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: 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: Magnolia Wednesdays by Wendy Wax

Vivi is an investigative reporter at a major news network. She's worked hard to eradicate her southern origins, doing everything she can short of completely cutting off her family, in order to be the hard hitting New Yorker that her job requires. When she is shot in the rear during a sting gone wrong and the footage ends up on YouTube she is sure that her life has hit an all-time low. Then she discovers that her boss has been out trolling for another investigative reporter, one younger and blonder than she is. Instead of staying to train her replacement, Vivi flies off the handle and quits her job. Things get more complicated when it turns out that it is her hormones that made her so unreasonable; she's pregnant, unmarried, now jobless, and her famous reporter boyfriend is on location in a war zone.

Unable to find another job in broadcast journalism, Vivi swallows her pride and takes something she feels well beneath her: writing a column incognito about life in suburbia. And since she has no direct experience of life in the suburbs, she tucks her tail and heads home to Atlanta to move in with her widowed sister, niece, and nephew, looking at herself as a stranger in the strange land of their lives, despite her previous lack of interest in her very proper, very southern family. Vivi is so busy trying to hide from the realities of her life she doesn't stop to see what her sister Melanie's life is really like, the daily troubles of life with two fatherless teenagers, the financial worries that are part and parcel of owning a business, especially one like a ballroom dance business, and the loneliness of a single parent who is stretched so thin that she barely has time to breathe much less show an interest in the opposite sex.

Vivi is oblivious to anything not directly impacting her own life, writing her dispatches from the suburbs from a deeply flawed perspective which outrages the suburbanites around her, and hiding her real reason for being home from her sister. And it is only when she starts to feel discomfort in sending up Melanie's life so cavalierly, when she starts to confront her own deeply held prejudices, when she starts to worry about the morality of withholding his impending parenthood from her concerned and caring boyfriend, and when she starts to see the complexities of life all around her that she starts to grow as a character.

Wax has created a wonderfully selfish character who finally grows up, understanding that not only is she not the center of the universe, but that each universe out there is valuable and doesn't deserve mockery. Vivi learns to re-evaluate success and to see that there are many ways to achieve. Like her namesake in Gone With the Wind, Melanie is a sweet, considerate woman who allows Vivi to take advantage of her while hoping that her kindness will eventually help her sister to become a better person. The pace of the plot is perfect with revelations coming at nicely measured intervals so that the reader is never bored. Vivi's eventual exposure was a tad unbelievable, quick, and surprisingly thorough given the scope of all her poking about. But that is a minor complaint about a book that was overall quite enjoyable. Of course, now I'm going to have to go and take the activity magnets off the back of my car so we're not so readily classifiable as Vivi says suburban moms are!

Thanks to Joy at Joan Schulhafer Publishing & Media Consulting for sending me a review copy of the book.

Review: Seeing Stars by Diane Hammond

What young girl doesn't have dreams of Hollywood at some time or another in her life? It might only be in the deepest, darkest, tiniest corner of her unconscious, but it's more than likely there. And for all those little girls, those now all grown up or those still day-dreaming, this is a novel for them.

Bethany Rabinowitz has talent and wants to act in Hollywood. Her mother Ruth is more than committed to making that dream a reality, packing Bethany up and moving away from their home in Seattle in hopes that Bethany will be the one in a million who makes it as a child star. Leaving behind her slightly skeptical dentist husband, Ruth chases the impossible, spending money right and left, driving Bethany from agent to acting coach to audition and back again. How much will be enough before the Rabinowitzes burn out or Bethany books a big enough part is the looming question in this novel of dreams and desperation.

Bethany is lucky though because, despite her mother's sometimes restrictive rules, Ruth cares enough to try and carefully shepherd Bethany through the process while several other of the young characters have been abandoned in their talent manager's lax care. While Bethany's life is ostensibly the center point of the novel, the other child actor wanna-be's backgrounds are also filled in, providing a counterpoint to Bethany's very average, somewhat stereotypical, love-filled upbringing. As the kids learn their parts and do the rounds, it becomes more and more clear that what drives the Hollywood business of children's acting is money. Launching a child into the firmament of Tinseltown depends on so much more than a child's talent.

Hammond has drawn a novel that questions the process, highlights the insatiable beast, and makes the idea of turning a child into a star vaguely distasteful. First impressions, superficial and often mistaken, make or break these characters. The reader feels nothing but sympathy for the children abandoned by their parents into this morass and wonders why a loving, involved parent would insist on persevering for something so likely to end in failure and an empty bank account rather than glory and a dream achieved (although that begs the question of whose dream--mother or daughter?).

Both Ruth and Bethany learn the value of real friendship and the ephemerality of childhood and time during the course of the novel. The cast of characters here is a bit too extensive, making certain of the children mere props for the plot and taking away from the principle characters. Despite this top-heaviness, the story itself is quite interesting, what with its revelations about the inner workings of auditions and the Hollywood machine. The novel is completely outside my realm of experience and I felt certain I would not have pursued things to the extent that Ruth did, but she was still a sympathetic character and one who was achingly realistic. Anyone who has ever gone to great lengths for their child or who has had their heart rate pick up just the slightest bit when a modeling agency or casting call advertisement comes on the radio will appreciate this cautionary tale.


For more, be sure to visit Diane Hammond's website. There's information on all four of her books (Hannah's Dream, Homesick Creek, Going to Bend, and this one), tour info, and even reading group guides (not one for Seeing Stars yet though).


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

Review: Love in Mid Air by Kim Wright

Elyse is on her way home from an art show where she has sold a respectable number of her pots when she ends up sitting next to Gerry, a wealthy banker. They strike up a conversation and make a connection that proves hard for them to break once their plane has landed and they must each run for their connecting flights. Ducking into the airport chapel, they kiss passionately before Elyse heads home to her stagnant and unsatisfying marriage. Chronicling three quarters of a year following this encounter, Elyse narrates as she commits to a long-distance affair with Gerry as well as continuing on blindly through her ordinary life, taking her young daughter to school and sports, going through the motions with Phil, the husband who no longer sees her, and seeing her friends as if her normal, everyday life hasn't shifted perceptibly.

But the book is about far more than a considered infidelity. While Elyse does carry on her clandestine and exciting affair with Gerry, she is also going to marriage counseling with Phil. And the realities and numbness that embody marriage for Elyse, even in a marriage to a congenitally “nice guy,” are more the focus than the affair. That Elyse felt underappreciated, unnoticed, and as if a vital piece of herself was missing is more to the point than anything else. She has become a caricature of herself, or the person she’s supposed to be in her marriage. An imposter. Inauthentic. The fact that she craves happiness over mere contentment speaks to the state of her life overall. And she knows she is behaving badly. She knows what is at stake and what she will be giving up when she finally does walk out that door. Because really, Elyse is trying desperately to conquer the inertia that holds her in her safe, married, suburban world.

Wright has not glorified affairs but she holds a troubling mirror up to the institution of marriage even as she allows the reader to sit in judgment over Elyse. Remarkably, given the subject matter, she has managed to create a thoughtful and piercing work. All the characters are seen through Elyse’s eyes but Wright has created a character self-aware enough to recognize her failings as a friend and a wife so that we readers get a rounded view of the people important to Elyse. Both Phil and Gerry remain ciphers but as they are more symbolic of the issues in Elyse’s life, the fact that we can’t really know them works and reinforces the struggle that Elyse is facing. Not a book to write off based on the rather fluffy title, this is well-written and provocative and likely to be a book I think about for quite some time to come.

Thanks to Miriam at Hachette Book Group for sending me a review copy of this book.

There are many other people touring this book today as well and you might want to check out their reviews as well:

Madeleine's Book and Photo Blog
A Few of My Favorite Things
Psychotic State
Bookin' With Bingo
In Bed With Books
Bless Their Hearts Mom
Drey's Library

Don't forget to check out a mini interview with author Kim Wright at Publisher's Weekly promising fiction debuts.

Kim Wright is a North Carolina author, local to me, so this is also a stop on the Literary Road Trip for North Carolina authors.

Review: If You Follow Me by Malena Watrous

Marina is twenty-two, living in rural Japan, and teaching English in a vocational university. She moved to Japan with her girlfriend Carolyn, in part to escape her grief over her father's suicide. But living in the midst of such a foreign culture, bottling her emotions up so tightly, and hiding the actual nature of her relationship with Carolyn makes for a stressful and eventful year. The novel opens with a letter to Marina from her supervisor Miyoshi-sensei trying to explain to her the importance of the elaborate and confusing gomi (trash) disposal rules in rural Shika and her neighbors' unhappiness at her inability to follow these rules. Throughout the year, Marina continues to receive these letters from her supervisor, both chastizing her and illuminating the Japanese character.

Marina's experience teaching is not at all what she expected and her relationship with Carolyn struggles and undergoes a major shift during this year abroad. Marina's students run the gamut from girls studying to become secretaries and oblivious to the accepted marginalization of women that surrounds them, to cock-sure boys destined to work at gas stations and in factories who harrass Marina and Miyoshi-sensei, to a silent and sullen former shut-in. She finds the majority of her interaction with the Japanese in town to be superficial, suffering disappointment whenever she thinks she's making a friend and discovering that said new friend only wants free English conversation. So the fact that she and Miyoshi-sensei develop a friendship is all the more valuable, until a strain threatens to eliminate this source of comfort for Marina. Meanwhile, being each other's only friend and companion is proving to be too much for Marina and Carolyn's relatively new relationship as they find themselves sinking under the combined weights of homesickness, loneliness, and grief.

Absurdities, humor, disturbing events and characters, and quirks, cultural and personal, abound in this novel. While the entire year covered in the book is narrated by Marina, the other characters do come off as fully-rounded as her understanding of them allows them to be. The conceit of using Miyoshi-sensei's letters to Marina to insert interesting cultural tidbits about Japan that otherwise would seem out of place, is well done and creative. Isolation as a major theme is handled well, with Marina's internalized feelings accurately reflected by her external circumstances: grief and aloneness reflected in her failing relationship and in her cultural isolation. Watrous has drawn a vivid picture of a small corner of Japan and although it is a picture that entices me to visit Japan not at all, I still appreciate the insight into the culture. More than the story of a young woman traveling part way around the world to find herself amidst a completely different culture, this plumbs the depths of love, life, and community.


Check out Malena Watrous'Facebook page.


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

Review: Not Quite Paradise by Adele Barker

Adele Barker is an American who went to Sri Lanka on a Fulbright to teach university for a year immediately following the terror of Sept. 11. She traveled back there again after the devastating Boxing Day tsunami of 2004. This book, part memoir, part travelogue, part political history tries to marry the two experiences and to illuminate Sri Lanka for the westerner.

In the first portion of the book, Barker arrives in Sri Lanka with her fifteen year old son and faces some of the culture shock inevitable to anyone moving from a familiar culture to an unfamiliar one. Instead of staying in the city, she and Noah move further into the country, to the town close to her university. This takes them farther from the ex-pat community and enables them to meet and become involved in the daily lives of the Sri Lankans around them. It also forces Barker to learn Sinhalese quicker in an effort to communicate. Her observations about the people and the customs around her are interesting and often lead her to wander into the history of Sri Lanka (once Ceylon). In addition to this history, she finds herself interested, saddened, and horrified by the ongoing violence between factions of Sinhalese and Tamils, continuing to wage a civil war that rends family, land, and a sense of oneness. The end of her subsidized year approaching, she sends her son home and soon thereafter follows him. This happens very abruptly in the book, cutting short any continued tales of daily life in Kandy, which was a shame as the rhythm of life in other places is so very fascinating.

The second part of the book opens with the news of the tsunami and Barker's unfolding knowledge of the devastation. She worries for the friends she's made, frantically calling and e-mailing to find out their fates. And eventually she makes her way back to this island that has so captured her, this time without her son. She meanders around the island, needing to see the impact on the people of the "day the sea came to the land" for herself. She hears and recounts tales of new misses, amazing luck, and stumbles on the sorrow of hearing that someone she knew daily had disappeared forever. She examines the good and the inefficiencies of the aid proffered this tiny island nation and laments the misunderstandings about the survivors' needs and continued displacements of the people. She doesn't probe too hard at the psychological remains, knowing that this is not her story. And she does, on this sojourn, go to the war torn portions in the north of the island to see the perspectives from there not only from the tsunami but also from decades of unrelenting war.

The book is a fairly complete short history of the island with political information evenly interspersed. Where it tends to fall short is on the memoir side. While Barker mentions her friendship with many local people, she doesn't really bring those people alive for the reader. And she is remarkably reticent about her own and her son's personal lives while there aside from the initial adjustment to a very foreign culture. Despite this lack, I did enjoy the book and certainly feel more educated about the state of an island nation about which I previously knew very little. Sri Lanka has always felt a little exotic to me and while it probably still would were I ever to visit, its current events are definitely more familiar to me after having read this book. The two portions of the book hang together awkwardly since the two sojourns were made for such disparate reasons but read more as two separate journeys connected only by country and author, they are fine. People looking for a true memoir or ones who want more of the personal should be warned that that is not a strength of this book before reading it. But it is a fascinating glimpse into another culture nevertheless.

Thanks to LibraryThing Early Reviewers from sending me a review copy of this book.

2010 Pub Challenge

Who doesn't love brand new books and being the first one on the block to read them? It gives you the opportunity to look superior whenever someone asks, "Have you heard of...?" and you smugly answer, "I've already read that one." Not that I would ever be all smug and superior, of course. But I do love being able to give my ever sought after opinion on the newest books out there. ::snort:: And that's just one reason I really love participating in 1 More Chapter's 2010 Pub Challenge for books newly published in 2010.

Here are the 2010 rules:

Read a minimum of 10 books first published in 2010. You don’t have to buy these. Library books, unabridged audios, or ARCs are all acceptable. To qualify as being first published in 2010, it must be the first time that the book is published in your own country. For example, if a book was published in Australia, England, or Canada in 2009, and then published in the USA in 2010, it counts (if you live in the USA). Newly published trade paperbacks and mass market paperbacks do not count if there has been a hardcover/trade published before 2010.

No children’s/YA titles allowed, since we’re at the ‘pub.’

At least 5 titles must be fiction.

Crossovers with other challenges are allowed.

You can add your titles as you go, and they may be changed at any time.

Sign up at the Pub Challenge site using Mr. Linky.

Have fun reading your 2010 books!

So here's my subject to change list right now (the final three of which I have actually finished already this year):

1. Committed by Elizabeth Gilbert
2. Mistress Shakespeare by Karen Harper
3. The Butterflies of Grand Canyon by Margaret Erhart
4. The Wives of Henry Oades by Johanna Moran
5. Mr. Darcy Broke My Heart by Beth Pattillo
6. Eddie Signwriter by Adam Schwartzman
7. The First Annual Grand Prairie Rabbit Festival by Ken Wheaton
8. Seeing Stars by Diane Hammond
9. The Summer We Fell Apart by Robin Antalek
10. The Bread of Angels by Stephanie Saldana

Review: The Bread of Angels by Stephanie Saldana

Stephanie Saldana went to Damascus on a Fulbright scholarship to study the Jesus of the Qu'ran. She wanted to learn Arabic and read the Qu'ran in the original. She had lived in the Middle East before but Syria was new to her. The course of this memoir takes place over her Fulbright year, a year in which it wasn't easy to be an American in Syria as we were deeply into the war in Iran, a year in which she found herself trying to escape her broken heart and the seemingly cursed history that plagued her mother's family, a year in which she searched for God in the quiet of a monastery in the desert and the winding streets of the Christian area of Damascus, in a women's mosque, and in her own heart.

This memoir is very introspective and thoughtful. Saldana examines closely her life before moving to Damascus. She tries to look at her past failures in love objectively and to understand what she craves in her life. Retreating to a monastery for a month of silence and soul searching, she wrestles with whether or not she should commit to God and become a nun. After the month is over, she must re-immerse herself in not only Damascus city life but life at home in the US and ultimately make the decision whether or not to finish her Fulbright year as well as if she has truly been called to become a nun. But everything about her priorities changes when she returns to the monastery and falls in love with a novice monk. While she studies the Qu'ran with a respected teacher, learning the different but similar versions of scripture found within, she must also wait and see what path her own life will take, practicing a calmness, a resoluteness, and a patience that help her to come to terms with so much else in her life.

Well written and affecting, this is an openly honest and challenging story. Saldana has taken a long journey to know herself, to learn about a different culture, and to recognize and appreciate real love. She has drawn a vibrant and fascinating Damascus and has captured the multiple inhabitants, from the older man who adopts her as a granddaughter to the Iranian refugees humanly and with affection. The spiritual journey portion of the book was, to me, the weakest part of the book but I suspect that conveying the mystical in words for others is not an easy task. However, because this was a major portion of her narrative, it needed to draw me in more than it did. I found myself more interested when her journey involved other people, the Sheikha, the Abbot at the monastery, Frederick. And her reflections on her life prior to arriving in Damascus, her family's personal history, her vivid painting of Damascus itself and the people therein, and the love story all carried me along. This would make for a good book club book for those bookclubs which don't shy away from spirituality and will interest anyone with a fascination for the Middle East.

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