Review: Tender Graces by Kathryn Magendie

Virginia Kate has gone home to West Virginia after her estranged mother dies. Her brothers don't go with her so she is alone in the house to face her memories of a difficult childhood and an alcoholic mother alternately loving and dismissive. As Virginia Kate goes through the house, avoiding her mother's room, she uncovers mementoes that trigger her reminiscences, both good and bad. Virginia Kate, a child of the West Virginia mountains, is the only daughter of a damaged mother and a Peter Pan father still tied to his mother's apron strings. Mother Katie escaped her own abusive father by marrying but she couldn't escape the emotional scars of her upbringing nor the devastating loss of her own mother in a house fire. Crippled by alcohol and utterly dependent on her beauty to give her life meaning, she has few emotional reserves with which to care for her children. Father Frederick is a philanderer who drinks too much and can't give up the carefree life he so desires despite being married with children. And when his mother summons him home from West Virginia, he leaves his contentious wife and sad children behind. And so life continues on for Virginia Kate and her brothers, difficult and yet somehow rooted in the mountain hollow community. Until her father shows up periodically and takes a child at a time home to Louisiana with him to live, where their existence will start to take on a semblence of normalcy thanks to stepmother Rebekha.

This novel, with its whispering narration and swirl of emotion, is beautifully rendered. Much of the narration here takes place in Virginia Kate's past although her current day self does comment several times throughout the story, as well as framing her childhood story. The characters are fully rounded and while their emotional damage to themselves and each other is great, it feels natural given their lives and what they have endured and tried (often failing) to overcome. Virginia Kate, as the main character, is sympathetic and the reader roots for her to recognize the love she is given freely and the reasons why the love she is so desperate for only comes in ways that make it hard to recognize. The theme of home and family and belonging are rife throughout the novel and they tie everything together, as home and family should, even if they sometimes do it in surprising ways here. There is some sort of closure at the end of the novel but a sequel is coming out this year and if it is as beautiful and poetic as this one, it will be a treat indeed.

Thanks to Deb from BelleBooks for sending me a review copy of this book.

Author Kathryn Magendie lives in North Carolina and this post is a part of the Literary Road Trip for North Carolina.

Review: The Help by Kathryn Stockett

If you know me at all by now, you know I have a love hate relationship with highly raved about books. I feel like I need to have read them to join the conversation but I am also leery of the heaps of praise, knowing that my expectations for the book are likely to be all out of proportion, making for a cranky reading experience. So it was with a little trepidation that I picked this one up for my book club. I am happy to report that it turned out to be a better book than I anticipated and although I am the last one on the planet to read it, I am pleased I did. It is an outstanding book club book and would have kept a more focused group talking for a long time. But we were unfocused partly because we had more people at book club than we've ever had before, which is a testament to the appeal of the book, even if discussion suffered due to a group too unwieldy to be effective.

Told in various different voices, mainly those of the black help to the elite cream of white society in Jackson, Mississippi during the extremely turbulent period of the sixties, this both rings true and reminds us all of the civil rights struggles so recently fought here in the US. Aibileen is maid and child minder to a young couple and their baby girl. She is still reeling from the senseless death of her son and has come to realize in a very visceral way, the value whites placed on a black man's life and death. Her anger and bitterness (very much earned, I might add) have changed her personality and also slightly what she is willing to risk in her position. Through her eyes, we first see the young white matrons and their unmarried friend Miss Skeeter and it's not a very flattering picture. But we get small glimpses that Skeeter is not quite like the others, even if she seems complicit in their casual disregard and racist attitudes.

Skeeter is freshly home from Ole Miss and still unmarried, much to the chagrin of her mother. She has bigger dreams than just settling into the same life her mother and friends are leading but she tries to not rock the boat too badly, dating when she can. As she has yet to "take" with an eligible man, she also finds herself a job writing a homemaker's advice column. Of course, as she has never kept a home, she needs help writing her replies and she turns to Aibileen for help, hoping that one day Aibileen will also feel comfortable enough to tell her what ever happened to her family's long time maid, the woman who raised her, Constantine who disappeared not long before Skeeter graduated and came home. Through her connection to Aibileen and with her own ambitions, Skeeter starts writing a social history of the help, those black women who work for the local white families. She captures the good and the bad of Aibileen's experience and then moves on to other willing participants with Aibileen's help.

Minny, Aibileen's best friend, is the third narrator in the novel. She has been fired and falsely accused of stealing by the daughter of her last employer and is only hired by a woman who is so new and so far beyond the pale of polite society than she has no idea of Minny's reputation. Minny comes to be oddly protective of her seemingly indolent mistress, Celia. She tries to maintain a "proper" distance, foiled at every turn because Celia, of poor white stock who has unwittingly married into the upper crust, has no concept of where those boundaries are and is starved for kindness and friendship. Minny becomes the second maid willing to help Skeeter with her book, despite the fraught times and danger of being identified as having contributed to this rather damning piece of writing.

Stockett has created credible, very real characters here. They are sympathetic and yet flawed. None of them are too good to be true and none of them have the sorts of flaws that are really only assets in disguise. These could be real people in the 60's in Mississippi. The various plot threads wind together nicely, weaving around the main plot carefully. The tension builds as Skeeter's book forms and anxiety over whether she has done these women a disservice, laying them open to recognition increases as the pages turn. The black community too becomes more and more tightly wound as the narrative goes along and Stockett has done a great job showing that the greater civil rights movement, the murders, the disappearances and the injustices, is a cause of this as much as the incendiary book Skeeter is compiling with their compliance. The revelation of the book and the protections surrounding it are masterful and while the book's completion is not the end of the book, it certainly could be as the rest of the novel has a sort of epilogue feel to it. But even if it is an epilogue, Stockett wisely leaves some threads untied and the potential for disaster, so prevalent at the time, intact. This was certainly worth the buzz it earned last year, a quick, engrossing read, despite the length of the book. Book clubs whish haven't already done it will love it and have much to talk about. Lone readers will also devour it, taken back to a time in our recent past that we tend to want to forget. Stockett has brought not only the time but the everyday reality of it to the forefront of our memories again, for which we can only thank her.

Review: Dog Years by Mark Doty

When I picked this book up, I expected it to be a memoir about Doty's life with his two beloved dogs. I certainly didn't expect it to be a rumination about life and loss and the ways that grief pushes into your life and holds on. But that is indeed, in many ways, what this is. Arden and Beau, the dogs of the title, just offer a central focus for the philosophical musings put forth here by Doty, a poet and memoirist. His relationship with his dogs is the scrim through which he recalls the slow decline and death of his partner from AIDS. And the dogs weave in and around his eventual relationship with his new partner as well.

But there's an interrupted feel to the writing here with chapters dodging and weaving about with no clear sense of timeline. Of course, starting the narrative with Doty's philosophical conception of dogs and language followed swiftly by the death of Beau, it is clear that this will not follow a conventional timeline or a conventional memoir's path. His writing tries a little too hard to capture poetry in prose and in the end ended up alienating me. I am a sucker for animal stories and yet this one elicited very little response, perhaps because it was more about Doty's cumulative losses and his grief than about the dogs. His dogs clearly meant the world to him but the sometimes overly florid writing and the intrusion of so much else detracted from their stories.

Although Doty claims that his dogs helped to lift him from depression and grief, there was very little uplift here, overwhelmed as it was by depressing outpourings on the ephemerality of life and the certitude of loss. As a reader, I needed a more focused narrative, a smoother integration of his life as a gay man both facing the loss of a beloved partner and finding a new love as well as showing more of the concrete, never-wavering love of his animals. Some animal lovers have praised this book highly while others have panned it so I seem to be fairly alone in thinking it was just an okay read. I did struggle a bit with the style and the disjointedness of the narrative but underneath it all, there was some good bone structure. I had just hoped for more out of it than I found.

Review: The Glimpses of the Moon by Edith Wharton

When the novel opens, Nick and Susy are newlyweds enjoying a glimpse of the moon from the country home that they've borrowed from a friend for their honeymoon. Nick and Susy aren't typical newlyweds though. They have a deal and figure they'll be married to each other for about a year. At the end of that time (roughly determined as the amount of time in which they, the vastly entertaining but poor couple, can live off of their incredibly wealthy friends), they assume they will divorce and each remarry someone more suitable, by which they mean rich.

Although they've been living off the largess of their friends for so long, they have differing opinions about what is morally and ethically acceptable and so despite their growing care for each other, they come into conflict over the differences. Pulled apart by misunderstanding, each of them goes off with different friends and tries to slip back into the life led before their marriage. But the time together has changed them both, deepened them as people and made it possible for them to think of a life not led in the superficial, glancing world of the inordinately wealthy. It has allowed them to truly fall in love.

While the plot might sound like many a romance novel, Wharton spends much time on the shallow foibles of the moneyed set shifting around Europe in search of entertainment. Nick and Susy are a lens through which to see some of these excesses. The writing is fantastic, with accurate descriptions, backhanded wit, and astute insights. The tone here is casual and light although Wharton does get in the expected rapier thrusts about the ennui and the callousness so characteristic of the social class she's describing. And in the end, the story is not so much about Nick and Susy's sponging off of others or about the friends who collect and discard relationships like last year's hats, but it's about a pair who, despite the company they keep, grow and learn and understand the importance of love. I've been a fan of Wharton's for a long time and this novel just re-confirmed my feeling.

This review is a part of the Classics Circuit. Check the website for additional Edith Wharton tour stops and to browse through her other book offerings.

Review: The Makioka Sisters by Junichiro Tanizake

The story of four sisters from Osaka, two married and two unmarried, in the years immediately leading up to WWII, this is the portrait of a time coming to a close and an aristocracy already in its twilight. The narrative here is slow and elegiac. Nothing much happens in the infinitesimal crumbling of the Makioka sisters' way of life but the novel is beautifully rendered nevertheless. The two unmarried younger sisters live not with their oldest sister, as would usually be the case, but with their second sister, Sachiko and her husband and daughter. The youngest sister, Taeko (or Koi-san), cannot marry until the thrid sister, Yukiko marries and so Sachiko and oldest sister Tsuruko want very much to find a match for the self-effacing but somehow stubborn Yukiko. Through the several years of the narrative, matches are found and discarded for various reasons. But with each new match, the prospective groom is somehow a less and less appealing prospect, mirroring the decline of the once great Makioka family name.

While the family dithers about a match for Yukiko and she herself stays quiet about the prospect, younger sister Taeko is being seen about town with the man she ran away with several years prior, defying decorum and jeopardizing Yukiko's chances for marriage. Frustrated by the protracted wait for Yukiko to marry so she herself can marry, Koi-san quietly goes about running her own life, in spite of her older sisters' admonitions and cautions. Meanwhile scenes of placid, unseeing domesticity intrude on almost every page as Sachiko sits thinking or crying or resting in her home with only the occasional company of her young daughter to enliven the room.

The three younger sisters are very well fleshed out and individual in this most domestic of novels although the reader's sympathy with each of the characters changes as the novel progresses. Japan during the "China Incident" is exquisitely rendered although very little of the gathering political storm clouds penetrate the novel's pages since the four sisters are mostly ignorant of the coming calamity, and indeed of anything much beyond their own sphere. The writing is luxurious and fulsome despite the fact that so much of it chronicles the ennui of the aristocratic housewife. This is most assuredly not the novel for people who want to have action in their novels. Almost nothing whatsoever happens here and yet somehow Tanizake has managed to make it an important and weighty nothing. Written during the Second World War, this shows perhaps most clearly, the traditions and the propriety that Japan stood to lose so clearly, really had already lost by the time of the writing. Full of faded beauty, stagnant hopes, and honor-bound duty, ancient and new, this is a tour de force.

TBR 2010 Challenge

Every year I sign up for the TBR Challenge. That's To Be Read for you non-bookies out there. And every year I have to make two lists, 12 original choices and 12 alternates, because I seem congenitally unable to stick to the original 12 and there are no swap-outs for this one. So this year I'll be doing the same thing.

The official rules are:

** Pick 12 books – one for each month of the year - that you’ve been wanting to read (that have been on your “To Be Read” list) for 6 months or longer, but haven’t gotten around to.

** OPTIONAL: Create a list of 12 “Alternates” (books you could substitute for your challenge books, given that a particular one doesn’t grab you at the time)

** Then, starting January 1, read one of these books from your list each month, ending December 31. )

There are also some addendums at the official sign-ups that you might want to check out here.

Now without further ado, here's my intended list for 2010 (and yes, astute readers will note that several of these were on last year's list too--just hush up!):

1. The Help by Kathryn Stockett
2. Harvest by Catherine Landis
3. Life at These Speeds by Jeremy Jackson
4. In Summer Light by Zibby Oneal
5. Keeper and Kid by Edward Hardy
6. The Makioka Sisters by Junichiro Tanizake
7. Dog Years by Mark Doty
8. With Violets by Elizabeth Robards
9. The Glimpses of the Moon by Edith Wharton
10. Before Lunch by Angela Thirkell
11. Tender Graces by Kathryn Magendie
12. The Well of Lonliness by Radcliff Hall

alternates:

1. Kartography by Kamila Shamsie
2. Pure Dead Frozen by Debi Gliori
3. Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight by Alexandra Fuller
4. Slow Fat Triathlete by Jayne Williams
5. Adam Bede by George Eliot
6. Emily of New Moon by L.M. Montgomery
7. The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie
8. The Saffron Kitchen by Yasmin Crowther
9. An Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri
10. The Lace Makers of Glenmara by Heather Barbieri
11. The Little Giant of Aberdeen County by Tiffany Baker
12. Sloppy Firsts by Megan McCafferty