CRYSTAL EATERS

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Crystal Eaters, Shane Jones, Two Dollar Radio, 2014, 173 pp

I had a tough time with this novel. I checked it out because I admire indie publisher Two Dollar Radio and I had listened to a podcast interview with the author on Other People. Set in a speculative world, or perhaps allegorical would be a better word, its gritty, even gross details actually made me feel yucky. 

A small extremely poor village with seven dirt roads lies outside an ever encroaching city. The villagers mine crystal and sell it to manufacturers in the city for technological uses. They have mythical beliefs about crystal's properties, the main one being that every living creature is born with 100 units of crystal in their bodies. As life goes on this count steadily lowers due to accidents, injuries, illness, punishments, and emotional turmoil, until all the crystal is gone and death ensues.

Remy is sad throughout the book because both her dog and her mother are dying, her dad is stoically distraught, and her brother is in jail. The most mythical belief of all is that the crystal count can be replenished by ingesting a certain rare and hard to mine color of crystal.

At least that is what I could figure out. The chapters are numbered from 40 down to 0. Remy and her brother love their parents, death is inevitable, but also brings sorrow. The city controls anything that is good in the material world but the powerless villagers still have feelings. 

I admit that the conceit with the crystals is original but the plot is not. If I had to live in that village I would welcome death. 

In a Paris Review interview, Shane Jones says, "...prayer, crystals, myths, folktales, the universe as a system of life and destruction--I'm attracted to these things and they are players in the book."

The book garnered some highly positive, even adoring reviews, but it did not work for me.

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

LUCKY US

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Lucky Us, Amy Bloom, Random House, 2014, 256 pp

Amy Bloom just never lets me down as a reader. Lucky Us was the last book I finished in 2014 and it was an auspicious moment when I did. 2014 turned out to be a rough reading year for me: personal issues which possessed my attention, illness, eye surgeries. All I wanted to do was read but sometimes all I could do was play Solitaire on my iPad.

So ending my reading year with a book so satisfying, so aligned with my current views about life, actually I must say, so perfect, reassured me that I could still consider myself a voracious reader but better yet, still be one.

Mainly with Amy Bloom for me, it is about the characters. All are flawed, none are completely admirable, but some manage to live and love and create in spite of their flaws. I also think she gets it that no matter how wonderful a person might be, what matters is how that person deals with the people around her or him.

Eva, half sister to Iris, was the gem among a parade of weak or disreputable or self-serving folks. She was abandoned by her mother, a single mom, a one-time lover of Eva's father. Dumped on her father's doorstep, she and Iris, whose mother has just died, form one of those deep bonds which aid survival but are also in ways dysfunctional.

It is the 1940s. The story travels from Ohio to Hollywood to Long Island. The characters' relationships span from Brooklyn to London. They help each other, betray, rescue, and love each other. Eva is fearless, Iris is reckless. The story could have gone for hundreds of pages and broken your heart.

But it is a short novel, a mere 256 pages. A very artful compression of time, incident, and emotion. I was left not with despair but delight. We are human, we get by or we don't, there are an infinite number of variations on how to live.

And so we go on. Living is a story. Some write them, some read them. I may not get my stories written but I am living a story and I love reading the stories of others.

By the way, each one of the 29 chapter titles is the name of a song from the 1930s and 1940s. I am listening to those songs now after reading the book but I wish I had listened as I read. Go ahead readers. Nerd out on that!

(Lucky Us is available now in hardcover on the shelves at Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

MY BRILLIANT FRIEND

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My Brilliant Friend, Elena Ferrante, Europa Editions, 2012, 331 pp

Now I have read the book that so many readers I respect and relate to loved. I loved it as well.

There is a magic between childhood friends, no matter the time period or locale. Elena Ferrante captures that magic and its combination of black magic and good. In the early chapters she makes the terrors, the sorrows, the worries between two young girls so real and true. I had those myself as a girl, even to the point of being made sick by them. At the same time, it was some kind of point of honor not to admit how bad those feelings were and a duty to rise above them. So it is with Elena and Lila.

Those two girls lived in postwar Naples, Italy. I grew up in postwar American suburbia, Princeton, NJ, to be exact and my circumstances were much more tame. Somehow these differences don't matter because it is the friendship and connection of growing up together, the changes that affect each girl and alter the relationship, that spoke to me and gave the story its emotional heft.

Anything else I could say would just be gushing. As Alice Sebold's blurb on the front cover says, "Elena Ferrante will blow you away."

Better yet, the third novel in this trilogy about female friendship, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, is on the short list for this year's Tournament of Books, so I have an additional reason to go ahead and binge read the next two volumes!

 

 

(My Brilliant Friend is available in paperback by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

CALIFORNIA

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California, Edan Lepucki, Little Brown & Company, 2014, 393 pp

I didn't keep any notes while reading this novel and I finished it many weeks ago. So I will just write about what still stands out in my mind.

1) Cal (short for California, the guy's college nickname) and his wife Frida. I don't think I know any people who are remotely similar to these characters. It could be an age thing. I think they are late 20s in the story and I kept feeling they were about the same age as the author would have been when she was writing the book, so she ought to know. I have nieces and nephews who are that age but they are not much like Cal or Frida.

2) Their marriage: OK so the setting is some 50 years in the future and this couple have escaped a decayed Los Angeles to live with practically nothing in the California wilderness, but they routinely keep secrets from each other. Big things and stupid little things, for good reasons like protection of the other and for perverse reasons.

I don't know if this is normal in marriages. It is normal in mine but for some reason it felt abnormal for two people who only have each other. Later when they become involved with a community that feels unmistakably like a cult, this compulsion to withhold information causes big trouble and leads them straight into the climax. So it was a great plot device.

3) The end of the story and a couple plot twists before that were for me complete surprises. I liked that. I just could not imagine how and where they would end up but any guesses I made or hoped for were wrong.

4) Lepucki's voice. For the half of the book it felt oddly brittle. She doesn't write like anyone I have been reading lately and I mean that in a good way. She is herself and by the end I was used to that voice, which has not a lot of humor nor is it compassionate. She is telling it the way she sees it.

5) Summary: In a dystopian setting peopled by a young married couple and various other desperate characters, the key tonality is desperation. I felt she took most of the things that are the most dysfunctional in our current world and made them just enough worse so that the rest of the story is believable.

This year I read On Such A Full Sea by Chang Rae Lee, MaddAddam by Margaret Atwood, and Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel. California is the most like On Such A Full Sea in tone and environment. It was the least like Station Eleven. The ending is not happy but there is really nothing happy in the book although happiness is pursued. It is an engrossing addition to the current crop of post-apocalytic fiction.

 

 

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

SEVEN FROM THE STARS

Seven from the Stars, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Ace, 1961, 248 pp

An early MZB novel from 1961 or 1962, depending on where you look. I found it an accomplished and entertaining sci fi novel with Heinlein and Asimov influences plus her signature feminist views.

Seven survivors of an intergalactic ship find themselves on Earth near a large Texas city. Each is a level of telepath or telempath also programmed to adapt to wherever they are and assimilate so well that the locals don't recognize them as extra-terrestrials. Earth is considered a Closed Planet meaning they will not be rescued.

As time passes a baby is born, there are conflicts amongst the survivors, and they become involved with a Texas rancher and his family. MZB gets in some semi-political commentary on Mexicans and immigration and treatment of illegals as employees.

Most of all I liked her nicely worked out neuroscience of telepaths (who can receive and transmit worded thoughts in any language they know) versus telempaths (who can probe the thoughts and emotions of all humans as well as translate these into the languages and concepts of any other race.) 

Due to these excellent skills as well as intelligent assimilation most of the seven survive and are able to bring a boon to Earth. Great story!

(Seven from the Stars is out of print but available from used book sellers as well as in ebook form. I found my copy on Nook.)

CASTLE DOR

Castle Dor, Arthur Quiller-Couch and Daphne du Maurier, Little Brown and Company, 1961, 288 pp

I don't recall how I first heard about Castle Dor. I think it was reviewed by one of my Goodreads friends. Since I am doing a completist reading of du Maurier's novels, I added it to my list.

Castle Dor was an incomplete novel by the very literary and august (according to my research) Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch. He died before finishing it. The du Mauriers were friends of Quiller-Couch so his daughter asked Daphne du Maurier to take over and write the rest of the book.

The story is based on the Celtic myth of Tristan and Iseult. Even I, who have only dabbled in mythology, know that tragic story of star-crossed lovers. In this version, which is set in the early 1840s near the Fowey River in the Cornish countryside, certain individuals unknowingly play the parts of the main characters in the legend.

The setting and the slipstream notion of people reliving a story from centuries earlier was the idea of Quiller-Couch. In the prologue he imparts the imaginations of a local doctor who spends the night waiting on a birth by standing on the ancient earthwork of a ruined Castle Dor and begins to fancy that he can perceive the sorrowful tale of those who lived there far in the past.

I loved the concept: "All England is a palimsest of such (quarrel, ancient feud, litigation), scored over with writ of hate and love, begettings of children beneath the hazels, appeals, curses, concealed travails." I was however challenged by the original author's rather florid and wordy style.

In several reviews readers have claimed that the continuation of the writing by du Maurier is seamless. I could tell right away when she took over, partly I suppose because I am familiar with her voice. Suddenly about a third of the way through I could read smoothly and easily without having to reread almost every sentence several times.

Then the book became a pageturner though it never lost that time travel essence. I ended up loving it and feeling as sad as if I hadn't know the lovers were doomed. I admired the skill with which she and Quiller-Couch placed the elements of the legend into the realities of life in the 1840s.

I am glad I read it.

(Castle Dor is available as an ebook by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

TOP 25 BOOKS READ IN 2014

It was another tough year in my reading life. I only read 92 books in 2014. I averaged a bit less than 2 books a week, only 80 pages average a day. I read 7 books of over 500 pages and possibly more challenging books than in previous years. But the bottom line is that I missed several weeks of reading in May when I was too ill and when my cataract surgery was going on I slowed way down on reading. Then I went on the Christmas road trip and was having much too much fun with real live people and real live scenery to spend any time reading. 

It is all good. I improved my health after that wake up call in May, I have much better eyesight after the surgeries, and my personal sorrows are down to only one. Life is hard, messy, glorious, and always interesting. 

This list is in alphabetical order by title not by favorite, but are the most loved and rewarding books I read in the past year. Not all were published in 2014. I read about 2/3 in real books and the rest on various e-readers. I have posted reviews of all but two books on the list and will post those shortly.

 

JUDY KRUEGER’S TOP FAVORITE BOOKS READ IN 2014

All the Birds, Singing, Evie Wyld

Americanah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

The Bird Skinner, Alice Greenway

Black Like Me, John Howard Griffin

The Blazing World, Siri Hustvedt

Boy Snow Bird, Helen Oyeyemi

The Chronicle of Secret Riven, Ronlyn Domingue

The Golden Arrow, Anna Redmond

The Golem and the Jinni, Helene Wecker

Half-Blood Blues, Esi Edugyan

If Beale Street Could Talk, James Baldwin

The Invention of Wings, Sue Monk Kidd

Little Failure, Gary Shteyngart

Long Division, Kiese Laymon

Lucky Us, Amy Bloom

The Madonnas of Echo Park, Brando Skyhorse

The Magician’s Land, Lev Grossman

Mood Indigo, Boris Vian

Mother Night, Kurt Vonnegut

My Brilliant Friend, Elena Ferrante

The Signature of All Things, Elizabeth Gilbert

Southland, Nina Revoyr

Station Eleven, Emily St John Mandel

A Tale for the Time Being, Ruth Ozeki

The Tuner of Silences, Mia Couto

HOLIDAY VACATION TRIP

Leaving today for points east and south. Going to visit family and drive many miles. I love a road trip. I am going to hang out with real people and give the internet a break. Well, not entirely. I will have a device or two with me. 

If you like music, here are links to my CDs of original music recorded a while back. You can listen to any of the songs for free, you can download tunes or full CDs, or you can buy them. Happy listening!

http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/judykrueger
http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/krueger2
http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/krueger

I will be back in January with the Favorite Books Read in 2014 post and more reviews.

Thanks for visiting and reading and commenting!

THE CHILDREN ACT

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The Children Act, Ian McEwan, Nan A Talese, 2014, 240 pp

I liked this novel more than I expected to. It is about family, marriage, children, religion and the law. The title refers to a bit of English law: "When a court determines any question with respect to...the upbringing of a child...the child's welfare shall be the court's paramount consideration."

This piece of legislation from 1989 is a giant step towards civilization from the climate of British legal views on children in the days when Charles Dickens grew up. I kept finding myself thinking of Oliver Twist and David Copperfield as I read.

But the child in question here is only months away from turning 18. Because he was raised and protected from the world by devout Jehovah's Witnesses, he has a childlike view of life and the world. He is dying of a disease (was it leukemia? I don't recall) and could possibly be saved by a blood transfusion but his parents will not allow it as that would violate their religious beliefs. 

Fiona Maye, a middle aged, childless High Court judge in family court holds the power to decide what has become a legal battle between the parents and the hospital where the boy lies dying. Concurrent with the progression of the case is a horrific problem in Fiona's marriage.

In almost perfect prose with impeccable timing, the drama plays out. Each character is poised on some brink where passions and disappointments in life meet the person's capacity for making good and sensible judgements. Or you could call it an inner battle of maturity meets childishness. 

Of course, no one really ever wins in such battles. Life is not that simple and is in fact messy. Turning 18 or even 60 is no guarantee of maturity. McEwan keeps the reader captive on these brinks he created which makes for an incredibly good read. He does not judge, even while every character makes judgements and thus we see ourselves and others with increased empathy.

I read this for one of my reading groups and we had one of our best discussions ever.

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

DEATH COMES TO PEMBERLEY

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Death Comes to Pemberley, P D James, Alfred A Knopf, 2012, 291 pp

I have previously read three books by P D James: her first, Cover Her Face, 1962; The Lighthouse, next to last of the Inspector Adam Dalgliesh books, 2005; and the stand alone Children of Men, 1992. 

I liked best the one that got low stars and tepid reviews: Children of Men. In her mysteries she is too sedate and slow moving for me. Children of Men had zing.

When one of my reading groups chose Death Comes to Pemberley, I was rightfully concerned. I don't much enjoy Jane Austen either. Ms James' book is written as a sequel to Pride and Prejudice with a murder mystery for the plot. I anticipated a dreadfully boring read and that is what it was for me. Exactly half of the reading group felt as I did and the other half loved it. There was no middle ground.

I think for Jane Austen/Pride and Prejudice geeks the book would be perfect. The two authors would certainly have been besties had they lived in the same era.

Ten days after I finished reading Death Comes to Penderley death came to P D James. I feel a bit mean now for hating her book. I admire her for a long successful career and for her contributions to the playing field of female mystery writers.

(Death Comes to Pemberley is available in paperback on the mystery shelf at Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

THE ROSIE PROJECT

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The Rosie Project, Graeme Simsion, Simon & Schuster, 2013, 320 pp

I read this for a reading group that I did not attend, but since I had intended to go and started the book with not much time to read, I read it super fast. Fortunately it was that kind of book and I did not dislike it particularly. But it is characterized by that light, slightly humorous writing found in TV shows, so not much of it remains in my memory.

A guy who is some type of heavy scientist residing somewhere on the asperger/autism spectrum is in want of a wife. He devises a project to find one who will match with his peculiarities and instead finds Rosie. He and Rosie run through the obligatory romantic comedy tropes.

It is all very endearing and witty and brings a few new aspects to the nerdy guy meets hot girl story. Being set in Australia, I was constantly having to readjust my internal GPS because the novel seemed so American in most ways.

Nice comfort read but it won't change your life. You already know this story.

(The Rosie Project is available in hardcover and paperback by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

AN UNFINISHED LIFE: JOHN F KENNEDY

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An Unfinished Life: John F Kennedy, Robert Dallek, Little Brown and Company, 2003, 711 pp

I have now completed the third biography on my list of US Presidents who have been in office during my lifetime: Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy. It appears that to be taken seriously a presidential biography must be a door-stopper no matter how long their lives or how many terms they served. John F Kennedy only lived for 46 years and only held the Presidency for 1000 days but he still got 711 pages of text from Robert Dallek.

This reading about presidents' lives is probably the most difficult of my various reading projects but also hugely satisfying in terms of an overview of American federal government and politics. Who they were and how they became presidents is a mirror on American life. But the main idea I have come to is that the news media gives us a distinctly skewed view of our presidents and the disconnect between who they really are and what they have to deal with as the leaders of our country compared to what we are told about that while it is happening only grows wider as the news media keeps up with technological changes over the years.

Despite huge swaths of boring day by day depictions of JFK's nomination and election campaigns as well as the major crises he faced during his term, I learned much more about the man than I was ever taught in school. I gained an understanding of why he was and continues to be so revered. He was THE man for the times in 1960; young, handsome, intelligent, and forward looking. He was also a consummate politician with an inborn sense of how to advance his career, complemented by what he learned from his father. He was far more ill for his entire life than was publicly known. Medicated to his eyeballs much of the time, his health was a risk and a big long story covered fully in Dallek's book.

Though I suspect the author down pedaled it to a large degree, Kennedy was an unrepentant and continuous womanizer. As a teenager I was infatuated with the romance between Jack and Jackie. In An Unfinished Life, Jackie only gets about 20 pages, so now I will need to read some books that give more of her side of the story. I was left feeling it was all a political show.

I wonder if I could have or should have read a different Kennedy biography. Robert Dallek's dull and pedestrian writing style certainly did not match his flamboyant subject.

(An Unfinished Life is available in paperback by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

THE MADONNAS OF ECHO PARK

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The Madonnas of Echo Park, Brando Skyhorse, Free Press, 2010, 199 pp

Brief news flash: Both of my cataract surgeries are now complete. I can see everything without glasses! Well, except for small print close up in poorly lit places, for which I use those reading glasses you can buy at pharmacies. I am so happy!

Now onto my review. Except for a trip on the week of Christmas, I shall be posting regularly again. Thank you for your patience.

My hand-crafted, boutique, and very special Tiny Book Group is on a project to read books set in Los Angeles. All three of us are from elsewhere, having come to LA in middle age. Echo Park is a Los Angeles neighborhood that began as a Mexican ghetto and has lately succumbed to gentrification. Brando Skyhorse grew up in Echo Park in the 1980s.

His truly wonderful novel is a successful example of a novel written as a series of collected stories featuring characters who appear again and again. By the end you know how they are connected through family and events.

"We slipped into this country like thieves, onto the land that once was ours." There is so much history in that opening sentence. It took my breath away. But history is the last thing on the minds of Skyhorse's characters. Their minds are crowded with fears of deportation, struggles to learn English, make a living, and assimilate.

Every living American today, except for Native Americans, is an immigrant or a descendant of immigrants. I wonder how many immigrant novels have been written here. Brando Skyhorse (descended from Mexicans but raised to think that his Native American step-father was his biological father) took this often told story and made it pulse with sights, smells, tastes, loves, deaths, and the infinite variety of human longings.

The Tiny Book Group met in Echo Park to discuss the book. We ate lunch at Xoia Vietnamese Eats.

We got pastries at Masa of Echo Park Bakery & Cafe.

We strolled to Echo Park Lake to eat our treats,

then to Stories Books to choose our next read.

All the while we talked about the book and wondered, "Where have all the Mexicans gone?"

Part of the answer can be found in this video, but most of the answers have been encapsulated in The Madonnas of Echo Park.

One more thing: reading and learning about the incident that inspired the book's title was a little piece of literary magic.

(The Madonnas of Echo Park is available by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

 

 

TWO EYES ARE BETTER THAN ONE

UPDATE

Two weeks after cataract surgery on the right eye and I have almost 20/20 vision for distance. My eyes don't look like the above image which I copied from Google. My eyes look more like Margaret Atwood's or Jane Smiley's or Hilary Clinton's. These are all eyes that have seen a lot, as have mine, eyes that have read millions of words. 

I've been stumbling around without my glasses because they don't work for me anymore. My left eye also has a cataract and is extremely near-sighted. Cooking for Thanksgiving was a challenge but I managed not to cut off any fingers by wearing my glasses with the right lens covered in duct tape. It has been quite an adventure. I can drive in the daytime and see better than I have in years. At night I need mild sunglasses to cut down on the glare from headlights, street lights, etc. Last night in the rain was truly scary but luckily I was only a few blocks from home.

But I can read! And I have been reading. As you can see I managed to post one review here but it was so stressful looking from my handwritten review to the computer screen, even with reading glasses, that I haven't done another.

Monday I got the good news that my second surgery will be this coming Monday! By next Tuesday morning I should be able to see distance in the right eye, middle (computer) distance in the left. Might need reading glasses for close distance like reading books or iBooks. I should be able to see better than I have for decades. No more progressive lenses, no more glasses for everyday tasks. Thanks to modern medicine, my wonderful ophthalmologist/surgeon and her team of technicians, eye drops, and my adoring husband who drives me to surgery and check ups. Thanks to Medicare. 

But OMG my eyes were nicely hidden behind glasses and I could not really see what they looked like. Life is quite a joke sometimes. Yesterday I spent money on new eye cream and face cream. I gave myself a mud pack facial. Face it, Judy. You are not young anymore.

Still I can read, I can drive, I can go to Texas and see my grandchildren for Christmas. I can come home in the New Year and hopefully read more books than ever. Maybe I can even post a couple more reviews before the year is over.

Thanks for your patience!

MAYA'S NOTEBOOK

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Maya's Notebook, Isabel Allende, HarperCollins, 2013, 387 pp

Isabel Allende never lets me down. Whether she writes a novel about a comic book hero (Zorro), a memoir about losing her daughter to a rare disease (Paula), or a coming-of-age/young adult hybrid (Maya's Notebook), I read happily absorbed in the story and the characters. Behind everything she writes is an underlying sense of history and a humanist creed about the worth of individuals.

Maya: deserted physically by her mother and emotionally by her father, was raised by her grandparents-Nini, a strong, protective, mystical woman who escaped from Chile during the politically troubled 1970s and Popo, a gentle and loving African-American astronomer and professor. When Popo dies, Maya goes majorly off the rails, leaves high school, runs away, and descends into drug abuse with all the attendant horrors.

Eventually Nini finds and rescues her but by then she is in so much trouble that Nini sends her to a remote Chilean island to hide out. There, Maya begins to keep a journal and documents her journey back to sanity while making a record of how she got so crazy. Thus Maya's Notebook is exactly that. Maya's story told in Maya's voice. 

Though this is a gritty story with plenty of human degradation, criminality, sex, and drugs, it has equal amounts of beauty. Nini's purple house in Berkeley, CA, and her fellow members of the People's Independent Republic of Berkeley embody a beauty of spirit. The island in the archipelago of Chiloe, where Maya lives for a year comprises wild beauty, native myths, the encroachments of modern civilization, and Manual Arias. Manual is Nini's old friend who has consented to take Maya in and protect her. Their initial meeting goes like this:

"I'm Manual Arias," the man introduced himself in English.

"Hi. I'm on the run from the FBI, Interpol, and a Las Vegas criminal gang," I announced bluntly, to avoid any misunderstandings.

"Congratulations," he said.

"I haven't killed anybody and frankly, I don't think any of them would go to the trouble of coming to look for me all the way down here in the asshole of the world."

"Thanks."

"Sorry, I didn't mean to insult your country, man. Actually it's really pretty, lots of green and lots of water, but look how far away it is!"

"From what?"

"From California, from civilization, from the rest of the world. My Nini didn't tell me it'd be cold."

"It's summer," he informed me.

The snotty tongued Maya and the reticent Manual eventually help each other to dig out of equally horrific pasts and though the final pages of what is a truly exciting story may be a bit sentimental, they are part of the character of the entire tale.

A troubled teen from a fractured family survives by acquiring a whole tribe, because Maya herself contains a beauty that compels many.

Isabel Allende talks about the book here.


(Maya's Notebook is available by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

PLEASE STAY TUNED

I had cataract surgery on my right eye on Monday. Now I have 20/20 vision in that eye but my old near-sighted left eye still has a cataract which will not be fixed until late December. That boils down to a sort of weird monovision for distance and a somewhat useless left eye. This is not conducive to reading or computer work except in short stints. 

Please bear with me. I will be back. I have a pile of excellent books already ready to review. I will get to them as soon as I am able. 

Meanwhile I am catching up on literary podcasts including the awesome Other People, where Brad Listi interviews cutting edge current authors, often published by small and independent presses. Check it out!

Thanks for your patience.

THE INVENTION OF WINGS

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There are certain novels that are so wonderful they keep me reading, always hoping I will find another wonderful one. If you are a reader, I am sure you can think of at least ten such novels. What is even more wonderful is how personal this is, how each reader is unique as to what makes a novel wonderful.

 

Sue Monk Kidd's first novel, The Secret Life of Bees, was such a novel for me. Now I have added her latest novel, The Invention of Wings, to my personal list of wonderful novels. And this is the last time I will use the word wonderful in this review!

The story involves a slave owning family and their slaves. The Grimke household is located in Charleston, NC. In 1803, on her eleventh birthday, Sarah Grimke is given her own personal slave, Hetty, also known as Handful because she is one.

Although her family has always owned slaves, Sarah is horrified by the idea of herself owning another human being. Instead she makes Hetty into a friend and begins teaching her to read. Soon enough both of them are in big trouble, but from that day on Sarah, Hetty, Hetty's mother Charlotte, and Sarah's baby sister Angelina are bound together. 

Sarah and Angelina grow up to be abolitionists and feminists, though of course they are expelled from their family home and from Charleston. All four women struggle, rebel, and suffer before the Civil War has even begun. Each one crosses the treacherous lines and boundaries of family, racism, and patriarchal traditions in a relentless search for freedom.

Readers of this blog know that I take umbrage at writers who unsuccessfully tell stories about other races, nationalities, or countries to which they do not belong. I hereby admit that some authors can manage such a feat convincingly and Sue Monk Kidd has done it twice. But if a person of color reads this review and disagrees, I am open to what you have to say.

I read The Invention of Wings in two days, carried along by the excellence of Ms Kidd's writing craft and immersed in her characters' adventures. I felt proud to be a human being. Here it is 2014 and we still encounter racism and oppression of women on a daily basis but from the beginning of time there have been individuals who stood up to humans oppressing humans and said, "No!"

(The Invention of Wings is available in hardcover on the shelves at Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

A SEVERED HEAD

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A Severed Head, Iris Murdoch, The Viking Press, 1961, 248 pp

Martin is happily married to Antonia but also has a mistress names Georgie. Antonia is older than Martin and undergoing analysis. Suddenly she leaves Martin and moves in with Anderson, her analyst. Anderson's sister Honor tells Antonia about Georgie. Honor is such a truly cracked character that she makes the rest of them look only mildly weird in comparison.

Again a 1961 novel about infidelity. In contrast to Wallace Stegner's A Shooting Star, this one is a breath of fresh air with that almost slapstick feeling Murdoch does so well. Every time I felt I had a grip on the plot, she went in exactly the opposite direction I would predict.

I can just hear some of my reading group ladies getting riled up because not one character is likable or admirable. I certainly did not imagine that the tortured, non-self-aware Martin would end up with ...ah, I can't say. But as she tells Martin, "This has nothing to do with happiness, nothing whatever."

And that is the joke percolating through the whole tale. Many of us tried open marriage in the 70s. What a Pandora's Box! We should have read The Severed Head first.

(A Severed Head is available by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

THE LIE

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The Lie, Hesh Kestin, Scribner, 2014, 229 pp

Once again a reading group steered me to a book I'd never heard about and am glad I read. The Lie is set in Israel and though it is standard fare as thrillers go, the author (a veteran of the Israel Defense Forces) gives readers a provocative look at today's issues.

 

Dahlia Barr, a tough attorney based in Jerusalem and known for defending Palestinians accused of terrorism, accepts recruitment into the Israeli security establishment. She believes she can change the system from within and do away with torture.

 

Then her 21 year old son, a soldier, is kidnapped by Hezbollah and the political becomes personal for Dahlia.

 

I have read David Grossman's To The End Of The Land and Amos Oz's A Tale of Love and Darkness, not to mention a great amount of historical fiction about war. It is the mothers who suffer most, at least from my point of view. 

 

In this novel I found a mother who was in a position to do much more than wait at home in fear and grief but that very position put her straight into the most difficult conflict of her life. What a gripping story.

(The Lie is available by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

A SHOOTING STAR

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Wallace Stegner has been an uneven novelist for this reader. I first read his 1943 historical The Big Rock Candy Mountain, a book I could not put down. The Preacher and the Slave, about Joe Hill and the Wobblies was also riveting. A couple others left me either bored or less than enraptured.

He was a great writer both in craft and the conveying of emotion, but sometimes I feel he tried too hard, even to the point of preaching his message too obviously. In A Shooting Star he went overboard on wordiness, his story arc took too long to arc, and while he tried hard to understand his female protagonist, a judgmental flavor spoiled the result.

I've had a time reading my 1961 list, as it has featured many long books and some weaker books by authors I have previously admired. However, as harbingers of cultural change to come, especially the sexual revolution of the late 60s and the second wave of feminism in the 70s, many of these novels are examples of how writers had their fingers on the pulse of change before it became apparent in mainstream culture.

Sabrina Castro, raised in a deeply screwed up but fabulously wealthy family, married a physician. As her husband became successful with rich matrons in Los Angeles, he began to neglect Sabrina. Because she was not able to conceive a child, she was restless, unfulfilled, and lonely. What does a woman in such straights do? She takes a lover. Thus the drama begins.

And goes on and on. Stegner creates tension with Sabrina's indecision about her marriage, her husband (a sanctimonious jerk), and her future. I am fully aware that female dithering is commonplace. I have been guilty of it myself. Reading about it drives me to distraction.

So OK, he gets that aspect of female life and it is in the 1950s when a woman could not easily go outside of accepted societal norms, no matter how rich she was, but it still went on too long. I also detected whiffs of Freudian concepts about females suffering from infantile behavior. Yuck! A woman working through issues with a messed up mother is not infantile, she is working through issues.

Bottom line: worth reading as a sign of the times; maddening that it took me six days to do so.

(A Shooting Star is available by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)