Review: The Mermaid of Brooklyn by Amy Shearn

It is not easy being a stay at home mom. It's especially not easy being a stay at home mom to two closely-spaced children. Been there, done that, and even added a third, fool that I am. Sometimes you ache for an escape or un-child related adult interactions or just some uninterrupted sleep. Amy Shearn's novel, The Mermaid of Brooklyn, captures the experience of being the mom to a toddler and an infant, the bone deep weariness, the endless frustration, and the moments of unsurpassed sweetness that help make the colicky screaming, the dirty diapers, and the disastrously messy house worth it, at least most of the time.

Jenny Lipkin is a stay at home mom to two year old Betty and infant Rose. Much of the luster has worn off of husband Harry, once her knight in shining armor, now harried and working for his family's failing candy business. The four of them are living in a tiny, cramped Park Slope apartment and, at least in Jenny's case, facing an endless stream of days filled with exhaustion and stultifying sameness. One night when Harry calls from work to say he's stopping to pick up some cigarettes and then never comes home, Jenny is too tired to even worry. In fact, Harry has a gambling addiction and has disappeared before, although never for as long, and he usually comes home either flush with some extra money or with his tail between his legs. But this time, Jenny's in-laws are worried about him and not just because he's taken money from the business. Jenny's biggest worry, since her brother-in-law and mother-in-law continue to deposit Harry's base pay into the bank for her, is how to live on the meager base without his sales bonuses, and more importantly, how to function as a single mother.

Unable to cope, Jenny climbs up on the Brooklyn Bridge intending to jump but changes her mind at the last second. Falling in anyway, Jenny plunges into the river where she is not only visited but also inhabited by a rusalka, a mermaid from Salvic folklore. Rusalkas are not the benign and benevolent mermaids of Disney movies but the souls of suicides, wronged wives, and the like. The rusalka who posseses Jenny won't share much of her past with her new host but she does get Jenny out of the water, back on land, and back to her babies. She also becomes the interior voice urging Jenny on and convincing her to really live, to find happiness even if it takes a long search. But the rusalka wants this because she wants to experience life again herself and so she pushes Jenny into both good and bad choices, even one disastrous choice, whatever suits the rusalka's own desires.

As Jenny goes about her days in the park with her mom friend Laura, at the coffee shop, at the library story hour, flirting outrageously with the one stay at home dad in their circle of acquaintances, at the kiddie gym, and with her mother-in-law, she carries on an internal dialogue between her real self and her rusalka as she learns to be a little freer, a little happier, and a little less caught up in appearances. Of course, her husband is still missing and she's still generally depressed and angry but she's learning to cope and to take care of herself, much in the way she cares for the needs of her girls.

Jenny as a character is very isolated. She is suffering from post-partum depression but her isolation, the distance she keeps from everyone, including her best friend, means the reader spends a lot of time with her and in her head. Sometimes this is a humorous thing, like when she and the rusalka are negotiating but equally often Jenny can be so whiny, listless, and woe-is-me that it's hard to keep inhabiting her thoughts. Yes, parenting is surprisingly, appallingly difficult but she has a mother-in-law to babysit for her whenever she asks and at least some income, paltry as it may be, as long as her husband's pay continues to come in from the business. She has the luxury of checking out and that makes it a little hard to read about her slogging through her life, complaining at every turn, for as long as the book requires. And certainly real life post-partum depression does go on and on for even longer than the duration of the time depicted in the book but reading about it without change for so many pages got tiresome. The pacing of the narrative was very slow and drawn out, much as the years of parenting young children feel when you are in the midst of them. The novel is very much driven by Jenny's character and her dawning self-realization. Whether Harry comes back in the end, where he's been for the bulk of the novel, is almost entirely immaterial. And even the rusalka, central as she should be based on the title, flits in and out of the pages, simply a plot element that might or might not be entirely in Jenny's head and certainly isn't fully explored. What Shearn gets right about parenting though generally outweighs the problems of the book. An interesting take on motherhood, marriage, and the claustrophobia of depression, this would be a good choice for a book club to discuss.

For more information about Amy Shearn and the book check out her website, Facebook page, or follow her on Twitter. Follow the rest of the blog tour or look at the amazon reviews for others' thoughts and opinions on the book.

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

Waiting on Wednesday

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

The Lucy Variations by Sara Zarr. The book is being released by Little, Brown Books for Young Readers on May 7, 2013.

Amazon says this about the book: Lucy Beck-Moreau once had a promising future as a concert pianist. The right people knew her name, her performances were booked months in advance, and her future seemed certain.

That was all before she turned fourteen.

Now, at sixteen, it's over. A death, and a betrayal, led her to walk away. That leaves her talented ten-year-old brother, Gus, to shoulder the full weight of the Beck-Moreau family expectations. Then Gus gets a new piano teacher who is young, kind, and interested in helping Lucy rekindle her love of piano -- on her own terms. But when you're used to performing for sold-out audiences and world-famous critics, can you ever learn to play just for yourself?

National Book Award finalist Sara Zarr takes readers inside the exclusive world of privileged San Francisco families, top junior music competitions, and intense mentorships. The Lucy Variations is a story of one girl's struggle to reclaim her love of music and herself. It's about finding joy again, even when things don't go according to plan. Because life isn't a performance, and everyone deserves the chance to make a few mistakes along the way.

It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

The early in the week headache thanks to my newly stitched together head made reading and writing a bit dicey but things improved at the end of the week. This meme is hosted by Sheila at Book Journey.

Books I completed this past week are:

The Mermaid of Brooklyn by Amy Shearn
The Silence of Bonaventure Arrow by Rita Leganski
All You Could Ask For by Mike Greenberg

Bookmarks are still living in the middle of:

Better Than Fiction edited by Don George
The One-Way Bridge by Cathie Pelletier

Reviews posted this week:

The J.M. Barrie Ladies' Swimming Society by Barbara Zitwer
Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter
Life After Life by Jill McCorkle
Paris in Love by Eloisa James

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

The House at the End of Hope Street by Menna van Praag
Ghost Moth by Michele Forbes
The Mermaid of Brooklyn by Amy Shearn
The Silence of Bonaventure Arrow by Rita Leganski
All You Could Ask For by Mike Greenberg

Monday Mailbox

Sometimes it's hard to restrain myself from pumping my fist when I pick up the mail and find a book in the box (or by the front door or inside on the counter if my children have brought it in for me already). This past week's mailbox arrivals:

Snapper by Brian Kimberling came from Pantheon.

I don't know much about birds myself although I have been trying to learn some here and there because I do like the feathered friends in my backyard but a book about a bird researcher in love with an enigmatic woman sounds wonderful and completely captivating.

The S-Word by Chelsea Pitcher came from Gallery Books.

Oh dear. Sometimes I prefer to keep my head firmly entrenched in the sand when it comes to the horrors and hatefulness that can devastate teenagers and sometimes I feel like I need to confront it and be aware since I have two of my own. This book about a girl branded as a slut and driven to suicide is sure to be horrifying and scary.

The Silence of Bonaventure Arrow by Rita Leganski came from Harper.

About a baby born mute but with acutely supernatural hearing who must bring healing to his mother and grandmother, I finished reading the copy I bought just as the copy from the publisher arrived (literally within minutes!) so expect a review in the not too distant future.

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

Review: Paris in Love by Eloisa James

Having lost her mother to cancer and then beaten breast cancer herself, romance author and Shakespeare professor Eloisa James (the pen name of Mary Bly) wanted a chance to live out a dream. So she and her Italian husband, Alessandro, a fellow professor, and their two children set about winnowing down their possessions, put their suburban home on the market, took sabbaticals from their respective universities, and moved to Paris for a year. During the course of that French year, James updated her Facebook status and Tweeted about their experience living as ex-pats and it is these snippets, slightly expanded, plus a few longer vignettes that have been collected into this light memoir of their year abroad.

James offers brief snapshots of ordinary life in Paris. She's captured the way they all meet life in this foreign culture. There's the kids' adjustment to their Italian school, the challenge and struggle of learning all their subjects in another language (despite the fact that they know Italian thanks to their father), and the negotiation of the social ins and outs of a new school. She offers minute descriptions of the sights, sounds, and smells around their charming neighborhood. She rhapsodizes about the shopping and the food so readily available to them and their endless parade of welcome guests. She tells of trips to Italy to see her mother-in-law, Marina, and Milo, the dog masquerading as a  furry speed bump who once belonged to the family but now lives in Italy permanently, growing ever fatter off of delicious table scraps, and she tells of Marina's visit to them in Paris. She captures the daily existence, complete with humorous moments, thoughtful pauses, frustrations, and joys of raising a family while having the flexibility of writing and researching from anywhere in the world. That these moments are in Paris rather than in the US makes them seem slightly exotic but aside from setting, in many ways they are really universal.

Arranged chronologically, the brief paragraphs of the memoir provide a nice amuse bouche of a book. But the very nature of the frothy and delectable brief bits means there is a skimming, superficial feel to the memoir. It comes across as fleeting and insubstantial,  lacking a narrative cohesiveness and feeling sketched, unfinished in some way. I imagine that it was beyond delightful to be on the receiving end of the status updates and tweets but I just don't know that the format works in favor of a completed memoir. James is a beautiful writer though and what she has captured and describes in the short paragraphs is very much the essence of each moment. Perhaps this is better as a book to dip into and out of over a long span of time rather than reading it in one sitting. It is a tiny confection and must be approached as such.

Review: Life After Life by Jill McCorkle

My grandmother lives in an assisted living and nursing facility. Each of the residents has his or her name on the door to their apartment but each time we go and visit, some of the names have changed. It is a sad fact of life, especially in a nursing home setting, that death is a constant. This place is the final home for almost all of its inhabitants. But here in the wrinkle ranch, the old folk's home, the elder shelter, heaven's waiting room, as much as death is a constant presence, life also goes on, a life after life. Jill McCorkle's much anticipated new novel, Life After Life, is set in just such a place, examining life, death, and the human spirit.

Told in vignette-style stories, the novel focuses on the lives and deaths of the residents, their deceased loved ones, and the staff of Pine Haven Retirement Facility in small town North Carolina. And contrary to popular belief about nursing homes, life at the Pine Haven is not just a monotonous wait for death. There are the same rivalries and friendships inside its walls that add spice to life outside the home. There are contentious residents, sweetly accepting residents, conniving residents, wise residents, angry residents, and contented residents. Their sojourn in the nursing home doesn't change who they are fundamentally.   In many cases, in fact, it distills this essential being, clarifying and sharpening it.

Sadie, a former third grade teacher who taught most of the residents of the town at one time or another, has started a thriving business creating photographs that place her fellow residents all over the world and in the midst of adventures they never took. She knows much of what goes on in the nursing home and offers well-considered, sage advice to those who ask. Rachel, an outsider to the area, harbors a secret she clutches to her heart and which brought her from Boston to this small piece of North Carolina. Stanley is a crotchety old man who seemingly slips in and out of dementia, one moment lucid and courtly and the next shouting and offensive. Joanna is a volunteer at the home who spends her time there sitting with the dying, chronicling people's last words, final moments, and the essence of who they were. She records her observations in her notebook, preserving the memory of each person, keeping them from being forgotten, bearing witness to their life and their death. CJ is a young, tattooed and pierced single mom who has lived a tough life. Best friends with Joanne, she works as Pine Haven's beautician as she tries to build a better life for her little boy. Abby is a lonely child who is all but neglected at home in the wake of her parents' growing unhappiness and anger and is bullied or ignored at school. Her mother is nasty and narcissistic while her father is blind to her emotional neglect so she escapes to Sadie's room and the caring she finds there whenever she can.

The short chapters, told from the perspective of the large ensemble cast, the pages from Joanna's notebook, and the final thoughts of the dying, all build an exquisite character driven novel about secrets and self and the facades we all present to the rest of the world. It's a thought-provoking work about death and letting go but also about life and the living of it right up until the very end. The narrative slowly reveals the stories of each of the characters, what life events created them, and why each of them, resident or not, made his or her way to the nursing home. As ever, McCorkle's writing is magnificent and her characters are just quirky enough to be completely human. There is a poignancy here, as might be expected in a novel so closely tied to the end of life, but it also offers the quiet solace of the eternal, especially through the final, unspoken but conscious thoughts of the dying. Life After Life is understated, reflective, and emotionally pitch perfect until the oddly incongruous and inexplicable ending.  It just doesn't fit with the tone of the rest of the novel.  Over all though, this was a lovely and incredibly enjoyable read despite the unfortunate ending.  It is, generally, a novel to be savored.

Thanks to LibraryThing Early Reviewers for sending me a copy of this novel to review.

Review: Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter

I know they say you can't judge a book by its cover but we all do. If we didn't, the entire art department at publishers would be out of work. So when I saw the gorgeous cover of this book with an Italian village oceanside and perched in the cliffs, I knew the book was calling to me. When I saw that it was written by Jess Walter, whose The Financial Lives of the Poets I read several years ago, I knew I needed to read it. And when I saw that it combined a story of 1960s Italy and modern day Hollywood, I knew I had to own it. So I bought it and it sat on my shelf unread. But then a blog tour happened and it was the perfect excuse to read this book about two different times and places converging into one complete if tangled storyline.

Opening in 1962 as a beautiful, rising young actress, a member of the cast of the still under production Elizabeth Taylor-Richard Burton movie Cleopatra, boats into the tiny, forgotten town of Porto Vergogna, sent there because she's been told she's dying of stomach cancer. Dee Moray is to wait there in this blip on the map for the man who will take her onward to Switzerland where a doctor will treat her condition. Pasquale Tursi, a young Italian man newly returned home after the death of his father, stands deep in the port's waters when the boat carrying the beautiful actress arrives. He's trying to shift rocks in order to be able to build a tennis court cantilevered out over the ocean for the enjoyment of the American tourists his father, who owned the only hotel in town, and now he believed would soon discover and flock to the little hamlet. And lo and behold, just as in his beliefs, an American actress to stay in his tiny hotel. During the short tenure of her stay in Porto Vergogna, Dee and Pasquale, despite having trouble communicating (she has no Italian and his English is rudimentary) make an unexpectedly deep connection with each other. Pasquale is kind and loyal and he does his best to help Dee see the beauty around them in life. And Dee responds to the bone-deep honor and goodness of this young man as she learns the truth of her situation.

And then the novel flips to modern day Hollywood where once legendary producer Michael Deane, botoxed and cosmetically enhanced into a caricature and a cliche, lives and works on the fringes of a studio no longer making epic movies, instead making the worst sort of reality tv: on-screen train wrecks. His assistant Claire Silver is facing a career crisis as she looks forward with trepidation to another of Deane's Wild Pitch Fridays, a day where anyone and everyone who ever came into contact with the great Michael Deane, the crazy, the misguided, and the terminally untalented, is given the opportunity to come in and have a face to face pitch meeting over which Claire will have to preside. And this Friday is no exception. But at the tail end of the day, something different happens. Shane Wheeler, a screenwriter who lives in his parents' basement after a failed marriage, arrives late to give his pitch: a different, gritty, and deeply depressing take on the Donner Party focused not on the cannibalism but on the devastation and grief of the members of that ill-fated party. He arrives at the studio at the same time as an old Italian man searching for Dee Moray, whose only clue to her whereabouts is an ancient Michael Deane business card. And because of Shane's time brief time abroad in Italy, he becomes the de facto translator for Pasquale Tursi as he meets Michael Deane and they all set out on a quest fifty years in the making to find out whatever happened to Dee Moray.

The novel is not told in any sort of linear fashion, with the plot jumping backwards and forwards in time willy nilly and from character to character. This literary whiplash is hard to adjust to in the beginning but as the novel moves on, it becomes easier and easier to make the leaps with it. Not only is it told non-linearly, the novel also uses more than just straight traditional narration to tell the stories of the myriad of characters in its pages. Among the narrative devices are an unpublished screenplay, an autobiographical play performance, an unfinished World War II novel which starts at the end and never does have a beginning, and the expunged, sleazy, and legally indefensible version of a memoir subsequently sanitized and published for wider consumption. All of these different narrative devices mirror the themes of the novel as a whole and enrich the stories of the characters to whom they belong. But the sheer number of characters, the amount of stories and backstories, the epic scope of this cinematic, quintessential Hollywood story, and the careening roller coaster ride of the multiple plotlines handicap the novel a bit. Walter does pull everything together and make it all pertinent in the end but getting to that point is sometimes too much. He has written an interesting look at integrity, goodness, and living an honorable life versus self-serving greed, despair, and failure. Some of his people and places are in fact the beautiful ruins of the title while others are instead ugly ravaged remains of a lifetime of poor choices. Walter is definitely a talented writer so although this novel proved to be missing just that slightest bit of heart that would have had me raving over it instead of concentrating on the complexity of the plot and the fantastic gymnastics of the writing itself, it is worth a read.

For more information about Jess Walter and the book check out his website or follow him on Twitter. Follow the rest of the blog tour or look at the amazon reviews for others' thoughts and opinions on the book.

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