Book Reviews January 2017

Unspoken and The Inner Circle by Mari Jungstedt.  I continued on with Mari Jungstedt’s Anders Knutas detective series books 2 and 3, but I will not read further.  I had hopes that she would be as good a writer as Asa Larsson, but Larsson is too hard of an act to follow.  Jungstedt’s writing is just not good and her characters are two-dimensional.  Anders Knutas, the lead detective himself is uninteresting – he’s supposed to come off as cautious and thoughtful, but he ends up seeming just not very bright.  The recurring journalist character Johan Berg is a bit more skillfully put together, but she drags out the story of his relationship with Emma, a victim in the first book, way too annoyingly and slowly.  Anyway, both books were about crimes on the island of Gotland.  You basically can figure out who committed the crimes, because there is always only one other character who is not police or journalist.  Both books were disappointing.

Little Labors by Rivka Galchen.  Galchen often writes for The New Yorker, and when I heard she had published a nonfiction book, I was eager to read it.  And it did not disappoint.  The book is basically about Galchen’s having a baby and how the baby changes and fits in to her NYC life.  I found her observations astute and well put.  She writes of her mother’s interactions with her daughter, how the people on the street who she sees everyday interact with her now, and even how elevator encounters are changed by the addition of an infant.  It’s the best example of a kind of “everything but the kitchen sink” approach to writing.  She goes off on tangents and they are always interesting.  She’s also a sparse writer – the book can be read in a couple of hours – and each piece is a gem. 

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead.  This is a good novel and well worth the acclaim given to it.  I was a little hesitant about the first third of it – I felt like Whitehead chose to go the easy sensational route in the beginning.  But then he settled in and hit his stride.  The novel is about Cora, a slave who tries to escape from her plantation, and her many triumphs and even more setbacks on her journey.  The immediately interesting aspect is that she uses the underground railroad, which in this book is an actual underground railroad – complete with train cars and tracks and tunnels.  It works, I’m not completely sure why, except that didn’t everyone want it to be an actual railroad when they first heard about it?  And Whitehead does a good job playing up the metaphors and symbolism of the unknown labor and laborers who built it.  Cora’s journey is a very harrowing one, and as a reader, I found it infuriating how she would often choose to stay put instead of immediately moving on to safety.  There is also a slave catcher, Ridgeway, whose nemesis Cora becomes (as does her mother who also got away).  There’s a lot of violence, and on occasion the characters veer a little toward caricatures, but it is a compelling read.

Trespass by Rose Tremain.  This is not a happy novel, but I very much enjoyed reading it nonetheless.  It takes place in the French countryside and tells the story of two brother and sister pairs whose lives intersect tragically.  Audrun and Aramon Lunel grew up outside of Ruasse and are on the brink of selling their crumbling mansion that was, when they were little, a working silkworm farm.  They have a sad family history (to put it mildly) and both are damaged by their past – one as the victim, and one the perpetrator.  Then there is Veronica Verey, who also lives outside of Ruasse with her partner Kitty Meadows.  Together they are working on a gardening book, and all is well until Veronica’s brother, Anthony, comes to visit.  Anthony is an antiques dealer in England who was once wealthy and reknown, but both his fame and fortune are dwindling.  Anthony thinks maybe he will buy the Mas Lunel from Aramon, and this is where everything begins to collide.  It is beautifully written and interesting, even though there isn’t really anyone to root for.  Tremain gets everything just right though and I now want to read anything else she has written.  I recommend it, but expect to be sad.

An Unbeaten Man by Brendan Reilly.  I wanted to like this thriller since it is written by a fellow Bowdoin alum, but it just didn’t work for me.  I think it could possibly be made into a good movie, except for the fact that it is a little old school with very typical “cold war” villains.  It definitely contained a lot of action and violence.  The writing was way too clumsy for me (all sorts of moments where the hero or heroine are knuckling their eyes for clearer vision), and too much didn’t make sense.  There’s the fact that almost everyone gets killed except for the hero, which is the kind of belief I’m willing to suspend, but there were needless torture scenes and also needless villains.  It was often overdone and the plot was cartoony.  Basically, a Bowdoin professor, Michael McKeon, gets kidnapped and is forced to destroy Russia and Saudi Arabia’s oil fields; his wife and daughter are being held hostage so that he will do as asked.  Unbeknownst to McKeon, another Bowdoin professor is really a secret agent, so sets a rescue in motion.   Characters come and go and it is hard to care what happens to them.  There’s also a revelation regarding his wife at the end which was downright silly.

The River At Night by Erica Ferencik.  This is an excellent thriller and one of the best reads I’ve read in a while.  Wini is nearing forty and is going on a white water rafting trip with three old friends.  One, Pia, is a bit of an adventure addict, so talks Wini, Sandra, and Rachel into going on the maiden voyage of a rafting expedition set up by a son of a friend of hers way up in the north of Maine.  Their guide, Rory, is very young and his idea of a good time is not shared by the majority of the four women.  The trip is to last three days and as you might imagine, everything goes wrong.  Everything!  It is scary and intense and I couldn’t put it down.  Ferencik writes beautifully – her descriptions of the river are great throughout the whole novel; she also does a really excellent job of creating believable characters and revealing just enough so that you understand them.  Wini, especially, is well-crafted; she’s at a crossroads in her life and is a self-professed coward, yet is able to rise to the ensuing challenges in ways that are poignantly described.  This book too would make an excellent movie; I would think the rights have already been sold.  It is gripping and unexpected and scary and interesting.  Read it!

Book Reviews September 2016

Eligible by Curtis Sittenfeld.  I had mixed feelings about this book.  It is a modern day rewrite of Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, and for the first third of it I was basically just grumpy that I wasn’t reading the original.  But then I discovered that if I pictured the main characters as Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle, then I could enjoy the book a little more!  Some of the updates are interesting – Lydia elopes with a transsexual, for example, and Mrs. Bennet is a compulsive shopper – but some of the story just doesn’t translate into modern times, particularly the family constraints.  It doesn’t matter today if you have tacky sisters and a stupid mother – that is no longer going to affect your own opportunities.  Sittenfeld is clever though, and the writing isn’t bad.  It’s an entertaining but not mind-blowing read.

Adnan’s Story: The Search For Truth and Justice After Serial by Rabia Chaudry.  If you listened to the podcast, Serial, and enjoyed it, then you should definitely read this book.  Actually even if you didn’t, it is a fascinating – if long – read.  Rabia’s brother, Saad, was Adnan’s good friend, and when Adnan got arrested in 1999, Rabia, who was then in law school, became his advocate.  It was Rabia who brought the case to the attention of Sarah Koenig, who then made theSerial podcast.  Anyway, Rabia puts all the very, very extensive evidence that Adnan Syed is innocent into her book.  I thought he was innocent before I read the book, but I definitely think so after.  She leaves no stone unturned, and once Serial becomes so popular, she gets a lot of help from professionals and others to sift through the transcripts and evidence and follow old leads, etc.  It was one of these helpers who discovered the fax page that has led to the case being reopened.  She shows how the police very early on came up with the theory that it was Adnan and some kind of a Muslim honor killing, and she goes on to prove how very silly and unfounded that theory was.  The police then bent all evidence into fitting that story line, however, and Adnan’s attorney was having major medical problems that people didn’t know about at the time.  Her illnesses made her incompetent.  It’s an often times stressful read – I had to put my kindle down and rage a bit from time to time, and Sean got very tired of me filling him in on outrageous details.  Adnan Syed has been in prison since the age of 17 for a crime he clearly didn’t commit.  Free Adnan!  And please find the real killer of Hae Min Lee.

Missing, Presumed by Susie Steiner.  This was an excellent novel and I look forward to reading more books about DS Manon Bradshaw in the future.  Manon is a detective assigned to a missing persons case in Cambridge, England.  Edith Hind, a 22 year-old student, is reported missing by her boyfriend who returns home from a weekend away to find the door to their apartment open and Edith gone, although her purse and phone and coat are all still there.  He calls her parents and the police.  The majority of the book is through the viewpoint of Manon, a 39 year-old woman who is good at her job and not as good in her personal life.  She is in the midst of internet dating and finding the pickings slim.  We also get chapters from the viewpoint of Miriam, Edith’s mother, and also Davy, Manon’s work partner.  The characters are all very well-written and developed and believable, and Steiner does a good job of telling just what is needed without getting overblown in the process.  The case unfolds slowly, and as more time passes, of course, there is less of a chance that Edith will be found safe.  I recommend it!

You’ll Grow Out Of It by Jessi Klein.  This is a hilarious book of essays, and I often found myself laughing so hard on the train while reading it, that I think I caused a fellow passenger or two to move a few seats farther away from me.  But it is so funny!  Klein is a comedian, and also a writer for Amy Schumer, so of course she is funny, but her writing is quite good too.  She concentrates in this book on her dating experiences, and then once she meets the man she goes on to marry in her late thirties, she writes about their relationship and infertility problems etc.  She has a great eye for detail and is also really adept at the interesting turn of phrase:  I laughed for several days at her description of herself trying on French lingerie in a high-end boutique in Manhattan, looking in the mirror while wearing a thong and saying that she looks like a groundhog wearing a tiny belt.  She pokes fun at herself constantly, yet she also finds the right balance of making serious commentary about relationships and what people go through to find good ones.  I knew she would be funny, but it is seriously an excellent book.

Lena Finkle’s Magic Barrel by Anya Ulinich.  I didn’t like this as much as I thought I would, although I think a lot of my problems with it had to do with the fact that it is a work of fiction, yet I kept forgetting that and thinking it was a graphic memoir.  I’m not sure why that caused me irritation, except that it did.  Lena is a woman in her late thirties with two daughters, who has just gotten a divorce and is on her own for the first time ever.  Lena and Anya are Russian immigrants, and Anya writes well about what it is like to have dual identities.  In the course of the book, too, Lena Finkle travels back to Moscow for book tours, and realizes that she cannot truly return.  Much of the first two-thirds of the book are about the different men she meets on an internet dating site.  I feel like the book hit its stride more when she starts dating “The Orphan,” a wealthy heir who lives like a homeless hipster.  One sees that the relationship is not going to last, but Ulinich does a good job of portraying Finkle’s devastation when it ends.  How she does so is also a good example of how graphic novels can perhaps show certain emotions better than words alone:  each time Lena returns to The Orphan to go over why he broke up with her, Ulinich draws her as a duck quacking “But I love you” over and over.

The Woman In Cabin Ten by Ruth Ware.  In general it is a pet peeve of mine when I’m reading a book in which the main character cannot a) sleep, or b) sober up.  It stresses me to the point where I don’t enjoy the book, and it also seems like an easy way out. I’m not saying it isn’t effective in plot advancement, as a sleep-deprived person of course makes bad decisions, but it just is unpleasant being dragged down that path.  Having said that, however, whereas I began being grumpy at this book for precisely the above reasons, I was grudgingly won over by the suspense and the plot.  Lo Blacklock is a journalist who writes for a travel magazine, and has the opportunity to go on a small luxury cruise for copy.  The first night on the boat, she borrows mascara from a woman in the cabin next to hers, and then when she tries to return it, realizes that there is no trace of the woman.  The crew denies that anyone was ever in that room, and the readers and the people in charge on the boat aren’t sure if Lo is telling the truth or if she was muddled from lack of sleep and too much drink.  Lo is stubborn, though, and keeps up her search for this mysterious woman, even when she begins to get frightening threats left in the steam on the mirror while she showers!  The suspense does not let up, and our curiosity and worry is piqued even further by between-section emails Lo’s boyfriend writes about Lo having disappeared herself from the ship.  It’s an excellent read!

Book Reviews July 2016

Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy:  Four Women Undercover in the Civil War by Karen Abbott.  I was thinking this book was fiction when I started it, but it is not.  However, Abbott writes about the four women as if she is privy to their thoughts, so it’s a nonfiction book with a very fiction feel to it.  Basically she switches between the lives of four women, two on the side of the abolitionists and two confederates.  At first I was frustrated with the two women she chose on the confederate side; but then I figured that of course it would be impossible to find confederate women with very admirable views – an intellectual disconnect goes with the territory.  So I was never too pleased when the switch was made to Rose Greenhow, the confederate spy in Washington society, or Belle Boyd, the annoying 17 year-old who fancied herself a great spy.  She was not, although she certainly did do some damage.  On the other side were Elizabeth Van Lew, a Richmond doyenne who worked hard for the unionists and at great personal cost, and Emma Edmonds, a Canadian who dressed up as a man and joined the union army.  Emma as Frank Thompson was a nurse and a spy, often dressing as a man dressing as a woman and crossing enemy lines.  I do feel like I learned a lot about the war and women’s role in it, and was surprised often (especially that when Rose Greenhow went to jail, her 7 year old daughter, little Rose, went with her).   It’s an interesting enough book and a fast read.

Elizabeth Is Missing by Emma Healey.  This was an excellent first novel and I really enjoyed it.  The narrator is an old woman named Maud, who is in the throes of alzheimers and cannot remember much from one minute to the next.  When the novel begins, she is currently still living in her home, but with her adult daughter checking in on her frequently, and aids coming daily.  She will eat a whole loaf of bread toasted, because after each slice she doesn’t remember that she already ate.  Maud has a friend, Elizabeth, and from time to time Maud remembers that Elizabeth seems to be missing and that she doesn’t know what happened to her.  So she will set out to her house, armed with little notes that remind her of things that seem important.  As we find out clues about Elizabeth and what Maud learns, we also get flashbacks to post-war London when Maud’s beloved older sister Sukey went missing.  Maud and her parents suspect that Sukey’s husband Frank has murdered her, but since it is post-war chaos and lots of people aren’t where they should be, the police are not able to devote much time to the search.  There are thus two mysteries being solved – Elizabeth’s and Sukey’s – and Healey does a really good job of letting each unfold slowly, while making Maud both hilarious, yet keeping her dignity as well.  I recommend it.

The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield.  I began this novel at the same time that the train commute in Philadelphia was thrown into chaos, so I admit to being a bit distracted while reading it, as I was usually doing so standing up in a packed crowd.  And on the whole I enjoyed the book, although I do think parts of it were too easy and manipulated.  I mainly had a problem with the characters, who veer toward caricature and don’t have much to them except their role in the story.  They didn’t seem real people to me.  It’s a gothic tale, more or less.  The narrator, Margaret Lea, is a young woman who, of course, works in an old bookstore owned by her father.  She’s a solitary thing, and is haunted by the death of a once-conjoined twin, who she never knew but for whom she found a birth certificate.  She’s never talked to her parents about her missing sister.  Anyway, in a nutshell, Margaret is out of the blue contacted by a famous novelist, Vida Winter, who wants her to be her biographer.  Ms. Winter is known for never telling the truth, having a long history of regaling journalists with tall tales about her past.  Margaret agrees to write Ms. Winter’s story, as long as she can prove that she is not being manipulated and lied to.  The rest of the book consists of Margaret’s narration of Ms. Winter’s life story, and then her own trips and researches as she tries to figure out the truth of what is being told.  It’s a story with many twists and turns and patches of inclement weather – rain on the moors, etc.  It’s entertaining, but not hugely skillfully written.

Around and Into The Unknown by Hillary Savoie.  This was more like a long essay than a book; it can be read in about an hour.  I came across Hillary Savoie’s blog, The Cute Syndrome, and found she had published this on Amazon in which she describes her daughter’s story in more detail.  Esme, now 6, was born with unknown health issues.  Each time the doctors think they have discovered which rare syndrome she suffers from, they would do cutting edge genetic tests only to realize they were wrong.  Savoie writes well about what it is like to have a sick child whose illness is unknown.  She is thus without a specific “community” that can be so helpful; she has nothing to compare her child’s progress to and she does not know Esme’s prognosis.  At the same time, she makes it clear that Esme is Esme – a happy child who continues on her own journey and has an impact on the people she meets.

The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousnessby Sy Montgomery.  This is an excellent nonfiction book – it turns out that I knew almost nothing about octopuses and that there is indeed a ton of fascinating things about them to know, beginning with you don’t say pi but puses.  I had no idea that octopuses were so smart, yet indeed they are so smart and so conscious that their abilities might even be beyond our comprehension (primarily in that it could be that their arms have separate intelligence).  The other main thing about them which I was ignorant of is that they can change colors and patterns in such detail that it puts a chameleon to shame, and this camouflage is thought out – octopuses decide on a hunting or hiding strategy and then become the color or pattern best suited to the circumstances.  Montgomery’s writing is delightful (I was pleased to see she has other books for both adults and children).  She sets out to learn about octopuses and befriends three at the Boston Aquarium.  She works with the keepers there, along with some octopus volunteers, and interacts with Octavia, Kali, and Karma.  When she first puts her arms in (or near) the tanks, the octopuses will taste her with their suckers, and then they develop a relationship.  She does a good job of writing about octopuses, will also pondering the question of consciousness that inevitably arises when interacting with octopuses.  How much do they know?  Scarily, much.  She learned how to scuba dive because of her octopus interest, and the chapters in which she goes on octopus dives were not as interesting to me as the other chapters.  But all in all this is a fascinating book – and I admit it shook the foundations of my world a bit.

Paradise Lodge by Nina Stibbe.  This new novel by Nina Stibbe is a continuation of sorts of her first novel, Man at the Helm.  Once again, the narrator is the delightful Lizzie Vogel, in this book a teenager, who gets a job at a nursing home down the street.  Her home life, rocky in the first book, has become rather stable – her mother is marrying her stepfather and she has a new baby brother – and Lizzie becomes swept up in the world of Paradise Lodge, to the point where she keeps choosing working there over attending school.  As with the first novel, the best part of this one is Lizzie herself – she is a wonderful and hilarious creation, with an odd blunt way of seeing the world that I found completely charming.  It’s a comedic novel, with the antics of the Paradise Lodge residents and workers providing much excellent fodder for Lizzie’s wry and earnest observations.  I will read anything else Nina Stibbe may care to write, and I hope there are more Lizzie books in the future.

Book Reviews February 2016

Slade House by David Mitchell.  This is a little treasure for David Mitchell fans that came out unexpectedly and relatively soon after his latest (and wonderful novel) The Bone Clocks.  I think Mitchell is one of the best novelists we have, and with the exceptions of Number9dream and Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet, I love all his books.  Slade House has a lot of characters we know from his other books (although that is not to say that I could place all of them).  It’s kind of a little ghost story/science fiction fantasy that deals with some of the issues he has raised in other books, although you do not have to have read any of his works to understand this one.  It’s scary!  It would be a good October read.  It begins with a mother and son looking for Slade House.  They keep passing it by, because the only way in is through a small doorway set in an alleyway.  They find it, and get separated, and the son begins to realize that all at Slade House is not as it seems.  The next chapter, and all subsequent chapters occur nine years later.  Each time someone is looking for Slade House, or investigating disappearances surrounding Slade House, and whether or not these people end up the next victim, you’ll have to read to find out. 

The Crooked House by Christobel Kent.  I have mixed feelings about this novel.  The main character, Allison, is a woman in her late twenties who was the lone survivor in her family of a terrible crime that occurred when she was 13 or so.  Her older brother, younger twin sisters, and parents were all shot, and it was said to be a murder committed by her father.  Allison (then Esme) was up in the attic at the time and was the one who came down to discover the carnage.  She went to live with an aunt and had never returned to her hometown.  When the book begins, however, Allison is dating an older man, Paul, in London, and Paul gets invited to a wedding of an old girlfriend back in the same hometown where Allison is from. Paul does not know Allison’s past, nor who she really is.  She returns to her hometown for five days and starts to remember things about the crime.  She no longer believes that her father is the perpetrator (he ended up basically braindead and living in a hospital).  As the book progresses, some people recognize Allison and some people don’t.  Allison talks to the policewoman who handled the case, and is not very pleased that Allison is back.  Of course, if her father didn’t do it, then the person who did might put Allison in danger.  It’s an interesting scenario and on the whole not badly done.  However, as a reader I felt manipulated by Kent, who is a bit stingy with her information.  For example, Allison goes to talk to the policewoman to find out information about the case, and does so, but the reader is not privy to the conversation.  So we then only find out in bits and pieces what she learned.  My other complaint is that Allison gets more and more in a fog as she spends time in her hometown, and more and more distressed.  This is understandable, but the reader is inside this fog with Allison and it gets tiresome.  We can see that something fishy is happening with her boyfriend, but Allison doesn’t notice.  Meanwhile Allison keeps running hither and thither and we are dragged with her as she goes. 

Laura Ingalls Wilder: A Writer’s Life by Pamela Smith Hill.  This was my first foray into reading about Laura Ingalls Wilder, and so all the information Hill discloses was new to me.  It’s a bit of a biography, but it is more about the writing of Wilder’s Little House books, and how they came to be.  Another main topic of the book is her relationship with her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, and the question of authorship – since some have suspected that Lane’s involvement might have been extensive.  It was all very interesting – Wilder began by writing a memoir, but her daughter (who was a working writer and acting as Laura’s go-between in the publishing world) couldn’t find a buyer for it, and didn’t much like it herself (although she later stole scenes from it for her own novels, an act which understandably caused a rift between mother and daughter).  Ingalls Wilder ends up taking her material from her memoir and turning it into a children’s book that was written as a novel, but is also very much an autobiography.  Hill walks us through the success of the novel, and the writing of the subsequent books in the series.  My problem with the book is that Hill herself is not the most adept of writers, and she tends to fixate on a point in her chapters and then brings every single incident back around to this one point: it gets tedious.  Plus, she focused too much on the line between fiction and nonfiction, and what it meant that Ingalls Wilder made up some scenes, or put some scenes out of order, or changed the trajectory of the books here and there.  And that really doesn’t seem like such a big deal to me.  The novels are fictionalized autobiography, and since her readers were children, she occasionally had to make things a little nicer than they otherwise were, as well as make things fit more into the plot.  So what? Rose Wilder Lane doesn’t come off too well either, to put it mildly.  She was very manipulative and highhanded and it’s hard to get past the fact that she plagiarized her parents’ life stories for her own work, without getting their permission first (and while Ingalls Wilder was in the midst of using the material herself). 

The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah.  I know people love Kristin Hannah, and her books are forever on the bestseller lists, but after reading this one, I have to say that I am not a fan.  I thought the writing was not good, and her characters were all one-dimensional stereotypes.  The book focuses on two French sisters, during World War II, but nothing about the sisters seemed particularly “French” to me, or particularly from the 1940’s.  They could have been two modern American women living in France; there just was nothing to tie them to time or place, other than the events that were happening around them.  Partly because of this, I also didn’t trust Hannah's presentation of the facts of the war.  Plus she seemed to take every horrible thing that happened in WWII, and make them happen to this particular family.  It was just too much and had no nuance.  The story is basically this:  Isabelle and Vianne are two somewhat estranged sisters, living in Paris and outside of it.  Isabelle, always bold and impulsive, becomes an infamous resistance fighter, known as The Nightingale, who rescues downed British and American pilots and walks them over the Pyranees into Spain.  Herself.  Vianne is conservative and wants to keep to herself when the Nazis occupy her town, but she soon ends up saving Jewish children, while dealing with the deaths of her friends and putting up with Nazi officers (one handsome! One sadist!) who are billeted in her house.  Did I get caught up in the story?  Yes, I did.  But I can’t recommend the book on the whole.

The Great Fortune by Olivia Manning.  I have heard for a long time that Olivia Manning’s Balkan Trilogy is worth reading and one of the best things written about WWII; that said, I didn’t know anything about the novels, or about her as an author.  She’s English, and her trilogy was said to be very autobiographical, in that like Harriet, the main character of the trilogy, Manning married a Marxist-leaning English teacher in Romania and spent the war years there.  This first novel was excellent.  She’s sparse with the details, but she’s great with character, so we learn and really like Harriet and her husband, Guy, and are very entertained by the motley cast of characters they befriend in Bucharest in the early 1940’s.  The war has not reached Romania, yet everyone there is warily paying attention to the movements of the Nazis and the Allies, and indeed go to the British and German legations in Bucharest to see the maps there with the arrows and pins of wartime “progress.”  Harriet meets some of Guy’s English colleagues, as well as an assortment of random folk, such as Prince Yakimov, of Russian and English heritage, but a professional moocher, Sophie, a Romanian woman who had hoped to gain a passport by marrying Guy herself, the Drucker family, who have escaped from Germany, and many others.  It’s interesting and charming:  Harriet doesn’t have much to do, but still sets out to make Romania her home.  She’s a good judge of character, and is still getting to know her husband, whom she married after only a few weeks acquaintance.  It’s quirky and charming and I look forward to reading volume two.

That Quail, Robert by Margaret A. Stanger.  This is a wee ink-smudge of a book loaned to me by my mother.  It’s nonfiction and was written in the early sixties by Stanger, whose neighbors take in an abandoned quail egg, which hatches.  Out comes Robert (who ends up being Roberta, technically), who imprints on the family and has no desire to return to the wild.  (They tried to leave her outside once she was big enough, and each time she’d scurry through the door ahead of them.  She also was courted several times by a wild male quail and would pay him no attention).  So Robert is domesticated by choice, and is a delightfully social bird who never met a guest she didn’t like and loves a dinner party.  She sleeps in a hat or on skeins of yarn, takes dirt baths in the yard, drinks V8 juice, and is very much a creature of habit.  Stanger is very involved in Robert’s doings, and has Robert come to live with her many months over the next few years when her adopted family travels.  Robert becomes a local celebrity of sorts, and receives her public with aplumb.  It’s an endearing little book.

Book Reviews January 2016

The Dead Hour by Denise Mina.  This is the second book in the Paddy Meehan trilogy and it was another excellent read.  If you like mysteries investigated by a journalist, than I highly recommend these books.  Actually, I recommend them regardless of whether or not you are a mystery reader (I would have said I was not, until a few years ago when I discovered that good writing is good writing, no matter what the genre…).  Anyway, this novel picks up a year or so after the first one ended.  Paddy has received a promotion, and is now riding in the calls car at nights, following the police a lot of the time and seeing if there are any stories to be made from the calamities she visits.  She gets involved with one call in which a man tries to bribe her silent, but after the domestic violence call ends in a murder, Paddy can’t let it go.  Interspersed with the Paddy chapters are chapters told from the point of view of Kate, a cocaine addict who is in a lot of trouble.  Paddy starts to figure things out and of course finds herself in danger.  It’s an interesting mystery, but again what I like so much about these books is Paddy herself.  She’s a great character—she’s part of the catholic community in Glasgow but has had no faith since around the age of 7.  She wants a career, and always has, yet has to balance this with the expectations of her family and community—which are basically that she will get married and have tons of kids.  She’s also just barely into her twenties, and is dealing with her own awakening sexuality and sense of adventure.  It’s an excellent book, and although I had been going to save the third one for another month, I immediately started the third upon finishing the second.

A Slip of the Knife by Denise Mina.  This third one was even better than the first two.  Five years have passed and Paddy is now a mother with a five year-old son and her own column in the newspaper.  She is juggling raising her son, while remaining true to her desire to live her life the way she thinks is right.  An old friend of hers (from the first book) is discovered murdered, and it appears the IRA might be involved.  If so, Paddy is out of her league, and realizes this when the murderers start threatening her child and family.  Mina continues some of the story lines from the earlier books—Paddy is still up against the same corrupt head policeman, and we learn how things have progressed with certain family members and characters from the other books.  The mystery is frightening and intriguing, and Paddy is as wonderfully done as ever.  At first as I read I was sad that there were only three books, but although Mina’s endings tend to be a little underdone, I was glad to be leaving Paddy to get on with her good life.  I recommend the entire trilogy.

Palace of Desire and Sugar Street by Naguib Mahfouz.  I admit that my main feeling upon finishing these two novels was relief that I was finally finished with the trilogy!  All together they were about 1400 pages long and often a bit of a slog.  Like my review of the first one, Palace Walk, it was interesting to see how an upper middle class Egyptian family lived at the turn of the century and beyond, but my reading experience didn’t veer much beyond the satisfaction of curiosity: it was interesting learning, but I didn’t find the stories to be very well-crafted, per se, other than the fact that you do get caught up in all the generations of this one family, and feel badly for how life does change for the worse for so many of them.  The second novel, Palace of Desire, often reminded me a bit of Proust, in that so much of it concerns Kamal, a young man who is in love for the first time, and spends pages talking of how he aches for his beloved, who is basically not at all aware of his feelings, and goes on to marry someone else.  The more interesting story line is how the father experiences the end of the prime of his life.  A merchant during the day, he spends his evenings drinking and enjoying music and prostitutes (while all the women of his household are literally not allowed out of the house, mind you), and when all of a sudden he is no longer so desired by these women, it comes as a shock.  In the third book his health takes a turn for the worse, and he is even more diminished.  Meanwhile, the daughters of the family have had children of their own, and one has experienced great loss from typhoid.  In Sugar Street, the main characters are the grandchildren, who are coming into their own and becoming very involved in the politics of the 1930’s—one becomes a Muslim brethren and the other a communist.  Things do seem slightly better for women who are less well off—many attend school—but the upper middle class women still seem to deal with grotesque restraints, although they can at least walk around the block now.  So the trilogy was interesting on the whole and I’m glad I read it, but it did not particularly speak to me.

Washington’s Crossing by David Hackett Fischer.  I borrowed this book from my father a few years ago, and finally read it.  And once I started reading a certain amount of pages from it per night, I enjoyed it.  My history knowledge is not, shall we say, bountiful, so I was glad to augment it.  This book concentrates on Washington’s crossing of the Delaware, and the battles that were fought in New Jersey in December 1776 and January 1777.  Although often dragged as a kid to some of the sites of the winter camps  in Morristown, NJ, I hadn’t realized how dire the situation was at this point in time.  The British had won most of the previous battles, and were occupying New York and a good part of New Jersey (as well as Rhode Island); if not for Washington’s New Jersey battles, Philadelphia would have been the next to go.  As it was, he was able to turn things around with determination and wisdom and a lot of luck, not to mention cold feet.  The crossing took place in a full-force Nor’easter, so the painting we see of that crossing was a little fanciful, and much dryer than the actual event.  It was cold and blizzarding and icy and the crossing itself took hours longer than it was supposed to.  Most of the material was new to me so it was all interesting – for example, I didn’t know that the Howe brothers, the British Generals in charge at this point of time, were very sympathetic to the American cause and did not want to win the war by destroying the colonies.  Several times they could have captured (or killed) Washington and did not do so.  Other generals wanted to.  My main criticism of the book was that the battle scenes were a little too detailed for my tastes—not in a violence way, but in a “the fourth regiment walked one mile southwest, while the Philadelphia Associators regiment was sent to cross such and such a creek”, etc.  My mind often wandered a bit during those parts.  All in all though, it was as good book, and I liked how he used the one crossing as a way into the whole state of the war at that point in time.

Nothing To Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea by Barbara Demick.  This book had been on my kindle the longest, so I forced myself to start reading it, and then was very surprised to discover that I couldn’t put it down!  It’s the best nonfiction book I’ve read in a long time, and I would get annoyed when I’d arrive at my station and have to stop reading.  Demick lived in South Korea for nine years, I think, and made several trips into North Korea (heavily chaperoned of course).  She interviewed in great detail six refugees who had escaped to South Korea, and then she presents their lives in North Korea in such a way that it reads really as fiction, or as compelling stories you don’t want to end.  The characters are a mix of people with different backgrounds and different relationships to the North Korean state.  For example, there’s Dr. Kim, who was grateful to get a medical education despite coming from a poor family, but then has her eyes opened when working as a pediatrician during the famine and can’t do anything to help her starving patients; there’s Mrs. Song, who was a huge supporter of their system, and worked as a block informant; there’s Jun-Sang, who was from a high-ranking family with relatives in Japan, who was able to go to a good university in Pyongyang, and whose family received a lot of money from their relatives so had an easier life there than many; there’s an orphaned boy Hyuck, who lives on the streets; and then there is Mi-ran, who is from a very low-ranking family (her father fought in the war on the South Korean side, but then was trapped in North Korea when the border was made), and who thus does not have a lot of career or life options, yet was still able to make a go at it as a primary school teacher before kids became too hungry to go to class.  Demick follows the different paths of these people, and does an excellent job of bringing the reader into their lives and mindsets.  It was fascinating to see how they managed to survive the many famines, and also the awakenings that each had that life might be better elsewhere.  It was also interesting to see all that South Korea does for the North Korean refugees that make it to the South; they seem to really try to help them fit into modern life.  Anyway, even though the subject matter is fraught, and it’s definitely also hard to read what these people had to go through, Demick does an excellent job telling their stories.  I highly recommend it.

Book Reviews: December 2015

Everybody Rise by Stephanie Clifford.  Reading this book was quite a journey:  I was very annoyed at it for the first third, mainly because the main character, a 26 year-old New Yorker named Evelyn Beegan, is putting all her energies into breaking into the upper echelons of New York society.  She can think of no greater thing than being accepted by this crowd, and the way it is written, it’s presented that the author thinks so too.  That is, there is no space between Evelyn’s desires and how they are presented, so it was frustrating to read if you do not share the goals of Evelyn.  However, it very gradually became obvious that Stephanie Clifford was doing this on purpose, in a kind of unreliable narrator technique way, so that we can really get inside Evelyn’s very, very gradual and tough disillusionment with her own values and goals.  The novel got more and more absorbing and well written, and by the end of the second third it really began to seem to me to be a modern day Edith Wharton novel.  And although I still wish there would have been some kind of acknowledgement or separation between Evelyn’s goals and how they are presented, I do think Clifford ended up pulling it off and I could not put the book down.  It’s a really good older coming-of-age story in a way, as Evelyn is gradually forced to confront all her missteps and to try to find a better way to be.  I recommend it.

Getting Things Done by David Allen.  This book has some strong practical advice.  It probably is only necessary to read the introduction and skim the rest of the chapters, however, as they tended to be repetitive.  He claims to have a simple system that if followed can be used to keep track of all aspects of your life, thus freeing up your mind to think and work on important things, rather than trying to remember all that you need to do.  It clearly was written for executives (and I’d say male executives at that), and talks of what you can have your secretary do, etc.  But if you ignore things like that, the actual advice that he gives is pretty good.  In a nutshell, he suggests that you write down everything you have to do (or use a computer or your phone, he doesn’t care how low or high tech your system).  Then once you have everything written down and placed in an “inbox,” you go through and turn it all into next action steps.  So you end up with lists that do not have things like “get the car fixed” on them, but instead, “call the mechanic to make an appointment,” etc.  You have lists of next actions, “waiting for” lists – where the next action is dependent on someone else, tickler lists where you don’t have to do anything until a certain day, etc.  Two things he said also really made sense:  the first is that you should never write “to do” items on your calendar, but instead just have things on the calendar that absolutely have to be done that day, like appointments, etc.  Otherwise you end up not doing something on your calendar, and thus begins the shame spiral.  He also points out repeatedly that it doesn’t really matter what kind of system you use, as long as you put everything into it, and then check it daily and review it weekly.  The point is to be disciplined enough in your list-making, so that you never have to worry that any task is unaccounted for.  I have nothing to quibble with there!

The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin.  This is a pleasant enough book, which I neither loved nor hated.  It’s at least on the surface literary, with the main character, A.J. Fikry, owning a small bookstore on an island off the east coast.  When the book begins, he is struggling to cope with the sudden death of his wife.  Time passes swiftly in this book, and soon A.J. finds himself friends with the local police officer, becomes the adoptive father of a young toddler, Maya, and then married to Amelia, a publisher’s representative.  It is entertaining, but also a little random, careless, and slightly sloppy.  The point of view in each chapter changes, but haphazardly:  we get a lot of Amelia’s point of view in the beginning – and it’s a good one – but then once they get married we never hear from Amelia again.  Each chapter begins with book synopses that Fikry is writing for those he loves, but these too are a little short and random.  It’s enjoyable enough, but it did not make me want to read her many other novels.

Field of Blood by Denise Mina.  This is the first book in Mina’s “Paddy Meehan” series of novels (I think she wrote three before moving on to another series), and it was a really good read!  So good, in fact, that when I finished it I immediately moved on to the second in the series.  It’s about a young woman in Glasgow in the eighties who has her first job as a “copyboy” at a newspaper.  Paddy is catholic – or her family is; Paddy herself is secretly not religious – and from what I can tell, this sets her apart in Glasgow; her family is part of a minority group that keeps to itself.  Paddy’s a great character:  she’s irreverent, and funny, and smart.  She is desperately trying to create a career for herself.  When the novel begins, she is engaged to Sean, but unbeknownst to him, she really has no plan of becoming a mother and a housewife.  Mina does an excellent job of making Paddy real and charismatic and believable, and very astute in her interactions with other people.  There is a big case in the news involving a missing three year-old boy, and Paddy soon notices that the story the police put forth doesn’t quite add up.  She tries to figure out the truth in the hopes of getting her big break at the paper.  It’s all very well and simply done.  Paddy is a treasure.

Two Years, Eight Months, and Twenty-Eight Nights by Salman Rushdie.  This is a whirlwind of a book, as Rushdie novels always are these days.  I don’t think he has ever written anything quite as good as his novels Shame and The Satanic Verses, and the reason for that, I think, is that his biggest flaw is also his greatest strength – he puts everything into his novels, and his writing has become a jumble of political, cultural, pop cultural, philosophical references.  It’s all there (and sometimes all there within one sentence), and it is up to the reader to sort everything out.  I do think this keeps his books from being great, but they are still fun to read, and since the last six or so have been this way, I don’t think he is going to change his style anytime soon.  I find his writing to be very funny too, and poignant – it’s just that the reader has to work to sort everything out.  Like a lot of his novels, this one is a mixture of eastern and western references; it takes place mostly in New York, but it is a New  York that has been invaded by jinn (jinni, jinnia?  He uses all versions.  Basically the eastern version of genies.)  The separation between the jinn world and our world has been breached, and it is turning everything in our world amok.  One jinnia, Dunia, who loves humans, decides to fight against the others jinns who are against us, and enlists some of her progeny in the effort.  It also becomes, in a circuitous way I won’t try to explain, a battle between reason and religion, and it’s not hard to guess which side Rushdie himself is rooting for.  It’s a fun book in a unique, Rushdie way – he’s a brilliant observer of the world, and I think his novels are worth the effort it takes to read them.

November 2015 Book Reviews

The Blood Spilt by Asa Larsson.  This is the second in Larsson’s Rebecka Martinsson mystery series and it is an excellent read!  Like the first, it again takes place up in Kiruna, Sweden, or close to it, and picks up a half year or so after the first one ended.  Rebecka the lawyer is traumatized from the events in the first book and her role in them and is not able to concentrate much on work.  She travels north with a partner in her law firm to help with a minor matter, and stumbles into an unfolding series of crimes in a nearby town.  Larsson switches back and forth between Rebecka, the detective Anna Maria Mella, some new characters, and even a yellow-legged wolf who has recently arrived in the area.  She does so with great skill and fast pacing – she’s very good at creating characters and letting you know about them without oversharing the obvious bits.  The new story and murders are shocking and sad and as they unfold and poor Rebecka unwittingly gets caught up in the goings on, it was very hard to put the book down.  And although I kept hearing my grandparents say something along the lines of – why are you reading Swedish mysteries when there are perfectly good Norwegian mysteries to be read? – I was very caught up in this one.  I shall pace myself a bit before beginning number three.  And here’s a bonus – although this book was set in the north of Sweden, most of it takes place in September, so there were barely any cold temperatures!  No parkas.  No snow.

The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up:  The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing by Marie Kondo.  I am late to this bandwagon, I know.  I’ve been reading about the book for the last half a year, and couldn’t decide if I was intrigued or not, but then was able to borrow the book from a friend.  And I’m glad I did – a lot of what she says I had already heard or read about, but it seemed worthwhile to me to read about her KonMari system in detail.  She basically comes across as kind of an idiot savant of tidying.  She portrays herself as being obsessed with organizing and tidying since the age of five, and whether or not that is true, she certainly proves herself to have thought a lot about the topic.  It is rather fascinating in its simplicity.  With Kondo’s help, her clients tidy their homes and in doing so change their lives – and she claims none of them ever return to their untidy ways.  The main way she is able to get them to reach success seems to me to be that she recommends throwing away more than half of what you own.  She believes you need to go through all your possessions, hold each one (each book, each item of clothing, each memento), and only keep “what sparks joy.”  If you are having trouble getting rid of an item that doesn’t spark joy, then it is because you can’t let go of the past or are fearing the future.  Once you’ve done this, it’s easy to keep your house tidy because you have nothing left!  But also, everything you keep has a place and so it is simple to always put everything where it belongs.  Simple, no?  There are a few things I resisted, while reading.  For one, I don’t see why you HAVE to do it at once, in a period of a few days, as Kondo suggests.  She says if you do a room at a time, it won’t work, but that doesn’t seem to me to have to be the case.  (She does recommend organizing by category rather than room – and has a specific order you should use for the categories.  Clothes, books, etc.)  There are also a few extremes:  everyone mentions her proclamation of not balling socks, that socks want to relax in the drawer etc.  But another of her proscriptions also seemed a little extreme – and that is unpacking your purse at the end of every day.  If you are going to put the same things back in the purse in the morning, then what is the point?  Other than rigidity?  But she definitely got me thinking, and I plan to implement some of her ideas, if not all.  (Update:  I did try her method of folding clothes in drawers, and was very surprised at how well it works!  I have twice as much room in my dresser as I did when I folded items and stacked them.  Mind blown!)

The Fever by Megan Abbott.  I read an interview with Gillian Flynn a while ago, in which she said that this was one of her favorite books, so I added it to my queue.  And it is good, although it’s not the most comfortable of reading experiences – on purpose, I am sure.  The novel takes place in a high school in a small town (whose location is specifically not identified, I’m not sure why), and events begin when one of a group of three high school girlfriends falls rather violently ill.  She ends up in a coma in the local hospital, and no one can figure out what is wrong with her.  Then other girls in the school start falling sick with some of the same symptoms.  The point of view is mainly that of one family – the father, Tom, who is a teacher at the school, and his son, Eli, a hockey player, and daughter, Deenie.  The book basically documents the slow build-up of mass hysteria, and that is where the reading gets a bit difficult.  I got tired of being in the school and in the small town and witnessing the growing hysteria of the kids and their parents, as everyone tries to figure out what is going on.  There’s a lake in the town that is fenced off and is covered with algae, so for a while people think that the lake is the culprit, since some of the victims went swimming there.  The writing is good, and her characters are believable and well created.  As I said though, I did get to feeling rather claustrophobic and tired of the hysteria, but right when I was really beginning to work up into a snit, the tension shifts as we learn the real cause of events.  It’s a thriller that moves in slow motion.

New And Selected Poems, Volume Two by Mary Oliver.  After finishing volume 2 of her collected poems, I’ve reached the conclusion that I don’t really like Oliver’s poems as much as I feel I should.  And when I say “should,” I don’t refer to any outside pressure, but just that the style of her poems are what I usually like in a poem:  the language is direct and clear, she uses an observed incident to reach an interesting conclusion, and she never seems to be difficult just for difficulty’s sake.  That said, I found that with this volume, I really liked ten or so poems and then was indifferent to the rest (but perhaps discovering ten or so poems in a book that really speak to me is enough, and I’m being greedy to expect more?  That is up for debate.)  At any rate, Oliver is a nature poet, whose language tends to verge towards the simple side of the colloquial: and when she gets it right, I think she really gets it right.  For example, in her poem, “The Measure,” she writes of stopping her car to help a turtle cross a road, and then ends up musing on who is lucky in that scenario, the turtle who gets perhaps life-saving help, or the woman who gets to stop and help the turtle.   She simultaneously raises the question of her life being manipulated by higher powers in a parallel way to how she is manipulating the life of the turtle.  In “The Owl Who Comes,” she sets the scene of an owl on the hunt and then wonders, “and if I wish the owl luck,/ and I do,/ what am I wishing for that other/ soft life,/ climbing through the snow?”  It doesn’t get much better than that.  So be sure to read “Touch-me-nots,” her famous “Snow Geese,” and “Some Things, Say The Wise Ones.”  You will stop and think, you will be all the wiser, you will be sure to notice details in the world around you that you hadn’t noticed before.

The Lake House by Kate Morton.  This is an excellent read – Kate Morton seems to get better and better with each book she writes, and I really enjoyed this one from start to finish.  It shares the format with the other two books of hers that I’ve read (there are two I still want to read) – and that is that the book jumps from a certain time in the past to a certain time in the present, and keeps going back and forth between the two timeframes.  Basically, a detective, Sadie Sparrow, who is on leave from her job, is staying with her grandfather in Cornwall.  While out running with his dogs, she stumbles upon an old overgrown estate on a lake.  Curious, and with too much time on her hands, Sadie starts to investigate and discovers that the house has been closed up since 1933, when the family who lived there had a 1 year-old child who went missing.  Sadie decides to try to solve the still unsolved mystery of the missing Theo Edevane.  The narrative then keeps returning to 1932 and 1933 and fills in the story of the Edevane family, with the patriarch, Anthony Edevane suffering from shell shock from WWI, and focusing in particular on the middle daughter, Alice, who went on to become a famous mystery writer and is now living in London in her late eighties.  We also get Alice’s point of view, both when she was a girl of 15 in 1933 and currently.  Then there is the added bonus of the reason Sadie is on temporary leave, which has to do with a case of hers in which she became too emotionally invested, regarding a mother who seems to have abandoned her 4 year-old daughter, whether on purpose or due to foul play.  It is all very well done:  Morton is really skilled at creating interesting characters who seem real in their flaws and strengths, and also very real and interesting in how they respond to the actions that befall them.  Some might find the ending a little too pat or wrapped up, but I was so enjoying the story that I couldn’t even criticize the improbable way it all came together.  It’s a really fun read!

Palace Walk by Naguib Mahfouz.  I have heard a lot about Mahfouz, but had never read any of his prodigious amount of novels, so I finally borrowed this trilogy from my father.  One 500-page novel down, two to go!  I read it very slowly – maybe one or two chapters three or four times a week, and enjoyed reading it, although wasn’t really compelled to move through it at a faster pace.  It seems to me that its value lies in how it portrays a certain slice of upper middle class Egyptian life in the early twentieth century.  There are of course elements of that life that are hard to wrap one’s mind around – especially when it comes to how the patriarch of the family makes every important decision for the family completely on his own, and his word is law.  Plus, the female members aren’t allowed out of the house – basically ever – so are more or less in a kind of house arrest.  The mother, Amina, will visit her mother every now and then, but those visits are escorted, and she is never allowed out in her own neighborhood, even to go to the market or to walk around the block.  The same holds true for the adult daughters, Aisha and Khadija.  It is hard to fathom.  In this first novel, three of the five children of al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-Jawad get married – all marriages arranged by their father.  Mahfouz shows one son, Fahmy, a 19 year-old law student get swept up in the anti-Britain demonstrations, and try to balance his obedience to his father with what he thinks is right morally and politically.  Then there is Kamal, a boy of 11, who only half understands what is happening when his sisters get married and don’t return home, and other incidents that occur around him.  Kamal enjoys the English soldiers who are billeted across the street from his house, and is not thrilled when they are forced to withdraw.  The next two books in the trilogy are about the same family, and I look forward to reading them, a small bit at a time.

Your Three Year-Old:  Friend or Enemy by Louise Bates Ames and Frances L. Ilg.  My mother’s friend recommended this series of books about parenting; she warned that since they were written in the seventies they are outdated when it comes to issues of gender (in most examples the fathers work while the mothers stay at home; boys like trucks, girls like dolls, etc), but that in her experience as a teacher, they were still the most accurate and helpful.  I haven’t read many parenting books at all, so I don’t have much to compare them to, but as I read each year, they are definitely helpful and are uncannily accurate.  It’s not like I think Owen is the rarest of special snowflakes (I mean, of course I do, but I know that as his mother I can hardly think otherwise), but it was still very surprising to read this book about three year-olds and see that so much of what I would have considered Owen’s traits, are really developmental phases that he is going through, as are all kids.  It is odd that we are such predictable, formulaic beings!  But after experiencing certain days packed with petty arguments with a small, lovely tyrant, it is also very reassuring to know that this too, will pass.