Review: Into the Tangle of Friendship by Beth Kephart

How do you describe friendship? How do you put into words, without sounding trite or overly sentimental, the essence of what a friend is? Beth Kephart manages to do this terribly difficult thing in a lyrical meditation on the meaning of friendship, how it changes, who we befriend, and why it is important in our lives through her experiences of her own friendships and her observations of her son's and her husband's as well. This is not a funny chronicle of the things she and her friends have done. It is a more spiritual examination of the power of friendship. It is a thoughtful, ruminative writing on just how friendship changes and enriches our life, in small ways and large. As Kephart discovers, our friends help define us, even if they are only briefly a part of our lives. But they round us out and offer themselves to us and Kephart has captured the elusive beauty of this fact with her poetic and honest writing. This book, like the other book of hers that I read, is not a straightforward narrative, relying on the skillful weaving of a descriptive and flowing style to pull together the thread of her thoughts. Billed as a memoir, the chapters have the feel of interconnected essays as much as anything. I would have liked a little more meat to the book but overall, it was a soothing reading experience.

Saturday Shout-Out

On my travels through the blogging world, I find many books that pique my interest. I always add them to my wish list immediately but I tend to forget who deserves the blame credit for inspiring me to add them to my list (and to whom my husband would like to send the bill when I get around to actually buying them). So each Saturday I'm going to try and keep better track, link to my fellow book ferreter-outers (I know, not a word but useful nonetheless), and hopefully add to some of your wish lists too.

I didn't manage to read anything besides e-mail in the internet world this week thanks to a spotty internet connection and total chaos at my house. But if anyone else has anything to suggest, feel free to let me know!

What goodies have you added to your wish lists recently? Make your own list and leave a comment here so we can all see who has been a terrible influence inspiring you lately.

Winners of Corked!

Random.org and I came up with the two winners (who will hopefully read along with me) for Corked by Kathryn Borel. The lucky readers are:

#2 Tribute Books

and

#6 dlhaley

I will be contacting both of them shortly. As for the rest of you, grab a copy of the book and read along with us!

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.

Guest Post from Connie May Fowler

I am delighted to be able to share with you a guest post from the talented Connie May Fowler, whose newest book, How Clarissa Burden Learned to Fly, I reviewed yesterday.

I love Kristen’s wonderful blog and her very evident dedication to books, so it’s quite an honor for her to ask me about how I generate ideas for books.

One of the first rules of being a novelist is The Writer Thou Shalt Not Bore Thyself. I mean think about it . . . novelists spend years (too many hours to count) spinning a single tale that will eventually end up on your bookstore shelf. The brain expenditure and the time dedicated are simply too large for us to spend our creative energies on something we find boring.

So the most honest answer to Kristen’s question is: The ideas find us. A character, a circumstance, a moment in history—perhaps even simply a conversation I eaves dropped on—will grab hold of me and won’t let me go. For instance, in my just released novel, How Clarissa Burden Learned to Fly, its inception began about five years ago when I was reading about pre-Civil War Florida history and uncovered information about the 1819 Florida Purchase Treaty.


Florida was a Spanish colony and though Spain didn’t practice progressive policies throughout the New World, in Florida it did. For instance, women and black people could own land. Black men could sit on juries. It was, considering what was occurring in the United States, an imperfect Utopia. But the treaty called for Florida to be turned over to the U.S.—a place where slavery and the subjugation of women flourished—in 1821. Thanks to a real estate deal, the most basic of human rights were stripped from two groups: women and people of African descent.
That haunted me. For years, I walked around with the information in my head, creating characters who would have been directly, horrendously affected by the treaty. But I didn’t want it to be a historical novel in the traditional sense, so it also became a ghost story with Clarissa Burden being our current day heroine. Clarissa, too, has to find her path to freedom.

I was interested in what happens to people who are trapped in cruel relationships (government or familial)—how that shapes them and affects other aspects of their lives. Clarissa’s challenges are many and most of them stem from the simple fact that she is mired in a loveless, mean marriage. Her march toward freedom is tied to the past—she recognizes that—and this tension between past and present, the acceptance of cruelty or its outright rejection, forms the foundation of the novel.
Sometimes ideas for my books come from my own life, sometimes from research, sometimes from the people and places around me. And always, always, they haunt and sustain me to the very end.

Cheers and happy reading!

Connie
www.conniemayfowler.com

Review: How Clarissa Burden Learned to Fly by Connie May Fowler

I stumbled across Connie May Fowler's works many years ago and have been enjoying her unusual writing ever since. With her trademarked meandering writing style, imitating and reflecting the heat shimmering over her fictional creation of Hope, Florida, Fowler has created the story of a woman beaten down by life, held hostage to her loveless marriage and her own inadequacies by self-esteem lower than a boa constrictor's belly who will finally rise up and learn to fly on her own.

Clarissa is a writer with two wildly successful books under her belt. She and her husband, Iggy, moved to Hope six months prior to the midsummer day (the summer solstice) during which all events of the story take place. As the day heats and grows, Clarissa watches as Iggy cavorts with his nude models (he's an artist or sorts) and is herself followed by a determined ghost who needs Clarissa to tell her terrible story and that of her husband and son as well. It is through the minor interventions of the ghost Olga and the imaginary voices in Clarissa's own head that she grows in strength as the day does, determining that her husband won't bully her anymore, that her opinion of things is valid, and that she has more worth than she's ever given herself for having.

The story seems to almost swirl through the pages, defying conventional narrative techniques. With ghosts unimagined and unacknowledged by Clarissa, a fly drunk on the appealing smell of the main character, a boy with a pet rattler, and a dwarf circus, this book is chock full of the unconventional and the unusual. And despite the craziness, Fowler manages to make this story of a woman's self-realization and strength completely normal and believable. Clarissa takes baby steps throughout her day and while her weaknesses make the reader groan, these small lapses into who she has been for all of her previous life make her newly fledged character all the more realistic. There are twists aplenty contained within and horrors too. The final culmination is a bit rushed but it nicely reinforces Clarissa as a woman with whom to be reckoned, a fighter. Once I picked this one up, I didn't put it down until I was finished, mesmerized as I was by the place, the characters, and the story itself and rooting for Clarissa to break free, to fly.

Thanks to Miriam at Hachette for sending me a copy of the book to review.

Review: Alexandra, Gone by Anna McPartlin

Opening with a cheery note written by Alexandra to her husband followed by her happily leaving her home to meet up with a friend, she heads off on the train, this being the last anyone will see of Alexandra before she vanishes. Husband Tom is devastated by her unsolved disappearance and he devotes his life to passing out fliers and trying to find any slim trail that might explain what has happened to his wife. Meanwhile, Jane, who has spent the last 17 years raising her son, still more than a little in love with his father, is sort of treading water when she, her successful artist sister Elle, and web designer Leslie are trapped in an stalled elevator with Tom at a concert. When Jane recognizes the Alexandra on Tom's fliers as an older version of her best friend from high school, a tentative alliance is formed in order to bring more attention to Alexandra's case.

All of the characters' lives revolve around the empty space Alexandra left behind but as time goes on, even as they continue to search and hope, they all learn to live their lives around the loss. Tom's sadness is palpable throughout the novel. He and Alexandra's mother lean on each other, believing in the impossible while Alexandra's brother and father seem to hold Tom responsible in some way. Jane jumps into the search for Alexandra thinking of her old friend and the way that they drifted apart when Jane got pregnant and Alexandra went on to college. Since Jane's life took a left turn, she has not only raised her son as a single mom, but she's been there for her ex as he waltzed through women, and has taken care of her flighty but incredibly gifted sister and their cantankerous mother. With her son finishing up high school, Jane's life is at a crossroads. Elle is childlike despite her powerful artistic gift and Jane's careful caretaking has allowed her to indulge in self-destructive behaviours driven by her manic depressive swings. Leslie, the one perfect stranger in the elevator, is reclusive, such a loner her neighbor, smelling something bad from her apartment calls the police, certain that Leslie has died in there. When she agrees to help design a website in hopes of finding new clues into Alexandra's disappearance, she starts to come out of her shell, making friends and choosing life instead of just waiting to die of the breast cancer that decimated her entire family. All of the characters face new beginnings in the wake of Alexandra's vanishing and while it initially seems impossible for each of them to wake up to the importance and potentials of their lives, they do indeed come to see the beauty in love, friendship, and new starts.

While the tone of the book could be overwhelmingly sad, and at times it is, McPartlin has managed to avoid making the novel one of nothing but loss, even though each of the characters' stories are indeed pervaded by loss. Alexandra's disappearance is the mystery around which all of the other characters' lives revolve, the reason they all meet in fact, but this is really more the story of how people carry on and how they face the next day and the next and the next and ultimately how they must go on to find some happiness in the world no matter how great the sadness weighing them down. The characters, are, in the end, to greater and lesser degree, hopeful. They've created connections amongst themselves and the reader certainly feels a connection to them as well. They are complex and interesting and well thought out characters.

The structure of the novel can be a bit choppy, as is often the case with ensemble casts of characters, with all of them being the focus of sections in turn. But it is important to see all of the characters fully so the structure needs to be this way. Alexandra, is of course, most present in her absence. And because of this absence, the reader will want a resolution to her story. But resolution is not the theme here and so the idea of renewal and continuation takes center stage. And while the reader does eventually discover a little of the mystery, the end of the book continues on, as befitting the theme. The cover here will appeal to readers of chick lit but there's a wealth of very serious topics covered within these pages. These topics add quite a bit to the story, taking this from the superficial to some surprising depths. The writing is not maudlin and the characters peopling the pages shine out of the pages. This is a devastating, hopeful, very good read.

Thanks to Sarah at Pocket Books for sending me a review copy of this book.