Review: Alice I Have Been by Melanie Benjamin

When my dad gave eight-year old me a red leather copy of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, I treasured the beautiful book both for its physical appearance and for its fantastical story. As I grew older and visited Wonderland again in a kiddie lit class in college, I learned a bit about the story behind the story. Alice Liddell. The girl for whom Lewis Carroll wrote Alice in Wonderland. The waif in many of the decidedly un-Victorian photographs that Charles Dodgson took. A hint of impropriety. And really that is the sum total of what I knew about "the real Alice" before I started Benjamin's fascinating novelization.

Opening with an aged Alice, immediately after the sale of her original manuscript, reflecting on her life as the inspiration for the famous nursery tale. How it has been tiring to be the object of such speculation. From thence, traveling back in time, Alice narrates her life starting with her early childhood in Oxford where her family was intimately acquainted with mathematics teacher Charles Dodgson. Alice's childhood and relationship with Dodgson are drawn in shimmering, sympathetic detail. The friendship between the adult Dodgson and the child Alice starts off innocently but eventually becomes fraught and captured through innuendo, causing a shiver of distaste, worry, or foreboding to travel down the reader's spine. The break between the Liddells and Dodgson comes without explicitly speculating on the reason behind it but suggesting, as the rumors of the day did, that there was ultimately an inappropriateness to Dodgson's relationship with Alice.

Whatever the cause, Alice Liddell did not forever remain the child Dodgson immortalized but indeed grew up and lived out a life that was certainly not the stuff of fairy tales. Benjamin chronicles Alice's adult life, the disappointments and losses as well as the late dawning realization of love and what it has meant to her to be, her whole life, "that Alice."

Using what is known for certain about Alice's life and adding in reasonable speculation, Benjamin has created a nuanced and beautifully written story. Alice is a sympathetic character. Dodgson comes off as somehow both innocent and lecherous. And the tale as a whole is not only readable but fascinatingly addictive. Having Alice narrate her own life gives a poignancy, bittersweetness, and retrospective feel to the novel as it retains the Victorian sensibility that was likely a cornerstone of the real Alice Liddell's entire life. Beautifully rendered, if you've ever wondered about Lewis Carroll and Alice Liddell, wondered what life was like on this side of the looking glass, this is the book for you.

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

Review: The Lost Dog by Michelle de Kretser

Tom Loxley is a divorced, childless, Jamesian scholar who is stalled at the end of writing his book. He takes his dog to a friend's cabin in the bush in order to find the inspiration to finish but on a long tramp with the dog, the dog runs away and doesn't return. Tom's sometimes frantic and sometimes desultory search for his lost dog then weaves in and out of the other plot threads, flashbacks all: his childhood in India and then Australia, his marriage and its ultimate failure, his sexually frustrated obsession with his artist friend Nelly Zhang, and (the only non-flashback) of his mother's aging diminishment.

There are a wealth of themes weaving throughout the tale. There's that of the immigrant and the outcast; there's familial duty and the inheritance of the past. Loss and redemption as well as desire and denial play their own enormous roles as the story builds to its climax. Despite the small action guiding the story, the search for the dog keeps the reader engaged and slightly tensed wanting an outcome even as Tom's life up until the loss of his dog unfolds slowly and with great deliberation reflecting the alternating hope and futility of the search itself.

The writing here is often times dense and rich in meaning with de Kretser showing her deftness with apt metaphors. Her descriptions are minute and startlingly accurate, a decided strength in a story with such an insubstantial plot driving the tale. If there's a weakness here, it's in the characters. Tom himself is hard to like, aimless and as stuck in his life as the conclusion of his scholarly research. Nelly Zhang is eccentric but stand-offish, even to the reader, exploiting her racial identity when it suits. And the long intervening amounts of text between when hints of mystery and understanding are dropped and when their threads are finally reintroduced into the story can induce a sense of frustration in a reader more accustomed to a straightforward writing style. But even with these considerations, it is clear that de Kretser is an accomplished and stylish writer. In the end, while I found it hard to sympathize or care for any of the characters, I wanted to know what happened to the dog, was impressed by the calibre of the prose, and amazed by the dexterity of keeping all the disparate plots going and ultimately interconnected. I look forward to reading de Kretser's other works.

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

Review: Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakthrough by Ruth Pennebaker

Joanie is nearly fifty, divorced and navigating the work world for the first time in years. Her fifteen year old daughter Caroline is surly, sarcastic, unappreciative, and dealing with all the terrible emotional baggage of being socially awkward in high school. Her ex-husband and his very young girlfriend are expecting a baby, yes the very same ex-husband who left her because he didn't want any commitments. And as if that wasn't enough to deal with, Joanie's mother Ivy has moved in with her now that the recession has depleted almost all of the careful savings she and her late husband had socked away. While Joanie wrestles with feeling like a dinosaur at the advertising agency where she's working and the stress of being a charter member of the sandwich generation, Ivy sinks into depression, feeling as if she's nothing but a burden on the daughter who she never loved quite as much as she loved her son, and Caroline suffers from unrequited love and the feeling of invisibility at school.

Narrated in turns by all three women, Pennebaker has captured three very different life stages with humor and understanding. Joanie, Ivy, and Caroline are facing monumental life changes and so they are perhaps having more than a little trouble focusing on anyone outside of themselves but they are all so interconnected that they must rub along together as best they can. Joanie still harbors anger at the fact that her brother was always the favored child, even now when he has not taken their mother in. Caroline is certain that her mother could never have any conception of how dismal her teenaged existence is so she is as uncommunicative as it is possible to be. Ivy knows that she has undervalued her daughter but can't help wishing that Joanie conformed more to what she, Ivy, wanted. The complex and tangled relationships between the characters show the exasperation, frustration, and (in some cases grudging) love between mothers and daughters, especially those forced by circumstance to live under the same small, too intimate roof.

Each of the characters comes off as a pitch perfect representative of her generation and stage in life. They seem like people we know in our everyday life or hear about from friends discussing their teenager's behaviour or their aging parent's gradual diminishment. Perhaps they are even us. Their myopic blindness about what is most vital in each others' lives is sad but Pennebaker has managed to temper that sadness and inability to see with great moments of humor. This is a quick, satisfying read and while I found the ending to be a bit abrupt, over all it was an entertaining book.

Enjoy the book trailer below:






For more information about Ruth Pennebaker and the book, be sure to visit her website.


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

Review: Lonely by Emily White

Conditions like depression used to be talked about in whispers if at all. There was something shameful about being depressed. Surely it was just something the sufferer could cure him or herself if they put their minds to it. Now we know that this sort of thinking is wrong-headed for depression but we seem to have shifted the stigma to loneliness. And not only have we shifted the stigma but we are reluctant to name loneliness as a chronic condition needing recognition and treatment in some people. After all, we all get lonely, right? So it can't possibly be anything worth researching, spending time and money on understanding. This in-depth memoir by Emily White certainly proves otherwise.

White suffered chronic loneliness for years. She knew all of the platitudes about going out and meeting new people to combat the problem but she just couldn't. Being of an analytical mind, she threw herself into researching the problem of loneliness as a means to understand and perhaps finally combat the hell with which she was living. She found a paucity of information compared to other afflictions and discovered that loneliness was often conflated with depression. But she knew there was more to it and so kept digging. Her very thorough research weaves around, through, and beside her own story of isolation and lack of social connection. She candidly describes her own symptoms as she sank further and further into a state of chronic loneliness, how she compensated in her life, and how ashamed she was of naming her feelings, despite the fact of having watched her mother battle loneliness and therefore knowing she had a genetic predisposition for the condition. White examines the recent rise in loneliness, social factors that exacerbate the problem, and the long-term physical and emotional effects of being socially unconnected. In addition to published articles, she also interviewed volunteers who identified as lonely, using their reports to add weight to the scientific findings and echoing her own struggles.

The concept of chronic loneliness being so debilitating is new to me, more familiar as I am with situational loneliness (loneliness with a root cause in a certain situation like a move or divorce). I found White's struggle with loneliness and the fact that she chose to research it in depth as a partial coping mechanism to be incredibly interesting. The research she presents in the book is comprehensive but it often overwhelms the more personal aspect of the memoir. There was a lot to absorb in the book and that made the reading dense although White is good with words and presents scientific findings in an accessible manner. Although billed as a memoir, it is probably more properly belongs in the psychology or social science section than with the biographies and memoirs as it is heavier on the objective research than it is on memoir. But that's more a classification issue than anything else. Folks looking to read a straight memoir won't find that here but will instead find a book that goes a long way to try and bring this under-examined condition to light and to erase the stigma so prevalent around admitting to lonelinesss. It's not just a personal social problem, it's a debilitating ache that should be given more credence in the mental health profession and indeed society at large.

For more information about Emily White and the book, be sure to visit her website or her blog.



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

Review: Major Pettigrew's Last Stand by Helen Simonson

Billed as a tale of love between two older people, the very properly English Major Pettigrew and the widowed Pakistani-English Mrs. Ali, who owns the local village shop, this marvelous debut novel is indeed a charming love story but it is very multi-dimensional, a delightful story of two people who find they have as many similarities as differences, a complicated look at the invidiousnesss of racism, even that unintentionally practiced, the cost of progress, and the conflicts of family. It is a modern tale of manners told with wit and brilliance.

Opening with Major Pettigrew hearing about his brother's death, we are introduced to the quiet, reserved, eminently traditional Major. As he and Mrs. Ali come to know each other better, the Major understands how little consideration he's given to this nice woman who has made her home in the same village he has for so many years. He must face his own culpability in keeping Mrs. Ali an outsider for so long, especially as he witnesses the deliberate unkindnesses and bigotry displayed by so many around him. He finds in Mrs. Ali a kindred spirit of the sort that his wife Nancy had been for him and he gradually welcomes her into his life and thence into his heart. As their friendship and mutual admiration grows, many other multi-faceted characters parade through the narrative.

The Major's son Roger is a colossal prat, completely self-involved and almost as grasping as the Major's sister-in-law and niece. Roger's fiancee, a loud American turns out to have hidden depths. Abdul Wahid, Mrs. Ali's nephew is dour and studious, a seeming stereotype who learns to bend. The villagers are a mixed batch, with some welcoming the increasing involvement between the Major and Mrs. Ali and others being horrified.

The Major desperately wants to reunite the gun his father left his late brother with his own gun, making them the matched set they once were. He feels an entitlement for it to be so but his desire also reflects his insistence on history and tradition. As he strives to rescue the gun from his brother's widow, who is most concerned with the money possible if the gun is sold, he faces, on a smaller, domestic scale, several issues swirling throughout the novel: the potential loss of heritage and misunderstood intentions.

I loved the characters here and appreciated their dry sarcasm. Although not strictly a humorous book, I did chuckle quite often as I read along. And I appreciated the oblique but completely clear manner of addressing obstacles and beliefs, both positive (stewardship and preservation) and negative (racism and self-absorption). The story was completely satisfying and I am pleased to say that I enjoyed the book as much as the buzz would suggest. A wonderful read.


For more information about Helen Simonson and the book, be sure to visit her website, her Facebook page, and her GoodReads page.



Thanks to Trish from TLC Book Tours for arranging the blog tour and getting me to finally read my copy of this wonderful book.

Review: The Crimson Rooms by Katharine McMahon

I generally don't read anything that has a body or blood in it because I am prone to nightmares, coward that I am. So it is probably completely incongruous that I would cheerfully agree to read a book in which one of the first female lawyers in Britain is helping to defend a man accused of murdering his wife. I am nothing if not inconsistent. Then again, I am up writing this review in the wee hours of the night when I am usually asleep because the image of a pink shoe on a lady's foot poking out of the underbrush has crawled into my brain and horrified me beyond sleep. Tame stuff for afficianados of the scary and gory but disturbing and lasting for babies like me.

Six years after her brother's death in WWI, Londoner Evelyn Gifford opens the door to find a small boy the spitting image of her brother standing with his mother on the stoop. There is no doubt that the child is her brother James' son, conceived just before his death. The household has been in a sort of grieving stasis since the telegram announcing James' death six years ago and the presence of small Edmund and his mum Meredith is about about to change everything. And while Evelyn's family life is undergoing this major upheaval, she is struggling in her professional life and opening up to an opportunity in her personal life as well.

One of the first female lawyers in England, Evelyn is still in training and facing the almost inevitable prejudice of being a trailblazer. Her boss has relegated her to mostly unimportant (and non-paying) clients. When he is out of town, by default she is given the case of a poor mother, a bit too fond of drink, who is accused of having kidnapped her own child. Leah Marchant willingly surrendered her children to a charity home while she tried to get back on her feet but in so doing, she didn't fully understand the consequences of her actions or the potentially terrible complications. In fact, neither did most of society fully understand the possible fates for children like Leah Marchant's. A seemingly insignificant case, it blossoms out of control as Evelyn undertakes to reunite the mother with her children.

Meanwhile, she is also called on to assist at a spectacular murder trial where a former soldier is accused of having shot his new wife in the heart while out picnicking and then cold bloodedly heading to a pub for a few drinks. The evidence against Stephen Wheeler is overwhelming if circumstantial and Evelyn may be the only person who believes his innocence. And proving that innocence could be beyond her capabilities.

As I've already mentioned, the murder storyline left me sleepless over the two nights it took to read the book. This is not because it was difficult to figure out who the killer was though. As a matter of fact, it seemed to me to be glaringly obvious from the first. But as the novel is much more than the mystery, this seems less a handicap than it might.

The obstacles faced by women in the time between the two world wars, as they not only entered the workplace but entered in educated professions which had always been the sole province of men, were enormous. And add to that the lack of rights of women in general during this time and it becomes clear the sorts of odds a character like Evelyn faced. She should have been a wonderfully admirable character but I just couldn't warm to her. She was somehow more insipid than I had expected given her drive to become a lawyer despite general public sentiment. Perhaps this was intended to show her complexity and make her multi-dimensional but it left me without a character with whom to identify. As for Meredith, the mother of James' son and the character who stands as a foil to Evelyn, I didn't care for her either. She was flighty and cruel, fickle, inconsistent, and grasping and I suspect she was not meant to seem that way. Evelyn's budding lust for Nicholas, a man who represents everything she abhors, was a distraction given everything else going on in the novel but his very presence was necessary to the meat of the plot, making for an interesting conundrum: how to include him without the busyness of yet another plot thread.

Given the fact that the novel was certainly out of my comfort zone, I probably zeroed in on things that wouldn't have struck other readers quite as strongly. And as evidenced by my lack of sleep, the detail of the story is quite vivid. The touches of historical information, the reaction and prejudice against the first female lawyers, the shipping of children from English charity homes to Canada where they could be ill-used, the toll the war had on the survivors, both soldier and civilian, all of these were fascinating and woven into the novel well. I just couldn't make a connection with the characters that didn't leave me irritated and so my overall enjoyment was lessened. I do think, however, that mystery readers will enjoy the threads of the story that kept me awake and historical fiction readers will find interesting nuggets scattered throughout this post-WWI set novel.

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

Review: Little Bee by Chris Cleave

The marketing for this book is deliberately evasive on the topic of the plot of this book. The suggestion is that telling too much beyond the fact that something horrific happens on a beach in Nigeria will "spoil" everything for the reader. This kind of self-created hype ratchets up expectations for the book. And my track record with high expectations and the frenzy surrounding the books they are trumpeting as the next best thing to sliced bread is not a good one. I do much better with low key surprises that make me want to shout from the rooftops about a book's understatedness. Obviously that was never going to happen here given the paucity of information about the book itself coupled with the overwhelming number of vague laudatory comments concerning it. And I have to say that I think the secrecy surrounding it does the book a disservice which has no bearing on the actual contents but which affects the reader's experience of the book.

Opening with Little Bee in an immigrant detention center, one in which she's been for several years, this is the story of her experience in Britain after escaping the oil-greed fueled atrocities in her home country of Nigeria. Told with flashbacks to the events that led her to try and seek asylum this is a personalized account but also a sobering look at a massive political problem, one that offers few solutions. Little Bee, whose real name she hides, ever fearful, wants to find Sarah and Andrew, the British couple she met on a Nigerian beach one surreal day and amazingly, she does find Sarah, knocking on the door the very day of Andrew's funeral. In short order, it becomes clear that all of the characters in this novel have been profoundly changed by the senseless and apathetic violence they each witnessed that day by the ocean. Little Bee continues to run, examining every place she lands for ways to kill herself should she need to escape "the men." Andrew was haunted by his inability to sacrifice and ultimately unable to live with his failure. Sarah is numbed and reeling, reaching out for human connection but cannot feel its warm healing. Even Charlie, Sarah and Andrew's young son, as been affected by his parents' unconsidered vacation, donning the persona of Batman in order to save the world as he knows it, not understanding the futility of heroism.

The characters here are clearly delineated. Little Bee is preternaturally wise for her young age, which is perhaps to be expected given her life experiences. Some of the sections she narrates are a little overly self-conscious and over-wrought. Sarah is not as sympathetic a character, her motivations and actions less understandable than Little Bee's. I found Charlie to be a tad annoying and intrusive although certainly the safety of his world (leaving aside his father's death) is meant to contrast with the all-consuming fear rampant in Little Bee's Nigeria. Sarah's lover, Lawrence, while meant to be a voice of caution, seems to have a vested interest in Sarah's continued frozen existence and as such was not a terribly appealing character.

I know other people have raved about this book but I think that the novel itself is overwhelmed by the idea behind the book. It didn't help that I tend not to enjoy having the author or narrator address me, the reader, directly from the text, and that does indeed happen here. That said, the topics of immigration and asylum, our casual Western disregard for or outright denial of the atrocities occuring elsewhere are important and should be held to the light. Would I have raved about this book like so many others had my expectations not been stratospheric? I guess we'll never know. As it is, I liked it well enough but that liking comes with a thin film of disappointment. Most people will find this a revealing and amazing read and book clubs will find much to discuss if they, unlike my book club, are willing to go out on a limb and choose a book in which the entire plotline has remained cloaked and secretive.

In the interest of full disclosure, I bought my own copy of this book and several weeks later, the publisher sent me a copy as well.

Review: Spellbinder by Helen Stringer

Belladonna Johson didn't think that the family gift for seeing ghosts was much of a gift until after her parents died in a car accident. Then it gave her the ability to continue to see and speak to them, living her life just like she had before the accident. But all of a sudden, Belladonna's world, heretofore peopled with ghosts and the living starts to thin out. The ghosts are all disappearing, including her parents, and only the living are left. Her grandmother and aunt are keeping something from her, something she knows is incredibly scary and terribly important. So Belladonna and her mischievous, always in trouble science partner Steve set out to figure out what is going on and how to not only make it stop but to reverse it. Moving between our world and the land of the dead, aided by the ghost of a girl haunting the school, Belladonna and Steve encounter good ghosts, bad ghosts, and supernatural creatures intent on destroying the world. They also discover a hidden, magical world that exists alongside our own.

There is a quest, heroism and all the makings of a modern middle grade myth here. Belladonna is a delightful heroine. Steve is annoying and funny. It is only his delinquency paired with Belladonna's dutiful studiousness that allows them access to the Land of the Dead to try to save the world. The adult characters are thinner than Belladonna and Steve in characterization and their knowledge and motivations are left frustratingly vague. The target age range won't find this terribly scary but they will be taken in by the charm and entertainment herein. While there were a few slow patches and some stereotypical bits including obstructionist adults unwilling to share knowledge with Belladonna, over all this was a fun read and one that would do well as the first in a series.

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

Review: After the Rain by Karen White

Suzanne is simultaneously running from and towards her past when she impulsively gets off a bus in tiny Walton, Georgia. An old locket of her mother's is engraved with a jeweler in Walton's name and it is this that determines her to stay put, at least for a while, in this town so small there's not even a hotel where she can rent a room anonymously. Instead, she ends up renting an old Victorian house and sliding into the life of the town and the people in it. Mayor Joe Warner is a widower with six children whose first impression of Suzanne is not a good one. She doesn't seem to like dogs or children. But despite their rocky start and the fear (Suzanne) and sadness (Joe) in their pasts, they start to forge a connection that even Joe's kids are okay with. Add Joe's re-election campaign and the underhanded dirt bag he's running against, the mystery of Suzanne's mother's locket, and Suzanne's abusive ex to the plot lines and you've rounded out the book.

This is apparently the second book about Walton, Georgia but it stands alone just fine (and I should know, not having read the first). I generally shy away from romances with children in them because the kids take up too much of the storyline and while that wasn't entirely the case here, it did intrude as Suzanne had to develop relationships with at least a couple of Joe's children. I also find that the presence of children in romances tends to cut the sexual tension and that again seems to be the case here. It may be "real world" in its portrayal but since I look to romances for escapism, that doesn't make me a happy reader. While I was reading, the book was fine but in all honesty, I didn't remember much about it once I'd closed the last page. Mostly this is a gentle sort of romance and people who like their stories on the sweet side will appreciate this one more than those who like their stories on the sexy side.

Review: Critical Care by Theresa Brown

Much has been written by and about doctors and their role in hospitals and patients' lives but very little has been written about nurses and the vital role they play. Most people in a hospital see far more of their nurses than they do of their doctors and yet so much focuses on the white-coated, stethoscope wearing MD. Brown remedies this with this memoir of her first year in nursing. Theresa Brown left her job as a college English professor to become an oncology nurse. For her, the jump was to do something more professionally meaningful and her decision to focus on oncology meant that her work was often carried out at the end stages of someone else's life.

The memoir tells of compelling patients and situations during her first year. She speaks of death and being available to her patients' families should they need her. She speaks of learning the commonplace language of the oncology ward. She invites the reader along as she learns the simple procedures she will have to do day in and day out. And she tackles the politics of hospitals, the difference in tone on wards and floors, the personalities of co-workers, good and bad. Her memoir is both personal and universal.

The set-up of the book has the feel of interconnected essays rather than an unbroken narrative but that works with the episodic nature of hospital work and the very different aspects that comprise a job like nursing. This is more a musing on her first year of nursing rather than an expose' of the hard, physical, dirty work that is often left to nurses. Brown mentions these distasteful things in passing but she doesn't go in for a lot of visceral description. Her writing is smooth and easily accessible, as one would expect from a former English professor, and the pages turn quickly. Anyone who has devoured doctors' memoirs will find a different but valuable corollary here in this book. Read it if you like non-fiction medical narratives or you've been touched by the kindness of a nurse or even if you've run across your own personal version of Nurse Ratched. You'll gain a little bit of insight and understanding of all of the above.

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

Review: The Boy Who Loved Tornadoes by Randi Davenport

This is a heartbreaking memoir about a mother who struggles with her developmentally delayed son and finding the best possible doctors, home, and care for her loved boy. Davenport's son Chase has been labelled with a veritable plethora of diagnoses over the years but none of them seems to be comprehensive enough or accurate enough to explain everything that is going on in Chase's world, especially as his symptoms change, weaken, or intensify with all sorts of internal and external stimuli. As this is a memoir, there is no fairy tale ending here, just the uncertainty and sorrow of watching and loving a son who is often unreachable. Davenport swings from the early years when Chase started showing indications that he was delayed to her more recent struggles to find an appropriate facility to house Chase and all the bureaucratic mess involved in holding the state accountable for what they needed to provide for this indefinable boy/man. She delves into the possible genetic connection, hinting that her ex-husband suffered from instabilities and mental health issues that intensified when manifest in Chase. She examines the impact of a child like Chase on a typical sibling, especially when she, as a single parent, must focus so much of her attention on Chase's care leading to guilt over her perceived neglect of Chase's younger sister Haley.

This is a memoir of difficulty and caring, frustration and love, despair and intensity. It is completely raw and unflinchingly emotional. Hard to read because of the freighted content, this is also the story of a mother fighting for what is best for her son, of perseverance and a dogged persistence that has given Chase the chance to live a life as unfettered as it is possible for him to live, not vegetative from drugs, not locked up as if criminal, but cared for and progressing along his own timeline. The writing is stark and precise and weighted by the depth of Davenport's emotion but it is beautiful and terrible and sad all at once.

Review: Venetia Kelly's Traveling Show by Frank Delaney

Perhaps my Irish blood has been too diluted or maybe it has been recalled entirely but I don't seem to enjoy Irish storytelling with all of its attendant divagations as much as I probably should given my heritage. Odd this, given my own propensity for rambling far afield of the topic. But the wandering digressions present in this book, as in so many Irish tales, made for a slow and meandering read for me. Couple this with much information about the political situation in Ireland in the 1930's and, well, I put the book down as often as I picked it up. Of course, the narrator tells us early on that both digressions and frank discussions of politics are deeply woven into the heft of the Irish character. Obviously my own sketchy connection to Ireland, traced back to a single great grandparent, is too small to count anymore since these two things are as scantily represented in my reading as possible. Occasionally I even forget to wear green on St. Patrick's Day for heaven's sake.

Ben MacCarthy is only 18 when his father takes him to see a traveling show. His father is enamoured of the show's headliner, Venetia Kelly, a young woman magnetic, charming, beautiful, and far too young for him but who welcomes the older MacCarthy into the crew of the show that evening, leaving young Ben to go home alone and break the devastating news to his mother. Ben's mother asks the impossible of her only son: to go and bring his father home. And so begins Ben's adventure through the world of vaudeville, dirty politics, and a doomed, incendiary love affair. While Ben grapples with his father's obsession for Venetia, a political charlatan and proponent of Fascism is stealing the family farm from right under Ben's mother's nose. Flipping between the situation with Venetia and that of the farm, Delaney weaves the personal and the political together tightly.

The narrative is being told by Ben many years after the events of the story and includes research about the people involved which he didn't know when he was freshly 18. The form works although it does allow for increased digressions and less of a sense of urgency than would have been likely had his character been telling the story in the thick of the events. There is an large cast of characters as well and the narrative jumps around to follow different people as their impact on the story waxes and wanes. So while it is told in a basically linear fashion, there are all sorts of tendrils creeping away from the central plot line. Ben's character addresses the reader throughout the narrative, making the reader feel as if he or she was sitting listening to a master storyteller beside the fire. And while the scope of the novel is sweeping, Delaney's narrative choice makes if feel smaller and more personal than it might.

As I mentioned above, I personally had some difficulty with the meandering of the tale but many other reviewers found the digressions added immeasurably to their experience. In pulling in so many greater issues, in terms of the politics and the national character of the Irish, I found myself at a remove from the characters which made it hard for me to feel sympathy for them in their situations, even when the most naive and trusting among them were being manipulated. Although the ventriloquist's dummy named Blarney was important symbolically, his inclusion outside the parameters of the show itself was a bit disturbing. Over all, I have to say I was a little disappointed in the book, perhaps less for what I read than for the loss of my expectations. And maybe I should go back and check my Fran's nationality again because I don't seem to have inherited the Irish adoration of theater, politics, and divagation along with my freckles.

Thanks to LibraryThing Early Reviewers for my copy of this book to review.

Review: Dead End Gene Pool by Wendy Burden

When I was small (and angry at my parents) I would fantasize about my "real" parents. They were undoubtedly rich and royal. Well, Wendy Burden never needed to fantasize. Her family may not have been royal, but they were undoubtedly rich. You see, she is a descendant of Cornelius Vanderbilt and she grew up surrounded by rather obscene amounts of money, a child of privilege, apathy, and neglect. Dead End Gene Pool is her memoir of a childhood lived mainly in the company of servants and in the rarified air of the super rich. And having read this book, I am quite certain I'm glad that no royal, rich parents came to claim me from my perfectly happy suburban existence.

Opening with a quick run through of her moneyed family tree, Burden starts with Vanderbilt and hops through the branches down to her own paternal grandparents. Once she settles on the family members she actually knew, she starts in on the crazy, sometimes funny, sometimes terrible life that made up her early life. Her father, suffering from depression, committed suicide when she was just six. Her alcoholic mother, written out of the will for her serial adultery, became a completely absent and neglectful parent. And Burden and her brothers ping-ponged between their mother's empty of supervision home and their wealthy grandparents' servant-filled homes. In neither place did they find the nurturing and love that children need.

Burden chronicles not only the eccentricities of the very rich (when money is no object you can order cars from Europe to be delivered to you that same day or find game that is in season somewhere in the world in order to have it for dinner the following evening or pad your entire bathroom in foam so that when you stumble and fall in your alcoholic and aged haze, you won't bruise yourself), she also lays bare the odd child that she was, obsessed with the Addams family, collecting dead animals to watch the various stages of decomposition, begging for a pony and then creating elaborate and murderous fantasies about Will's demise when it was gifted to her older brother instead of her. She writes about many of her family members as if they were fictional characters, mocking their faults (an overly flatulent grandmother and a misogynistic grandfather), exposing their immorality (Uncle Ham-Uncle Ham's Nazi fetish), and generally skewering all and sundry. In one instance she appears to think that her uncle's obsession with tracts warning against the evils of inherited wealth, which he distributed to the whole family, is laughable but really, it seems that while he may have been a buffoon, at least as Burden represents the family, his tracts weren't off base.

While there were funny anecdotes sprinkled throughout the book, this was ultimately a sad story. The absenteeism, the drug use and abuse, the mental illness, acknowledged or not, and the general lack of love and attention displayed here make it hard to call this a funny book or even one rife with dark humor. I was left with the feeling that the people in Burden's family were unpleasant and distasteful and I wouldn't have wanted to know them myself. She does have a neat turn of phrase here and there and some amount of self-awareness comes through but the narrative itself is often choppy and repetitive. This brief visit into the skeletal closets of the highest of society makes me grateful that I don't live there and it was with an unseemly sense of relief that I closed the book at the last. Although I didn't love the book myself, it is a fascinating peep into a world in which very few people live and those who enjoy the lifestyles of the rich and famous and want to know more about the grit under the facade of the houses and the cars and the possessions will undoubtedly enjoy this book for its insight into the troubled highest echelons of WASP society.

An interesting interview/article about the author in the New York Times can be found here. As a bonus, there's a slide show of rooms in her home, decorated with Vanderbilt and Burden heirlooms.

Also, Ms. Burden will be talking about the book with readers at Books on the Brain, "live" in the comment section for one hour on May 18th, 5 pm PST. Please stop by and say hi if you're able to! More information about this chat session can be found here.

If you'd like more info about Wendy, check out her website.

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

Review: A Rather Lovely Inheritance by C.A. Belmond

American Penny Nichols works as an historical consultant on low budget movies when she gets a call telling her that her great aunt Penelope has died and left behind an inheritance. Thinking it wouldn't amount to much, Penny leaves her current movie and heads to London for the reading of the will. Her good looking cousin Jeremy meets her there and helps her through the surprise of a rather sizeable inheritance as well as helping her to navigate the tricky waters of the British side of the family. It isn't until Penny and Jeremy find their other cousin Rollo trying to steal the car left to Penny (she was gifted with the garage and its contents at great aunt Penelope's French home) that the madcap adventures of the novel really begin. Racing all over Europe to untangle the family tree and to prevent Rollo and his mother from succeeding in getting Jeremy disinherited, Penny and Jeremy uncover all sorts of mysteries about great aunt Penelope, her life, and the sometimes small ways in which World War II affected even those who didn't fight.

The characters are lovely and the plot clips along at a good rate after the reading of the will is over. Belmond does a nice job setting the scene and describing the family dynamics. While nothing tears families apart faster than money, and Rollo and his mother are actively working to have Jeremy disinherited, there is very little of the nastiness that usually surrounds these sorts of fights. And that is quite refreshing! This is a fun and frothy adventure full of light mystery and romance. There is a whiff of times gone by throughout the narrative and a gentility to the characters, even in the midst of heists and swindles. It is the first in a trilogy (at least so far), an amusing read that is delightful entertainment. I will happily be reading books two and three when I want a charming diversion.

Review: Nana by Emile Zola

After I finished school, diploma clutched tightly in my hot little hand, I realized that degree notwithstanding, I had some holes in my education through which a careful driver could manuever a truck. Reading snob that I was at the time, I decided that I needed to remedy the situation and live up to my newly minted certification as well read. So I popped out to the local bookstore and snatched up some of the classics we never covered in school. Zola was one of those authors and Nana was the title of his that most appealed to me so home it followed me, whereupon it languished on my shelves unread for something approaching (exceeding?--I don't have record of the date I bought it and my records start in 2002) ten years. Was it because I thought it would be inaccesible? Was it because I shelve alphabetically and so it was at the bottom in a corner? Perhaps it was because subconsciously I knew that it wasn't going to be a very happy reading experience for me. If the last reason is true, sadly, it was prophetic. Before I pulled the book off the shelf and paid for it, I should have read the back cover copy and remembered how very desperately I loathed the Naturalist writers I had read. I could have saved myself a lot of reading anguish this past week.

Nana is the story of an actress who rises up from the gutters of Paris and takes the town by storm, collecting men and their money as she ascends. She is an avaricious creature, not only demanding money from her protectors but also prostituting herself whenever she cannot extort enough money from the seriously ridiculous rich men with whom she surrounds herself. But she doesn't start out quite so greedy. At the start of the story, she is just coming into her own and she is naive in the ways of manipulation. Through her clever maid's offices and the advice of certain hangers-on, she learns to exploit not only her sexuality but the strange magnetism she exudes over men. She is an Eve of the worst sort, shallow and selfish, unconcerned with the destruction of others.

Because this is a novel in the naturalist tradition, it uses very detailed realism and suggests that heredity and social origins determine a person's personality. This tips the reader off to the fact that Nana is not a heroine to strive to emulate. Rather she is a product of the lower classes and must needs be a lesser person as a result, most likely one who will come to a likely end no matter how high she manages to rise as a courtesan. As annoying as this prefiguring based on literary convention made reading, the novel was tiresome for more than just that. Zola takes fully half the novel to develop his character of Nana, drawing her as both stupid (she is a woman, after all) and cunning (ditto). He spends many pages throughout the novel in overly detailed descriptions of rooms, people, clothing, plays, etc. Despite his florid descriptions of the physical settings, Zola manages to make the male characters who flock to Nana like moths to a flame almost entirely interchangeable and indistinct. And so very few of the characters besides Nana achieve any sort of clarity in the mind of the reader. It's hard to read a novel where there is an unpleasant main character and few, if any, distractions from them.

Wasteful, bored, and dissolute characters abound in this ultimately pessimistic, doom-laden offering. It is a classic of French literature, and I suppose that I can be content with myself that another hole in the education has been plugged, but it was a dismal, dreary, and dull reading experience that I can't recommend. Others have offered accolades though so check out differing opinions on the novel before you dismiss it. But if you do choose to ignore my warnings and read it, don't blame me (unless you are an insomniac looking for a sleep aid). Not surprisingly, this will be my only experience with Zola.

I read Nana for the Classics Circuit's tour of Zola although I struggled so much that I missed my official tour date and am only squeaking this review in under the wire in order to be considered a participant at all.

Review: The Gravedigger's Cottage by Chris Lynch

The McLuckies, dad, Sylvia, and Walter, have moved to a new town for a new start hoping to leave their bad luck and overarching sadness behind them. But they've moved into the locally known Gravedigger's Cottage, ironic given their frequent losses to death: Sylvia's mother, half brother Walter's mother, and a veritable plethora of pets. The McLuckies are mostly self-contained, sheltering with each other away from the rest of the world, until Walter welcomes an odd local child into their midst as his friend. It is the advent of the outside into thier home that highlights just how thin the thread that holds them is. The story is told by fourteen year old Sylvia and is fairly unrelentingly dark. The chapters alternate between the disintegrating psychological state of Mr. McLuckie accompanied by the distress of the kids and brief vignettes about each pet they've had and how it eventually, generally accidentally, met its death. There is a creepiness and morbidity to the book that is unrelieved by the easy and redemptive ending because it is too abrupt to banish the feel of the book up to that point.

Although this is a young adult book so I am not the target audience anyway, I found it very difficult to immerse myself in the story and more bothered than anything else by the characterizations. It was hard to be sympathetic towards any of the characters. It just felt off-kilter most of the time. Perhaps the middle school audience for whom I was pre-screening it will be more receptive to it than I was.

Review: The Great Blue Yonder by Alex Shearer

I don't generally read a load of YA books but when the middle school librarian asked me to read and review some for her, I was more than happy to oblige so I picked out a whole stack of goodies and promptly ignored them. Now that the school year is starting to wind down, I thought I should get the book read, reviewed and returned in time for some of the kids to have a crack at them before summer comes and they have to wait for the fall for these particular books.

Narrated by 12 year old Harry after he is hit by a truck and dies, this is an interesting and ultimately upbeat book. Harry wanders around the Other Side, roaming through the adults who have died and meeting another young boy who has been dead for 150 years. The two pair up as Harry learns his way around the afterlife, even as he wonders about the Great Blue Yonder marked on the map he was given the day he arrived. Instinctively he knows that he cannot move on until he finishes his business on earth, notably forgiving his sister for her harsh words before he died and in turn forgiving hers back to him. Just before he raced off on his bike and was hit, his sister Eggy had told him she wished he would die and he said she'd be sorry when he was dead. Certainly not the last words you want to ever say to a loved one on either side. And so as he and his buddy Arthur zip around the Other Side trying to find Arthur's mother, Harry ponders how he can indeed apologize and free Eggy and himself. When Harry and Arthur go back to Earth, they look in on Harry's old school, his best friend, his enemy, and his family and Harry learns some truths about who he was in life and how his absence has affected everyone and it's not exactly as he's imagined it.

Shearer keeps the tone of the story light and Harry's active imagination, even post-death, is entertaining. Harry is very definitely a 12 year old boy with all that that entails and so middle schoolers will definitely relate to him and his anxieties. The other characters are really incidental to Harry's quest to make things right and we only ever see them through his immature eyes but his dawning understanding of life and his earthly relationships makes this dead character experience believable growth. The moral of the story is well handled and doesn't overwhelm the charming character of Harry or of his experiences after death on the Other Side and back on Earth. A quick read about an unusual situation, this will offer a pleasant variety to most middle school libraries.

Review: Sweater Quest by Adrienne Martini

I tend to enjoy "stunt memoirs" where an author chooses to indulge in a passion (or something just eccentric) for a year and chronicles the journey for those of us not inclined to devote a year of our lives to whatever task they have chosen. So I thought I would simply adore Adrienne Marini's Sweater Quest about her desire to knit the Fair Isle Mary Tudor sweater designed by Alice Starmore, a famously talented designer and something of an enfant terrible in the knitting world. I really, really wanted to love the book. I mean, I learned to knit many years ago when my grandmother sat patiently with me, picking up my myriad dropped stitches and generally trying to help me create a reasonable fascimile of a scarf. (Note that the scarf was never finished and I do not remember much at all about knitting, to the point that when two of my children took a knitting class this summer, I was at a loss to help them and their own unfinished scarf renditions can be stashed next to mine in the basement forever.) But much as I wanted to love this book, I didn't. And I found myself just a little bored by it.

Very little of the book is actually about knitting the pattern that makes experienced knitters sit up and say "Wow." Instead, the book wanders from the mechanics of knitting (and really, even a non-knitter like me doesn't need a description of the knit and purl stitches) to the controversy of Alice Starmore to yarn to why knitting as an art was dying to the thoughts of other famous knitters. While all of these are or could be interesting, they don't hold together here. Bouncing from topic to topic, this lacks the cohesiveness and sense of the project that should pervade a book of this type. Like many of the stunt memoirs, this started as a blog project and that shows in the writing here. It is casual, full of slang, and a little overly precious at times. I would have like more on her struggles with the actual project and less about whether or not her changing the yarns made her sweater not what she set out to knit. Perhaps this question is of great importance to serious knitters but to casual hobbyists or non-knitters, the repetition is too much. And in surfing around I see that serious knitters seem to like this a lot more than I did. It's too bad it didn't live up to its potential for me but the knitting community is large so fitting into that niche market rather than a generalist market wouldn't be terrible. Meanwhile, I might dig out that old mangled scarf and ask my grandmother to show me how to knit one more time.

Thanks to Caitlin at Simon and Schuster for sending me a copy of the book to review.

Review: The Lunatic, the Lover, and the Poet by Myrlin A. Hermes

Hamlet is the Shakespeare play I have read over and over and over again. It was a perpetual inclusion on class reading lists from high school all the way to graduate school. I've even seen it performed more than once. And yet I never thought too much about what kind of past would have created a melancholy character like the ever philosophical, strangely stagnant Prince of Denmark. Luckily for me, Myrlin Hermes has thought about that past and written a truly rollicking good novel complete with many of Shakespeare's own crazy conventions to flesh out that topsy-turvy tale.

Loyal Horatio is a poor scholar at Wittenberg University, toiling away for years on a philosophical dissertation that has long since ceased to interest him, chiefly because of his badly concealed agnosticism. Into his narrow world comes Baron de Maricourt, who commissions a romantic play meant to laud his own holdings and flatter those among his friends. Horatio cannot afford to turn down the commission even if he struggles not only with the original source material but also with the increasingly ludicrous additions suggested by the Baron, or rather by his lady wife Adriane. Meanwhile, as Horatio wrestles with what sounds suspiciously like A Midsummer Night's Dream, he meets Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark, and in this possibly mad but exceedingly fair wastrel, finds his muse.

Horatio writes for Hamlet, falls in love with him, and devises a way for Hamlet to act in his play. But this brings Hamlet into the sphere of Lady Adriane, the Dark Lady of Shakespeare's sonnets, with whom Horatio is also half in love and having an affair. And just as in Shakespeare's comedies, this love triangle becomes confused and befuddling. Add in a late-arrival in the character of a poet called Will Shake-speare, seemingly Horatio's rival both for the affections of both Hamlet and Lady Adriane and for the job of playwright/poet and the plot gets dizzyingly intricate.

Horatio narrates the majority of the novel but occasionally the reader hears from Lady Adriane's perspective when Horatio's limited knowledge of the complicated and carefully orchestrated situation doesn't reveal enough. It can be a little jarring, despite the font difference, the first time the narrator changes but in the end, it works well. Hermes has sprinkled little Shakespeare treats throughout the story and the astute reader will feel little puffs of pride at catching more than simply the most obvious of the allusions and famous lines. Her narrative is madcap and definitely twists Hamlet in ways I never would have suspected but she has done it with such facility that it seems nothing more than entirely plausible to me now having come to the end of her prequel.

It did take a sort of re-alignment of my expectations in order to sink fully into the text but once I did, the comedic twistings and turnings, the bed-hopping and gender identity issues, the nods and curtsies to the Bard, the wild imaginings, and even the sly questions on Shakespeare's authorship kept me reading along at a good clip. It's probably best for a reader to have some knowledge of Hamlet before reading this but those without that grounding might still find the romance and the tragedy of friendship, true love and loyalty appealing as well.

For more, be sure to visit Myrlin Hermes' website as well as her blog.



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

Review: Why My Third Husband Will Be a Dog by Lisa Scottoline

Mostly culled from Scottoline's Chick Wit column in the Philadelphia Inquirer, these brief essays are collected under the subtitle of The Amazing Adventures of an Ordinary Woman. And they are indeed ordinary adventures as most women readers will recognize the situations that Scottoline has written about, having experienced them themselves at some point. She uses her family and her own life as the basis for these very short (they were published in a newspaper after all) life pieces. While they provided some entertainment during the reading, they have been, unfortunately, very forgettable since then. And while I'm certain that I must have chuckled at least once, I cannot for the life of me pin it down and be certain of that. These are probably best for a "woman of a certain age" combined with those sitautions where you want to have a book in hand but must be capable of putting it down at a moment's notice. In other words, this would be perfect while standing in line at the DMV (which, come to think of it, she doesn't write about despite it being a place rife with comedic potential). Obviously not my favorite read of the month but others have found it hysterically funny so perhaps we just don't share the same sense of humor.