Monday Mailbox

Just one but it sure looks like fun. :-) This past week's mailbox arrival:

Girl Before a Mirror by Liza Palmer came from William Morrow and LibraryThing Early Reviewers.

A forty year old account executive, a romance writer's convention, and what it means to take control of your own life, how could this not be delectable?

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.

Sunday Salon: What's different about college these days?

I have been spending the past couple of weeks going on college visits with my oldest child. (Here's where I save you from having to offer me empty compliments: yes, I am in fact old enough to have a child going off to college next year--God willing and the creek don't rise--despite the almost sincere avowals about my youthfulness that courtesy requires.) In any case, going on college visits for your kid is sort of shocking, especially since I feel like I was just on my own college visits last week too. In the really long time blink of the eye since I was in the college choice process myself, things have changed a lot. Colleges have Starbucks and Burger King and the like on campus for their students' convenience. At many of them, there's no need for cash to pay for this stuff either; it all comes out of their meal plan dollars or the extra bucks that come with the meal plan. And let's talk about the regular old cafeteria, shall we? Holy cow! The choice and the appealing smells! This is not your mother's dining hall, kid. No college seems to charge kids for laundry anymore, which makes me wonder if I can pay a tuition bill with the rolls of quarters we'd been assembling in advance of sending our darling off into the big, bad, responsible world. Every campus seems to have game rooms and the like (often with state of the art electronics) in order to entice students in their free time.  Seriously, they beat the hell out of my basement, that's for sure.  A mom on yesterday's tour told me that one of the colleges she'd visited with her daughter included entertaining their students as one of the fundamental things with which they *must* provide the student body, ranking it up there with food, housing, and education. Every college we've visited yet this year has gifted my child with a t-shirt instead of making us fork over my money at the bookstore. And dorm rooms? Some of them, including those for freshmen, are nicer than our first apartment (not that my husband and I felt deprived in any way, mind you, because we lived in cubbyholes in college, not suites with full kitchens, private bedrooms, a common room, and a bathroom shared between a mere four people). Staggering, really.

But these are all fairly superficial differences designed to attract a very privileged generation, of which I am, admittedly, raising three members (although I've tried to hammer the entitlement out of them as best I can). The biggest difference I noticed though, the one that is more than icing on a cake, is at the campus libraries and the school bookstores. Several college visits in and I have to admit that when we walk into one or the other of these places, I still look to see the books. And I am saddened by the obvious, gaping lack. Sure, there are still some here and there. But more often the libraries are full of computers and study areas and only a few lonely looking stacks. The bookstores are overrun with sweatshirts, yoga pants, and blankets, with but a mere corner devoted to actual books. And their absence makes my heart bleed for all the improvements that are so conspicuously much more valued than books. I recognize that we're visiting at a time of year when kids aren't buying course texts and so that's to account for some of it, that the bookstores have sent back the unsold books from first semester to make room for the upcoming texts for second semester. And I know that much of the information we used to look up in the library stacks is now found digitally on the ever ubiquitous computers. But I do still mourn. (I could mourn a little less if someone, somewhere could see fit to give me the gift of a card catalog of my very own because that's another thing I desperately miss. I am deadly serious, but I do digress.) Walking around with my son and seeing the amazing things ahead of him next year, including the food options, game rooms, suite living, and more, I half wish I could go back to college again myself. But in the same moment, I am glad that my long past college experience had books spilling out of it at every turn, from the library to the bookstore to the bowed shelves in my small non-private dorm room. His experience will undoubtedly be very different than mine, not least because he will avoid the English department like the plague.  I have no worries that he'll get a good education, I wouldn't be writing tuitions checks if I did, but I am glad that if we isn't surrounded by books at school next year, he certainly will be whenever he comes home.  He might have all the fast food and video games he wants at school, but he'll always get a taste of old school books at my house.

I've mostly been sunk in light reads and romances this week, what with contemplating the imminence of the first fledgling leaving the nest and all. I explored Nepal from the perspective of an American anthropologist interested in women's issues, a woman who also happened to be married to a Nepali man. I watched as a woman incapable of fidelity tried to decide if she could marry her unsuspecting fiancé. I faced a spoiled teenaged ghost who drove his now adult brother and a B and B owner into each other's lives. I had a front row seat as five single guests at a wedding brought their own dramas, imperfect lives, and often regrettable behaviour to the reception. And I was entertained as two former lovers battled over the phone sex empire that their beloved mutual friend left them in his will.

Where have your reading travels taken you this week?

Review: Fog Island Mountains by Michelle Bailat-Jones

Weather can have a big impact on people and their emotions. Sunny days make it easier to be happy. Grey, overcast days inspire lethargy and can feed depression. So the rising of a storm coupled with a terrible diagnosis would easily symbolize a growing grief and could certainly inspire denial and avoidance, a desire to run and hide from the coming trauma as do the characters in Michelle Bailat-Jones' lyrical short novel.

Alec Chester has lived in Japan for forty years, teaching English. As a South African in a small Japanese town, he is used to being the outsider, remaining one always, despite the fact that his wife, Kanae, is Japanese and their children are half Japanese. As the town, in the shadow of the Fog Island Mountains, braces for a coming typhoon, Alec is given a diagnosis of terminal cancer. His wife, suspecting the grim prognosis, doesn't meet Alec at the hospital for the diagnosis. Nor does she visit after his exploratory surgery. In fact, she is running and hiding from the truth of his condition, angry that despite his promise never to leave her that he will in fact die and do just that, and so she commits an act that she will want to undo almost from the moment of commission. When Alec leaves the hospital and goes missing, Kanae must acknowledge her feelings in the face of his disappearance and choose to either accept or reject the fear that he might have gone away to commit suicide.  Opting to reject that possibility, now she too must head fearlessly into the teeth of the coming storm.

Narrated by an old and wise storyteller named Azami, who finds and heals wild animals, the novel is pitched in the stages of the impending storm, emotions echoing the violence and the fury, as well as the calm, of the coming weather. Azami has insights into the entire community although her focus is the emotional chaos of the Chester family, from Alec and Kanae, accepting the diagnosis in different ways, to oldest daughter Megumi, who refuses to tell anyone who the father of her young son is, to fragile, scared daughter Naomi, to son Ken'ichi, fact driven and soon to be a father himself. Alec is adrift in his own body, the rising storm outside mirroring the rising storm inside him. And rather than battening down the hatches, he and Kanae take separate emotional flights away from each other and what is to come before racing back towards the safe harbor of their shared past.

Bailat-Jones' writing is spare, gorgeous, and dreamy and the novel is stunning in its emotional impact. She has taken the natural world, in the symbol of the gathering typhoon and woven it throughout the narrative to great effect. And she has used the traditional Japanese mythological spirit of the kitsune, in the person of Azami, carefully and deliberately to tell this story as it must be told. The characters are fully rounded in their fears and the way they acknowledge or suppress their emotions. The story is both tragic and a triumph, all at once contemplative, brutal, and tender. There is a slow building tension to the narrative as the storm grows ever closer and as with an outsized storm, the aftermath for everyone is forever changed, washed clean, and immortalized in the remarkable tale so recently told. An elegant, graceful tale of grief, sorrow, and leaving, this is beautifully rendered and will stay with the reader long after the last page is turned.

For more information about Michelle Bailat-Jones and the book, take a look at her web page, follow her on Twitter, or take a look at the book's page on GoodReads. Follow the rest of the blog tour or look at the amazon reviews for others' thoughts and opinions on the book. If you'd like to listen to a clip of the book, check it out at Audible.com.

Thanks to Lisa 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.

Lives in Ruins by Marilyn Johnson. The book is being released by Harper on November 11, 2014.

Amazon says this about the book: The author of The Dead Beat and This Book is Overdue! turns her piercing eye and charming wit to the real-life avatars of Indiana Jones—the archaeologists who sort through the muck and mire of swamps, ancient landfills, volcanic islands, and other dirty places to reclaim history for us all.

Pompeii, Machu Picchu, the Valley of the Kings, the Parthenon—the names of these legendary archaeological sites conjure up romance and mystery. The news is full of archaeology: treasures found (British king under parking lot) and treasures lost (looters, bulldozers, natural disaster, and war). Archaeological research tantalizes us with possibilities (are modern humans really part Neandertal?). Where are the archaeologists behind these stories? What kind of work do they actually do, and why does it matter?

Marilyn Johnson’s Lives in Ruins is an absorbing and entertaining look at the lives of contemporary archaeologists as they sweat under the sun for clues to the puzzle of our past. Johnson digs and drinks alongside archaeologists, chases them through the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, and even Machu Picchu, and excavates their lives. Her subjects share stories we rarely read in history books, about slaves and Ice Age hunters, ordinary soldiers of the American Revolution, children of the first century, Chinese woman warriors, sunken fleets, mummies.

What drives these archaeologists is not the money (meager) or the jobs (scarce) or the working conditions (dangerous), but their passion for the stories that would otherwise be buried and lost.

Review: Last Train to Babylon by Charlee Fam

As my own children grow ever closer to young adulthood and to striking out on their own, I worry more and more about the world and them making their way in it. The choices they make will change them. Those choices can harm them or help them; either way they will certainly be life altering. As they move out into the world, their friendships, once so solid seeming, may change or fade or end and they may one day have to face the betrayal of a friend. It is a hard lesson and one so many of us have had to learn. Books like Charlee Fam's debut novel, Last Train to Babylon, don't help to assuage my fears for my kids. In fact, it even reinforces some of them, but it is so realistic and true as a possibility for today's twentysomethings that it cannot be dismissed.

The prologue opens with Aubrey Glass waking up in a hospital bed. She doesn't quite remember how she ended up there but it is clear that something deep and unhappy haunts her since there is a psychologist at her side asking her questions. And from this, the rest of the novel takes off. Moving backwards in time to before the hospital bed, Aubrey is surprised to hear from her mother that her former best friend, Rachel, has committed suicide. In fact, it is Aubrey who has five years worth of suicide notes in case she chooses to end it all. (She also has break-up notes to leave for the boyfriend with whom she lives if it comes to that rather than suicide.) She is angry that everyone wants her to grieve over someone who hurt her as badly as Rachel once did, not that she allows the reader to know what happened between them, at least not to start. As she works through her own internal rants about Rachel, she paints a picture of an unequal and unrewarding friendship. Rachel sounds awful but Aubrey doesn't sound any better. And she has no intention of going home to the funeral and the after party being organized in Rachel's memory. But she does go home where she is faced with the memories of everything that was right and then went so very wrong.

The novel moves back and forth from the past to the present as Aubrey works through her feelings both about what happened years ago to irreparably break their friendship then and how she feels now knowing that Rachel is gone. Aubrey tells the story herself, allowing her to give an incomplete accounting, continue to hide just what Rachel did to her, and to avoid the elephant in the room of the trauma that drives her whole existence now. She's a cold character, afraid of feeling emotion, who drinks to forget, to mute life, to self-medicate. She has fooled herself into thinking that she is over what happened but by never addressing it, she has allowed it to close her off to life, enjoyment, and connection. Aubrey is clearly damaged and cannot start to heal until she addresses the pain and truth of her past. She is not particularly likable and she portrays Rachel as a controlling, toxic, mean girl, queen bee too; even so Aubrey's lashing out at those who want to change Rachel's character after death is violent and self-destructive. The tone of the book is edgy, angry, and dark. Despite the bleakness of the story, especially once Aubrey allows herself to admit what happened to her, it still contains the seed of the importance of forgiveness and acceptance. Your choices can lead you into nightmares but holding onto them, internalizing them, and forever shouldering the blame robs you of the chance for future happiness. In capturing the voices of the Millennial Generation so clearly, Fam has written a hard nosed novel about truth, victimhood, and the end of friendship, one that is hard to read, with characters it is hard to like, but that still compels the reader to keep turning pages.

For more information about Charlee Fam and the book, take a look at her web page, follow her on Twitter, or take a look at the book's page on GoodReads. 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.

It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

I spent the weekend with my daughter at a dance competition. While I wrote no reviews over that three day span and only finished one book I had already started before I went, I did get some Christmas shopping accomplished, spent time with the other dance moms and girls (no, we're nothing like on the tv show), and got to watch my daughter dance her solo better than I've seen it yet. She's gotten so good! So not a big bookish week, but a great week nonetheless. And I think I've finished all of the previously requested book reviews so if you have any in that last list that you'd like to see me write sooner, let me know and I'll try to get right on that. This meme is hosted by Sheila at Book Journey.

Books I completed this past week are:

The Way North edited by Ron Riekki
Last Train to Babylon by Charlee Fam
Z by Therese Anne Fowler
Fog Island Mountains by Michelle Bailat-Jones

Bookmarks are still living in the middle of:

Ruby by Cynthia Bond
While the Gods Were Sleeping by Elizabeth Enslin

Reviews posted this week:

The Lost Tribe of Coney Island by Claire Prentice
If Not For This by Pete Fromm
Bellman and Black by Diane Setterfield

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

Angels Make Their Hope Here by Breena Clarke
Ishmael's Oranges by Claire Hajaj
Neverhome by Laird Hunt
Burial Rights by Hannah Kent
Euphoria by Lily King
The Blessings by Elise Juska
The Traitor's Wife by Allison Pataki
Painted Horses by Malcolm Brooks
All Fall Down by Jennifer Weiner
Juliet's Nurse by Lois Leveen
We Are Called to Rise by Laura McBride
The Orphans of Race Point by Patry Francis
Ordinary Grace by William Kent Krueger
Mr. Tall by Tony Earley
Gemini by Carol Cassella
The Bride Insists by Jane Ashford
A Farm Dies Once a Year by Arlo Crawford
A Fork in the Road edited by James Oseland
Marching to Zion by Mary Glickman
Reluctantly Royal by Nichole Chase
The Geometry of Love by Jessica Levine
The Wednesday Daughters by Meg Waite Clayton
Highland Scandal by Julia London
Since You've Been Gone by Anouska Knight
Starting Over by Sue Moorcroft
Falling For Max by Shannon Stacey
Christmas Brides by Suzanne Enoch, Alexandra Hawkins, Elizabeth Essex, and Valerie Bowman
'Til the Well Runs Dry by Lauren Francis-Sharma
The Banks of Certain Rivers by Jon Harrison
To Marry a Scottish Laird by Lynsay Sands
The Way North edited by Ron Riekki
Last Train to Babylon by Charlee Fam
Z by Therese Anne Fowler
Fog Island Mountains by Michelle Bailat-Jones

Monday Mailbox

An interesting pair to get together this week. :-) This past week's mailbox arrivals:

The Divorce Diet by Ellen Hawley came from Kensington and TLC Book Tours for a blog tour.

How can you not want to read a book about a woman whose husband divorces her causing her to turn to a weight-loss book for the recipe to future happiness? This looks like a lot of fun.

We'll Always Have Paris by Jennifer Coburn came from Sourcebooks and France Book Tours for a blog tour.

Traveling through Europe with her daughter on a trip Coburn wanted to take because she was afraid of dying young, a vacation that taught her to live life to the fullest, this memoir sounds fantastic.

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.