Haven't posted a Facebook status round-up in a while and have noticed that the blog has been mainly book reviews lately. So apologies to those of you who have read these on Facebook over the past weeks, but here's the stream of consciousness of my life lately:
K. is pleased to note that she still remembers enough of the Cyrillic alphabet to recognize the words "porno" and "sex" in the spam comments for the blog. (Although why they are English words written in Cyrillic is completely beyond me.) Always good to know what my reading public wants to comment about the most.
K. gets the smallest bit claustrophobic when confronted with the obsessive, possesive love of certain family members at night.
K.'s gums are puffed up in indignation over the violence done them by the dental hygenist. :-P
K. thinks Heat Miser needs to get some cojones and take the South back.
K. doesn't think R. is her kid. She's graceful, extremely talented in math, and has legs up to her ears. Oh wait. She's also mouthy and sarcastic. I guess she is mine after all.
K. really hates when guilt over last night's drives her out of her bed on a Saturday morning. And really, what is so bad about a dinner consisting solely of Milk Duds and diet Coke?
K. just found another type of shopping I don't enjoy doing: furniture shopping. Can someone else just take my house in hand and make it gorgeous?
K. made the teenager excavate his bedroom tonight. Under his bed? Old dog poop he kicked under there instead of cleaning up. Ew! No wonder teenaged boy's bedrooms smell!
K. wonders if it's too late to reconsider having children. I think I'm much more suited to being a mom to fish.
K. found a new way to beat the candy craving: stop at a trendy store and try on a top before buying said candy. One glance in the mirror and candy is the last thing I wanted.
If one car leaves Charlotte going south while another car leaves Savannah going north and they are both driving at an average speed of... oh nevermind, probably better not to admit the average speed. Lead feet are apparently genetic and so my children may never get their driver's licenses. Ever.
K. should perhaps give up tennis for baseball. Homeruns are appreciated in the latter and not the former. Must remember this in future.
What does gum do to a dog with a beard? Glue her mouth shut, of course. How do I know this? Ask W.
When the right buttock button on the pocket of your jeans pops off and ricochets through the bar, the answer to the question of whether the jeans make your butt look big is a resounding YES! (Would it be too weird to glue the button back on?)
K. ventured into the cosmetics aisle at WalMart today to buy some dance stuff for R. I looked as out of place (and uncomfortable) as a hooker in church.
K. is going to a gathering of some of D.'s new co-workers tonight. The words that strike fear into my heart? "They're looking forward to meeting you." Would that be the real me, sarcasm reflex and all, or the Stepford corporate wife me I don't seem very adept at channeling?
K. wonders what about me screams Laura Ingalls Wilder on LSD? Because that is the look the saleswoman at one store today seemed to think worked for me.
K. is tired of the clothes in her closet. Is it too late to move somewhere consistently temperate and become a nudist?
K. skipped dessert tonight when I realized that warmer weather means I'm going to have to fit into those terribly short tennis skirts. Think I can lose ten pounds by, say, tomorrow?
Gatsby is lucky she's so cute. If not, I suspect she'd taste great roasted on a spit and served with brown potatoes and carmelized onions.
One kidney for sale. It won't be cheap though. I have a new dance bill to pay.
Incongruous image of the day? Me running out of the middle school in my quite short, slightly too tight tennis skirt past a mom in full abaya and niqab coming in.
Sitting at urgent care with T. Why do 8 year old boys think the prospect of a broken bone is so cool? I think the prospect of me writing out third grade homework for the next weeks stinks.
K. is in a pisser of a mood not helped by the fact that transcription of 3rd grade math homework was severely slowed by the loss of the interogatee's one entire set of fingers to count on.
A sign the diet might be getting to you? Drop your small bag of popcorn on the floor and then actually growl at the dog when she comes over to help herself. It worked though so I must be the alpha dog.
To run or to spin. To run or to spin. The decision this morning is exhausting. Maybe I'll just sleep on it.
Seriously? Yoga pants and a tank top are not a flattering combination for the roly poly amongst us, self included. And yet, that's what has graced my body all day today. I am becoming one of those people who wear workout clothes all day without working out.
Got the wildly unattractive fat girl "before" pictures in my e-mail, got bent over in my tennis match, and my favorite comfy jeans tore wide open front and back so they are now crotchless. It's been one of those kinds of days. Are we sure it's Friday?
Wiped the smallest kid all over the court at tennis. Have to get my wins in where I can. Plus I figure I am teaching him how to be a good loser. So really I only beat him in order to do some quality parenting.
Nothing like discovering that one of your kids didn't go to school today at the rather late hour of 10am when he came stumbling out of his room. School is apparently not missing him either as they didn't call to ask about the truant.
T. came home from school protesting the amount of homework he has to do: "If I was a superhero I could do it all but I'm just T. everyboy." Please note he's been home from school about an hour and he is completely finished with his work despite his common man status.
Last year I waffled back and forth over whether or not to accept a review copy of Elle Newmark's debut novel, The Book of Unholy Mischief. The cover copy mentioned some things that made me leery of reading it. Eventually I went ahead and said yes because the things that intrigued me about the book overcame my qualms. And I have rarely been happier that I took the chance. So when The Sandalwood Tree was made available, I jumped at the chance to read it. The fact that it is set in India in the final year of the British Raj and follows the life of a woman whose marriage is under intense pressure and who finds and becomes obsessed with the Victorian letters of two British women who lived in her home a hundred years prior made it almost tailor-made to my tastes. And like The Book of Unholy Mischief, this is an expansive and engrossing tale.
Evie and Martin used to have a strong and happy marriage. Then Martin went off to Germany to fight and came home a different man. Now their marriage is crumbling. So when Martin, an historian, is offered a Fulbright scholarship to go to India to document the end of the British Raj, Evie fights to accompany him with their 5 year old son Billy in the hope that a new place will help them find their way back to the open and loving relationship they once had. But India is in turmoil, facing Partition, and tension runs high, exacerbating Martin's fears and making Evie feel constrained and resentful. And while they are in a fairly safe place, removed from the bulk of the religious violence breaking out elsewhere, there are menaces even in this British summer outpost.
As Martin goes about adopting native costume and habits and courting danger, he forbids Evie to move freely herself, an order she disobeys, driven by her curiousity about a set of letters from the mid-1800's that she found secreted behind a brick in the kitchen wall. Wanting to know more about Felicity and Adela, Evie embarks on a search to learn more about them, their circumstances, and what could possibly send at least one of these Englishwomen to India in the midst of the Sepoy Rebellion. Slowly Evie pieces together the story of Felicity and Adela, their lives and loves, and the long-forgotten scandal(s) swirling about them.
Evie and Martin's marriage continues to founder and fail as Evie reads about these two unusual Victorian women who pushed so hard against the constraints of the historical time in which they lived. As the women declared, they "lived for joy." Evie wants desperately to live for joy also, trying, pushing, and demanding an opening back into Martin's life and mind.
This is a sweeping love story on so many fronts and involving so many character combinations: the love of husband and wife, the love between illicit lovers, the love of parent for child, the love between friends, and unrequited love. Even as the country itself is being torn asunder, all of these unifying relationships are playing out on the page and serving as a path for Evie and Martin to find their way back to each other.
The place is beautifully rendered in this novel. India and her overwhelming color and lushness stand out even as Newmark has captured the insularity, racism, and surprising compassion of the late 1940's British ex-pat community there. Making Evie and Martin American allows them to stand out as different from the start and enables Newmark to have Evie interact a bit more with the Indian community than would otherwise have been believable. The parallel stories twine together nicely and keep the reader engaged with both plots. Each chapter starts with a year heading making it easy to know when Evie and Martin's story flips to Felicity and Adela's story. Despite this though, the story must be narrated by a modern day Evie based on a few comments (a remark about Vietnam vets is just one example) in the narration. This is rather disconcerting as the sensibility of these comments is at odds with the post-WWII society during which the tale is set. This only happens a few times in the very beginning of the book and then the incongruous and modern Evie disappears, which is all to the good. The ending of the book is a bit rushed, predictable, and a little too easy but the ride to that point makes it forgivable. Over all, a very enjoyable read and I'll definitely look forward to Newmark's next book.
Thanks to the publisher for sending me a copy of this book to review.
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 Peach Keeper by Sarah Addison Allen. The book is being released by Bantam on March 22, 2011, better known as my 40th birthday.
Amazon says this about the book: The New York Times bestselling author of The Girl Who Chased the Moon welcomes you to her newest locale: Walls of Water, North Carolina, where the secrets are thicker than the fog from the town’s famous waterfalls, and the stuff of superstition is just as real as you want it to be.
It’s the dubious distinction of thirty-year-old Willa Jackson to hail from a fine old Southern family of means that met with financial ruin generations ago. The Blue Ridge Madam—built by Willa’s great-great-grandfather during Walls of Water’s heyday, and once the town’s grandest home—has stood for years as a lonely monument to misfortune and scandal. And Willa herself has long strived to build a life beyond the brooding Jackson family shadow. No easy task in a town shaped by years of tradition and the well-marked boundaries of the haves and have-nots.
But Willa has lately learned that an old classmate—socialite do-gooder Paxton Osgood—of the very prominent Osgood family, has restored the Blue Ridge Madam to her former glory, with plans to open a top-flight inn. Maybe, at last, the troubled past can be laid to rest while something new and wonderful rises from its ashes. But what rises instead is a skeleton, found buried beneath the property’s lone peach tree, and certain to drag up dire consequences along with it.
For the bones—those of charismatic traveling salesman Tucker Devlin, who worked his dark charms on Walls of Water seventy-five years ago—are not all that lay hidden out of sight and mind. Long-kept secrets surrounding the troubling remains have also come to light, seemingly heralded by a spate of sudden strange occurrences throughout the town.
Now, thrust together in an unlikely friendship, united by a full-blooded mystery, Willa and Paxton must confront the dangerous passions and tragic betrayals that once bound their families—and uncover truths of the long-dead that have transcended time and defied the grave to touch the hearts and souls of the living.
Resonant with insight into the deep and lasting power of friendship, love, and tradition, The Peach Keeper is a portrait of the unshakable bonds that—in good times and bad, from one generation to the next—endure forever.
I was probably predisposed to like this book a lot. Shakespeare allusions? Check. Sisters and their love/hate relationship? Check. Bookish characters? Check. It's almost as if Brown knew just how to make this book completely beloved by readers of my stripe. And she succeeds beautifully. Imaginative, raditating charm, clever, enchanting, literate. All these adjectives fit this delightful, well-written novel.
The Andreas sisters are all coming home, converging on their past and escaping their present. Rose, Bean, and Cordy grew up in a small Ohio college town with a Shakespearean scholar for a father who frequently communicated through the Bard's words, verses, and couplets. Each of the girls is having trouble and have chosen to make the news that their mother is fighting breast cancer the catalyst for coming home again, not expecting their siblings to also come home. Like the witches' portion in King Lear, the novel is narrated by the sisters as one omniscient entity, a method not often seen in literature. And this unique narration works so well because even when the story is focused on one sister or another and her secrets, no one besides sisters can know each other so intimately as to unmask and lay bare the truth so thoroughly without malice.
Rose has convinced herself that she has come home from Columbus where she is a well-respected math professor, to help and organize her parents, who clearly need to be parented themselves. What she isn't acknowledging is that she is terrified to leave the comforting idea of home and venture into the wider world with her fiance, who has taken a position over in England for the year. Bean, who couldn't wait to shake the dust of the provincial town from her feet has spent years in New York but she has never found what she so desperately seeks, devouring men and shopping beyond her means to the point that she resorts to embezzlement to fund her binges. Discovered and without any other recourse, she has come home to the place she once so longed to escape. Cordy also fled Barnwell, the pampered youngest who never had to face the consequences for any of her actions, coddled and humored. She has been drifting aimlessly since she left home, afraid to be successful. Only now she's discovered that she is pregnant and she turns to the people and place that have always offered her a soft and forgiving place to land: family and home.
With all three sisters home again, they quickly revert to their expected roles in the family while resenting the others for assuming theirs. It is clear that the sisters care for each other very deeply, even when they are angry or frustrated with each other. They each keep secrets and don't want to expose their mistakes or uncertainties to each other, wanting to maintain the persona with which they have long been labeled. To expose themselves so clearly would change the dynamic between them for sure. And yet they already know each others' weaknesses and faults as well as they know their own. These characters are so real and appealing that even when they are making the wrong choices and sniping at each other, it is easy to like them. All three of the sisters learn, grow and change throughout the course of the story. And they learn the value of family love and support as they become the people they were meant to be, both within and without the confines of the family.
I loved the bookishness of the sisters. Their reliance on Shakespeare to communicate with each other was a quirky and fun family trait. The sisters were very distinct characters and even the secondary characters were unique and differentiated, contributing much to the story. The love/hate relationship Rose, Bean, and Cordy had with each other was completely true to life. No one can frustrate you faster than a sister but no one will step up to bat for you faster either. Brown managed to tell the story with wit and humor. Having gone to school in a small Ohio college town and married someone raised in yet another one, I can say with confidence that Brown has captured the aura of the place beautifully, the ambivalence and/or reverence of the faculty kids towards the local school, and the quaintness of some liberal arts faculty (dare I say especially English faculty?). I highly recommend this novel of family and books and finally growing up
Thanks to the publisher for sening me a copy of the book for review.
Another good reviewing week for me. I'm liable to be completely silent next week while I'm on my birthday trip though so this is all in preparation for that. This meme is hosted by Sheila at One Person's Journey Through a World of Books.
Books I completed this week are:
The Invisible Line by Daniel Sharfstein
The Sandalwood Tree by Elle Newmark
The Other Life by Ellen Meister
Bookmarks are still living in the middle of:
Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens
The Vagabond by Colette
Reviews posted this week:
Radio Shangri-La by Lisa Napoli
The Kitchen House by Kathleen Grissom
The Invisible Line by Daniel Sharfstein
Books still needing to have reviews written (as opposed to the ones that are simply awaiting posting):
The Wierd Sisters by Eleanor Brown
The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
The Sandalwood Tree by Elle Newmark
The Other Life by Ellen Meister
Open Giveaways
Three copies of Radio Shangri-La by Lisa Napoli
Extensively researched and well-documented, this scholarly history examines a recognized but often over-looked phenomenon in American history and racial relations: crossing the color line. As the subtitle, Three American Families and the Secret Journey From Black to White, suggests, the book uses as case studies three different families who crossed the color line at three different times in history and at three different Southern places. The end result for each of the families was quite different socio-economically with one family gaining significantly in power, while one descended sharply, and a third continued along at about the same subsistence level in which they had been living.
Told in a chronological fashion, the stories of the Gibson's, Wall's, and Spencer's personal family histories are woven through with the history, politics, and law of the times to create a picture of just how each family's racial designation changed over time. The narration is a curious mix of detached historical fact and a deliberate and immediate omniscient narration style more commonly found in fiction. The bulk of the story centers around the decades immediately preceding and then subsequent to the Civil War when the concept of race was established more firmly in legal terms than at any time prior or since. And while the story is of the families as wholes, the focus is rather tighter on certain family members who left more historical record. Sharfstein chooses to keep his historical narration chronological which means that chapters on each family alternate throughout the book. This was sometimes slightly confusing and difficult to follow, especially in the beginning before the major figures became quite as distinct and recognizable as they eventually did. Once the central figure in each family was better established, it was easier to follow the switches but then they became a bit distracting as just when the reader settles into one family's narrative, the chapter break appeared to follow a different family's narrative.
Despite the structural difficulties, there is much interesting information contained here. I had always assumed from classes and previous mentions in books that the color line was fairly rigid and that "passing" was a difficult and fraught endeavor. While it was certainly fraught given the laws on the books about what percentage of blood, even the infamous "one drop," determined race, the line was never as uniformly rigid as many history books make it out to be. In fact, it turns out that the color line was actually rather porous. And that rather than being a furtive, quick event, crossing the line could, in some cases, be more of a gradual drift that not only did no one question but in which entire communities were complicit.
I found the book to be a rather dense read when it delved into racial legalities and political situations but strangely descriptively fictional feeling when discussing the lives of these very real people. There are several instances of repetition of the historical facts made all the more obvious by their similar wording within the different family's chapters. In spite of the structural flaws and dichotomous narrative technique, there was much good, very detailed information to be found here. This book could easily be required reading for a college history class focused on race in the South, being generally more readable than many traditional history books. It is certainly an interesting entry toward a more complete understanding of race and the US, shining a light on a fascinating phenomenon that was for so long only whispered of, if even that.
For more information about Daniel Sharfstein visit his webpage and his Vanderbilt faculty page.
Thanks to Trish from TLC Book Tours and the publisher for sending me a copy of the book for review.
