THE FAULT IN OUR STARS

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The Fault in Our Stars, John Green, Dutton Books, 2012, 194 pp

Here I go with the second book I read from the Tournament of Books list, another book I was not ever going to read because of the subject matter. I know I am going against the grain here because it won four awards and is that rare book that has 5 stars everywhere you look. But I was right. I did not need to read this book.

In another way, I'm not sorry I did. It was an informative example of a certain type of emotional enslavement accomplished by writing fiction. Call me what you want but I am not an emotionally cold person. I have strong feelings across the entire spectrum every day. When it comes to writing of any kind though, I subscribe to Wordsworth's dictum that "poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility." 

Some subjects are still too raw and unprocessed, at least to me, and though I would never endeavor to suppress the creativity or right to communicate of any artist, such subjects must be handled with extreme care in order to produce what I consider art. I understand that this view is utterly personal and that is as it should be.

Having said all that, I also am aware that a large proportion of our society just loves to be emotionally manipulated in ways that I find abusive. This is equally true of the lesser proportion of people who read books. Hence the wild popularity of certain books with reading groups, hence Oprah Winfrey, Dr Phil, etc. Hence most of what is on TV and our news coverage these days and the astonishing pervasiveness of marketing in shaping our society. I won't even begin on our political process.

It was not lost on me that the book Hazel reads over and over turns out to have been written by an alcoholic psychopath. Because adolescence is the most highly charged emotional period of life, it is not surprising that many teens loved The Fault in Our Stars. I don't begrudge them that. But the fault in John Green is that he should have been more careful and less emotionally abusive, because he is a good YA writer and could have pulled it off.

One more thing: (from Chapter 4) "Cancer kids are essentially side effects of the relentless mutation that made the diversity of life on earth possible." Really? Hazel says it but where did that idea come from? I searched the web but only found references to John Green's book. If this idea is part of current cancer research I would like to know how it came about. Does anyone know?

(The Fault in Our Stars is available in hardcover on the Young Adult shelves at Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

GONE GIRL

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Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn, Crown, 2012, 444 pp

OK. I have read one of the most talked about books of 2012. I read Sharp Objects last year and didn't like it much, so I was not going to read Gone Girl, but it is on the Tournament of Books list.

So. Plotting leading to compulsive page turning. Check.

The two voices of the wife, the one of the husband. Check. (But an overused device these days.)

The Patricia Highsmith influence. Check.

The surprising twist at the end. That was the best part of the book.

Bad parents do produce dysfunctional offspring sometimes (Flynn's theme in both books, it seems) and often, said offspring never recover. Sometimes great parents, like mine, produce troubled offspring. There are no answers in Gone Girl.

My opinion: the good points including the timeliness (about the current economic scene), do not make up for a novel that is mostly a spectator sport. It might make a good movie. Keep your eyes peeled for that.

(Gone Girl is available in various formats by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

FAITHFUL PLACE

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Faithful Place, Tana French, Viking, 2010, 400 pp

Tana French manages never to write the same book twice while staying in her police procedural/mystery genre, her location in Dublin, Ireland, and among the same main characters, all members of the Dublin Murder Squad.

Frank Mackey, the cynical and controlling Undercover guy who put Cassie Maddox in harm's way over and over again in The Likeness, shows his softer side. Faithful Place is a street in one of the most downscale neighborhoods of Dublin and is where Frank grew up. The whole lower-class Irish life, complete with abusive alcoholic father, crazy controlling mother, and squabbling siblings, provides the setting that made Frank who he is.

But even assholes can have fallen in love once, lost that love, and become cynical. As a matter of fact, the same thing happened to Frank's father but Frank managed to get out of his personal ghetto when he became a cop. Turns out, as always, that you can't get the ghetto out of the man.

French is at her best, again, combining murder, plot, and personal turmoil. It is almost ridiculously easy to read her novels yet she never lets up with the literary writing or the deep characters. I hope she never lets up period and keeps on giving me a new novel to love every two years.

(Faithful Place is available in various formats by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

NW

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NW, Zadie Smith, The Penguin Press, 2012, 401 pp

My husband is a recording engineer and sound mixer. He is also one of the most tasteful guitarists I know. He spends his days recording and mixing music for both professional clients and his songwriter friends.

He is always studying and learning from the masters. One morning he played for me a comparison demo he had set up to show the results of what has come to be called the Loudness Wars. Since the 1980s, recorded music has gotten louder and louder. It started out as a kind of King of the Hill thing: the louder the CD, the more it would stand out, particularly on the radio. The result is that the contemporary wall of loudness has submerged the clarity of the human voice, the brilliance of solo instruments, and the punch of the drums.

I could go into the technical nuances of Zadie Smith's writing in NW and they are many, making her latest novel a challenging read. I finished her book a week and a half before writing this review. After listening to my husband's demo, I suddenly saw the brilliance of NW.

Fiction is tales of the myriad particulars of the human condition. Each novel gives us the big picture of human life by telling the details which make up a certain group of characters in certain times and places. My main beef with the modern world is a relentless extinction of the details due to factors like marketing and the internet, until a homogenization of the particulars brings about an ennui of sameness. In what I would call current popular fiction, it all begins to sound alike. We read what is the agreed upon synthesis of emotion, experience, and possibility for life.

NW takes place in a neighborhood of London where this homogenization effect is in process but not by any means complete. The characters are in various stages of either resisting or flowing with the process.

Thus I got the nuances, the exotic differences, the extinction factors, and the pressures to conform because of the techniques used by the author. Most of all I got the psychic distress experienced by each character. Once again, it is the end of the world as we know it and Zadie Smith bears witness.

(NW is available in hardcover and eBook by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

THE CHAPMAN REPORT

The Chapman Report, Irving Wallace, Simon and Schuster Inc, 1960, 383 pp

The #4 bestseller of 1960 is yet another confirmation that the 60s was THE decade when sex took its place of prominence in fiction. Now it is a commonplace, almost required or expected in contemporary fiction, but by the end of the 1950s most of the big censorship cases against sexually explicit novels had been defeated and the Pandora's Box of literature was forever opened.

Too bad then that The Chapman Report is also an example of the worst trashy bestseller writing; so bad it made me laugh. But Wallace made his point: when you get women talking about their sex lives, anything can happen.

A team of sex researchers are finishing their rounds of surveys in a Los Angeles suburb. The location is fictional but resembles a mix of the Santa Monica/Brentwood/Bel Air neighborhoods. The women are married, widowed, or divorced. They are also well-off and many have small children. Additionally, each female character is a type: nympho, intellectual, frigid, Daddy's girl, adulteress, and driven career woman. The lives of each of these women blow up once they begin to participate in the interviews.

Wallace has a second point to make: a soulless, scientific, numerical approach to female sexual practices leaves out the emotional life of these women. It was after this book that Erica Jong and others came along in the 1970s to reveal the female side of the story.

Wallace, a prolific journalist and screenwriter, clearly did his research. The major sex researchers of the day and their conflicts with each other are mentioned, including Alfred Kinsey. Wallace claimed that his researcher is not based on Kinsey or any of the others. Having read T C Boyle's The Inner Circle, a novel based on the life of Kinsey, I beg to differ.

In the end, despite the laughable prose, this melodramatic and juicy story was a titillating read. Apparently the American reading public of 1960 also found it to be so.

(The Chapman Report is out of print but can be found as a used paperback, an eBook, and in audible form by searching the internet.)

HOW THE DEAD DREAM

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How the Dead Dream, Lydia Millet, Counterpoint, 2008, 244 pp

I have always meant to read Lydia Millet. Instead of starting with her first novel, as I usually do, I decided to begin with the first of her trilogy.

How the Dead Dream is an intriguing title. I was expecting something like Kevin Brockmeier's The Brief History of the Dead. I didn't get that but I got something equally astounding and good.

A curious mix of dry humor, tragedy, and unique characters makes up the story of T. As a boy he grows up with a reverence for money and institutions. He becomes a savvy and successful real estate developer only to be felled in the end by loss. After learning the truth about his distant and indifferent father, finding and losing the love of his life, and taking on the burden of his loopy, Christian, and somewhat senile mother, T turns to animals for comfort and answers.

Not just any animals but animals who are on the verge of extinction become his obsession. When Barbara Kingsolver writes about what mankind is doing to each other and the environment, she lays it on the line in no uncertain terms. Lydia Millet takes a different approach.

By way of T's gradually developing awareness of how the practices that have made him successful are the very actions causing losses in the natural world, Millet shows the answers to two of my most perplexing questions: how will mankind ever wake up to the damage being done and will we wake up in time to avert our own extinction? Her answer to the first is, very slowly. To the second, possibly not.

One of the recent developments in writing style is evident in How the Dead Dream. It is a certain deadpan, reportorial, removed voice. I am coming across it more and more in contemporary fiction and sometimes find it disconcerting. I wonder if the trend in non-fiction writing toward a more creative, literary style is having an inverse effect on fiction toward a fact-based journalistic style.

Millet took me into the psyche of T but with a distinct lack of sentiment. And yet, when he loses his girlfriend, her rendering of the grief process is one of the best I have ever read. Some of the scenes between T and animals have the potential to rend the heart with a Steven Spielberg-type sentimentality, but she never crosses that line. She keeps her distance. It is as though she were practicing tough love on her readers, saying this is what real life is made up of, so you better just suck it up and keep trying for some semblance of being admirable.

In the end, the book did not end but left me hanging. Then I remembered it was the first of a trilogy and there is more to come. Some readers complain about author manipulation. I've never been much bothered by it. I expect an author to have her way with me. Why else would I read so much? Along with the voice I mentioned above, Millet's prose is also poetic, even other worldly at times.

Reader, beware. You will be manipulated and you might just like it.

CLOUD ATLAS

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Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell, Random House Inc, 2004, 509 pp

What can I say? I had a hard time with this book, extremely hard. If it hadn't been made into a movie this year, it would still be on my shelf where it has been for many years and I would still be filled with the anticipation of a great read. But the movie was released, I have read the book, and I feel like a failure because I did not really love it and I can't gush.

All my pride as a reader is gone. After dissing reading group members who whine about too many characters, too much jumping around in time, having to read dialect, I have been defeated by all of the above.

I wonder if I should take a class on Cloud Atlas so I can have it explained or at least be made to write a paper or take an exam, forcing me to find and answer the right questions.

OK, there were some parts I liked, some characters I remember. I can admit, grudgingly, that Mitchell created and mastered all those different voices and styles. I got his message that we are ruining our planet and our fellowmen. 

I can tell you one thing for sure: at a 2.5 hours running time, I will not be seeing Cloud Atlas in a theater. I would have to pee at least once and I would surely need a smoke.

(Cloud Atlas is available in various formats by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

THE HOUSE AT TYNEFORD

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The House at Tyneford, Natasha Solomons, Penguin Group, 2011, 351 pp

I read this for one of my reading groups and found it fairly good historical fiction. It stands out as yet another story derived from the global event called World War II. I don't suppose we will run out of tales about that for a good long time.

Elise Landau is 19 and forced to emigrate from Vienna to England in 1938 because she is Jewish, her father is a novelist out of favor with the Third Reich, and her parents want to keep her safe. Apparently, many young, affluent girls escaped Europe on a domestic service visa to Great Britain in those years.

Elise had been spoiled by her family's comfortable circumstances in Vienna including a rich social life due to her mother's status as an opera singer and her father's fame as a novelist. Arriving at the Tyneford House on the wild Dorset coast, she found it difficult to adjust to being a servant rather than being served.

In truth, the story was like The Secret Garden for adults. The writing is nicely done, except for a tiresome tendency of the author to begin each chapter with a page of description. Fortunately Ms Solomons writes well about the beauties and fitful weather of the area.

Most of my fellow reading group members found it improbable and even cringe inducing. Elise and the son of this family fall in love, so she rises from her servant station to family member. Because of the war, the love affair is doomed.

In my view, historical fiction of this sort must include a love story; war usually sends love into disastrous and sad directions; disruption of family life, economic conditions, and treasured traditions is inevitable. The House at Tyneford touches on all of the above. It made me cry once and sob near the end.

Not bad. More than a piece of fluff. And I am now determined to learn to make a Sacher torte. (Did you know it is a gluten-free dessert?)

(The House at Tyneford is available in various formats by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

TOP 25 BOOKS READ IN 2012

This past year I read 138 books; not too bad but not as many as I had planned to read. Some were for reading groups, some were for research, some I read just to keep up with the unusually large amount of good novels published in 2012. This list is compiled from the ones that gave me the largest kick or pleasure or just plain awe.

I got an iPad for my birthday and navigated the changes necessary to read in a digital format. It turned out to be fine and an e-reader is especially good for reading those huge tomes that give me reader's elbow. Like most modern people, I am now hooked on being able to get a book in minutes without having to leave the house. 

My goal this year is to read 161 books. That is one more than my highest ever total books read in one year. Please, let's not have anyone I love getting sick, dying, or deciding to need me for large chunks of time. My mantra will be, "Leave me alone, I am reading." I can dream, can't I?

THE LIST

Among Others, Jo Walton

As Though She Were Sleeping, Elias Khoury

Childhood's End, Arthur C Clarke

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe

The Golden Mean, Annabel Lyon

Go Tell It on the Mountain, James Baldwin

Henderson The Rain King, Saul Bellow

Horse Heaven, Jane Smiley

How the Dead Dream, Lydia Millet*

The Inner Circle, T C Boyle

Last Night in Montreal, Emily St John Mandel

Lovers and Tyrants, Francine du Plessix Gray

NW, Zadie Smith*

The Orphan Master's Son, Adam Johnson

Our Tragic Universe, Scarlett Thomas

A Partial History of Lost Causes, Jennifer duBois
The Patagonian Hare, Claude Lanzmann

The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving, Jonathan Evison

Stoner, John Williams

Telegraph Avenue, Michael Chabon

Tete-A-Tete, Hazel Rowley

Truman, David McCullough

White Teeth, Zadie Smith

Who Fears Death, Nnedi Okorafur

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, Jeanette Winterson

* review coming soon. The rest of the list can be found reviewed on this blog.

MR IVES' CHRISTMAS

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Mr Ives's Christmas, Oscar Hijuelos, HarperCollins, 1995, 248 pp

Oscar Hijuelos' third novel began a bit slowly but in some way I have yet to figure out, took hold of me with a gradually tightening grip and left me gasping for relief at the end. The writing is deceptive. It seemed almost simple, almost pedestrian, until I found myself embedded in the hearts and minds of Mr Ives and his wife.

The couple, Mr Ives of Cuban descent and Mrs Ives of Irish, are bound together by passion, intellect, and faith. Content to remain living in a multicultural neighborhood in Upper Manhattan which has seen better days, they are raising two children and are deeply involved in their church and community when disaster strikes. Robert, their son, who is days from entering the seminary, is killed during an incident of senseless violence by a neighborhood punk. Every good thing in their lives, especially their love for each other and their faith in God, is tested.

The impact of a child's death on a marriage and family has been depicted many times in fiction. Hijuelos makes the story new again, mostly due to his two main characters. In an almost bland third person voice he brings the reader so close to Mr Ives and his lovely, vibrant wife Annie, he dives so intricately into the minute personal differences between them as they deal with grief, with religious belief, with life itself, that the novel tested my own faith in love, in mankind, in a Supreme Being, and in life itself.

I don't know if the amount of emotional turmoil in Mr Ives' Christmas is every reader's cup of tea. I didn't think I would be able to stomach the overtly Catholic views. But then again, I have been drawn in by Graham Greene, especially The Power and the Glory. As I watched the movie version of The Life of Pi on Christmas Eve, I remembered that part of my love for that book was Pi's seriously held and seriously tested faith in the three religions he practiced simultaneously.

Oscar Hijuelos did not turn me back to the Christian faith of my youth. He performed another kind of miracle and renewed my faith in living by one's values and in the divine nature of human love.

(Mr Ives's Christmas is available in paperback by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

LOVERS AND TYRANTS

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Lovers and Tyrants, Francine du Plessix Gray, Simon and Schuster, 1967, 316 pp

I loved this novel unconditionally. I have always meant to read Francine du Plessix Gray because I had the impression of a smart, outspoken female, along the lines of Mary McCarthy, Simone de Beauvoir, etc. Her latest novel, The Queen's Lover, was released recently, reminding me that I still hadn't read anything she had written. As is my usual practice, I went for her first novel.

Her books seem to get tepid reviews, though she gets a lot of respect, making me think that possibly she is not easily accessible and has a unique take on whatever she writes about. I was right!

Lovers and Tyrants is probably autobiographical since the life of Stephanie, the main character, follows Gray's life: born of a French father and Russian emigre mother, raised in France and then America after escaping the dangers of World War II. The theme of tyranny by those who love us the most felt true to me.

If I had read this novel in the 70s when I was going through my own awakening to feminism and personal freedom (and I so wish I had), I would have loved it and learned from it and been given courage by it. Women in their 20s and 30s today might not find it as moving because life actually is better for women now. Not perfect, but better.

Reading it now, in my 60s, with my children grown and having worked out many of my issues with men, marriage, and motherhood, was an emotionally satisfying way of looking back over what it was like for me. In many ways, it acted as absolution and benediction for all the missteps I made.

If you are a woman who has grappled with the disconnect between the urge to nurture and the urge to flee, I recommend Lovers and Tyrants to you. Gray's writing is wild and impassioned, sometimes undisciplined, sometimes overblown. But it is from the depths of an intelligent, creative woman who will not be denied and who claims all the rights due to a human being.

(Lovers and Tyrants is available in paperback by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

THE QUEEN OF COOL

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The Queen of Cool, Cecil Castellucci, Candlewick Press, 2006, 166 pp

THE CHRISTMAS WEEK FAMILY READ

Continuing my completist reading of Cecil Castellucci's novels. The Queen of Cool is her second after Boy Proof.

I didn't love this one as much but it has highlights. Libby Brin is #1 popular girl at school. She is spoiled at home: even when she rarely gets grounded, she gets out of it. She has her own car, a huge wardrobe, and all the requisite toys. Her boyfriend's mind resides in a lower body organ than his brain or heart.

She lives in Los Angeles and (highlight) stumbles into an internship at the LA Zoo. I admit, I always enjoy books set in LA since I live here. At the zoo she has to work with Tiny, a "Little Person" and Sheldon, a science geek, two people at the extreme bottom of the coolness rating.

Naturally her eyes are opened to the shallowness of her existence. I have nothing against midgets or geeks but the message that they are people too was a bit off-putting in its preachiness.

I did enjoy watching a female teen realize that life includes more than clothes, parties, cars, and gossip. The biggest highlight was a novel for teens that admits to the amount of drinking, drug use, and sex going on in high school.

(The Queen of Cool is available in various formats by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

THE CONSTANT IMAGE

The Constant Image, Marcia Davenport, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1960, 253 pp

The #6 bestseller of 1960 was purely awful. It falls in that category of fiction by the likes of Danielle Steele: endless descriptions of clothing, jewelry, and furnishings; passages of mildly bad sex writing; the vacillating obsessive maunderings of a young woman in love with the wrong man. Perfect bestseller material for a certain type of female reader who is not me.

Set in Milan, the story makes a big deal about the difference in moral values between Americans and Italians. Of course, they are all rich and in fact, infidelity is still infidelity when such an amount of lip service is paid to the sanctity of family. Included is the old conventional wisdom that the men are expected to fool around but the women are either victims or sluts. As my straight-laced grandma used to say, "It takes two to tango."

I guess that is enough ranting. After all, it was my freely taken decision to read the bestsellers from 1940 onward and even books like this fit the premise: the popular books reflect the culture of the time.

(The Constant Image is justifiably out of print but available in libraries and through used book sellers.)

THE HOURS BEFORE DAWN

The Hours Before Dawn, Celia Fremlin, Victor Gollancz, 1958, 190 pp

One of the pleasures of reading all those old books for My Big Fat Reading Project is discovering gems like this. The Hours Before Dawn won the Edgar Award in 1960.

Louise Henderson is the young mother of two children in 1950s London. Her infant does not sleep much, especially between the hours of 2 AM and dawn. He cries incessantly so that by the time he is just a few months old, Louise is so sleep deprived she moves through her daily housewifery duties in a daze.

Mr Henderson is a typical 50s husband who wants his dinner on time and thinks his wife should be able to quiet that baby so he can sleep at night. Neighbor women on either side of their home are busybodies: one is full of advice on child rearing and the other threatens to call the authorities about the screaming baby.

When the Hendersons let out a bedroom to a local school teacher, strange things begin to happen. It takes Louise several weeks to realize something weird is going on, being so sleepy that she is always on the verge of nodding off.

Once she realizes their boarder Vera may be the cause of the trouble, Louise turns amateur sleuth and saves her family in the nick of time.

The Hours Before Dawn equals the best of Shirley Jackson for its abundance of creeping creepiness as well as its wry take on motherhood and the plight of the housewife. Luckily for me, the book was reprinted in 1995 by Black Dagger Crime Series and I found it at my local library.

GOODBYE, COLUMBUS

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Goodbye, Columbus, Philip Roth, Houghton Mifflin, 1959, 298 pp

At last, I am no longer a Philip Roth virgin. He broke out with this collection of the novella, Goodbye, Columbus and five short stories, for which he won the National Book Award in 1960.

The theme of all the pieces is second and third-generation Jews moving from the ghetto into assimilation as Americans. I liked the novella for its characters and plot, though he stole shamelessly from Herman Wouk's Marjorie Morningstar. I fell shamelessly into the love story between Neil Klugman, poor New York City Jew, and Brenda Patimkin, New Jersey suburban Jewish American Princess. After all, this is one of the major plots of American literature in the late 20th century and already Roth could write like nobody's business.

The short stories ranged from not quite good to deeply weird but they had all been published in mags like "The Paris Review" and "The New Yorker." That was the way young, white, male writers gained recognition in those days and clearly Roth got his due.

Conclusion: I will continue with Roth's novels and ignore the short stories.

(Goodbye, Columbus is available in paperback by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

CLEA

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Clea, Lawrence Durrell, E P Dutton & Company, 1960, 287 pp

Sadly, I have come to the end of The Alexandria Quartet*. It has been a revelatory reading experience and I now see why this dated collection is still read, praised, even loved.

I found Clea the weakest of the four, perhaps because Durrell is winding down, as is the historic city of Alexandria. (These days it is considered an unsafe location for tourists.) During the time covered by Clea, the British Empire's heyday is coming to a close. In his inimitable way, Durrell infuses all of this into a sad farewell.

Clea, who had always been a shadowy presence in the earlier novels, now has her day. She is an artist, a painter. Of all the women in the Quartet, she comes across as the most well balanced; a sort of Earth Mother figure and the feminist of the bunch. The nararator (whom I assume is Durrell himself) finally has a love affair with her. He is older and wiser now, but Clea is wiser still.

The End.

*The Books of the Alexandria Quartet:

Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea

(Clea is available in paperback by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

THE WEIRD SISTERS

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The Weird Sisters, Eleanor Brown, G P Putnam's Sons, 2011, 318 pp

This novel did pretty much nothing for me. It is a type: I would call it "women's fiction with a quirk." The three Andreas sisters, raised by a nice but distant mother and a Shakespeare professor who named them after Shakespearean women, grew up in a small college town. The family was wont to approach life via quotes from Shakespeare plays and sonnets. They were all great readers, mostly because there was nothing else to do in their small town.

As the novel opens, they are all adults, two have moved away and one is living nearby. Because their mother has been diagnosed with breast cancer, they come together in their childhood home, ostensibly to care for her, but actually to escape their screwed up lives. Then they have conflicts and realizations and it all turns out happy.

Readers of my blog know that I have a fatal flaw which prevents me from being able to enjoy Shakespeare. When I realized how lame it was, I only finished The Weird Sisters because it was a reading group pick. I thought I might like it because three years ago my two sisters and I came together to care for our mother after she had a major stroke. That experience brought out the worst in our relationship. 

But this excuse for a novel borders on Shakespeare-light, worse than No Fear or Cliff Notes, just a bunch of quotes thrown in sometimes apropos of nothing. The characters are predictable and they get off much too easy for the mistakes they've made.

I used to have an acquaintance who was a writer and opened a bookstore on the California coast. She had a sign by the cash register offering a refund for any book you bought there that you didn't like. One day a man came in brandishing a book and yelling that she had robbed him of his time. She had recommended the book to him and he had hated it. He was demanding to be repaid for his reading time.

Of course that is one of those tales of horror told by booksellers and we had a good laugh about it. But honestly, I felt this way about The Weird Sisters.

(The Weird Sisters is available in various formats by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

WITH OR WITHOUT YOU

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With or Without You, Domenica Ruta, Spiegel & Grau, 2012, 207 pp

This memoir came into my hands in advance reader's edition form. It will be released in February, 2013. I devoured it in one gulp. It came with high praise from Amy Bloom and Gary Shteyngart. The marketing person compared it favorably to The Glass Castle. All good.

But for at least 50 pages I was underwhelmed. Where was the lyricism of The Glass Castle? Where was the "darkly hilarious" tone? I admit those 50 pages went by in a flash but couldn't say why.

So yes, bad mother on drugs, poverty, crazy unstable life, addiction, blah, blah, blah. The kid turns out to be a reader, the mom does a couple actual helpful things, and this girl, who by middle school was hooked on OxyContin, managed to graduate with good grades from high school and college, while getting into a prestigious MFA program. Did I mention that she also became an alcoholic?

Try as I might to analyze what happened, all I know is that I got hooked on Domenica Ruta's deadpan, affectless prose. Then when she finally figured out that to survive she needed to lose the mom, I had to find out how she did it. Because the truth that makes this memoir real is that we love our mothers no matter who they are or what they do. Even the best, most perfect moms can haunt you; the poisonous ones are an addiction in themselves.

Final analysis: With or Without You is powerful, possibly a classic in the memoir genre, and does not sugarcoat the damage done nor what it takes to live with said damage. Not exactly inspiring, definitely sobering (no pun intended.)

(With or Without You is available in hardcover or audio CD by advance order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

WELCOME TO HARD TIMES

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Welcome to Hard Times, E L Doctorow, Simon and Schuster, 1960, 209 pp

Doctorow's first novel is a literary western. That's right. It was shelved in Westerns at my library. In truth, it is a philosophical though action packed story set in Dakota Territory during the wild, lawless days when the West was being settled.

The writing is taut and just about perfect. You can see, hear, almost smell the town of Hard Times and the characters leap to life. The "Bad Man from Bodie" rides into town, rapes the whores, then burns down the entire town.

Blue is the default philosophizing mayor. In penance for failing to defend his town from the Bad Man because he was not willing to kill the guy, he attempts to rebuild the town and to create a family by taking in Molly, one of the raped whores, as well as the young son of his best friend who died in the fire. Molly reminded me of Kathy from Steinbeck's East of Eden.

But evil has visited the town once and Doctorow creates some serious foreboding and foreshadowing. You know it's coming back. Quite a page-turner for such a philosophical book because the symbolism is embedded in the drama.

(Welcome to Hard Times is available in paperback and eBook by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

MEET THE AUSTINS

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Meet the Austins, Madeleine L'Engle, Vanguard Press, 1960, 191 pp

THE SUNDAY FAMILY READ

 

When Meet the Austins was published in 1960, Madeleine L'Engle was two years away from publishing her break out book A Wrinkle in Time. Somewhere I read that she was quite discouraged as an author at this time, even though she had been writing stories since childhood. She got published but prior to Wrinkle in Time her books had not sold well. In the long run, Meet the Austins grew into her second most well-known series.

I loved this book. It has all the charm of my favorite childhood book, The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett, but is set in contemporary times. L'Engle had a rather sad and lonely childhood, spent mostly in boarding schools. She must have channeled all her longing for a close family life into this book.

The Austins live in comfortable but not overly prosperous conditions in a rambling house somewhere outside of New York City. Mr Austin is a medical doctor, Mrs Austin a stay-at-home mom. Four kids, two dogs, several cats. Classical music, books (their mother reads to all four every night before bed even though the littlest is four and the oldest in high school.) An uncle who lives in the city is an artist and Mrs Austin's BFF, Elena, is a touring pianist.

Into this idyllic scene comes seven-year-old Maggy, who has just been orphaned and has no where to go. Maggy was the daughter of one of Elena's friends but since Elena is often touring, the Austins take her in. The little orphan is a spoiled brat who behaves badly so the Austins tame her with love and their special brand of discipline, but not before she manages to bring turmoil and even danger to the family.

The story is predictable, narrated in the first person of Vicky, an observant 12-year-old who sounds much like L'Engle, but the tone is an indescribable mix of common sense and warmth. I can't imagine any reader not falling for this family and wanting to be part of it.

Interesting biographical fact: L'Engle and her husband adopted a seven-year-old girl in 1957. The child's parent who left her an orphan had been a close friend of Madeleine's, who by 1957 had a 10-year-old daughter and a five-year-old son.

Meet the Austins is available in paperback by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)