (you should hear some of the pounding footfalls), and heavy as in heavy breathers. The latter is me and apparently I'm a heavy and loud enough breather to scare people who are wearing iPods given the number of over the shoulder startled looks I got as I plugged along today. I will never be one of the front runners, not the 5-6 minute mile runners who finish their entire race before I hit mile 2, but I'd love to get back to my sub-nine minute pace. Not thinking that's likely for this half next month but maybe for the half in January if I do remember to get out and run sometime again before then.

It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

2011-10-03T03:53:00.000-07:00

The week started off well on the reviewing front but tapered off into reading only. Baby steps! This meme is hosted by Sheila at Book Journey.

Books I completed this past week are:

The Wishmaker by Ali Sethi
Stay by Allie Larkin
Tassy Morgan's Bluff by Jim Stinson
Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan
Jane Austen Made Me Do It edited by Laurel Ann Nattress
Fiction Ruined My Family by Jeanne Darst

Bookmarks are still living in the middle of:

Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens
The Vagabond by Colette
Let the Great World Spin by Colm McCann
This Is Just Exactly Like You by Drew Perry

Reviews posted this week:

Shadow Divers by Robert Kurson
The Silver Boat by Luanne Rice
Twelve by Twelve by William Powers

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

Amaryllis in Blueberry by Christina Meldrum
The Wedding Cake War by Lynna Banning
Dance Lessons by Aine Greaney
Blood, Bones, and Butter by Gabrielle Hamilton
The Paperbark Shoe by Goldie Goldbloom
Someone Will Be With You Shortly by Lisa Kogan
The Art of Saying Goodbye by Ellyn Bache
When the Killing's Done by T.C. Boyle
The First Husband by Laura Dave
Joy for Beginners by Erica Bauermeister
The Mystery of the Third Lucretia by Susan Runholt
Next by James Hynes
Spanish Holiday by Kate Cann
The Little Woman Letters by Gabrielle Donnelly
Left Neglected by Lisa Genova
To Be Sung Underwater by Tom McNeal
Silver Sparrow by Tayari Jones
The Oracle of Stamboul by Michael David Lukas
Baby Don't Go by Susan Andersen
The Summer Without Men by Siri Hustvedt
Unsaid by Neil Abramson
The Soldier's Wife by Margaret Leroy
Harvest by Catherine Landis
The Sweetness of Tears by Nafisa Haji
The Dry Grass of August by Anna Jean Mayhew
Birds of Paradise by Diana Abu-Jaber
Don't Kill the Birthday Girl by Sandra Beasley
The Evil B. B. Chow and Other Stories by Steve Almond
Withering Tights by Louise Rennison
Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight by Alexandra Fuller
True Love and Other Disasters by Rachel Gibson
The Winters in Bloom by Lisa Tucker
The Embers by Hyatt Bass
Valeria's Last Stand by Marc Fitten
The Watery Part of the World by Michael Parker
River House by Sarahlee Lawrence
The Sea Captain's Wife by Beth Powning
The Last River Child by Lori Ann Bloomfield
Saved by the Sea by David Helvarg
The Marriage of the Sea by Jane Alison
Down the Nile by Rosemary Mahoney
The Wishmaker by Ali Sethi
Stay by Allie Larkin
Tassy Morgan's Bluff by Jim Stinson
Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan
Jane Austen Made Me Do It edited by Laurel Ann Nattress
Fiction Ruined My Family by Jeanne Darst

Monday Mailbox

2011-10-03T01:44:00.000-07:00

Just two books this past week but both should be good fun. This past week's mailbox arrivals:

The Last Blind Date by Linda Yellin came from Gallery Books..
A memoir about her love life, this happily ever after promises laughter along the way.

Jane Austen Made Me Do It edited by Laurel Ann Nattress came from Ballentine Books.
A collection of short stories inspired by Jane Austen? ::swoon:: This one is tailor made for my taste.

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

Review: Twelve by Twelve by William Powers

2011-09-29T01:48:00.000-07:00

Our book club likes to read certain categories of books at least once a cycle. So when the non-fiction selection month was available, I jumped on it and chose this book. Not only was the premise fascinating to me, but it takes place in our state so I thought it would be perfect. Unfortunately, I think my choice earned the unanimous rotten tomato award for the year and I'd have to agree. There was so much promise left unfulfilled and that, combined with the fairly sanctimonious tone, was the kiss of death.

Powers, an ecological activist long worried about his own carbon footprint, hears of a doctor living in a 12x12 home completely off the grid. Intrigued by her lifestyle, he is offered the opportunity to move into her home during a time period when she is out west protesting and he jumps at the chance to live the life of a wildcrafter. But this leap is inauthentic at best, while musing on nature and this back to the earth lifestyle, Powers never embraces the life fully, falling back on his girlfriend's car, apartment, and the local wi-fi enabled cafe. He glorifies the tiny carbon footprint of living 12x12 and while his point that we should all do more to reduce our carbon consumption is valid, he also ignores the problems of living as Dr. Jackie has done. A major reason she's chosen her lifestyle is her disagreement with tax money being used for war. A legitimate ideological stance but neither she nor he addresses anything worthy that tax money is used for though, such as education. Opting out of taxes through living small means not supporting your local library or local schools, etc. And many of Power's neighbors during his sojourn in Jackie's home aren't truly living in 12x12 homes. Multiple 12x12 buildings to work around the taxation issue is just plain cheating.

And perhaps these issues wouldn't have been so off-putting had they been addressed in the text. Instead, Powers came across as sanctimonious, certain of his righteousness and superiority, and frankly just plain pedantic. The writing was overloaded with unrelated musings and recountings of his past experiences, including his past relationship which resulted in a daughter. Very little of this had any bearing on his living in a small 12x12 structure. Actually, very little of the book indeed, had much of an account of his daily living there. While this is not intended to be a how to guide (and nor did I expect such), including more of the realities and challenges of a life so different from what most of us generally live would have made for a more interesting read. Simply condemning technology for technology's sake left this reader bored and came off as rather disingenuous given Powers' continued reliance on the technology of which he approves but simply removed from Jackie's homesite.

We do need to be more mindful of our impact on the environment but this book ultimately didn't even detail the author's striving to be mindful. A disappointment all the way around.

Review: The Silver Boat by Luanne Rice

2011-09-28T13:06:00.000-07:00

When you see white shells on a book cover, it is generally a pretty good indication that the book itself is a beach read. That is very definitely the case with Luanne Rice's latest, The Silver Boat.

Dar and her sisters are having to say goodbye to their family home on Martha's Vineyard after the long illness and eventual death of their mother. Dar is the only one remaining on the island, her sisters having built their lives and families elsewhere so she is perhaps the most affected by the hard decision to sell the family's house and land. As time winds down for the McCarthy daughters and the memories they have rooted in this home, Dar finds letters from her father to her mother. He had always maintained that his family had a royal land grant on the island and so he left to sail to Ireland in search of proof of his claim. Michael was always assumed lost at sea but something in the letters makes Dar believe that he could possibly have made it to Ireland and found the proof about which existence he was so adamant and so she heads off to investigate for herself.

While Dar takes the majority of the focus here, there is a veritable crush of other characters as well, all of whom seem to be suffering in some way. Both Delia and Rory, the other two sisters, are facing family dysfunction of grand proportions and Dar is a rather prickly, curmudgeonly, recovering alcoholic. Their friends on Martha's Vineyard are not terribly well-fleshed out and are unremittingly eccentric. Family drama this has in spades but it has too much going on and too little focus on the primary storyline to be terribly effective. It does, however, fulfill the promise of the cover: a superficially entertaining beach read albeit one that will stay in memory for a shorter time than the sand will stay in your beach bag.

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

Waiting on Wednesday

2011-09-28T00:16:00.000-07:00

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

For me, I can't wait to read: A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty by Joshilyn Jackson. The book is being released by Grand Central Publishing on January 25, 2012.

Amazon says this about the book: A GROWN-UP KIND OF PRETTY is a powerful saga of three generations of women, plagued by hardships and torn by a devastating secret, yet inextricably joined by the bonds of family. Fifteen-year-old Mosey Slocumb-spirited, sassy, and on the cusp of womanhood-is shaken when a small grave is unearthed in the backyard, and determined to figure out why it's there. Liza, her stroke-ravaged mother, is haunted by choices she made as a teenager. But it is Jenny, Mosey's strong and big-hearted grandmother, whose maternal love braids together the strands of the women's shared past-and who will stop at nothing to defend their future.

Review: Shadow Divers by Robert Kurson

2011-09-26T16:55:00.000-07:00

My husband and I got certified to scuba dive this past spring and I absolutely love it but I have to say that I am incredibly grateful that I didn't read this book before we took our classes. Holy toledo! The bends are a magnitude of 100 times worse than I ever imagined. But being underwater is phenomenal. I don't know that I'd ever want to do deep wreck diving; I'm probably more than content to always be one of the thousands of recreational divers out there. I will never turn down the chance to read about the men and women who dive on the edge of the knife blade though, risking their very lives, especially if the account is as gripping as Kurson's non-fiction account of the discovery and eventual identification of the mystery German U-boat laying in 230 feet of water off the coast of New Jersey, where no U-boat should have been according to official war accounts.

Kurson follows the two divers who were most instrumental in the identification of the U-boat, two men who initially disliked each other but came to respect the driving force behind their different desires to dive the wreck, put a name to it, and to honor the sailors who were forever trapped in their watery grave. Kurson weaves dramatic tension throughout his narrative, even ratcheting it up as he presents the terrible tragedies of first Steve Feldman's death and then Chris and Chrissy Rouse's. He never minimizes the risks taken by all of the divers although his main focus remains on Vietnam vet John Chatterton, who ultimately pulled the spare parts box that would identify the wreck and Richie Kohler, who felt such a responsibility to the long dead sailors that he traveled to Germany to meet with their families.

Kurson does tend to neglect many of the other divers, especially those on the initial dives, mentioning their names briefly but without offering any suggestion of their impressions or contributions. However, his laser focus on Chatterton and Kohler makes for a tight and thrilling narrative that will keep readers, even those with zero knowledge of diving, on the edge of their seats. His descriptions of the dangers inherent in deep water diving, especially in the 90's, before nitrox mixes gained ascendency for such dives, are absolutely heart pounding. And he is spot on when detailing the swirling mess of sediment that contributes to zero visibility. Kurson does not shy away from graphic descriptions of the physical effects of the bends or from the vision of what a drowned body would look like after 5 months in the water and these descriptions will induce horror indeed but they reinforce the dangers and their potential results to which these wreck divers willingly and repeatedly expose themselves.

The book is not all diving though; it is also an historical mystery and Kurson takes the reader along as, much to the dismay of Chatterton and Kohler, each credible theory about the identity of the U-boat falls apart. As the wreck continued to withhold its secrets, the divers had to do archival research and in the process discovered that history as it is written is not always accurate and true. And as they waded through both the factual and the murky, they learn quite a bit about U-boats themselves. At the end of the narrative, as the quest for the boat's identity is coming to its conclusion, Kurson also draws a very credible picture of life on this particular U-boat as well as the lives of the lost crew members.

The writing is polished and the story exciting. I gulped the book down in a little over a day, pulled ever onward by the mystery and the persistence of these men. Dramatic and intense, this was a cracking good read. I just hope the image of what happens to your blood in extreme cases of the bends fades from my head before I have the chance to put a regulator in my mouth again.

It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

2011-09-26T11:37:00.000-07:00

Loads of good themed reading but not one review to show for it. I am hanging my head in shame! This meme is hosted by Sheila at Book Journey.

Books I completed this past week are:

Saved by the Sea by David Helvarg
The Marriage of the Sea by Jane Alison
Shadow Divers by Robert Kurson
Down the Nile by Rosemary Mahoney

Bookmarks are still living in the middle of:

Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens
The Vagabond by Colette
Let the Great World Spin by Colm McCann
The Wishmakers by Ali Sethi

Reviews posted this week:

Not a one. Shame on me!

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

The Silver Boat by Luanne Rice
Twelve by Twelve by William Powers
Amaryllis in Blueberry by Christina Meldrum
The Wedding Cake War by Lynna Banning
Dance Lessons by Aine Greaney
Blood, Bones, and Butter by Gabrielle Hamilton
The Paperbark Shoe by Goldie Goldbloom
Someone Will Be With You Shortly by Lisa Kogan
The Art of Saying Goodbye by Ellyn Bache
When the Killing's Done by T.C. Boyle
The First Husband by Laura Dave
Joy for Beginners by Erica Bauermeister
The Mystery of the Third Lucretia by Susan Runholt
Next by James Hynes
Spanish Holiday by Kate Cann
The Little Woman Letters by Gabrielle Donnelly
Left Neglected by Lisa Genova
To Be Sung Underwater by Tom McNeal
Silver Sparrow by Tayari Jones
The Oracle of Stamboul by Michael David Lukas
Baby Don't Go by Susan Andersen
The Summer Without Men by Siri Hustvedt
Unsaid by Neil Abramson
The Soldier's Wife by Margaret Leroy
Harvest by Catherine Landis
The Sweetness of Tears by Nafisa Haji
The Dry Grass of August by Anna Jean Mayhew
Birds of Paradise by Diana Abu-Jaber
Don't Kill the Birthday Girl by Sandra Beasley
The Evil B. B. Chow and Other Stories by Steve Almond
Withering Tights by Louise Rennison
Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight by Alexandra Fuller
True Love and Other Disasters by Rachel Gibson
The Winters in Bloom by Lisa Tucker
The Embers by Hyatt Bass
Valeria's Last Stand by Marc Fitten
The Watery Part of the World by Michael Parker
River House by Sarahlee Lawrence
The Sea Captain's Wife by Beth Powning
The Last River Child by Lori Ann Bloomfield
Saved by the Sea by David Helvarg
The Marriage of the Sea by Jane Alison
Shadow Divers by Robert Kurson
Down the Nile by Rosemary Mahoney

Memento mori

2011-09-25T08:28:00.000-07:00

I hadn't thought about his name in years. But when I saw a facebook update from a mutual friend that he'd died, well, I've been thinking about him ever since. I really don't know anything about the man he became and so I can only grieve his death for the boy I knew, the one I had a serious crush on one year in high school, the one I kissed not once but twice, the boy who seemed far too cool and fearless to have a clue who I was (those two kisses notwithstanding). About his adult self, I only know the tiniest bits I just now gleaned from his Facebook page: that he has at least one daughter, that he owned a business, that his listed interests suggest that he was still fearless. But I really don't know about all of that. I remember the boy and I'm sorry that he is no longer in this world.

I wasn't your garden variety giddy high school girl giggling over every boy. I was a fairly even-keeled, straight arrow, teacher's pet kind of kid. I had my fair share of high school crushes, most (all?) of whom had no idea I had any interest in them at all. The funny thing is that I didn't have an interest in C. until one December when the junior class' annual "Kissing Elves" fundraiser happened. This is the sort of fundraiser that I'm sure would never be allowed now. Frankly I'm a little surprised that it was allowed then. In any case, the juniors sold messages to help finance the junior senoir prom. Each message had a recipient and a deliverer. The recipient had to kiss the deliverer in order to receive the message, hence the name kissing elves. So if you had a huge crush on someone, your friends would send you a kissing elf to be delivered by your crush. Yes, it was as mortifying as it sounds! But there were twists as well. Your friends could be truly diabolical and have the thing delivered by the "Monster Elf." I don't know what the school administration thought the Monster Elf was but in kid terms, it was known to be not just a chaste little smooch in exchange for your message, it was a full on kiss, tongue and all, delivered by an unknown (identity theoretically kept secret) person. At least that's what I was told it was (did I mention I was also very gullible?--although I've never been told that my interpretation was wrong even lo these many years later).

So that December of my freshman year, a friend told me she was going to send me a kissing elf and wanted to know who I wanted to have deliver it. I told her that I didn't want an elf under any circumstances. She threatened to send me a Monster Elf if I didn't give her a name. I didn't believe her. My friends were just as straight arrow as I was and I never would have had the guts to send a Monster Elf. Imagine my surprise when delivery week rolled around and she admitted that she had indeed sent me the Monster Elf. Once the panic subsided a bit, I had to find out who the Monster Elf was that year so I could avoid him as assiduously as possible. It was C. He was a year ahead of me and most likely didn't have a clue who I was even though we went to a very small school. Surely if I skulked through back hallways avoided common areas, I'd be safe, right? Nope. C. tracked me down right outside the lunchroom doors where a third of the school all stood waiting for lunch to start and planted a heck of a kiss on me. I don't think I have ever blushed harder to this day. I suspect that I blushed every time I saw him for the following year too. You'd be forgiven for thinking that I developed a crush on him because of that kiss but I didn't really. I think the crush came about because I had expended so much mental energy thinking about him (and the best ways to avoid that kiss). In any case, in the following year, I found myself trying to be wherever I thought he might be too.

It thrilled and horrified my little soul when he knocked on my car window after school one day when I was sitting in the ever so cool (NOT!) Student Driver car for a behind the wheel lesson. My instructor was not terribly impressed, I might add. After I got my license, I did convince a friend to drive with me past his house a few times in hopes that he was outside. He never was. I had a few brief conversations with him in school when a friend of mine started dating a friend of his. And the friend who had sent me the Monster Elf sent me one specifically from C. the following year. So he kissed me again. And that was really that. Nothing much of interest ever happened with my crush on C. It just sort of faded away. I admit that I did note where he ended up going to college even though by then I had a boyfriend, but my interest was just a small echo of that once consuming crush and after I noted it, I forgot until I saw it listed on his Facebook page.

I haven't thought about him in years, yes, but he held a small (strange) piece of my history, even if, as is most likely, he himself didn't remember one tiny bit of it. 41 is too young to die. RIP C. and may your family take comfort from their memories of you.

Waiting on Wednesday

2011-09-21T00:43:00.000-07:00

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

For me, I can't wait to read: The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides. The book is being released by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux on October 11, 2011.

Amazon says this about the book: It’s the early 1980s—the country is in a deep recession, and life after college is harder than ever. In the cafés on College Hill, the wised-up kids are inhaling Derrida and listening to the Talking Heads. But Madeleine Hanna, dutiful English major, is writing her senior thesis on Jane Austen and George Eliot, purveyors of the marriage plot that lies at the heart of the greatest English novels.

As Madeleine tries to understand why “it became laughable to read writers like Cheever and Updike, who wrote about the suburbia Madeleine and most of her friends had grown up in, in favor of reading the Marquis de Sade, who wrote about deflowering virgins in eighteenth century France,” real life, in the form of two very different guys, intervenes. Leonard Bankhead––charismatic loner, college Darwinist, and lost Portland boy––suddenly turns up in a semiotics seminar, and soon Madeleine finds herself in a highly charged erotic and intellectual relationship with him. At the same time, her old “friend” Mitchell Grammaticus––who’s been reading Christian mysticism and generally acting strange––resurfaces, obsessed with the idea that Madeleine is destined to be his mate.

Over the next year, as the members of the triangle in this amazing, spellbinding novel graduate from college and enter the real world, events force them to reevaluate everything they learned in school. Leonard and Madeleine move to a biologicy laboratory on Cape Cod, but can’t escape the secret responsible for Leonard’s seemingly inexhaustible energy and plunging moods. And Mitchell, traveling around the world to get Madeleine out of his mind, finds himself face-to-face with ultimate questions about the meaning of life, the existence of God, and the true nature of love.

Are the great love stories of the nineteenth century dead? Or can there be a new story, written for today and alive to the realities of feminism, sexual freedom, prenups, and divorce? With devastating wit and an abiding understanding of and affection for his characters, Jeffrey Eugenides revives the motivating energies of the Novel, while creating a story so contemporary and fresh that it reads like the intimate journal of our own lives.

Summer vacation chronicles

2011-09-19T09:11:00.001-07:00

It's taken me a long time to get around to my usual travelogue after our summer travels and I seriously thought about skipping it but then I realized that if I did, you all might miss out on your bi-annual vomit reading. And that would just be a crying shame. ;-) So here for your reading pleasure, what we did on our summer vacation:

You might be forgiven for thinking that we are incapable of reading a map given that this year we drove south in order to go north. Yes, we drove to Tampa and Orlando to get to northern Michigan. Why not add 10 hours to our already 15 hour trip, right?! R. had dance nationals in Orlando so I shipped the boys up to my parents and packed her, all her costumes, make-up, and assorted dance paraphenalia as well as all of our clothing (warm weather and cold weather) for the month we were planning on spending in the UP, both dogs, the frogs in their aquarium, and a half van load of toys and books that I planned to dump on my small niece and nephews into the van and headed south to my sister's house in Tampa. I got smart and asked the vet for anti-nausea drugs for the carsick dog so the trip south with the traveling menagerie was pretty uneventful. We drove back and forth from Tampa to Orlando each day R. had to dance and I took my niece with me a couple of the days. She is as girlie as they come and she thoroughly enjoyed the glitz, especially loving the day that I told R. to take her onstage for the awards. Pretty sure I'm aunt of the year for that one. Oh, and if it means my sister will have to suffer through dance for years and years too, I will feel like my job is done.

Once the competition was finished for R., we re-packed the car with all critters, clothes, and dance junk but minus all the outgrown toys and books and hit the road. I was caravanning with my sister, S., who had asked specifically for R. to ride with her to help entertain her kids (6, 4, and 2). It was really rather pleasant to listen to the audio book I chose without the constant accompaniment of the binging and pinging noises of a Nintendo DSi acting as background noise. The dogs slept peacefully on the front seat (carsick dog was blissfully drugged once again) and I only ever heard unpleasantness when S. called me from her van to say she needed to stop for gas or food or whatever. Then I was treated to a screaming cacophony over the phone.

The trip ultimately took 3 days and because I was alone for all of it, it was not a bad drive. The first night we stopped at my dad's apartment in Atlanta. Almost as soon as we walked into the apartment, S.'s puppy Packer vomited right at my feet. She dragged him outside as I cleaned up puke not even of my own family's making, Miss Gatsby still being looped on her pill. When S. came back in with Packer, he promptly squatted and pooped in the middle of the family room and since we were screaming at him, moved into the kitchen to pee. Darned good thing that dad was in the process of moving out of that apartment. Because if it hadn't needed to have the carpet replaced before we got there (it did), it sure would have afterwards. Entertainingly, Packer was scared of the open concrete stairs to get up to the apartment so after each accident, S. had to either drag him down them or carry his heavy butt down them. After a day of screaming in her car, she was not in the best of moods that night. I, however, felt perfectly fine. ;-) The second night we spent at my in-law's. Luckily no dogs had accidents or I probably would never be welcome there again. We did have to try and shove Packer into Gatsby and Daisy's travel crate and that provided some hilarity since he didn't fit and kept making it cartwheel across the floor. We left him in it with it collapsed around him, rationalizing that it had mesh ends so he wasn't going to suffocate. Day three of driving was a repeat of days one and two and we were all terribly grateful to finally make it to the cottage.

We settled into our regular summer life once we got there with one big change. For the first year ever, we allowed W. and R. to drive the little boat all by themselves. They got their boating licenses last year and this year they earned a little freedom, at least for a while. We put their licenses in a plastic baggie that they stashed in a cubby in the boat and at some point the licenses must have blown out. Curtailed all their freedom and meant we had to run our own errands again so it was a bummer for all of us. But if their caution in the boat translates to driving a car, I feel much better about the fact that W. can take driver's ed as soon as next month.

One night I was out late picking up R. and we came back to the cottage after dark. I reminded myself to turn off the running lights as I came into the dock. Both of us went to our respective beds and went to sleep. About 2 hours later, my mother came storming into my room, woke me up, and accused me of not turning the lights off on the boat. As she grumbled about dead batteries and responsibility, I went downstairs to head to the dock. We grabbed a flashlight to light the way. I clicked it on and then off again. When it clicked off, the boat lights were no longer on. I asked if there was someone down on the dock but she told me not to be ridiculous and grabbed the flashlight. I admit I was being totally chickenshit, which is probably related to batshit crazy in my case but that's a whole other story, but I was sure there was someone there. Damn near wet my pants when we almost ran into my dad on the path from the dock, where he had been down turning the boat lights off. I kept bleating that I had turned them off and I didn't know how they turned on. No one believed me and I felt like a delinquent little kid. But lo and behold, the local poltergeist turned the lights on at least twice more in the night (turned out it was a loose connection) so I was completely vindicated.

The summer was filled with the usual swimming, sailing, and tennis fun. T. attended a 3 day kayak camp and according to him thoroughly enjoyed himself, except for how hard he had to work paddling. Uh, yeah, that's kind of the deal with kayaking!

We went out for pizza one night and looked away from the box just long enough for one ballsy seagull to snag an entire piece of pizza for himself. Unfortunately, he was also a discerning seagull and snagged a piece of the fantastic Greek pizza instead of going for the plain cheese. No wodner sea gulls are so rotund.

Miss Gatsby, who is also fat as a little toad (from lack of exercise, not from stealing pizza) played and romped with my mom's dog but continued to get fatter. I'm claiming she's got a glandular disorder but I think that might be a bit like me stuffing my face with cookies and then wondering if I have a thyroid problem. We might not share any DNA but it's good to know my dog emulates me in the ways that make us truly family.

T. spent the summer impersonating Nature Boy. He told my mom that I told him he only had to wash his pits so he didn't bother to soap any other parts. Obviously I have to be more specific with dirt boy. He also decided that plain old peeing on a stump wasn't enough of a break for the septic system so he was apparently regularly pooping in the bushes (thank heavens we're isolated on our bay!) until the dog busted him. I swear the child has an allergy to cleanliness.

Every night in my bed, I tried to claim alpha dog status but by morning it was clear I'd lost again. (And no, this is not a reference to my sex life; get your dirty minds out of the gutter.) Trying to share a single bed with two small dogs is not recommended unless you too like hanging your uncovered, goose-pimpled butt off the edge of the bed.

This summer I acquired a new name: Aunt DooDoo. Rather charming, don't you think? I suspect that I will be thanking my two year old nephew for that one for years to come. I'm pretty sure that translated to "Hey $hithead, I'm trying to get your attention." I could be misinterpreting though.

There were several statements this summer impossible to misinterpret. The best of these was when I had my friend's youngest with me in the boat. He told me that T. told him "If Ki-Bam (our boat) was nicer, we could pick up babes." So I looked at C. and asked him he he wanted to pick up babes. His response? "No. But T. does." Yeah, that's about right too. Of course, he'll have to start bathing and stop shitting in the woods for any girl in her right mind to be interested in him so I guess I don't have to worry any time in the near future.

The other unmistakeable comment this summer? Both W. and I signed up to play in the annual, just for fun Butzie Tournament. W. twisted his ankle rather badly in the first set but my partner (who is a phenomenal tennis player) and I made it to the finals. Before the last match, W. looked at me and said, "Good going mom. You can get second!" Brat! R. and I didn't get second. We won. So when we got home, T.'s comment on finding out that I'd brought home the crystal clock? "So I guess R. did all the work, huh?" Both boys are fired as my kids until further notice!

Other highlights of the summer included having a damsel fly land on my nose causing me to go just about cross-eyed. Better up close and personal with that bit of nature than with the skeeters and black flies though. W. got up close and personal with a nasty case of creeping crud from the water. He played stump the ER doctor one night and had us driving 45 minutes to see a dermatologist a few days later. Turned out to be a particularly virulent case of impetigo. He's still all polka-dotty from it, just how he intended to start high school, I'm certain. On the plus side, I now know that if I insult him to the point that he is laughing uncontrollably, blood draws are much easier. I suspect that the ER staff thinks we're completely loony tunes but they have no idea how much easier I made their lives!

This year we were up north for the annual Pirate Party and that was good fun to watch as a whole pirate flotilla motored up and down the channel, firing cannons, waving cutlasses, and lobbing water balloons. My friend J. and I went to the bar that night but we did not go in costume like so many other people. I fully intended to close one eye and say "Arrrrg" if I was called on it but my smart ass response was not needed, more's the pity.

And lest you think that my sister's dog is the only vomiter this year, I have to add that once I ran out of the good drugs for Gatsby, car travel suddenly got dicier. We took her 45 minutes to Sault Ste. Marie to the groomer and just before we pulled into the parking lot a horrific stench filled the car. I thought she'd pooped all over but it turns out that she had eaten poop and her stomach had finally rebelled. (And given her weight issues, I'm guessing poo is quite high in calories.) With my mother gagging, my kids hollering, and every one of us hanging a head out of the closest window in order to breathe, I pulled into the groomer. Every last one of them fled the car, including all four dogs, at top speed and left me to deal with the atrocious mess. We actually had to buy a bottle of Febreeze to keep in the car.

The last bit of fun this summer was the regatta. Sailing in it alone for the first time, poor R. had every sailing mishap possible short of capsizing (she ultimately took third though). The fact that she kept going back day after day was pretty impressive since I could hear the crying and shouting all the way at the dock on day 2. Rather a good thing that W. opted not to sail because I'm sure there would have been blows. Shortly after R. collected her trophy, we had to pack the critters back up and head home.

15 hours felt positively short compared to the 3 days it took to get up there. And the drive was uneventful if much noisier with the addition of the boys. Of course, just to remind me of her capabilities, the night we got home, R. up-chucked pizza all over the power room. I'm still trying to find paint that will cover those grease marks permanently!

It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

2011-09-19T05:23:00.000-07:00

Well, an appalling week in terms of books for me. Ah well! This meme is hosted by Sheila at Book Journey.

Books I completed this past week are:

The Grief of Others by Leah Hager Cohen
River House by Sarahlee Lawrence
The Sea Captain's Wife by Beth Powning
The Last River Child by Lori Ann Bloomfield

Bookmarks are still living in the middle of:

Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens
The Vagabond by Colette
Let the Great World Spin by Colm McCann
Saved by the Sea by David Helvarg

Reviews posted this week:

The Grief of Others by Leah Hager Cohen

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

The Silver Boat by Luanne Rice
Twelve by Twelve by William Powers
Amaryllis in Blueberry by Christina Meldrum
The Wedding Cake War by Lynna Banning
Dance Lessons by Aine Greaney
Blood, Bones, and Butter by Gabrielle Hamilton
The Paperbark Shoe by Goldie Goldbloom
Someone Will Be With You Shortly by Lisa Kogan
The Art of Saying Goodbye by Ellyn Bache
When the Killing's Done by T.C. Boyle
The First Husband by Laura Dave
Joy for Beginners by Erica Bauermeister
The Mystery of the Third Lucretia by Susan Runholt
Next by James Hynes
Spanish Holiday by Kate Cann
The Little Woman Letters by Gabrielle Donnelly
Left Neglected by Lisa Genova
To Be Sung Underwater by Tom McNeal
Silver Sparrow by Tayari Jones
The Oracle of Stamboul by Michael David Lukas
Baby Don't Go by Susan Andersen
The Summer Without Men by Siri Hustvedt
Unsaid by Neil Abramson
The Soldier's Wife by Margaret Leroy
Harvest by Catherine Landis
The Sweetness of Tears by Nafisa Haji
The Dry Grass of August by Anna Jean Mayhew
Birds of Paradise by Diana Abu-Jaber
Don't Kill the Birthday Girl by Sandra Beasley
The Evil B. B. Chow and Other Stories by Steve Almond
Withering Tights by Louise Rennison
Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight by Alexandra Fuller
True Love and Other Disasters by Rachel Gibson
The Winters in Bloom by Lisa Tucker
The Embers by Hyatt Bass
Valeria's Last Stand by Marc Fitten
The Watery Part of the World by Michael Parker
River House by Sarahlee Lawrence
The Sea Captain's Wife by Beth Powning
The Last River Child by Lori Ann Bloomfield

Monday Mailbox

2011-09-19T05:17:00.000-07:00

Just one book this past week but one that should be good fun. This past week's mailbox arrival:

A Rather Remarkable Homecoming by C. A. Belmond came from New American Library..
A funny and entertaining caper series I've been enjoying, this is the fourth book and I'm sure it will make me chuckle as often as the others.

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

Sunday Salon: Themed Reading

2011-09-18T07:16:00.001-07:00

Autumn has blown in with a vengeance here. One day we were suffering hideous humidity and wearing shorts and t-shirts and the following day we were bundled up in sweatshirts and long pants looking at a flat grey sky. Up until this sudden weather flip-flop, it was hard to believe that fall was upon us, despite having pushed all three of the kids out the door for their waiting buses. Now there's no doubt though. And in my life, fall means the resumption of Women's National Book Association meetings.

I am the secretary of our local chapter so every fall, in preparation for October's National Reading Group Month, I am asked to compile a themed list of books good for reading groups. Last year I wrote up a list of foodie books. This year, my friend C., past president and she who is in charge of the list compilation, suggested that I do something centered around water given my known weakness for any book that even hints of a connection to water. The lists should contain mostly paperbacks and a mix of fiction and non-fiction. And because I have always been a teacher's pet, I not only scour my past reads for inclusion, but I pull titles I have sitting around and try to read as many of them as I can to see if they too should be on the list. So far, the list as it stands now (subject to change, of course):

Safe From the Sea by Peter Geye
The Watery Part of the World by Michael Parker
Stiltsville by Susanna Daniel
Eternal on the Water by Joseph Monninger
The Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey
The Secret River by Kate Grenville
Pocketful of Names by Joe Coomer
River House by Sarahlee Lawrence
The Sea Captain’s Wife by Beth Powning

As you can see, I am not doing so very well on non-fiction titles this year. It's hard because the book can't just be one that appeals to me (a long and quite honestly easy list to make) but also be appropriate for a sustained book club discussion. So I'm still reading and deciding. I have bookmarks in Saved by the Sea by David Helvarg and The Last River Child by Lori Ann Bloomfield. I also have a stack pulled from my shelves to potentially read as well: The Marriage of the Sea by Jane Alison, Ocean Sea by Alessandro Baricco, River by Colin Fletcher, Shadow Divers by Robert Kurson, The Last Dive by Bernie Chowdhury, and Underwater to Get Out of the Rain by Trevor Norton. I am certain there are many others in my collection that fit the theme as well so please let me know if I am missing one for consideration. And if you have any suggestions for pithy list titles, send 'em along. So far I've heard The Old Book and the Sea (but some of the books are river or lake focused) or Drowning in Books (but that might be a bit negative even though some of the books do indeed have drownings in them).

It should probably go without saying that this past week, most of my reading has taken me to sea, down rivers, and underwater. It feels like my home element. If someone would just develop a truly waterproof book, I would strap on a scuba tank and only resurface for more air! Reading and water, my world. Where do you love to have your reading take you?

Review: The Grief of Others by Leah Hager Cohen

2011-09-15T02:54:00.000-07:00

Grief is quiet and consuming and solitary but it eats away at happiness and connection like an acid. In Leah Hager Cohen's exqusite new novel, grief is smothering the tiny flicker of life left in the Ryrie family. John and Ricky's marriage is failing as they mourn the loss of their infant son a year previously. Not only can they not find their way back to each other, but they cannot find their way to helping their older children, 13 year old Paul, a target of bullying, and 9 year old Elizabeth, called Biscuit, who is skipping school regularly and obsessed with cultural death rituals. The loss of Simon, born with anancephaly and only living 57 hours past his birth, magnifies the existing cracks in the Ryrie family. And the collective silence about his existence and death serves to split the cracks wide open. Into this struggling house comes Jess, John's oldest daughter and the product of a prior relationship. She is in her early twenties, single, and pregnant. Her presence complicates evyerthing and highlights the happier time years before when, as a young teenager, she vacationed with the Ryries.

The narrative follows each of the six main characters, getting into their heads and showing the different ways in which their grief and longing cripples them. Each of the characters, the four Ryries, Jess, and Gordie, a young man reeling from his own father's death and introduced to the Ryries through Biscuit, is complete and realistic. While some of the decisions made by the characters, John and Ricky in particular, are hard to understand, the truth and burden of their individual mourning make the decisions real and wrenching, especially when seen in the context of the family and in the impact on each of the other, equally needy, characters. The narrative timeline moves back and forth from the present, capturing the months before Simon's birth and immediately following as well as eight years prior when Jess last spent time with the Ryries. This allows the reader to see into the heart of the familial relationships to their very core, even before grief so overwhelmed them.

Cohen's writing is simply gorgeous, filled with amazing descriptions that take your breath away. She has effectively isolated her characters from each other even when they need each other the most and it is impossible to feel anything but deepest sorrow at their very alone-ness. That each of them is profoundly lonely and incapable of re-establishing long frayed bonds is overwhelming and adds to the pervasive sadness of the story above and beyond the loss of a baby. The characters' very secrets hold them at arms length from each other, husband from wife, parents from children, Ryries from family outsiders, and the revelation of their deepest beliefs will change their lives forever. While it is hard to comprehend the remoteness of the characters, Cohen has done a marvelous job drawing these broken people who have lost the ability to trust and to nurture and to make a family. Absorbing and effecting, this was a moving novel about loss and secrets and family and trust and the struggle to emerge from grief not unchanged but whole.

For more information about Leah Hager Cohen and the book visit her webpage, her blog, or visit her on Facebook.

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

Waiting on Wednesday

2011-09-14T00:10:00.000-07:00

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

For me, I can't wait to read: Following Atticus by Tom Ryan, especially because it has a schnauzer on the cover and I have two at my feet even as I type this. The book is being released by William Morrow on September 20, 2011.

Amazon says this about the book: Middle-aged, overweight, and acrophobic newspaperman Tom Ryan and miniature schnauzer Atticus M. Finch are an unlikely pair of mountaineers, but after a close friend dies of cancer, the two pay tribute to her by attempting to climb all forty-eight of New Hampshire’s four-thousand-foot peaks twice in one winter while raising money for charity. In a rare test of endurance, Tom and Atticus set out on an adventure of a lifetime that takes them across hundreds of miles and deep into an enchanting but dangerous winter wonderland. Little did they know that their most difficult test would lie ahead, after they returned home. . . .

At the heart of this remarkable journey is an extraordinary relationship that blurs the line between man and dog, an indelible bond that began when Tom, following the advice of Atticus’s breeder, carried the pup wherever he went for the first month of their life together. Following Atticus is ultimately a story of transformation: how a five-pound puppy pierced the heart of a tough-as-nails newspaperman, opening his eyes to the world’s beauty and its possibilities. It was a change that led to a new life among the mountains; an unforgettable saga of adventure, friendship, and the unlikeliest of family; and an inspiring tale of finding love and discovering your true self.

It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

2011-09-12T04:53:00.000-07:00

I had a busy week that allowed for a lot of reading (mostly in the car waiting on kids or appointments) but not much time to write reviews. In lieu of writing much, I ran a 5K to beneift the libraries around here (my first one in ages) and volunteered at a Special Olympics tennis tournament. So although my "needs reviewing" list grew, I feel like I made a difference and that's a good thing. This meme is hosted by Sheila at Book Journey.

Books I completed this past week are:

Little Black Dress by Susan McBride
The Embers by Hyatt Bass
Valeria's Last Stand by Marc Fitten
The Watery Part of the World by Michael Parker

Bookmarks are still living in the middle of:

Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens
The Vagabond by Colette
Let the Great World Spin by Colm McCann
The Grief of Others by Leah Hager Cohen

Reviews posted this week:

Book Lust to Go by Nancy Pearl
Little Black Dress by Susan McBride

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

The Silver Boat by Luanne Rice
Twelve by Twelve by William Powers
Amaryllis in Blueberry by Christina Meldrum
The Wedding Cake War by Lynna Banning
Dance Lessons by Aine Greaney
Blood, Bones, and Butter by Gabrielle Hamilton
The Paperbark Shoe by Goldie Goldbloom
Someone Will Be With You Shortly by Lisa Kogan
The Art of Saying Goodbye by Ellyn Bache
When the Killing's Done by T.C. Boyle
The First Husband by Laura Dave
Joy for Beginners by Erica Bauermeister
The Mystery of the Third Lucretia by Susan Runholt
Next by James Hynes
Spanish Holiday by Kate Cann
The Little Woman Letters by Gabrielle Donnelly
Left Neglected by Lisa Genova
To Be Sung Underwater by Tom McNeal
Silver Sparrow by Tayari Jones
The Oracle of Stamboul by Michael David Lukas
Baby Don't Go by Susan Andersen
The Summer Without Men by Siri Hustvedt
Unsaid by Neil Abramson
The Soldier's Wife by Margaret Leroy
Harvest by Catherine Landis
The Sweetness of Tears by Nafisa Haji
The Dry Grass of August by Anna Jean Mayhew
Birds of Paradise by Diana Abu-Jaber
Don't Kill the Birthday Girl by Sandra Beasley
The Evil B. B. Chow and Other Stories by Steve Almond
Withering Tights by Louise Rennison
Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight by Alexandra Fuller
True Love and Other Disasters by Rachel Gibson
The Winters in Bloom by Lisa Tucker
The Embers by Hyatt Bass
Valeria's Last Stand by Marc Fitten
The Watery Part of the World by Michael Parker

Monday Mailbox

2011-09-12T00:42:00.000-07:00

As I slowly work back into my regular life again (and yes, it is a wildly slow transition for me), books have started to trickle in again as well. This past week's mailbox arrival:

The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach came from Little, Borwn and Company..
I was never so happy as when both of my boys decided that baseball wasn't for them anymore because I find watching it akin to watching the grass grow. So go figure that a book with baseball at its very core would intrigue me so much but this novel does just that.

Fiction Ruined My Family by Jeanne Darst came from Riverhead Books..
The memoir of a woman who emulated her alcoholic mother and writer father before finally having the courage to become herself despite her inheritance, this sounds totally entrancing.

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

Review: Little Black Dress by Susan McBride

2011-09-07T04:19:00.000-07:00

Just about everyone has one hanging in her closet, a little black dress that is. They are the workhorses of the female wardrobe, generally flattering and appropriate for almost any occasion. But what if your little black dress was capable of giving you visions of your future, not a possible future but the fated, unchangeable future? You'd have the dress in this appealing, charmed novel.

Toni Ashton is certain that her cautious accountant boyfriend is about to propose and this wedding and events consultant is going to finally get to plan her own wedding instead of other peoples'. Instead, she gets a phone call telling her that her mother has had a stroke and is in a medically induced coma. She rushes home, not ready to lose her mother, despite the two of them having had a difficult relationship for quite a while. Once home Toni must face her feelings about the relationships in her life, the secrets of her family's past, and figure out why her mother was up in the attic wearing a little black dress so early in the morning when she had her stroke.

Narrated in alternating chapters by Toni and her comatose mother Evie, the tale also flips between the present and the past that led up to Evie and her sister Anna's estrangement, which is at the crux of the entire novel. Toni has no access to Evie's tale and so she must uncover answers herself. Meanwhile, Evie remembers the day that Anna bought the little black dress and the havoc it wreaked in their lives, causing Anna to run out on her elaborate, much anticipated wedding the night before the ceremony and devastating her family in the process. The chain of events leading from that moment onward seems fated and almost driven by the visions that the little black dress gave Anna and then Evie in turn. And now Toni, home and looking for answers, will inadvertantly try on the dress as well and discover the magic in it.

The tale is whimsical although quite predictable and the source of the dress and its magic is a plot point that is quickly abandoned in favor of the family drama. The characters are generally likable although the obviousness of one particular plot twist will leave the reader wondering if Toni is particularly thick since she never does seem to cotton on. It is slightly strange to have a comatose woman narrating the back story so that the reader will understand far more than Toni does but if you ignore Evie's current circumstances, it does work. The narrative pace is generally steady until the ending, which is a bit rushed and has all ends neatly tied up.

A novel of regrets, forgiveness, family, and coming home, this quick read enlivened by the hint of magical in the fateful little black dress was a pleasing way to spend a day. And while I don't know that I'd want to unleash the sort of chaos that ensued as a result of the titular little black dress, I might like a glimpse or two here or there or my own future when I next slip into my own little black dress.

For more information about Susan McBride and the book visit her webpage.

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

Waiting on Wednesday

2011-09-07T00:30:00.000-07:00

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

For me, I can't wait to read: Running Away to Home by Jennifer Wilson. The book is being released by Riverhead Hardcover on October 11, 2011.

Amazon says this about the book: Jennifer Wilson, her architect husband, and their two kids lived the typical soccer-and-ballet practice life in the most middle-American of places: Des Moines, Iowa. They overindulged themselves and their kids, and as a family they were losing each other in the rush of work, school, and activities. One day, Jen and her husband looked at each other - both holding their Starbucks as they headed out to their SUV parked in the center lot while the kids complained that the store didn't have their favorite soda - and asked themselves: "Is this the American dream? Because if it is, it sort of sucks." Jim and Jen had always dreamed of taking a family sabbatical in another country, so when they lost half their savings in the stock-market crash, it seemed like just a crazy enough time to do it. The family packed up and left the troubled landscape of contemporary America for the Croatian mountain village of Mrkopalj: land of Jennifer's ancestors. It was a village that seemed hermetically sealed for the last 100 years, with a population of 800 (mostly drunken) residents and a herd of sheep milling around the post office. For several months, they lived like locals, from milking the neighbor's cows to desperately seeking the village recipe for bootleg liquor. As the Wilson Hoff family struggled to stay sane (and warm), what they found was much deeper and bigger than themselves.

Safe From the Sea out in paperback!

2011-09-06T04:10:00.000-07:00

I read this book last year and I still mention it with unbridled enthusiasm whenever someone asks me for a book recommendation. It is a truly magnificent book and it's out now, this very day, in paperback. So if you were waiting to read it, you have no excuse as you can do it less expensively than ever. If the fact that I'm still talking about it more than a year later doesn't convince you, here are a few excerpts from my review of it: "Geye's writing in this first novel is superb and even sublime" and "Everything about the novel was captivating to me, from the father-son dynamics to the running of the freighters. And the theme of events, certainly catastrophic events but also simple ones, that forever change lives and relationships is monumental and artfully handled. I can't say it enough: read this book and revel in its beauty." Want my whole review? Read it here. I'm not the only one saying this stuff though. Newspaper reviewers loved it. Bloggers raved about it. Industry publications enthused over it. It won the 2010 Indie Lit Award for literary fiction. Simply said, it's gorgeous and you need to read it. Go! Now! You can thank me later.

Review: Book Lust to Go by Nancy Pearl

2011-09-05T15:44:00.000-07:00

My husband saw me reading this latest collection of book lists by Nancy Pearl with a pen in my hand and he just shook his head and groaned. The implication of course, was that I needed a book of book lists like I need a hole in my head. Of course, he's not far wrong either but I do enjoy reading other people's recommendations. And Nancy Pearl, probably the most famous (former) librarian out there is a fount of these recommendations.

In this, her fourth book (following two general books and one for YA and kid's books), she chooses to focus on books set in or about very specific places on our planet. Chapters are based on the country or city being highlighted and as such the book is perfect for travelers who like to read about the country or city which they intend to visit to get a better sense of it. The lists include travel narrative, fiction, and authors native to the place (although they may not live there currently). Certain sections of the book are more packed with recommendations than others, especially when there's a paucity of works in English translation from which to choose. And as in her previous books, Pearl suggests both current and out of print books that might be available at your local library.

What I noticed as I read along in this particular book is how very many mysteries Pearl recommends. Obviously this is a genre she enjoys and with which she is familiar but as I am not a mystery reader, I found the number of these suggestions a bit excessive. Purely a taste thing. Also, I enjoyed those sections where Pearl annotated the titles a bit rather than just mentioning the title and author and moving on. I like to have some sense of the general premise of the book and am more inclined to look for more information if I have that than if I just read the title in an unenlightening list of books set in, say, East Tumble Bumble. But these are minor quibbles and as mentioned above, I read with a pen in hand and came away from the book as a whole with quite a substantial list of books I intend to further research and possibly add to my ever expanding library. Plus, now I have an easy way to find a vacation-set book before my next trip.

It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

2011-09-05T05:02:00.000-07:00

This meme is hosted by Sheila at Book Journey.

Books I completed this past week are:

Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness by Alexandra Fuller
Just My Type by Simon Garfield
Anthropology of an American Girl by Hilary Thayer Hamann
The Winters in Bloom by Lisa Tucker

Bookmarks are still living in the middle of:

Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens
The Vagabond by Colette
Let the Great World Spin by Colm McCann
Little Black Dress by Susan McBride

Reviews posted this week:

You Know When the Men Are Gone by Siobhan Fallon
False Colours by Georgette Heyer
Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness by Alexandra Fuller
Just My Type by Simon Garfield
Corked by Kathryn Borel

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

The Silver Boat by Luanne Rice
Twelve by Twelve by William Powers
Amaryllis in Blueberry by Christina Meldrum
The Wedding Cake War by Lynna Banning
Dance Lessons by Aine Greaney
Blood, Bones, and Butter by Gabrielle Hamilton
The Paperbark Shoe by Goldie Goldbloom
Someone Will Be With You Shortly by Lisa Kogan
The Art of Saying Goodbye by Ellyn Bache
When the Killing's Done by T.C. Boyle
The First Husband by Laura Dave
Joy for Beginners by Erica Bauermeister
The Mystery of the Third Lucretia by Susan Runholt
Next by James Hynes
Spanish Holiday by Kate Cann
The Little Woman Letters by Gabrielle Donnelly
Left Neglected by Lisa Genova
To Be Sung Underwater by Tom McNeal
Silver Sparrow by Tayari Jones
The Oracle of Stamboul by Michael David Lukas
Baby Don't Go by Susan Andersen
The Summer Without Men by Siri Hustvedt
Unsaid by Neil Abramson
The Soldier's Wife by Margaret Leroy
Harvest by Catherine Landis
The Sweetness of Tears by Nafisa Haji
The Dry Grass of August by Anna Jean Mayhew
Birds of Paradise by Diana Abu-Jaber
Don't Kill the Birthday Girl by Sandra Beasley
The Evil B. B. Chow and Other Stories by Steve Almond
Withering Tights by Louise Rennison
Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight by Alexandra Fuller
True Love and Other Disasters by Rachel Gibson
The Winters in Bloom by Lisa Tucker

Monday Mailbox

2011-09-05T02:23:00.000-07:00

As I slowly work back into my regular life again (and yes, it is a wildly slow transition for me), books have started to trickle in again as well. This past week's mailbox arrival:

Tantra Goddess by Caroline Muir came from Meryl Zegarek Public relations, Inc..
My husband's eyes about popped out of his head when this one, subtitled A Sexual Awakening arrived. I'm not entirely certain I'm the proper audience for this one, but I guess we'll see.

Catherine the Great by Robert Massie came from Random House..
Massie is a wonderful writer and I have enjoyed his other biographies of Russian tsars and tsarinas. Couple that with the impressive person of Catherine and this should be a fascinating read.

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

Sunday Salon: Borders

2011-09-04T08:47:00.000-07:00

Unless you've been living under a rock, you know that Borders is going out of business, kaput, liquidating, disappearing forever. Other people have written about the effect this bankruptcy will have on the future of bookselling and why this is something to mourn. Their elegies are lovely and many but I'm still going to add my voice to the choir. Losing a bookstore is always a bad thing and you have to feel for the dedicated folks who are losing their jobs. Those feelings did not keep me from heading over to my local Borders (which I did support while it was in business, I might add), list in hand now that books are marked down to 70% off the cover price. I felt a little (okay, a lot) like a vulture picking through the books. The thrill I felt at finding so many on my list was coupled with a slight nausea and sadness over being present at what felt like not just a funeral but an interment. As I scoured the shelves, I saw loads of wonderful books I wanted to pull out and rescue. (This impulse is why I cannot go into pet stores either.) At the very least I wanted to push them into the arms of my fellow vultures.

So I was already in a sort of elegaic mood when one of the women who worked there started trying to rearrange the shelf I was looking at back into some semblence of alphabetical order. It was a futile effort, of course, and I have to admit to feeling a slight irritation that she had to swoop in as I was looking closely at the titles on that particular shelf. But my irritation ebbed away to horror as the innocuous older woman browsing next to me opened fire and took the poor employee to task. Her opening salvo was, "Oh, so it's not just the customers messing up the shelves." Now, had this been accompanied by a chuckle or even a grin, it might have been ignorable but she then segued into a 10 minute complaint/tirade about how several days ago when the books were only 60% off, she had been in and found some shelves that advertised an additional 15% off on top of the 60% and so she had found several books she wanted there. When she took the books to the cash register though, she was not given the full discount, which she was careful to note that she had figured out in her head. Instead of the 69% discount she expected, she was only given 66%. And this went on and on with the poor cornered employee trying very hard not only to get a word in edgewise but to also remain civil. But the grumpy old lady was relentless. After literally 10 minutes of this, she finally closed with, "You shouldn't advertise it if you don't intend to honor it. I figured it out in my head at the register and double checked when I got home and I was right."

I am a little ashamed to admit that I did not step in while the woman was ranting away to remind her that this was a liquidation and therefore bargain basement prices already, the employees had no control over on which shelves the customers might wrongly stash things, that the register made any perceived errors rather then the henpecked woman on whom she was taking out her wrath, and furthermore, that this long-suffering employee was losing her job in two weeks or less and was still treating the nasty woman with far more civility than she deserved. I did, however, tell said employee, once the bitter grouch had walked away, that I was very sorry she'd had to endure that and that she had been far kinder than I would have if I had been in her position. Several other people in the area, also complimented her on her composure and then we all stood and sympathized when she admitted that the liquidation had brought out the worst in people and that the employees had been having to endure some truly terrible behaviour from customers. The things she described, the employees sobbing in the break room, people tossing books to the floor, the arguing over prices, etc. made me want to weep. I always thought book people were generally nice, unassuming folks. Don't get me wrong, I worked in a bookstore myself 15 years ago so I am well aware of the we'll be polite and call them pitfalls of dealing with the public in a retail capacity. And I know that not all book folk are civil and decent. But I somehow had hoped that the majority were. So I am mourning not only the demise of Borders and the uncertainty of all their former employees lives now that they are jobless, but also the loss of my own illusion that I am a member of a generally good tribe. Among the many lessons that the failure of Borders has taught us, take this one away too: step back out of your selfishness and strive to rejoin that kind, good tribe of people. The world needs less of the nastiness and more understanding and compassion, in stores, in your neighborhood, and in all areas of your life.

As for my Borders haul? Well, I walked out of there with 43 new books (only two of which turned out to be duplicates I already own) and saved a record setting $549.01. I might have mortgaged the house in return for so much of their inventory. I'm thrilled to have so many new goodies in my collection but I truly do think I'd rather have a world where Borders didn't fail than have all the books right now.

My reading adventures this week took me to Africa during the Happy Valley era, taught me the history behind type and fonts, pulled me along as a not very appealing young woman finally came of age, and as two very fearful parents confronted the kidnapping of their son by facing the secrets in their pasts. Where have your book travels taken you this week?

Review: Corked by Kathryn Borel

2011-09-02T11:00:00.000-07:00

Kathryn Borel goes off to France on a wine tasting trip with her oenophile father after she has a terrible car accident that has made her cognizant of her dad's mortality. But her sudden revelation about the fleeting nature of life isn't the only thing that she comes face to face with during this tour the breadth of France. She spends quite a lot of her time deconstructing the romantic relationship she's ended just before leaving as well. While she and her father do indeed travel around to different vineyards, this is more a journey to knowing and understanding each other, and at least in Kathryn's case, in understanding herself better. The wine vacation is simply the framework upon which hangs the tales of Kathryn's feelings and relationships.

This memoir is billed as the tale of a wine innocent daughter and her expert father learning about each other as much as about wine and vintners. Truly though, the information about wine and the trip itself is sparse and not terribly satisfying. Instead, the two relationships, between Kathryn and her father and Kathryn and ex-boyfriend Matthew, take center stage. Unfortunately, in the case of the father daughter dynamics, I'm not certain their relationship translated particularly sympathetically to the page. It is easy to see that Kathryn is reduced to childishness when around her domineering father but he is also reduced to a fairly childish caricature in these pages. The by-play between the father and daughter, which I suspect could be funny and entertaining in real life, limps along on the page. Inside jokes are only funny to those in the know and we readers aren't enough in the know here to recognize and appreciate those found here. When the narrative veers to Kathryn's relationship (or former relationship) with Matthew, it feels as if the reader is being dragged out of one story and into another one entirely, one only tangentially related to the original story. Somehow there had to be a way to connect the two threads and then weave them convincingly against the backdrop of Kathryn's life changing accident, but it's done so loosely that it loses what needs to be an effective, tight connection. Ultimately disappointing, this road trip used as therapy memoir might have been cathartic for Borel to write but therapy sessions aren't engrossing reading for anyone other than the subject(s) or therapists in training to read and this doesn't disprove that.

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

Review: Just My Type by Simon Garfield

2011-09-01T03:12:00.000-07:00

Are you one of those people who reads the typeface information in the back of books? Do you look at the individual letters in the words on posters and signs? Do you frequently change out of the default font on your computer because it's not your favorite? If you said yes to any of the above, this is the book for you. If you didn't say yes to any of the above, this book will get you thinking about all of these things and more.

Garfield's very readable history of fonts and typography is fascinating and accessible even to the layman. Main chapters about the development of printing techniques, the evolution of fonts, and the aesthetics of both surround interstitial "fontbreaks" that focus on a story connected to one particular font. The chapters range from examinations of the difficulties with creating new fonts, the politics and meaning that some fonts carry, the issue of intellectual property and piracy, the most used fonts in the world, those that inspire scorn and loathing in the arts world, and the dramas that have occurred when well-known and corporately identifiable fonts have been abandoned in favor of something new.

Garfield explains what makes a font successful and only delves into the technical aspect of design very briefly. When he discusses the differences in letters between fonts, the astute reader will notice that more often than not, that particular letter is printed in the font under discussion (however, it is only that letter so the font change can be hard to notice for a speedy reader). Some differences are miniscule so the backstories on why certain fonts were adopted for specific uses and how they were tested out to ensure effectiveness are definitely interesting.

The anecdotes make this a fun and informative read. I can now say with confidence that I prefer serif to sans serif and am definitely a traditionalist with regards to my fonts. I don't think I have the aesthetics of a font designer though as each time Garfield asserts that anyone who likes a particular font has no taste, I found the font under discussion perfectly acceptable. Ah well, as long as my books are legible and readable, I suppose I can accept almost any font the designer wants to use. In the meantime, I will now be trying to recognize the more common fonts whenever I come across them thanks to Garfield and his quick and quirky book.

For more information about Simon Garfield and the book visit his webpage or follow him on Twitter.

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

Review: Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness by Alexandra Fuller

2011-08-31T04:39:00.000-07:00

Bobo has written another AWFUL BOOK. Huzzah! Huzzah! Now before you think I am condemning this long awaited follow-up prequel/sequel to her memoir Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, you should know that this is in fact how her family refers to her fantastic first book. Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness is a worthy successor to her first critically acclaimed memoir. Knowing I had this book coming up on my list for review, I hurried to read Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight about Fuller's African childhood because I am completely and totally compulsive about reading things in order (and I had owned the first book, unread, for well over a decade). Less obsessed readers do not need to do so though as this tale, centered around Fuller's dramatic and entertaining mother Nicola Fuller, easily stands on its own.

Nicola Fuller grew up in Kenya while Britain was still ascendant on the African continent and her attitudes were shaped by life under a ruling minority. She is a fascinating, expansive, extravagant, over the top personality who shines as the emotional center of this book. With insight from her mother and extensive, casual interviews over cocktails under African sunsets, Fuller tells of her mother's childhood, young adulthood, charmed early life with Fuller's father, and the increasingly dangerous times and tragedies they survived. While this sequel does cover some of the same ground as her first memoir, it adds a whole new dimension to both Tim and Nicola Fuller, painting them more sympathetically than they were previously portrayed. And given the love that shines out from the pages of this book, this portrayal is probably the more accurate.

Woven throughout the tales of her mother's life, are events of great historical significance. These forays into modern African history never come off as dry but instead as shaping the everyday life and tragedies of everyone around them, not excluding the Fullers themselves. Fuller does not whitewash the colonial sympathizing sentiment with which she grew up. She details the atrocities of a war that touched many people she knew and that constrained her own childhood. The acknowledgement that the African continent and the countries on it are complicated is a constant subtext. Nicola Fuller is also complicated, full of contradictions, and enduring just like the land she so loves.

This memoir/biography is really a love story on many levels: the Fullers' love for Africa, Bobo's love for her mother, and Nicola's and Tim's steady love for each other. It is enchanting and funny, heartbreaking and nostalgic, a tale acknowledging and mourning the past but content to move into the future complete with cocktails served under the tree of forgetfulness (an actual tree on the banana and fish farm where Nicola and Tim live now). A lushly gorgeous rendering of a specific time and place, this was a charming, intimate, and delightful read.

For more information about Alexandra Fuller and the book visit her webpage.

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

Waiting on Wednesday

2011-08-31T03:41:00.000-07:00

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

For me, I can't wait to read: Falling Together by Marisa de los Santos. The book is being released by William Morrow on October 4, 2011.

Amazon says this about the book: What if saying hello to an old friend meant saying good-bye to life as you know it?

It’s been six years since Pen Calloway watched her best friends walk out of her life. And through the birth of her daughter, the death of her father, and the vicissitudes of single motherhood, she has never stopped missing them.

Pen, Cat, and Will met on their first day of college and formed what seemed like a magical and lifelong bond, only to see their friendship break apart amid the realities of adulthood. When, after years of silence, Cat—the bewitching, charismatic center of their group—e-mails Pen and Will with an urgent request to meet at their college reunion, they can’t refuse. But instead of a happy reconciliation, what awaits is a collision of past and present that sends Pen and Will, with Pen’s five-year-old daughter and Cat’s hostile husband in tow, on a journey across the world.

With her trademark wit, vivid prose, and gift for creating authentic, captivating characters, Marisa de los Santos returns with an emotionally resonant novel about our deepest human connections. As Pen and Will struggle to uncover the truth about Cat, they find more than they bargained for: startling truths about who they were before and who they are now. They must confront the reasons their friendship fell apart and discover how—and if—it can ever fall back together.

Thoughts that occurred to me while running this am...

2011-08-30T05:47:00.000-07:00

and one that occurred afterwards because I am a little slow on the uptake.

In the order that the thoughts occurred to me, which is to say, no particular order at all, let me share with you some of the contents of my head during this morning's run.

1. I can't believe I gave up extra sleep time for this! (Either I'm coming down with something or hell has frozen over because I looked at my bed this morning after coming back from kid #3's bus stop and actually chose to go for a run instead of crawling back under the covers.)

2. Huh. I'm not sure these lyrics are the best thing to be hearing mid-run. (The iPod was on shuffle so I'm not sure of the song but the lyrics were something along the lines of "I want to be running when the sand runs out." Yeah, not feeling so metaphorical at that particular moment.)

3. Holy cow buddy! Please don't ever drag your trash to the curb shirtless again. Unless you are in phenomenal shape and a hottie to boot, save even the partial nudity for the privacy of your own house. (And shortly following that, directed to the same guy came another thought.) Just because the jeans are your skinny jeans, does not make them, in fact, *actual* skinny jeans. I have jeans that fit 20 years and 30 pounds ago too but I keep them as a goal, not a current fashion statement. And as far as that goes, skinny jeans on men is not a pretty fashion anyway so best to just avoid the whole look. (Yes, it took me a while to run past this guy's house. I think it was the running equivalent of slowing down in the car to rubberneck. Unfortunately it probably reinforced the guy's image of himself as able to pull off the too small jeans hiding under the tubby gut--and yes I am well aware of the pot calling the kettle black circumstances of that observation but at least my tubby gut was covered and trying to exercise.)

4. What does that guy have in his hand? A golf club? Shit! Maybe I shouldn't run past him. (It's a little disconcerting to be faced with passing a walking man carrying a golf club when you are clearly a chubby, slow, out of shape woman. On the plus side, he was a painfully slow walker if I was sailing past him like I had wings on feet because Apollo I'm not.)

5. Seriously, if you wanted to ban feathers in girls' hair, shouldn't that have been included in the dress code before the school year began and I spent money getting one put in R.'s hair? Not knowing that it would be the fashion is no excuse for you, as principal of a middle school, to declare after the fact that feathers are not okay. It's been a fashion making its way around the country for months now as you would know if you paid any attention whatsoever. (Fly fishermen the country over have been lamenting the rising cost of feathers for their flies as a result of the trend and even I, in my self-imposed news vaccuum--gearing up to avoid all election BS, dontcha know, know that and I'm not paid to deal with 6th-7th-8th graders all day every day. Seriously, how out of touch is the school administration?)

6. Only a few more small hills and then I'm home. Wonder if crawling up them still counts as running? (Self-explanatory, no?)

And the shower thought...

7. Mother effer! (Sweat washing into the paper cut like snicks all across my legs where I had a run in with ornamental grass planted too close to the sidewalk on my walk last night hurts like a son of a beeyotch. And furthermore, lotion after a shower is an even worse idea. Just sayin'. And you're welcome for keeping it close to PG rated since you know there was absolutely zero censoring in my actual thoughts. Hey, it's my own private shower after all. We also won't discuss the fantasy I had about creeping out late at night and taking a weed whacker to the whole damn mound of grass. A girl can dream though.)

Review: False Colours by Georgette Heyer

2011-08-30T00:10:00.000-07:00

I have been reading romances since I was 10 or 12 years old. I fell in love with Jane Austen the first time I opened the pages of Pride and Prejudice. And yet, it wasn’t until recently that I opened, read, and enjoyed my first Georgette Heyer novel, despite the fact that Heyer is widely considered a worthy successor to Austen. But after my first Heyer, I was glad to know I hadn’t yet read much of her works because it meant that I still had that much enjoyment ahead of me. False Colours is the third work I’ve read and although it didn’t entertain me as much as my previous two novels did, it still had the authenticity, attention to detail, and that indefinable something that characterizes Heyer’s works.

Borrowing a successful plot contrivance from great writers before her, False Colours has a masquerade or false identity plot. Kit and Evelyn are twins and as close to physically identical as can be. So when Evelyn is missing on the very eve of a party to introduce him to the family of the woman he hopes to marry, Kit reluctantly gives in to his flighty and charmingly capricious mother’s insistence that he impersonate his elder brother, the Earl of Denville. After all, the masquerade is only to last one evening and only for the purpose of convincing Cressy’s intimidating and opinionated grandmother to give her blessing to their marriage. But Evelyn doesn’t return the following day and despite Kit’s best efforts to remain out of Cressy and her grandmother’s way so that they don’t discover the hoax pulled over on them, his mother agrees to host them at a small house party on Evelyn’s country estate. Kit and Cressy are thrown together with great regularity and start building a happy rapport. Yet Kit cannot tell her his real identity and so things bumble along in an almost Shakespearean comedy sort of way towards the denouement.

While the depiction of the times and social mores is as perfect as ever, the language, even for a reader familiar with much Regency-set fiction, is rife with unfamiliar slang and coloquiallisms. This might not be as large a problem as it is except that the bulk of the book is dialogue between Kit and Lady Denville, robbing the reader of many context clues. Lady Denville, Kit’s mother, as a character, is absurd and cheerily profligate, even in the face of ruin. She is depicted as a doting mother and yet she is unconcerned that her debts, the ones she is doing her utmost to ignore or forget, are going to force her eldest son into a loveless marriage of convenience so that he can end the trust in which his fortune is held. And she is unbothered by the tenuous, rather dicey situation in which she’s placed Kit, the potential heartbreak which it will cause both Kit and Cressy. It’s an inconsistency of character that Heyer doesn’t generally make. The plot is rather more drawn out than it needs to be and it is lacking in the tension that would keep the reader eagerly turning the pages given that both Kit and Lady Denville are spectacularly unconcerned by Evelyn’s prolonged and continued absence. There are moments of humor here but the weakness of the story otherwise overshadows them. This is not a bad book, it just isn’t everything Heyer is capable of and readers unfamiliar with her oeuvre might want to start elsewhere, perhaps with the enchanting caper that is The Grand Sophy (my own personal favorite so far).

Review: You Know When the Men Are Gone by Siobhan Fallon

2011-08-29T07:48:00.000-07:00

Normally short stories are not high on my list of appealing things to read. A few authors have managed to break through my apathy for the form though and after reading this collection of linked short stories, I'm going to add Siobhan Fallon to the list. When we see news coverage of our troops, it generally focuses on the far away places in which they are fighting, the emotional toll it takes on the men and women in uniform, or on the tragedy of their loss. Rarely do we see even a human interest story on the lives of the people they've left behind, the husbands, wives, and children who wait patiently for them on military bases around the country. Fallon's stories offer glimpses into the lives of the families who live a military life even when the men (and women) are gone.

I picked this up one night and absolutely zipped through it. Beautiful and affecting, these tales of life on base after the soldiers are deployed and how they integrate back into their lives and those of their families after such extended absences are timely and well-written. The uniqueness of the army base setting and the challenges faced by our military and their families make this an unusual but important read. Tackling subjects as diverse as infidelity, loss of trust, loneliness, the ever present threat of death or disability, and the petty everyday minutia that takes on a greater significance in light of the dangers facing the husbands in these stories, the collection is unvarnished and honest.

Fallon's prose in unadorned and straightforward and the stories are sometimes stark and unforgiving. The lives of the wives are threaded through with tension and anticipation, sometimes pleasant and other times terrifying. Some of the stories are a little ragged and unfinished but that reflects reality of life on base. There are no real endings, not even when a wife hears the worst, that her husband has died, just the relentless march of life moving onward. A moving look at the enormous range of sacrifices made by our military and their loved ones, this collection is well worth savoring.

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

It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

2011-08-29T05:19:00.000-07:00

Hmph! School supply shopping, the start of school itself, and the resumption of all kid activities has obviously taken a whack at my reading and reviewing as evidenced below. Here's hoping this coming week I'll be able to find a better balance again. This meme is hosted by Sheila at Book Journey.

Books I completed these past several weeks are:

Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight by Alexandra Fuller
True Love and Other Disasters by Rachel Gibson

Bookmarks are still living in the middle of:

Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens
The Vagabond by Colette
Let the Great World Spin by Colm McCann
Anthropology of an American Girl by Hilary Thayer Hamann

Reviews posted this week:

How to Love an American Man by Kristine Gasbarre
The Irresistible Henry House by Lisa Grunwald
From Zero to Mastectomy by Jackie Fox

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

You Know When the Men Are Gone by Siobhan Fallon
The Silver Boat by Luanne Rice
Twelve by Twelve by William Powers
Amaryllis in Blueberry by Christina Meldrum
The Wedding Cake War by Lynna Banning
Dance Lessons by Aine Greaney
Blood, Bones, and Butter by Gabrielle Hamilton
The Paperbark Shoe by Goldie Goldbloom
Someone Will Be With You Shortly by Lisa Kogan
The Art of Saying Goodbye by Ellyn Bache
When the Killing's Done by T.C. Boyle
The First Husband by Laura Dave
Joy for Beginners by Erica Bauermeister
The Mystery of the Third Lucretia by Susan Runholt
Next by James Hynes
Spanish Holiday by Kate Cann
The Little Woman Letters by Gabrielle Donnelly
Left Neglected by Lisa Genova
To Be Sung Underwater by Tom McNeal
Silver Sparrow by Tayari Jones
The Oracle of Stamboul by Michael David Lukas
Baby Don't Go by Susan Andersen
The Summer Without Men by Siri Hustvedt
Unsaid by Neil Abramson
The Soldier's Wife by Margaret Leroy
Harvest by Catherine Landis
The Sweetness of Tears by Nafisa Haji
The Dry Grass of August by Anna Jean Mayhew
Birds of Paradise by Diana Abu-Jaber
Don't Kill the Birthday Girl by Sandra Beasley
The Evil B. B. Chow and Other Stories by Steve Almond
Withering Tights by Louise Rennison
Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight by Alexandra Fuller
True Love and Other Disasters by Rachel Gibson

Monday Mailbox

2011-08-29T04:37:00.000-07:00

I thought for sure I wasn't going to have any more surprises in the mailbox but I was wrong! (Don't tell my kids I was wrong though; I have them convinced that I'm always right. Of course, it helps that they have yet to figure out the proper use of the words right and correct so I'm not really lying.) This past week's mailbox arrival:

Fabulous Finds by J. Lee Drexler and James R. Cohen came from Meryl Zegarek Public relations, Inc..
Stories from a long-time antiques appraiser, this is likely to contain some pretty entertaining tales.

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

Review: From Zero to Mastectomy by Jackie Fox

2011-08-25T01:45:00.000-07:00

When I found an e-mail in my in-box asking me if I would be interested in reviewing this book, my first instinct was to say no. I mean, I like to bury my head in the sand whenever possible so reading a book about one woman's experience hearing the diagnosis of breast cancer and then undergoing treatment went against every molecule of my being. So I did what every self-respecting fan of denial does, I was wishy-washy in my response, punting the decision whether she wanted to send me the book back onto the author. Decisive, that's me. But Ms. Fox didn't give up and the book landed in my mailbox. I placed it on a shelf and eyed it warily for rather a long time. I've finally read it and while I am still hopeful that I can ignore the statistics about breast cancer and women, I am starting to be touched by these terrible numbers in ways I would never wish. First, a friend of mine was recently diagnosed. And now I've found a small lump in my own breast so I suspect I'm headed to my first mammogram (which was coming like a freight train anyway as I'm closing in on a rather significant numbered birthday). Much too close for comfort. And while I imagine that things are fine (I come from lumpy-breasted women who also worry terribly so this won't be posted until after I have more info to allay their fears), it certainly makes the sand my head is currently buried in a lot more translucent than I would like.

Subtitled What I Learned and You Need to Know About Stage Zero Breast Cancer, this memoir tells of Fox's experience from diagnosis through treatment. It also has a final chapter made up of questions and answers from Fox's own team of doctors. Stage zero cancer is DCIS (ductal carcinoma in situ) and while it is the most curable form of breast cancer, it is still cancer and diagnosis with this carries with it all the emotional freight of cancer in other stages. Jackie Fox was not entirely surprised to get the diagnosis but she certainly wasn't ready for it either. And she wasn't ready for the roller coaster ride that she would shortly take both emotionally and physically as a result. This book is the result of her ride and her desire to share her experience with other women. It is, of course, intensely personal and uniquely her own but it has advice and wisdoms universal enough to share.

The short chapters in this book definitely recall the newspaper essays that were the original form of this "mammoir" as they are fairly self-contained. The writing is conversational and Fox directly addresses her readers on many occasions. She offers her experience and her suggestions, making this a sort of hybrid memoir/self-help combination. I personally would have prefered straight memoir and think it would find a bigger audience as such but Fox's stated objective in writing this was not straight memoir and so any perceived failing is on my part. Who knows? Perhaps after my doctor's appointment this week I'll be very grateful for the advisory parts of the book. I sure hope not though! (Edited to add that I wrote this months ago and I can happily keep my head in the sand for a while longer.)

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

Review: The Irresistible Henry House by Lisa Grunwald

2011-08-24T05:07:00.000-07:00

The late 1940's and 1950's evoke proper housewifely images like Barbara Billingsley as June Cleaver, vaccuuming in heels and pearls. Although this was a Hollywood constructed image, achieving a near likeness to it was certainly the plan of the day. And doing so did not come easy. Quite a few colleges across the US offered young women home economics courses to teach them to be good wives and mothers through hands-on experience. The invented midwestern Wilton College in Grunwald's novel is one of those. Main character Henry House, borrowed from a local orphanage, was a "practice baby," intended to be lent to the program for two years of raising by a group of young, enthusiastic women learning to be mothers.

Martha Gaines, the house matron, ran a tight ship and subscribed to the very strict methods of child rearing about to be eclipsed by Dr. Sears' more gentle and loving approach. But Henry, at 6 weeks old, comes to a practice house at a time when babies are still tightly scheduled and cared for but not lavished with love. There is, as the title suggests, something irrestible about this baby and even the bitter, widowed matron comes to love Henry, craving his love in return, eventually lobbying to be allowed to keep Henry and raise him in the practice house as her own son.

As sought after as Henry is (and will continue to be for his entire life), he is emotionally stunted, marked by an inability to make connections with others, and incapable of not only fulfilling the needs of others but also of even wanting another person until or unless she is emotionally inaccessible to him. Being raised by so many mothers who must, of necessity, graduate and move on in their own lives, taught Henry that everything in life is transitory, fleeting. The desperate love of his "mother," matron Martha Gaines, comes too late and too threaded through with untruths about his beginnings for its depth and permanence to have an impact on Henry's emotional life. Being a "practice baby" completely defined Henry.

As he moves from childhood to adulthood, his search to belong somewhere continues through his efforts with his birth mother, his work as an animator at Disney, his move to 1960's London to be a part of The Beatles' The Yellow Submarine, and his eventual homecoming to the States. As he moves through each of these times in his life, he continually reenacts the heady infatuation, easy conquest, and abandonment of his infancy and early childhood. But instead of being the object of this, he inflicts this destructive cycle on the women in his life. And yet, he remains a sympathetic character, if not quite the irresistible one of the title.

The times and places of Henry's life are rendered in vivid and accurate detail. The secondary characters who swirl around him are fully realized, or as fully realized as they ever are to Henry, and human. If some of the plot threads are unfinished and abandonned, it is because that is how Henry, in his emotionally stunted development, leaves them. The story reinforces the idea that early childhood is vital in character formation, acknowledges that nature and nurture both play important roles, and highlights the damage that can be done, even inadvertantly, without love. With a unique and fascinating premise, I thoroughly enjoyed this well written novel.

For more information about Lisa Grunwald and the book visit her webpage or her Facebook page.

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

Waiting on Wednesday

2011-08-24T03:38:00.000-07:00

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

For me, I can't wait to read: Yankee Doodle Dixie by Lisa Patton. The book is being released by Thomas Dunne Books on September 13, 2011.

Amazon says this about the book: Lisa Patton won the hearts of readers last year, her book Whistlin’ Dixie in a Nor’easter became a sleeper-success. Building on a smashing debut, Lisa’s poised to go to the next level—because whether in Vermont snow or in Memphis heat, Dixie heroine Leelee Satterfield is never too far from misadventure, calamity...and ultimately, love.

Having watched her life turn into a nor’easter, 34-year-old Leelee Satterfield is back home in the South, ready to pick back up where she left off. But that’s a task easier said then done…Leelee’s a single mom, still dreaming of the Vermonter who stole her heart, and accompanied by her three best friends who pepper her with advice, nudging and peach daiquiris, Leelee opens another restaurant and learns she has to prove herself yet again. Filled with heart and humor, women’s fiction fans will delight in this novel.

Review: How to Love an American Man by Kristine Gasbarre

2011-08-22T04:49:00.000-07:00

In her late twenties, Kristine Gasbarre has had her fair share of unsuccessful relationships, dating all the wrong men. She decides to spend a year living and nannying in Italy, finding out something about her beloved grandfather's roots there. But then her grandfather dies and Krissy knows that she needs to go home, be with family, and comfort her widowed grandmother. So when her year in Italy is up, she flies home and chooses to move back to her small hometown, moving in with her parents. Wanting to help take on the care of her grandmother, Krissy realizes that her grandmother, happily, contentedly married for almost 60 years, would be the perfect person to help Krissy understand why she herself has not found the lasting love she so craves, to help her understand where all of her former relationships had gone wrong.

Gasbarre's evolving relationship with her grandmother is a satisfying and touching piece of her story. The tightening bond between the young woman and the grandmother who can teach her so much, especially about love, is inspiring. And Krissy's gentle attention to her grandmother benefitted both women so much. For a woman used to being needed, to be widowed and to have no one depending on her after almost 60 years of marriage must be unmooring, especially coupled with early stages of dementia. After a veritable lifetime of a perfect marriage, her grandmother had a store of wisdom that no one else in the family had tapped, so Krissy's desire to understand what had made her grandparents' marriage work happily for so long gave her grandmother a focus and a reason. An incredible love shines between Gasbarre and her grandmother throughout the book, when Krissy was asking for advice, when she was offering solace or alleviating her grandmother's loneliness, and even just when she chose to put her own plans on a back burner to take her grandmother to the doctor or to run errands.

It was this sense of caring for another person, coupled with a healthy respect for self, that Gasbarre's grandmother was trying to teach Krissy was a vital ingredient in any relationship. But Krissy was still learning and another relationship played out under her grandmother's eyes failed. A second love interest, endorsed by her grandmother, holds much more promise. I only hope that Gasbarre's grandmother was correct about Dr. Christopher, the major player in Gasbarre's dating life, and his potential to be "the one" because he comes off, in this memoir, as completely and totally unappealing. Emotionally unavailable and selfish, he is so dedicated to his work (and it is good work indeed) that he cheerfully goes completely radio silent for months, gives with one hand while taking away with the other, and stands Krissy up without showing a single shred of remorse. I just can't find what makes him such an appealing potential partner or believe that tolerating this uncaring behaviour is what her grandmother means when she says that Gasbarre must support her partner in his goals, accept him, and be completely in tune with his feelings and wants. What I saw on the page was just about 100% abnegation of her own wants and needs to a man who feels, at least as he is portrayed here, reluctant at best and unworthy at worst.

I found myself extremely frustrated by all of Gasbarre's dating relationships (including with Dr. Christopher) not because she was going about them incorrectly and not because she was asking her grandmother for advice, but more because she felt so needy in them and because she was so desirous of having what her grandparents had that she was willing to stay in each relationship long past the time that she should have, desperately trying to make them work by subsuming her own worth. Her familial relationships were much more appealing and evenly balanced than any of the relationships she had with men. And her relationship with her grandmother, where they became two equals, even while her grandmother gave her advice, was most satisfying and touching of all. Overall, this slowly moving, introspective memoir was fairly evenly balanced between evoking interest and annoyance in me.

For more information about Kristine Gasbarre and the book visit her webpage, her Facebook page, and follow her on Twitter.

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

It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

2011-08-22T03:04:00.000-07:00

In the midst of trying to get everyone ready for school to start next week, I am still getting some reading and reviewing done. It's probably all that keeps me sane throughout the process!!! Plus, there's a sense of accomplishment at chipping away at the *very* long list of books to review that I have accumulated. This meme is hosted by Sheila at Book Journey.

Books I completed these past several weeks are:

Don't Kill the Birthday Girl by Sandra Beasley
How to Love an American Man by Kristine Gasbarre
The Evil B. B. Chow and Other Stories by Steve Almond
The Irresistible Henry House by Lisa Grunwald
Withering Tights by Louise Rennison

Bookmarks are still living in the middle of:

Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens
The Vagabond by Colette
Let the Great World Spin by Colm McCann
Anthropology of an American Girl by Hilary Thayer Hamann
Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight by Alexandra Fuller

Reviews posted this week:

What Language Is by John McWhorter
West of Here by Jonathon Evison
Let's Take the Long Way Home by Gail Caldwell
The Gap Year by Sarah Bird
Made For You and Me by Caitlin Shetterly

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

You Know When the Men Are Gone by Siobhan Fallon
The Silver Boat by Luanne Rice
Twelve by Twelve by William Powers
Amaryllis in Blueberry by Christina Meldrum
The Wedding Cake War by Lynna Banning
Dance Lessons by Aine Greaney
Blood, Bones, and Butter by Gabrielle Hamilton
The Paperbark Shoe by Goldie Goldbloom
Someone Will Be With You Shortly by Lisa Kogan
The Art of Saying Goodbye by Ellyn Bache
When the Killing's Done by T.C. Boyle
The First Husband by Laura Dave
Joy for Beginners by Erica Bauermeister
The Mystery of the Third Lucretia by Susan Runholt
Next by James Hynes
Spanish Holiday by Kate Cann
The Little Woman Letters by Gabrielle Donnelly
Left Neglected by Lisa Genova
To Be Sung Underwater by Tom McNeal
Silver Sparrow by Tayari Jones
The Oracle of Stamboul by Michael David Lukas
Baby Don't Go by Susan Andersen
The Summer Without Men by Siri Hustvedt
Unsaid by Neil Abramson
The Soldier's Wife by Margaret Leroy
Harvest by Catherine Landis
The Sweetness of Tears by Nafisa Haji
The Dry Grass of August by Anna Jean Mayhew
Birds of Paradise by Diana Abu-Jaber
Don't Kill the Birthday Girl by Sandra Beasley
How to Love an American Man by Kristine Gasbarre
The Evil B. B. Chow and Other Stories by Steve Almond
The Irresistible Henry House by Lisa Grunwald
Withering Tights by Louise Rennison

Monday Mailbox

2011-08-22T00:26:00.000-07:00

Having been gone for so long, I didn't expect anything to land in my mailbox this week, especially since I have only just begun to dig myself out from under the avalanche of e-mail that accumulated while I was gone and haven't yet responded to a single review request! But somehow two books still found their way into my mailbox. This past week's mailbox arrivals:

Surprised by Oxford by Carolyn Weber came from Thomas Nelson.
Set in Oxford, this is a year long memoir about a woman finding religion in a very unlikely place: graduate school.

Jesus, My Father, the CIA, and Me by Ian Morgan Cron came from Thomas Nelson
This one is a spiritual memoir, cycling back through the author's childhood relationship with his father and how that informed his faith.

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

Sunday Salon: Vacation--Adventures in bookstores not my own

2011-08-21T11:38:00.001-07:00

We're finally back from our annual summer holidays and while there are the usual crazy bits to report, that's another e-mail entirely. This year I didn't post about my ditherings over which books to take with me on vacation. I forestalled such problems by taking just about everything I could (and far more than I'd ever read in the allotted time period). And I didn't ask for advice on which books to impose on my ever good-natured book club members for the months of June, July, and August. This year's selections (The Arrivals by Meg Mitchell Moore, Harvest by Catherine Landis, and Kartography by Kamila Shamsie) were mostly well received and I'll get to continue on as Supreme High Dictator and Life-long Book Chooser so that's good. No, instead, I traipsed off northward without soliciting a single bit of reading advice and then spent my weeks away wallowing happily in the books I had around me. But me being me, I couldn't exactly be entirely satisfied with only the 50 or so books with which I had weighted down the back end of the car. I had to make a few scouting expeditions to those rooms of unscoured (by me), unmined potential: local bookstores. And by scouting, I mean going with wallet in hand to support the local economy of this place I love so much and only see once a year. Luckily I also have my book loving kids to help me give the stores the biggest possible financial boost I can.

Safe Harbor Books (which does not look all cozily snow covered like this in the summer) is the little bookstore on the main drag in Cedarville, the town closest to our cottage. I used to spend hours in there talking to my friend K. who ran it but now that she's moved, I don't get in there nearly enough. This year though, my children plowed through and decimated their stock in years gone by's grand tradition. All three kids collected an entire series of books (the Warriors series, The Clique series, and Steve Hamilton's series) to cart back to the cottage and looking at their prodigious stacks, I was fairly restrained, picking up only The English Major by Jim Harrison and The Year of the Boat by Lawrence Cheek. I did feel we needed to leave while there were still books there for other people!

The Village Idiom is the local used bookstore in the next town over and I love the owners. Sadly they are planning on closing up shop so I won't be able to pop in and natter with them on the spur of the moment anymore. R. chose a book while she was there that I figured she wasn't really going to like but never one to say no to a book (unless it is about a licensed tv or movie character), I let her get it and will just add it to my own stacks now that I've turned out to be correct (not that there was ever any doubt). T. bought a few while there too.

And finally, on a day when we had to kill some time in Sault Ste. Marie, I stumbled upon Up North Books and did a fair bit of damage in a short amount of time. The fun thing about a used bookstore this close to the Canadian border is that it has the potential to carry books not generally available in the States. And I found some of these forbidden gems in the brief amount of time I pottered around the store. I collected Not That Kind of Girl by Catherine Alliott, The Secret of Us by Roxanne Henke, Janice Gentle Gets Sexy by Mavis Cheek, Wedding Season by Katie Fforde, Constance by Rosie Thomas, and Mackinac Rhapsody by S. B. Meier.

And no, I did not read a single one of these new purchases this summer, sticking solely to the books I had carted with me. But I fully intend to visit these bookstores again next summer (well, not The Village Idiom unless E. and G. decide to keep it open) and add a few more in. After all, I didn't get to the bookstore on Mackinac Island this year nor did I make it to Petoskey, which has a great bookstore I haven't visited in over a decade. New (and old) bookstores are not my very favorite thing about vacation but they sure are on the list!

Review: Made for You and Me by Caitlin Shetterly

2011-08-21T05:43:00.000-07:00

No matter what the news pundits and financial experts say, the state of the economy is best understood from the inside, from a personal perspective. How is your individual family weathering the economic mess? How are your friends? How are the businesses in your community doing? Do you too have to cut up your beloved Borders discount card because it is no longer viable? Caitlin Shetterly set out to personalize the financial crisis facing so many people, sharing her own family's slow, painful descent into debt and the lifestyle change and lessons learned as a result.

Shetterly and her husband were young and newly married when they packed up all of their belongings and their pets and headed to the west coast to follow their dreams and escape life already teetering on the edge of financial struggle in Maine. But one year out in California and the reality of the dream is inescapable and unfortunately untenable. And so the couple, beyond broke, having unexpectedly welcomed a baby into their family and lost a beloved pet, starts off on the long road home to the only safety net they know, to move in with Caitlin's mother. Having already chronicled their journey and the revelations that it inspires for NPR's Weekend Edition, Shetterly expands on that experience here in her book.

In some ways it feels unkind to say that I didn't much like Shetterly since she is not a fictional character in a book but instead a real flesh and blood person. But she has chosen a particular way to represent herself here in this memoir and I found it hard to like this representation. The story is repetitive and Shetterly seems unduly whiny, especially for someone who has quite a few more resources than the average joe who really is losing his or her shirt in this recession. Her losses, and they are many and potentially crushing, do grant her some perspective on our culture of excess and the need for connection among family and community but rather than count the blessings that she can still see, she bemoans everything that the country has done and is doing wrong and that led to her small family's failure. I found myself irritated more than moved by Shetterly's narrative. Perhaps the lack of personal accountability on the pages fueled my reaction more than the story itself. According to reviews elsewhere, most people disagree with me and find this moving and heartfelt. I had more of a visceral reaction to the scene in 1997's movie My Fellow Americans with the former presidents and the homeless family who had invited them into their station wagon. Obviously this was just not the book for me.

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

Review: The Gap Year by Sarah Bird

2011-08-19T01:52:00.000-07:00

Something changes in kids during the final year of high school before they go off to college or take a gap year, marking the start of their adult lives. Perhaps these (unintentional) changes are a way of making the break that they must make an easier one. I know that my mom was not ready to have me leave for college until she endured my senior year in high school, certain that I had morphed into a terror. (And let me note for the record that I was overall a very good and easy kid compared to many.) I do not look forward to my own children, who grow ever closer to this age, doing the same shutting-out and shutting-down that I did and that is so stereotypical of 17-18 year old kids. Yet I happily chose to read a book about just this situation. Perhaps you could call it being forewarned and forearmed. Or maybe it will be, as the main character explains at one point, my "at least," as in "at least my kid isn't like that."

Cam Lightsey is a single mom who works as a lactation consultant. She has been raising daughter Aubrey alone since her ex, Martin, an attorney, left her to join a Scientology-like cult called Next! where he protects high profile Hollywood Nextarians. Aubrey was only two when Martin left and has no memories of him but she's now having conversations with him on Facebook behind her mother's back. While Cam ignores Aubrey's growing apathy to college, Aubrey is making her own plans for her future, ones that include her boyfriend, the high school football star, Tyler Moldenhauer. The disconnect between this mother and daughter, who were once so close, silently grows.

Narrated by both Cam and by Aubrey, the timelines of their narration are completely different. Cam tells of the present, the summer after Aubrey's graduation, as alone, she buys all of the things that she imagines Aubrey will need once she boards that plane for college. Aubrey, meanwhile narrates the fall prior to this post-high school summer, when she gives up band and falls for Tyler, and in the process drastically changes who she's always been. In each of their narratives, it is possible to see all the places that things have gone wrong between mother and daughter.

Cam wonders if Aubrey's life would have taken the path that she, Cam, wanted had Martin been present in their lives or if they had not moved to the suburbs to send Aubrey to better schools or even if she had just insisted that Aubrey see a doctor after suffering heat exhuastion at band boot camp. Bird has done a fanastic job of capturing the insecurities of a mother second-guessing herself, only wanting her daughter to succeed and to have the life that Cam has sacrificed so much to provide. That Aubrey wants a different life is what Cam is having such a difficult time seeing and accepting with grace.

Aubrey, who was once so open with her mother, retreated, withheld, and turned sullen her final year in school seemingly inexplicably and so Cam blames this transformation on boyfriend Tyler. In fact, Aubrey's narration shows that her withdrawal from her mother is simply a growing up and growing into adulthood. The only way that she feels that she can do that is by becoming secretive and breaking the bond she and Cam have shared for so long. This is, of course, not the only route to adulthood, but it is such a common one because the self-centeredness of teens makes them believe that their parent(s) will accept their self-sufficiency, personal choices, and change no other way. Again, Bird has captured this beautifully.

While the main narrative about the growing, yawning gap between Cam and Aubrey is very well done, the secondary characters are little more than shadows. Even Aubrey's boyfriend Tyler, whose revelations to Aubrey about his past are seminal to the story, is little more than a place holder. Cam's ex and Aubrey's father never quite develops beyond the wishy-washy picture-less Facebook writer, certainly not to the point that it is understandable why Cam still carries a torch for him all these years after his abandonment. But these characters are truly secondary to the main thrust of the novel, which Bird does get right.

A very readable, enjoyable novel about communication, misunderstanding, letting go, and growing up, this would be a perfect book for those taking a child off to school for the first time. A reminder that our children's lives are not our own and that they will forge their own path as adults, this is funny, heatbreaking, and poignant in equal measure. Sarah Bird has delivered a bittersweet page-turner that will leave you sympathizing with both Cam and Aubrey as they each face a new chapter in life.

The Gap Year is featured in Good Housekeeping's Summer Beach Reads 2011 and on Yahoo's 10 Best Books for Summer.

For more information about Sarah Bird and the book visit her webpage, her Facebook page, and follow her on Twitter.

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

Review: Let's Take the Long Way Home by Gail Caldwell

2011-08-18T01:48:00.000-07:00

Gail Caldwell met fellow author Caroline Knapp through their mutual dog trainer and the two of them soon discovered that they were, in Anne of Green Gables parlance, kindred spirits. Their relationship wasn't just friendship, it defined the concept of best friend, that rare and precious ideal. This gorgeous and loving memoir is a tribute to that friendship and the terrible loss of it when Knapp, still so young, died of cancer.

Both Caldwell and Knapp were, as many writers are, solitary souls but each became for the other, a bright and safe light in the world of connection. They shared their hopes and dreams through the prism of everything they had in common--not just the writing but also their battles against alcoholism, their love of dogs, and their focus in life. Knapp taught Caldwell to scull and the two of them spent hours on the Charles River rowing together and going their own way. And this is perhaps an apt metaphor for their relationship. Each woman taught the other, they worked together, and they freely gave each other the space to go it alone, celebrating each others' individuality even as they pursued similar goals.

There are brief dips into both Caldwell and Knapp's pasts and the memoir isn't strictly chronological. It is more a free flowing meditation that captures something deeply precious and sadly ephemeral unconstrained by the mundane sense of time as a line. It is a record of Caldwell's heart laid bare for the reader, her gift to everyone who has missed out on knowing the amazing person who was her friend. It is grief-filled and poignantly accurate about the sucker punch that is loss. But ultimately it is a magnificent and beautifully written memoir that captures and records the friendship that is too special to let fade away with Knapp's death.

Gail Caldwell is the former chief book critic for The Boston Globe, where she was a staff writer and critic for more than twenty years. In 2001, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. She is also the author of A Strong West Wind, a memoir of her native Texas. Caldwell lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. (from the Random House site)

This review is a part of TLC Book Tours but the copy of the book was purchased by me.

Review: West of Here by Jonathan Evison

2011-08-17T13:47:00.000-07:00

This is a big book. It's not just long, it has very big, discussable ideas underpinning the text: environmental impact, Native Rights, the West as a place for reinvention, etc. It's a saga. It's also a big deal, generating a lot of buzz in the industry. And like so many other books in similar positions, it fell short for me.

I had a college geology professor who often said that he thought the word dam should always be a four letter word and it appears that this is eminently true here in this novel. Two competing storylines set 100 years apart but in the same Washington State town, this is the tale of the Elwha River Dam's construction and 100 years on, about the drive to tear it down. The characters in the present day narrative are mainly descendants of the historical characters but all of them seem fairly cliched. There's the Native American who has visions; the early feminist, strident and brash; her idealistic lover turned capitalist; the lesbian park ranger environmentalist type; the ex-con awol from his parole officer; the off-kilter, possibly crazy, Bigfoot sighter; the forge-ahead-at-all-costs adventurer; the ironically moral prostitute; and the list goes on. The characters sometimes cross paths and other times are only fellow inhabitants of the muddy little pioneer town that simply grows into a more modern version of itself after the advent of the dam. Flipping back and forth in time just as the reader becomes accustomed to one time period, the juxtaposition of the other time period is jarring and breaks the flow of the novel.

With an enormous cast of characters and more than enough plotlines to accomodate all of them, the novel was definitely ambitious. Unfortunately the two disparate narratives never came together satisfactorily for me. Ultimately I was just relieved to be finished. The overwhelming hype surrounding the book didn't help but mainly by the end, I was too battered by the effort needed to get through the book to care much about it or any of the issues it should have raised. Others have found this to be a huge and wonderfully enveloping epic. I did not but may it be that way for you if you crack it open.

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

Waiting on Wednesday

2011-08-17T00:26:00.000-07:00

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

For me, I can't wait to read: Fiction Ruined My Family by Jeanne Darst. The book is being released by Riverhead Hardcover on September 29, 2011.

Amazon says this about the book: The youngest of four daughters in an old, celebrated St. Louis family of prominent journalists and politicians on one side, debutante balls and equestrian trophies on the other, Jeanne Darst grew up hearing stories of past grandeur. And as a young girl, the message she internalized was clear: while things might be a bit tight for us right now, it's only temporary. Soon her father would sell the Great American Novel and reclaim the family's former glory.

The family uproots and moves from St. Louis to New York. Jeanne's father writes one novel, and then another, which don't find publishers. This, combined with her mother's burgeoning alcoholism -- nightly booze- fueled weepathons reminiscing about her fancy childhood -- lead to financial disaster and divorce. And as Jeanne becomes an adult, she is horrified to discover that she is not only a drinker like her mother, but a writer like her father.

At first, and for years, she embraces both - living in an apartment with no bathroom, stealing food from her babysitting gigs, and raising rent money by riding the subway topless, or performing her one woman show in her living room. Until gradually, she realizes that this life has not been thrust on her in some handing-down-of-the-writing-mantle-way. She has chosen it; and until she can stop putting drinking and writing ahead of everything else, it's a questionable choice. She writes, "For a long time I was worried about becoming my father. Then I was worried about becoming my mother. Now I was worried about becoming myself."

Ultimately, Jeanne sets out to discover if a person can have the writing without the ruin, if it's possible to be both sober and creative, ambitious and happy, a professional author and a parent.

Filled with brilliantly flawed, idiosyncratic characters and punctuated by Darst's irreverent eye for absurdity, Fiction Ruined My Family is a lovingly told, wickedly funny portrait of an unconventional life.

Review: What Language Is by John McWhorter

2011-08-16T02:29:00.000-07:00

I do love words. My kids roll their eyes at me when I explain that I knew that Spanish word without ever taking Spanish because its English equivalent is a Spanish cognate. They are less than impressed when I tell them that the Russian and French words for store (I took both languages in high school eons ago) are also cognates. Obviously the English portion of the SAT will prove more challenging for them, mathematically inclined as they are, than it did for their word-nerd mom. For Pete's sake, I actually felt a sense of loss when the Oxford comma was phased out (and I will likely use them forever anyway). So a book about language, simple and complex, static and evolving, spoken by millions and spoken by only a few, was particularly suited to my interests.

McWhorter's primary argument is that language is changing and orally driven no matter the complexity of the grammar or the polyglot that created it. He offers examples of the ways in which language accretes new words, new grammatical structures, and how it evolves over long spans of time, branching (or merging) into discreet but related languages. He discusses the theory of adult learners causing extreme simplifications in languages in the time before language was written down.

McWhorter argues that language cannot be constrained by the prescriptives inherent in written language because writing as a development is too new but he is entirely comfortable insisting not only that language is fluid and ever changing but that new languages are currently developing in fact. An interesting inconsistency to be sure. I have to admit that I tend to lean a bit more toward a prescriptive view of language than he does as I see no problem in codifying language, articulating rules (as much as they can be articulated and despite my tendency to flout them willy-nilly), and accepting that the advent of writing is changing and lessening the fluidity of language just as people's movements changed language in the past before writing. It's a bit disingenuous to discount or dismiss the impact of the printing press because of its relative newness. I am, of course, coming at this not as a trained linguist but simply as someone who enjoys language, its evolution, its quirks, and yes, even (especially?) its rules.

McWhorter's viewpoint and mine are oftentimes at odds and I found myself shaking my head at his conclusions but I will say that his writing is very accessible, despite the sometimes highly specialized nature of the content. I loved his footnotes, breezy, casual, and witty. But his central metaphor about looking at language, like looking at underwater life from on shore, not noting things as they are and applauding the changes, is one that just doesn't hold up well. Underwater life may be changing but everywhere I've been diving or even just paddling about, the efforts are focused on conservation, not on allowing change to forge ahead unfettered to the detriment of the larger ecosystem. Despite our obviously differing viewpoints on language and the importance of abiding by the rules codified (and admittedly changed) since Gutenberg, McWhorter challenged me to think about why I feel the way I do about language and furthered my understanding of the unpredictable ways in which language drifts.

For more information about John McWhorter and the book visit the publisher's page about the book.

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

Monday Mailbox

2011-08-15T10:07:00.000-07:00

Coming home from an extended vacation always means there will be delightful surprises waiting for me. And opening these packages beats putting away clothes and doing laundry by a longshot! This past several week's mailbox arrivals:

Angelina's Bachelors by Brian O'Reilly came from Gallery Books.
I've already reviewed this one here.

Domestic Violets by Matthew Norman came from Harper Perennial thanks to Trish at TLC Book Tours.
I've already reviewed this one here

The Winters in Bloom by Lisa Tucker came from Atria Books.
Like all of Tucker's book descriptions, this one of a much beloved husband and father disappearing from his backyard triggering his wife and son to examine the secrets they each hold and how those might hold the keys to his disappearance pulls me in easily.

How to Love an American Man by Kristine Gasbarre came from Harper thanks to Trish at TLC Book Tours.
A memoir about opening up and learning to love through the lessons of her newly widowed grandmother, I am very excited about this one.

The Grief of Others by Leah Hager Cohen came from Riverhead Books thanks to Trish at TLC Book Tours.
How the death of a newborn impacts a family and changes relationships, I fully expect to weep and ache reading this one.

Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness by Alexandra Fuller came from The Penguin Press thanks to Trish at TLC Book Tours.
Fuller's mother's story, this will be a wonderful addition to Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight and I am definitely looking forward to it.

Little Black Dress by Susan McBride came from Harper thanks to Trish at TLC Book Tours.
Looking so classic with a black dress and a strand of pearls on the cover, the hint of magic in a dress that offers two sisters a peek into the unavoidable future, this looks delicious.

When She Woke by Hillary Jordan came from Algonquin.
A dystopian sort of Scarlet Letter, this one promises to be incredibly different and completely disturbing.

The Taste of Salt by Martha Southgate came from Algonquin Paperbacks.
A family haunted by addiction, the successful daughter who thought she had escaped them, and an affinity with water make this very appealing to me.

Maman's Homesick Pie by Donia Bijan came from Algonquin.
A chef memoir with the added benefit of Persian recipes, this is just the kind of book I gravitate to every time.

Pretty by Jillian Lauren came from Plume.
A self-destructive woman who must battle her demons and find something to believe in to stay on the rails, this sounds like it will be incredibly intense.

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

It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

2011-08-15T06:08:00.001-07:00

I've been gone for 6 weeks. First there was a little time in Florida for my daughter's dance competition and then 5 weeks enjoying myself at our family cottage up north. The beauty of the place is at least partly in that it is a place that requires old fashioned entertainment. We didn't even have a phone or electricity until the late 90's. We do now have both but that hasn't changed things too terribly much. Tv is still limited almost exclusively to videos since the three channels we do get (no cable) come in with varying degrees of snow on the screen. There is cellphone coverage if you walk to the very end of the dock, stand on your head and wrap your left leg around your right shoulder while leaning to the west. OK, not really but truly there is only sporadic cell phone coverage. And there certainly is no internet access back in our solitary little bay. What this means for my weeks away is loads of time to sink into reading, lots of books finished, and very few reviews written. But it is the place I love the most in the world so getting a littel behind (a lot) in reviewing is a small price to pay. Please try not to gasp, snicker, or otherwise show any reaction to the now enormous list of books awaiting review! This meme is hosted by Sheila at Book Journey.

Books I completed these past several weeks are:

A Good Hard Look by Ann Napolitano
The Little Woman Letters by Gabrielle Donnelly
French Lessons by Ellen Sussman
Left Neglected by Lisa Genova
To Be Sung Underwater by Tom McNeal
Silver Sparrow by Tayari Jones
The Oracle of Stamboul by Michael David Lukas
Baby Don't Go by Susan Andersen
The Summer Without Men by Siri Hustvedt
Unsaid by Neil Abramson
The Soldier's Wife by Margaret Leroy
Harvest by Catherine Landis
The Sweetness of Tears by Nafisa Haji
The Dry Grass of August by Anna Jean Mayhew
What Language Is by John McWhorter
The Rules of the Tunnel by Ned Zeman
Angelina's Bachelors by Brian O'Reilly
Domestic Violets by Matthew Norman
Birds of Paradise by Diana Abu-Jaber
Let's Take the Long Road Home by Gail Caldwell
The Gap Year by Sarah Bird

Bookmarks are still living in the middle of:

Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens
The Vagabond by Colette
Let the Great World Spin by Colm McCann
Anthropology of an American Girl by Hilary Thayer Hamann

Reviews posted this week:

A Good Hard Look by Ann Napolitano
French Lessons by Ellen Sussman
The Rules of the Tunnel by Ned Zeman
Domestic Violets by Matthew Norman
Angelina's Bachelors by Brian O'Reilly

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

West of Here by Jonathan Evison
Made For You and Me by Caitlin Shetterly
You Know When the Men Are Gone by Siobhan Fallon
The Silver Boat by Luanne Rice
Twelve by Twelve by William Powers
Amaryllis in Blueberry by Christina Meldrum
The Wedding Cake War by Lynna Banning
Dance Lessons by Aine Greaney
Blood, Bones, and Butter by Gabrielle Hamilton
The Paperbark Shoe by Goldie Goldbloom
Someone Will Be With You Shortly by Lisa Kogan
The Art of Saying Goodbye by Ellyn Bache
When the Killing's Done by T.C. Boyle
The First Husband by Laura Dave
Joy for Beginners by Erica Bauermeister
The Mystery of the Third Lucretia by Susan Runholt
Next by James Hynes
Spanish Holiday by Kate Cann
The Little Woman Letters by Gabrielle Donnelly
Left Neglected by Lisa Genova
To Be Sung Underwater by Tom McNeal
Silver Sparrow by Tayari Jones
The Oracle of Stamboul by Michael David Lukas
Baby Don't Go by Susan Andersen
The Summer Without Men by Siri Hustvedt
Unsaid by Neil Abramson
The Soldier's Wife by Margaret Leroy
Harvest by Catherine Landis
The Sweetness of Tears by Nafisa Haji
The Dry Grass of August by Anna Jean Mayhew
Birds of Paradise by Diana Abu-Jaber
Let's Take the Long Road Home by Gail Caldwell
The Gap Year by Sarah Bird