Monday Mailbox

This week's mailbox arrival:

"Til the Well Runs Dry by Lauren Francis-Sharma came from Henry Holt and LibraryThing Early Reviewers.

A family and love story set in Trinidad, this sounds exotic and familiar at the same time (a combination that should make for a fantastic read).

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

Review: Eyestone by D. R. MacDonald

A friend recently asked me what book I had on my shelves that had been there unread the longest. As I went hunting to find out, (Henry James' Wings of the Dove, incidentally), I came across this Pushcart Prize winning collection. Published in 1988, I have owned it for almost as long. And so with a promise to James that I would come back to him, I pulled this one off the shelf, curious to see what had intrigued my high school self to buy it and yet never to read it. I can't begin to guess what it was that drew me to it so many years ago, especially since short stories have never been my favorites. In this case, though, the short story is the perfect form, offering just enough and yet not so much pervading sadness and despair to overwhelm the reader.

All of the stories are set in the rugged and rural Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, an area populated by the descendants of the Scots, overlaid with the soft sounds of Gaelic and the muted plaids of kilts. Each of the stories in the collection offers a spare sense of place and feels washed in sepia tones, capturing the aging population, fading culture, and the economic depression of the time and place. There is a mournful nostalgia, a harkening back to the past, and a sense of life having long since passed by both the place and the people. The main characters are mostly aging protagonists, an old woman drinking alone in memory of her newly deceased brother, an artist whose wife has left him living cheek by jowl with an elderly widow he wants to evict, a laborer saying goodbye to his lifelong working and drinking buddy who has had a stroke, a fisherman shocked by the sudden, violent death of the local minister killed while on vacation in the old country, a nephew taking his elderly uncle back to the old homestead only to discover it has been vandalized, a brother lamenting his tough older brother's life, an uncle who presents his nephew with the symbol of uselessness, despair, and futility embodied in a Chinese rifle from the Korean War and then in the twilight of his life gets the rifle back, an old handyman checking in on a blind widow living alone and isolated, and an old sailor easing into death as his son remembers his father's tales. Woven throughout the whole collection is a fading, a melting into the gloaming. The landscape is vast but the lives left to the people in these stories are small and drifting towards their finish. A slight book, this must be read slowly and deliberately, just as the stories seem to have been written.

Review: Clever Girl by Tessa Hadley

Domestic set novels have long been disparaged. They are said to not have enough excitement or not to deal with large enough themes. And yet they frequently deal with the same themes that more wide ranging novels do, just in a more concentrated and subtle form. People have the potential to learn and grow in their everyday life just as much as they do when on a quest, on an adventure, or facing the unknown. The best domestic novelists prove this fact easily. Tessa Hadley is a beautiful writer and she knows the perfect pitch for a novel centered tightly around one woman, her life, and the small and large choices that determine her trajectory and yet, despite this, her new novel, Clever Girl, somehow just misses the mark.

Written in a series of chapters structured as short stories or vignettes, Stella is a child when the novel opens. She lives with her mother in a tiny flat in Bristol. She's been told that her father is dead but eventually learns that he left when she was a toddler. Stella is a curious and clever child, content to live simply with her mother and spend a lot of time with her nearby grandmother. The novel takes the reader through Stella's childhood, her becoming a teen mom and dropping out of school, living in a commune of sorts, depending on unlikely friends, going back to school as a mature adult, and eventually into her settled and somehow unsatisfactory feeling middle age. Although Stella shows promise when she's young, she makes bad decision after bad decision. Her life seems to be undirected but in fact she makes deliberate choices that lead her to each stage in her life. And after each choice, she is lucky enough to have an extended network step in and support her in moving forward.

Although a novel, the story is told entirely in Stella's voice looking back in time, making it feel like a reflective memoir. And despite it being told chronologically, there are some disconcertingly large gaps in the narrative. These gaps may not have changed Stella's character but because they are missing, some of the links between her stages in life feel like they are missing vital information as well. Stella's narration comes across as disconnected and emotionally detached. This could be because she is telling the story in hindsight but it makes it hard to feel in the moment with her and makes her life seem mundane despite events that should have added excitement. The novel's pacing is slow moving and so no matter how much I wanted to like this clearly well written novel, I just never warmed to it or to its main character who never seemed to change or develop. The bigger themes are missing here and without them, the story just meanders. As much as I loved Hadley's Married Love, set in similar situations to those that Stella finds herself in, I just didn't feel the same tug of recognition and emotional truth that was present in that collection.

Tessa Hadley has written several other books, including Accidents in the Home, which was long-listed for the Guardian First Book Award. 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 the book for 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.

Sedition by Katharine Grant. The book is being released by Henry Holt and Co. on April 1, 2014.

Amazon says this about the book: An unforgettable historical tale of piano playing, passions, and female power

The setting of Sedition by Katharine Grant: London, 1794.

The problem: Four nouveau rich fathers with five marriageable daughters.

The plan: The young women will learn to play the piano, give a concert for young Englishmen who have titles but no fortunes, and will marry very well indeed.

The complications: The lascivious (and French) piano teacher; the piano maker’s jealous (and musically gifted) daughter; the one of these marriageable daughters with a mating plan of her own.

While it might be a truth universally acknowledged that a man in possession of a title and no money must be in want of a fortune, what does a sexually awakened young woman want? In her wickedly alluring romp through the late-Georgian London, Italian piano making, and tightly-fitted Polonaise gowns, Katharine Grant has written a startling and provocative debut.

Review: The House of Memories by Monica McInerney

How do you go on living when your whole world has collapsed? And how do you go on living amongst the people who you blame for your world's collapse, even if they are the people you love most? In Monica McInerney's newest novel, The House of Memories, Ella O'Hanlon thinks that she can't but that there's no peace or healing until you find a way to offer forgiveness.

Ella is completely and understandably gutted by the death of her small son Felix. She is angry, furious really, and she runs away from her beloved husband Aidan, going from town to town throughout Australia, finding jobs, and then fleeing again. She does her best not to think, not to remember, not to feel, not to accept the pain. In her desire to escape, physically and mentally from those she blames for Felix's death and from her own guilt and self-loathing, she finally runs to her uncle Lucas Fox's large, dilapidated, messy house in London. Ella's uncle has long been a safe haven for her, through her parents' divorce, her mother's remarriage, and the arrival of half sister Jess who seems to have hung the moon in Ella's mother and stepfather's eyes. Although Lucas lived thousands of miles away, he was always there for Ella, offering gentle advice and providing her with a much needed outlet. So it's not much of a surprise that she would eventually run to him in the wake of this overwhelming loss.

But things are different this time around. Ella is an adult and although she's found comfort at Lucas' house before, now she also has to contend with the memories she has of meeting her husband there several years prior and the golden time they spent together, memories that lead her back to her precious toddler and the unimaginable loss of him. As Ella settles into Lucas' house, she cooks and cleans for him and the student tutors living with him. She also agrees to investigate the current tutors since Lucas has gotten some calls from his clients, all incredibly rich and some very famous, that pricey things have gone missing in their homes.  It gives her a sense of purpose, even if she's not entirely certain how to go about it, and it also gives her another avenue through which to avoid facing her feelings over Felix's death.

There's only one other family member Ella hasn't cut off in her grief, her stepbrother Charlie, a wonderful, funny man who lives in the US with his wife and children. He and Ella immediately hit it off when their parents married, quickly becoming a united front. When their half sister Jess was born later, there wasn't room for her demanding, center stage personality in their relationship. Although Charlie is a world away from Ella now, they have maintained their closeness, but Ella can no longer read Charlie's funny weekly family update emails, shunting them unread into a folder on her computer.  She is unready to witness family happiness when her own small family has been destroyed.  Neither Lucas nor Charlie can convince Ella to speak to Aidan or to Jess and her relationship with her mother and stepfather, which has been strained since Jess' birth and their clear favoritism for her, is even more distant than it once was.

As Ella tries to sleepwalk through her life in London, Jess, an actress, is also making her way from Australia to London in hopes of getting her big break in the West End. Because of the longtime animosity and antagonism between the two, no one wants to tell Ella that Jess is there as well, afraid that the information will send her fleeing again. As Ella lives in the house containing so many good memories of her courtship with Aidan, she starts to face her grief and all of the feelings of blame she has been harboring for more than a year and a half. And in facing her feelings, she comes to understand that family is imperfect and we all have resentments from the past that color our present but that sometimes family is all we have. And only they can help her try to move forward and live again despite the Felix shaped hole forever seared into her heart.

Told mainly from Ella's perspective, it is easy to feel her insecurity over her place growing up in her blended family and how that affected all of her interactions over the years, even before Felix was born, lived his short, happy life, and died. But in order to get a little bit of perspective as well, the narrative also includes Charlie's hilarious emails about life in the trenches with a successful wife and four entertaining children, Jess' chirpily cheerful diary entries, and Aidan's heartbreaking letters to Felix. All of them, as well as the rest of the family, grieve the loss of this sunny little boy but they all take different paths and because Ella's grief and sense of loss is so enormous and overwhelming, she can't see that she is only alone because she determinedly and intentionally has closed everyone else out.

Despite the balance that the other narratives offer, the characters still come across as true to the way that Ella sees them. Jess, whatever her pain, is the spoiled favorite, never having had to stand on her own two feet. Lucas is caring and stalwart and capable of tough love if need be. His girlfriend is unpleasant, abrasive, and unsympathetic, a character you can't help but dislike and whose appeal to Lucas remains unfathomable. Charlie is funny and kind and always able to understand Ella, even if he can't reach her in her deepest pain. Aidan is more elusive because Ella works so hard to forget what she loved about him. And Ella's mother is rather distant and wrapped up in Jess without ever acknowledging Ella's feelings of exclusion. Because Ella's strong opinions of each character form the reader's view of each of them, it is difficult (and in some cases, impossible) to temper those views even after the whole truth of Felix's death and its effect on each of the adults comes clear. This will always be a family that grapples with all of the hurts and blame and heartbreak of the past but they just might be able to find peace and happiness again as well.  Our past will always be with us in large and small ways, happy and sad, but the lesson is in moving forward and in forgiving and acknowledging that we all do the best we can as we live, love, and make mistakes. A sad but hopeful novel about grief and love and family, this is an engrossing read.

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

It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

With the start of tennis season for me and dance competition season for my daughter, my reading will take a real hit for a while. But being active is good, right? This meme is hosted by Sheila at Book Journey.

Books I completed this past week are:

Mrs. Coverlet's Magicians by Mary Nash
Ajax Penumbra 1969 by Robin Sloan
Lost Lake by Sarah Addison Allen

Bookmarks are still living in the middle of:

Quiet by Susan Cain
Clever Girl by Tessa Hadley
Encounters With Animals by Gerald Durrell
Romance Is My Day Job by Patience Bloom

Reviews posted this week:

Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan

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

The House of Memories by Monica McInerney
Eyestone by Dr. R. MacDonald
Mister Owita's Guide to Gardening by Carol Wall
The Pleasures of Autumn by Evie Hunter
Mrs. Coverlet's Magicians by Mary Nash
Ajax Penumbra 1969 by Robin Sloan
Lost Lake by Sarah Addison Allen

Monday Mailbox

This week's mailbox arrivals:

Casebook by Mona Simpson came from Alfred A. Knopf and TLC Book Tours for a blog tour.

About a boy who eavesdrops and investigates his family's inner, private life as his parents decide to separate, this novel of life-altering secrets uncovered sounds fantastic.

The Moon Sisters by Therese Walsh came from Crown Publishers.

A book about sisters, one of whom is a synesthete, and their quest to travel to the location of their late mother's unfinished novel, this sounds great.

Delicious by Ruth Reichl came from Random House and TLC Book Tours for a blog tour.

I've drooled over her memoirs so I am anxious to see what she does with a novel.

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