Reading Round-Up

I spent last week basking in the sun and playing in the waters of Perdido Key.  Though Gulf waters were slightly colder than normal, I was not deterred.

I spotted a school of about 20-30 stingrays, eight dolphins frolicking in the surf, and one very large (and very close to shore) shark.  Scuttlebutt said it was a Great Hammerhead, but I have my doubts; I saw the head and it was not a hammerhead.  Looked more like a blue shark or a nurse shark to me.

I also played both the Florida Lotto and the Powerball.  Alas, I was not a winner in either.  Better luck next time.

I did some extensive reading done, and that is the goal of this blog post–to share with you what I read.

Masterful and exquisite period piece set in the Great Depression.  This comes out in June.

The perfect, propulsive summer read.  A Hundred Summers is like candy–once you start, you can’t stop!

Disappointing but better than The Lost Symbol.

A YA novel adults will love.  Thought-provoking and highly intense, this page-turner will keep you up all night.

Brackmann’s clever, taut sequel to her bestseller Rock Paper Tiger.  

What I’m Reading:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It’s May–What Should I Read?

May is here, and everything’s coming up books!  And that is indeed a wonderful thing.  There’s lots of variety, meaning there should be something for everyone this month.

Titles To Pick Up Now

Dear Lucy by the extraordinarily talented Julie Sarkissian is available now.  I loved Sarkissian’s debut and feel fiercely protective of her main character, Lucy, who is developmentally delayed.  If you are a fan of Gothic tales, this will be perfect for you.  I spotlighted the book and interviewed Sarkissian.  Book review is coming soon.

I go down the stairs quiet like I am something without any weight. I open the door in the dark and the cold sucks my skin towards it. It is the morning but there is no sun yet, just white light around the edges. It is the time to get the eggs. Time for my best thing. The eggs they shine with their white and I do not need the light to find them. The foxes need no light either. I am a little like the fox, he is a little like me.—From Dear Lucy

Dear Lucy is a very unique book, one that you will be sorry you missed.

 

Another recently-released debut that I am enjoying is  Amity & Sorrow by Peggy Riley.  Check out my spotlight on the novel.  

A mother and her daughters drive for days without sleep until they crash their car in rural Oklahoma. The mother, Amaranth, is desperate to get away from someone she’s convinced will follow them wherever they go–her husband. The girls, Amity and Sorrow, can’t imagine what the world holds outside their father’s polygamous compound. Rescue comes in the unlikely form of Bradley, a farmer grieving the loss of his wife. At first unwelcoming to these strange, prayerful women, Bradley’s abiding tolerance gets the best of him, and they become a new kind of family. An unforgettable story of belief and redemption, AMITY & SORROW is about the influence of community and learning to stand on your own.

Riley’s tale is gripping, even from the first page when she introduces readers to sisters who are tied together at the wrist.  Amity & Sorrow is an unflinching, timely, and intriguing look at a fundamentalist cult and a mother who will do anything to save her daughters.

 

Claire Messud, author of The Emperor’s Children, returns with a new novel called The Woman Upstairs.  

Nora Eldridge, a 37-year-old elementary school teacher in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is on the verge of disappearing. Having abandoned her desire to be an artist, she has become the “woman upstairs,” a reliable friend and tidy neighbour always on the fringe of others’ achievements. Then into her classroom walks a new pupil, Reza Shahid, a child who enchants as if from a fairy tale. He and his parents–dashing Skandar, a half-Muslim Professor of Ethical History born in Beirut, and Sirena, an effortlessly glamorous Italian artist–have come to America for Skandar to teach at Harvard.  But one afternoon, Reza is attacked by schoolyard bullies who punch, push and call him a “terrorist,” and Nora is quickly drawn deep into the complex world of the Shahid family. Soon she finds herself falling in love with them, separately and together. Nora’s happiness explodes her boundaries–until Sirena’s own ambition leads to a shattering betrayal.  Written with intimacy and piercing emotion, this urgently dispatched story of obsession and artistic fulfillment explores the thrill–and the devastating cost–of giving in to one’s passions. The Woman Upstairs is a masterly story of America today, of being a woman and of the exhilarations of love.

I’m so proud of debut novelist Julie Wu.  Her dazzling historical epic, The Third Son, was featured in May’s O, The Oprah Magazine and chosen as one of Amazon’s best books of May.  The Third Son is a rich debut featuring a character who I came to see as family.  Saburo is a very special character, one who will steal your heart.  Wu’s story is perfect for fans of Samuel Park, Jamie Ford, Janice Y.K. Lee, and Lisa See.  I spotlighted the book and interviewed Wu.  A review is coming soon.

It’s 1943. As air-raid sirens blare in Japanese-occupied Taiwan, eight-year-old Saburo walks through the peach forests of Taoyuan. The least favored son of a Taiwanese politician, Saburo is in no hurry to get home to the taunting and abuse he suffers at the hands of his parents and older brother. In the forest he meets Yoshiko, whose descriptions of her loving family are to Saburo like a glimpse of paradise.  Meeting her is a moment he will remember forever, and for years he will try to find her again. When he finally does, she is by the side of his oldest brother and greatest rival.

Set in a tumultuous and violent period of Taiwanese history—as the Chinese Nationalist Army lays claim to the island and one autocracy replaces another—The Third Son tells the story of lives governed by the inheritance of family and the legacy of culture, and of a young man determined to free himself from both.  In Saburo, author Julie Wu has created an extraordinary character, a gentle soul forced to fight for everything he’s ever wanted: food, an education, and his first love, Yoshiko. A sparkling, evocative debut, it will have readers cheering for this young boy with his head in the clouds who, against all odds, finds himself on the frontier of America’s space program.

 

Coming Soon

On May 7, Bloomsbury USA will publish the latest novel from bestselling author Gail Godwin.

Ten-year-old Helen and her summer guardian, Flora, are isolated together in Helen’s decaying family house while her father is doing secret war work in Oak Ridge during the final months of World War II.At three Helen lost her mother and the beloved grandmother who raised her has just died.A fiercely imaginative child, Helen is desperate to keep her house intact with all its ghosts and stories.Flora, her late mother’s twenty-two-year old first cousin, who cries at the drop of a hat, is ardently determined to do her best for Helen.Their relationship and its fallout, played against a backdrop of a lost America will haunt Helen for the rest of her life.

This darkly beautiful novel about a child and a caretaker in isolation evokes shades of The Turn of the Screw and also harks back to Godwin’s memorable novel of growing up, The Finishing School. With its house on top of a mountain and a child who may be a bomb that will one day go off, Flora tells a story of love, regret, and the things we can’t undo.It will stay with readers long after the last page is turned.

Caroline’s Leavitt’s tenth novel, Is This Tomorrow, comes out May 7 from Algonquin Books.

 

In 1956, when divorced working-mom Ava Lark rents a house with her twelve-year-old son, Lewis, in a Boston suburb, the neighborhood is less than welcoming. Lewis yearns for his absent father, befriending the only other fatherless kids: Jimmy and Rose. One afternoon, Jimmy goes missing. The neighborhood in the era of the Cold War, bomb scares, and paranoia seizes the opportunity to further ostracize Ava and her son.Lewis never recovers from the disappearance of his childhood friend. By the time he reaches his twenties, he s living a directionless life, a failure in love, estranged from his mother. Rose is now a schoolteacher in another city, watching over children as she was never able to watch over her own brother. Ava is building a new life for herself in a new decade. When the mystery of Jimmy s disappearance is unexpectedly solved, all three must try to reclaim what they have lost.

 

 

A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra will be released on May 7 by Hogarth.  A resilient doctor risks everything to save the life of a hunted child, in this majestic debut about love, loss, and the unexpected ties that bind us together.  In his brilliant, haunting novel, Stegner Fellow and Whiting Award winner Anthony Marra transports us to a snow-covered village in Chechnya, where eight-year-old Havaa watches from the woods as Russian soldiers abduct her father in the middle of the night, accusing him of aiding Chechen rebels. Across the road their lifelong neighbor and family friend Akhmed has also been watching, fearing the worst when the soldiers set fire to Havaa’s house. But when he finds her hiding in the forest with a strange blue suitcase, he makes a decision that will forever change their lives. He will seek refuge at the abandoned hospital where the sole remaining doctor, Sonja Rabina, treats the wounded.  For the talented, tough-minded Sonja, the arrival of Akhmed and Havaa is an unwelcome surprise. Weary and overburdened, she has no desire to take on additional risk and responsibility. And she has a deeply personal reason for caution: harboring these refugees could easily jeopardize the return of her missing sister. But over the course of five extraordinary days, Sonja’s world will shift on its axis and reveal the intricate pattern of connections that weave together the pasts of these three unlikely companions and unexpectedly decides their fate. A story of the transcendent power of love in wartime, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena is a work of sweeping breadth, profound compassion, and lasting significance.

Also on May 7 comes Daniel Wallace’s latest yarn, The Kings and Queens of Roam, from Touchstone.

 

From the celebrated author of Big Fish, an imaginative, moving novel about two sisters and the dark legacy and magical town that entwine them.  Helen and Rachel McCallister, who live in a town called Roam, are as different as sisters can be: Helen older, bitter, and conniving; Rachel beautiful, naïve – and blind. When their parents die an untimely death, Rachel has to rely on Helen for everything, but Helen embraces her role in all the wrong ways, convincing Rachel that the world is a dark and dangerous place she couldn’t possibly survive on her own … or so Helen believes, until Rachel makes a surprising choice that turns both their worlds upside down.  In this new novel, Southern literary master Daniel Wallace returns to the tradition of tall-tales and folklore made memorable in his bestselling Big Fish. The Kings and Queens of Roam is a wildly inventive, beautifully written, and big-hearted tale of family and the ties that bind

 

Unbridled Books will publish River of Dust by Virginia Pye on May 14.  On the windswept plains of northwestern China, Mongol bandits swoop down upon an American missionary couple and steal their small child. The Reverend sets out in search of the boy and becomes lost in the rugged, corrupt countryside populated by opium dens, sly nomadic warlords and traveling circuses. This upright Midwestern minister develops a following among the Chinese peasants and is christened Ghost Man for what they perceive are his otherworldly powers. Grace, his young ingénue wife, pregnant with their second child, takes to her sick bed in the mission compound, where visions of her stolen child and lost husband begin to beckon to her from across the plains. The foreign couple’s savvy and dedicated Chinese servants, Ahcho and Mai Lin, accompany and eventually lead them through dangerous territory to find one another again. With their Christian beliefs sorely tested, their concept of fate expanded, and their physical health rapidly deteriorating, the Reverend and Grace may finally discover an understanding between them that is greater than the vast distance they have come.

 

On May 14, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s new novel, Americanah, hits shelves from Knopf.  From the award-winning author of Half of a Yellow Sun, a dazzling new novel: a story of love and race centered around a young man and woman from Nigeria who face difficult choices and challenges in the countries they come to call home.  As teenagers in a Lagos secondary school, Ifemelu and Obinze fall in love. Their Nigeria is under military dictatorship, and people are leaving the country if they can. Ifemelu—beautiful, self-assured—departs for America to study. She suffers defeats and triumphs, finds and loses relationships and friendships, all the while feeling the weight of something she never thought of back home: race. Obinze—the quiet, thoughtful son of a professor—had hoped to join her, but post-9/11 America will not let him in, and he plunges into a dangerous, undocumented life in London.   Years later, Obinze is a wealthy man in a newly democratic Nigeria, while Ifemelu has achieved success as a writer of an eye-opening blog about race in America. But when Ifemelu returns to Nigeria, and she and Obinze reignite their shared passion—for their homeland and for each other—they will face the toughest decisions of their lives.   Fearless, gripping, at once darkly funny and tender, spanning three continents and numerous lives, Americanah is a richly told story set in today’s globalized world: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s most powerful and astonishing novel yet.

 

Patricia Beard’s A Certain Summer will be ready for your beach bag on May 21.  The publisher is Gallery Books.  “Nothing ever changes at Wauregan.” That mystique is the tradition of the idyllic island colony off the shore of Long Island, the comforting tradition that its summer dwellers have lived by for over half a century. But in the summer of 1948, after a world war has claimed countless men—even those who came home—the time has come to deal with history’s indelible scars.  Helen Wadsworth’s husband, Arthur, was declared missing in action during an OSS operation in France, but the official explanation was mysteriously nebulous. Now raising a teenage son who longs to know the truth about his father, Helen turns to Frank Hartman—her husband’s best friend and his partner on the mission when he disappeared. Frank, however, seems more intent on filling the void in Helen’s life that Arthur’s absence has left. As Helen’s affection for Frank grows, so does her guilt, especially when Peter Gavin, a handsome Marine who was brutally tortured by the Japanese and has returned with a faithful war dog, unexpectedly stirs new desires. With her heart pulled in multiple directions, Helen doesn’t know whom to trust—especially when a shocking discovery forever alters her perception of both love and war.  Part mystery, part love story, and part insider’s view of a very private world, A Certain Summer resonates in the heart long after the last page is turned.

Also published on May 21 is We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulawayo from Reagan Arthur.  Darling is only 10 years old, and yet she must navigate a fragile and violent world. In Zimbabwe, Darling and her friends steal guavas, try to get the baby out of young Chipo’s belly, and grasp at memories of Before. Before their homes were destroyed by paramilitary policemen, before the school closed, before the fathers left for dangerous jobs abroad.

But Darling has a chance to escape: she has an aunt in America. She travels to this new land in search of America’s famous abundance only to find that her options as an immigrant are perilously few. NoViolet Bulawayo’s debut calls to mind the great storytellers of displacement and arrival who have come before her–from Zadie Smith to Monica Ali to J.M. Coetzee–while she tells a vivid, raw story all her own.

 

 

Riverhead releases what may well be another bestseller for author Khaled Hosseini on May 21, And the Mountains Echoed.  Khaled Hosseini, the #1 New York Times-bestselling author of The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns, has written a new novel about how we love, how we take care of one another, and how the choices we make resonate through generations.

Who doesn’t love a good thriller?  While I was no fan of The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown, I am looking forward to the release of Inferno, out May 14 from Knopf Doubleday.  As The Lost Symbol showed me, Robert Langdon works best in Europe, and not in America.

In his international blockbusters The Da Vinci Code, Angels & Demons, and The Lost Symbol, Dan Brown masterfully fused history, art, codes, and symbols. In this riveting new thriller, Brown returns to his element and has crafted his highest-stakes novel to date.  
In the heart of Italy, Harvard professor of symbology Robert Langdon is drawn into a harrowing world centered on one of history’s most enduring and mysterious literary masterpieces . . . Dante’s Inferno.  Against this backdrop, Langdon battles a chilling adversary and grapples with an ingenious riddle that pulls him into a landscape of classic art, secret passageways, and futuristic science. Drawing from Dante’s dark epic poem, Langdon races to find answers and decide whom to trust . . . before the world is irrevocably altered.

Paperback Releases

If you didn’t catch these amazing reads last year, they are either now available in paperback or are coming out this month.  Don’t miss them!

The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers is out now from Little, Brown.  Powers was nominated for a National Book Award in fiction for his tale of the Iraq War.

The Yellow Birds is unlike other Iraq War novels.  Powers actually fought in combat so he knows his stuff.  This is fiction, but there are kernels of truth within these pages.  He drives home the point that the War in Iraq has irrevocably changed a whole generation and our country will not ever be the same.  The Yellow Birds is penetrating, poignant, and deeply personal for Powers.  I can’t stop thinking about Bartle and Murph.  This is the debut of the year.  –Bookmagnet’s review

 

 

 

Peter Heller’s The Dog Stars comes out in paperback May 7 from Vintage.

Hig is an “old man at forty” who lost his wife and their unborn child to the flu.  Hig’s narrative is unconventional as Heller uses flashbacks and sometimes strange streams of consciousness to tell us his story.  After the flu struck, encephalitis felled Hig.  “Two straight weeks of fever, three days 104 to 105,” Hig explains, “I know it cooked my brains.”  There is no pattern to Hig’s thoughts.  They are often jumbled and mish-mashed, often without segue from one thought to the next.  He begins many of his sentences with “and” or “so” and most of his thoughts are fragments.  What Hig has lived through and what he has lost speak to us from the page.  Heller uses a very powerful device, and Hig just would not be Hig without it.–Bookmagnet’s review

 

 

 

 

On May 7, Vintage releases Maggie Shipstead’s debut, Seating Arrangements, in paperback.  

Seating Arrangments is THE read of the summer, but this is no fluff piece.  Shipstead constructs a many-layered story in the same way a baker creates a layered wedding cake or a designer sews a wedding gown.  There are layers upon layers, and we must peel them back chapter by chapter. There are debut novels, and then there are debut novels.  Messy, disorganized jumbles lacking cohesion.  Unrealized characters with nothing to drive them.  Settings that fall flat.  A plot that isn’t.  This is not one of those debut novels.  –Bookmagnet’s review

 

 

 

 

Lance Weller’s electrifying and shocking debut Wilderness comes out May 14 from Bloomsbury USA.

I interviewed Weller and he had this to say about coming up with the story:

“Abel Truman came to me well before I had any notion whatsoever that Wilderness would become what it ended up becoming.  I wanted to try and write a really excellent dog story and, to that end, started writing a short story about an old man and his dog and what became of them.  Before I really knew it, they were living on the Washington State coast and the old man was an American Civil War veteran and I was beyond the point where it was a short story by a good number of pages.”

–From my interview with Weller

 

Mariner Books will publish Jennifer Miller’s smart debut The Year of the Gadfly May 28.  

Foreshadowing is just one of the plot devices in which Miller shows off her skills.  Traveling to the school with her mother, Iris notices that “the mountainous peaks resembled teeth.  The road stretched between them like a black tongue.  And here we were, in our small vehicle, speeding toward that awful mouth.”  One cannot help but wonder if the school will swallow Iris…I recommend The Year of the Gadfly to fans of Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep, Amber Dermont’s The Starboard Sea, and Donna Tartt’s The Secret History.  Miller’s story is intelligent, sharp, and eye-opening.  Miller shines as she describes the pain of adolescence and aptly compares high school to the political dealings of a Third World nation.  “In high school,” Miller warns, “you never knew who was your enemy and who was your friend.”  Keep that warning in mind as you readThe Year of the Gadfly.  As in Miller’s novel, our enemies sometimes disguise themselves as our friends.  Iris should be vigilant.  —Bookmagnet’s review

Book Review: The Pink Hotel by Anna Stothard

The Pink Hotel comes out April 23 from Picador.

            In Anna Stothard’s candidly unflinching, evocative, and razor-sharp debut novel The Pink Hotel, the female protagonist is interested in creation stories and myths.  The Epic of Gilgamesh, Noah’s flood, and the Aztec legend of “Coatlique” fascinate the astute and precocious 17-year-old British girl.  And there’s a reason for her curiosity: her mother, Lily, left when she was only three.  The girl desperately wants to know her own creation story, and her dad has never been forthcoming about the tale.

Stothard does not give her protagonist a name.  Since Stothard tells the tale from the girl’s first-person perspective, perhaps Stothard did not feel the need to name the main character.  It is a rather curious move.  Naming and identity are so closely intertwined; because the narrator has no name, I never connect with her, I do not feel like I ever truly know her.  For me, she is unknown, unknowable, and rather unlikeable.  That is not to say that Stothard does not do a good job of fleshing out this individual—she does.  But not giving the novel’s main personality a name bothered me immensely.

Yet I appreciated the main character’s mindset.  Yearning for one’s mother is a universal concept that everyone can understand.  The Pink Hotel begins when the girl gets news that her mother, who lived in Los Angeles, has been killed in a motorcycle accident.  Stothard’s main character does not think of the consequences; she is 17, after all, and frantic over the prospect that she will never know her mother now that she is dead.

As she explains, “Presumably most people can conjure an image of their mother from childhood, but my memories are either from photographs or they’re physical.  I can’t imagine what she used to look like, but remember fragments of her holding my hand too tight in a supermarket, the texture of her legs when I grabbed them….” So she decides to travel to Los Angeles, where her mother owned “The Pink Hotel” in Venice Beach with her second husband.

For the young girl, her journey is really a pilgrimage.  When she arrives at the hotel for her mother’s wake, she sneaks into her bedroom and steals a red suitcase.  She stuffs it full of her mother’s clothes, letters, and pictures.  The girl flees the hotel after encountering her mother’s current husband.  With a stolen credit card and little money, the main character sets out finding the people her mother knew in hopes of learning more about the woman who left all those years ago.

In an effort to get closer to her mother, the protagonist seems to take on the role of her mother.  “I’m not Lily” she says, while wearing her mother’s “tight black dress and her red stilettos.”  “Are you as good at lying as you are at storytelling” a character asks her.  And she is quite adept at telling falsehoods, but not to the reader, only to others.  You would think this quality would endear her to the reader; alas, it does not.

The Pink Hotel is peopled by a quirky cast of characters.  Some of my absolute favorites are the Armenian women she meets.  “How did you come to America?” the girl asks one of them.  “My twin sister and I,” the woman replies, “weren’t interested in marrying men named Noah, you know?”

Stothard chooses the perfect setting for her characters and for the story.  In fact, it is setting that drives The Pink Hotel and its characters.  The author perfectly captures the essence of Southern California to create an atmospheric tale that would not have worked anywhere else.  With lines like “If the Atlantic was a foaming, snapping Rottweiler, the Pacific was a sleepy gecko in the sunlight,” Stothard grabs you and puts you in the middle of the story.

Sense of place is so important in The Pink Hotel.  In fact, the setting is what saved this story for me when I did not connect to the narrator.  Stothard writes, “Los Angeles isn’t built for the rain, and everyone panics.  The air gets saturated with ambulance sirens as oil rises up through the suddenly soaked tarmac highways, causing crashes.”  “The heatwave had finally ignited, and LA had a halo of fire over it.”

Descriptions such as these make The Pink Hotel compelling and worth reading.

Stothard is a master at using lyrical prose.  But I think The Pink Hotel would make a better movie than it does a book.  Perhaps the actress who played the main character could make her more knowable and more likeable.  A good actress could make moviegoers relate to the narrator and identify more with her, which was sadly missing here.

—-Bookmagnet

The author

Original 2011 cover

German cover

Book Review: And Then I Found You by Patti Callahan Henry

And Then I Found You by Patti Callahan Henry (St. Martin’s Press; 272 pages; $24.99).

For Katie Vaughn, the first day of spring was always a day of firsts: the day she experienced her first kiss, the day she fell in love, the day she ran a marathon, the day she opened her boutique, and the day she vowed to love Jack Adams forever.  It was also the day she gave up her newborn for adoption in Patti Callahan Henry’s tender, sincere, and deeply poignant novel And Then I Found You, the April Book Club Selection for She Reads.

For Kate, the first day of spring held more than blooming daffodils.  It was still a day of firsts.  Kate had a ritual, a sacred ritual.  She made sure that she did something she’d never done before, something that would count as new on the first day of spring.  Six years ago she’d opened her boutique.  The year before that she ran a marathon with her sister.  Of course there was that trip to California with Norah.  Then four years ago the midnight swim in the darkest water with Rowan, the first time he’d visited her in South Carolina.  It didn’t matter what she did or said or saw as long as it hadn’t been done, or said, or seen before.

The plot of And Then I Found You is as swiftly-paced as the current of Katie’s beloved South Carolina River.  Katie is successful and in a loving relationship with her boyfriend, Rowan.  When she accidentally stumbles upon an engagement ring he bought for her, Katie comes to a crossroads of sorts.  She thought she loved Rowan, but now she finds herself unsure.  The problem is Jack, her first love and the father of Luna, the baby she gave away all those years ago.

To go on with her life, Katie feels like she has to see Jack and talk to him.  Maybe then she can have the closure she needs.  But once Katie travels to Birmingham, Jack’s home, old feelings resurface for them both.

Henry tells the story from the very different perspectives of 35-year-old Katie and 13-year-old Emily Jackson, Katie’s biological daughter.  I truly admired how Henry managed to realistically capture both points of view.  In And Then I Found You, Henry also takes us back and forth through time to provide windows into Katie’s past, crucial moments we must know to better understand her and the narrative. 

And Then I Found You is told with such honesty and heart because, for Henry, it is very personal.  Life often imitates art, but sometimes art can imitate life.

In the story, Katie has two younger sisters.  One, Tara, is a writer.  When Emily begins an online search for her biological mother, links to Tara come up over and over.  Emily contacts Tara through Facebook; this social media connection leads to a reunion.

As Henry explains in her letter to readers at the front of her novel, And Then I Found You is loosely based on a true story.  Henry’s sister placed her baby up for adoption over 21 years ago.  “It was the most heartrending, courageous and difficult decision she had ever made, and we all wept with her when she handed her baby girl to an anonymous, yet hand-chosen family,” Henry writes.  Then, one day, two years ago, Henry received “a Facebook friend request from a young girl with the same birthday as my adopted niece.  It was too much to hope for, almost too miraculous to believe.  But it was true: My sister’s daughter, my niece, found us on Facebook.”  Henry emphasizes the awesome power of social media in her story, and simultaneously inspires and moves us, yes, to tears.

Henry drew me in from the very first page, and I read this novel in one sitting, as I could not tear myself away; I had to find out what would happen.  I was surprised to enjoy this novel as much as I did.  Initially, I worried it would be too sappy and too romantic for my tastes, but my concerns were for naught.

Passionate, stirring, and full of sentiment, this is a story about first love, family, mistakes, forgiveness, and second chances.  I predict readers will fall in love with And Then I Found You, a perfect read for book clubs because it’s so easy to like Henry’s characters.  And Then I Found You is destined to become one of the summer’s hottest beach reads.  Throw this title in your beach bag but don’t forget the sunscreen and sunglasses!

For more reviews, discussions, and giveaways, visit She Reads.

Patti Callahan Henry

Spotlight on Blackberry Winter by Sarah Jio

I am currently reading Blackberry Winter by Sarah Jio.  Let me say this is my absolute favorite of all her novels!  She is truly a master at weaving together past and present storylines.

From Goodreads:

“In 2011, Sarah Jio burst onto the fiction scene with two sensational novels–The Violets of March and The Bungalow. With Blackberry Winter–taking its title from a late-season, cold-weather phenomenon–Jio continues her rich exploration of the ways personal connections can transcend the boundaries of time.

Seattle, 1933. Single mother Vera Ray kisses her three-year-old son, Daniel, goodnight and departs to work the night-shift at a local hotel. She emerges to discover that a May-Day snow has blanketed the city, and that her son has vanished. Outside, she finds his beloved teddy bear lying face-down on an icy street, the snow covering up any trace of his tracks, or the perpetrator’s.

Seattle, 2010. Seattle Herald reporter Claire Aldridge, assigned to cover the May 1 “blackberry winter” storm and its twin, learns of the unsolved abduction and vows to unearth the truth. In the process, she finds that she and Vera may be linked in unexpected ways.”

 

Book Review: Perfect is Overrated by Karen Bergreen

Perfect is Overrated by Karen Bergreen (St. Martin’s Griffin; 308 pages; $14.99).

                Most authors do not know how to use humor in their storytelling.  Their attempts at comedy fall flat or come out all wrong.  Karen Bergreen, though, is not like those writers.

Bergreen is a stand-up comic who has appeared on Court TV, Comedy Central, Oxygen, and on Law & Order.  That is just her “second” career.  She is a former attorney who also clerked for a federal judge.  Bergreen is smack-dab in the midst of undertaking yet another vocation: author.  Her latest laugh-out-loud murder mystery is called Perfect is Overrated; she previously wrote Following Polly.    

                In Perfect is Overrated, Bergreen’s comedic timing is impeccably spot-on.  After the mother of one of her daughter’s preschool classmates is murdered, Kate Alger remembers meeting her for the first time.  The mothers and their daughters were sitting in a waiting area of the preschool’s admissions office.  Beverly offered her daughter, Bitsy, some hummus.  Molly, Kate’s daughter, thought the woman would offer her some, too.  “She’s not sick, is she?” Beverly asked, anxiously.  “Bitsy doesn’t like germs.”  Beverly made it clear to little Molly that the food was for Bitsy and she could not have any.  Kate instead offered Molly old saltine crackers from her purse.  Beverly was horrified, “Ooh, you do salt?”  Beverly then turned to Bitsy: “Bitsy, sweetie.  Mommy is going to help Bitsy out of her stroller.  And then Bitsy can give Mommy a kiss.  Mommy loves Bitsy.”  And then Bitsy threw up on Beverly.  “Molly took the second saltine out of its plastic wrap and handed it to the little girl.”  See what I mean?  Bergreen knows instinctively where to position humor in her storytelling.

But Perfect is Overrated is not all punch-lines and laughter.  Kate once had the perfect life.  She was an assistant district attorney who loved her job and was married to Paul, a gorgeous cop.  The couple was overjoyed to be expecting their first child.  Molly’s premature arrival and her touch-and-go first weeks of life irrevocably changed all that.  Kate developed postpartum depression, and nothing, not even Molly, could pull her from the black depths of despair.  Paul knew how to deal with perps but he had no clue how to handle an emotional and despondent wife.  They divorced.  He moved into an apartment right above his ex and their daughter.

Kate finally finds a cure for her postpartum blues when someone begins murdering the wealthy, snobby, seemingly perfect moms in Molly’s class.  Paul and Kate’s old boss are on the case.  Kate is hungry for information and launches her own investigation, which includes breaking into Paul’s computer and doing some snooping in her old boss’ office.  Kate gets more than she ever bargained for, though, when she discovers she could be next.

Because Bergreen knows the law, the plot to Perfect is Overrated is true to life.  She knows the ins and outs of police procedure and how to build a case against a perpetrator.  Because she also knows comedy, the story is funny, too.  Case in point:  when the killer is finally in police custody, the accused describes one of the murders.  “She answered the door in a stupid Chanel suit, which, I’m sorry, is so over.  Coco is dead, lady.  Buy de la Renta.”  I think I can honestly say that I have never read a funnier mystery.

Bergreen’s two careers, law and comedy, come together in this novel.  It’s a good marriage, one that I hope is long-lasting. May she never stray.

 

Book Review: The Salt God’s Daughter by Ilie Ruby

The Salt God’s Daughter by Ilie Ruby (Soft Skull Press; 352 pages; $25).

                Ilie Ruby, the critically acclaimed author of The Language of Trees, counts among her influencers some big names like Isabel Allende and Alice Sebold.  Reading her moving, hypnotic new novel The Salt God’s Daughter,  this reviewer clearly saw traces of both Allende and Sebold, as well as Alice Hoffmann.  Ruby combines elements of mystery, fantasy, and magical realism to tell a moving story about three generations of women in Southern California.  The Salt God’s Daughter is a beautifully told and seductive tale that lets Ruby show her amazing talent.

Ruby’s main character is Ruth, who, together with her older sister Dolly, struggles with an absent mother.  Diana, their unconventional mother, obsesses over the moon cycles of her beloved Old Farmer’s Almanac and interprets the phases of the moon.  They warn her of potential dangers or possible opportunities.  Through the character of Diana, Ruby is able to imbue elements of Jewish mysticism into her story, making it richer and beguiling.  With their mother inhabiting a world of her own, the sisters find themselves alone most of the time.  Dolly and Ruth quickly learn to protect each other.

“We ran wild at night, effortless, boundless, under a blood red sky—to where and to what we couldn’t have known.  We craved it, that someplace.  We were two little girls, sisters, daughters with no mother, distrustful of the freedom we were given, knowing she shouldn’t have left,” Ruby writes.  “We stole wrinkled leather sneakers that were two sizes too big, and wore them until they fit.  We raced in the sand, fought in the dusk.  We knew we were not invisible.  We tightened belts around our stomachs at night….”

Despite their mother’s negligence, they love her and desperately long for her.  “If I told you that I ached for a different mother, I’d be lying,” Ruth admits, “I ached for my own, every minute.  As motherless daughters do.”  When she is with them, they are a family.

Amazingly, the sisters have no idea their lives are unusual; they are isolated and insular.  Their one link to the outside world is the soap opera General Hospital.  When their mother dies, though, the girls face new challenges, as traditional society collides with their nontraditional, nomadic upbringing.

As the sisters grow older, each grapples with adversity, violence, and rape.  Each sister must decide what to do with an unwanted, unplanned pregnancy.  Violence against women, then, as well as lust and sexuality are just some of Ruby’s big themes.  She does not shy away from the brutality of rape.  The scene in which Ruth, a virgin, is raped is difficult to read, yet Ruby approaches the subject with realism, tact, and straightforwardness.  Understandably, Ruth begins to search for a place where she can heal, where she can carve out a life that is all her own.

Ruth finds a place of stability at Wild Acres, an old hotel on the beach. There, among the fragrant and colorful bougainvillea, rising tides, sandy beach, and rough surf, Ruth makes her own kind of family with the elderly people who live there.

She quickly finds a refuge in love, but this is not an average union.  Ruby falls in love with a selkie.  The Salt God’s Daughter is strongest in its use of the traditional Scottish folkloric tale of the selkie, or seal wife.  Ruth begins an affair with a mysterious fisherman who leaves salt in her bed and then leaves her for long periods of time.  A daughter, Naida, is born from their intimacy.

Kids bully Naida and call her a “frog witch.”  Naida is different and undeniably special.  Watched over by three sea lions, dubbed the “sisters,” Naida swims like a fish and keeps a secret.  For her, the ocean is a form of solace against the bullying and her difference.  Naida, though, feels a deep sense of loss because of her absent father.  She is sure he holds the key to her many gifts and determines she will find him.  Her journey will have lasting consequences, and the answers she seeks may hurt more than they heal.

Ruby does not portray men in the best light in this story.  Men leave; men abuse; men lie; men cheat; men rape; and even boys bully and beat up little girls.  The only man of any worth in The Salt God’s Daughter is Mr. Taki, a resident of Wild Acres and former friend of Diana’s, who may or may not be Dolly’s father.  Yet, women are at the heart of this story, particularly one woman: Ruth.  Ruth must overcome loss and heartache to raise Naida and create a home for herself and her daughter.  Ruth must choose to be a beacon in the storm for her daughter.

The bond between mothers and daughters is palpable in The Salt God’s Daughter.  Even when Diana is absent, Ruth and Dolly still yearn for her.  Her almanacs are a way for Diana to speak to her daughters and to her granddaughter even after her death.  Ruby likewise does everything humanly possible to protect her daughter.  Young girls need guidance and protection.

Ruby came up with the idea behind this story while reading about bullied girls.  “I had been reading about four young girls who were bullied and who could no longer stand it,” she writes. “As I researched their stories, that number grew to ten girls. Then seventeen girls. There are more. I wrote their names out on a piece of paper on my desk, and I felt a strong sense of purpose. There was no way I was not going to tell this story.”  Her aim was not only to tell a “beautiful story, but to give voice to every girl who has ever been tested—who has been called out, named, bullied, gossiped about. And who has found the strength to stand up in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds.”

The Salt God’s Daughter is full of magic and enchantment, violence and tragedy, fantasy and magical realism, discovery and survival.  Like an undertow, The Salt God’s Daughter pulls the reader in.  Before one realizes, she is far from shore.  Fear not, dear reader.  Let the current pull you under.  Ruby’s story is a tale to drown in.

 

Book Review: Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn (Crown; 432 pages; $25).

 

            “Let me set the scene,” to borrow a phrase from a character in Gillian Flynn’s third novel Gone Girl.  I normally do not read mysteries or thrillers; my exceptions are usually James Rollins and Steve Berry.  Most mysteries are not well-written, and I roll my eyes over what someone says or does.  I would rather read literature and fiction any day.  Another reason I stay away from mysteries is that I can usually guess the plot in the first few chapters.  Knowing what is coming simply takes the fun out of reading a so-called mystery.

I was reluctant to read Gone Girl, although I genuinely liked Flynn’s first novel Sharp Objects.  When I saw Gone Girl was about a wife who disappeared, my first thought was, “Hello, Scott Peterson.”  Been there, done that.  I was forgetting one crucial factor, however.  I had forgotten what a page-turner Flynn could produce and how nothing is simple in her world.

Nick and Amy Dunne have been married for exactly five years when Gone Girl begins.  In fact, the very day the book begins is their anniversary.  There will be no romantic candlelit dinners followed by an evening of dancing.  Amy disappears.  Not surprisingly, the police focus on Nick.

And Nick is all too aware of this fact: “Everyone knows it’s always the husband, so why can’t they just say it: We suspect you because you are the husband, and it’s always the husband.  Just watch Dateline.”

The reader has no choice but to suspect Nick, too.  He loved her once, deeply, but things have changed.  They both lost their jobs and relocated to Nick’s hometown from New York City when his mother became ill.  Money problems weigh heavily on them.  In short, they were having trouble and were far from being a happy couple.

When Nick thinks of his wife, oddly, he “always” thinks “of her head,” specifically the back of her head.  That does not bode well for Amy’s well-being, that’s for sure.

Yet Nick proclaims his innocence.  I was skeptical, especially when he reveals he has told the police five lies, all within the first few minutes of meeting with investigators.  His twin sister, Go (short for Margo), confirms that Nick would “lie, cheat, and steal” and even kill all “to convince people” he’s a good guy.  Nick, we soon learn, is an unreliable narrator.  Nothing he says can be trusted.  He has no qualms whatsoever about lying, and he’s good at it–so good it’s scary.

Flynn takes us on many twists and turns throughout this story that I literally could not put the book down nor could I catch my breath.  Gone Girl is a psychological thriller.  Just when you think Nick is the culprit, Flynn throws us a curve ball by introducing Diary Amy.  We meet Amy, but only through her diary entries.  Through her eyes, Nick becomes a deeply sinister figure.  But can we trust Diary Amy?

Amy loves “mind games” and creates a treasure hunt for Nick every year on their anniversary.  She gives him clues to follow.  Before Amy went missing, she wrote the clues for this year.  As Flynn shows us more and more of Amy’s diary entries, one cannot help but notice the different stories Nick and Amy are telling.  Amy may be unreliable, too; she may lie just as much as Nick does.  The dilemma is who to believe.  The trick is that both may be lying.

Amy is Flynn’s most intriguing character.  Her parents wrote a series of books for children which were quite popular in the 1980s called ”Amazing Amy.”  The little girl in the books looked just like Amy; she was Amy, only better.  There was always a moral in each and usually taken from an actual instance in the real Amy’s life.  The real Amy did the opposite, though, of what “Amazing Amy” did.  Her parents, thought real Amy, did it to teach her a lesson.

Kids loved to read the stories.  So did a few freaks, like a girl Amy knew in school who began dressing and even acting like Amy.  She went so far as to push Amy down the stairs.  Then, there was the guy Amy dated who took their breakup so hard he tried to commit suicide.  Nick goes on the offensive and tracks them down, insisting he did not hurt her.  He criticizes the authorities for not going after the real culprit.  Nick swears, despite evidence to the contrary, that he is innocent.

Yet, despite his protestations, all signs point to Nick, especially after the police find blood (and a lot of it!) in the kitchen.    And why does Nick keep seeing Amy bleeding anyway?  As Flynn writes, “I saw my wife, blood clotting her blond hair, weeping and blind in pain, scraping herself along our kitchen floor.”  He hears her call his name: “Nick, Nick, Nick!”  Might he be playing back the crime in his mind?

Just when you think you have it all figured out, Flynn introduces something else into the mix.  This is a who-done-it that really keeps you guessing, right up until the last page.  That’s what makes Gone Girl worth reading and what makes it so darn good.  I do not remember ever reading a thriller with so many plot twists and revelations.  After I finished, I wanted to immediately read it again to see what I had missed.

Amy was once a writer of personality quizzes for magazines.  To end this review, I am going to borrow something from her yet again.  After finishing Gone Girl and loving it, you:

A)  Tweet about it to your followers—hey, it’s the least you can do.

B)  Rate the book on Goodreads and even recommend it to your friends there—hey, they would like it, too.

C)  Write a glowing critical review of the novel—hey, it’s just that good!

D)  All of the above.

I know which choice I would pick.  I have a hunch that, after you read it, you’d give the same answer as I.  Gone Girl is Flynn’s best work.  Everyone needs a good mystery, and I challenge you to find a better one.  I know from experience that it isn’t easy!

People Get Weird At Weddings

Seating Arrangements by Maggie Shipstead (Knopf; 320 pages; $25.95).

 

            There are weddings, and then there are weddings.  Destination weddings.  Weekend weddings.  Lavish weddings.  Small weddings.  Weddings where drunken bridesmaids sleep with equally inebriated groomsmen.  Even Shotgun weddings where no one has to guess “is she or isn’t she?”  The wedding of Daphne Van Meter features a little of all of the above in Maggie Shipstead’s strong, hilarious debut novel Seating Arrangements, part social satire and part serious examination of a man’s mid-life crisis.

Shipstead is a California girl who sets her story on an exclusive New England island.  Although a wedding occurs in her tale, Shipstead’s story is not really about the ceremony itself; Shipstead is concerned with the events and details that lead up to the big day.

Daphne’s wedding is the social event of the season.  Daphne, though, can lie back on her beach towel and relax.  She is no blushing bride; Daphne is seven months pregnant.  Both Daphne’s parents and the groom’s parents pushed the couple into walking down the aisle pronto.  If his daughter had a child “out of wedlock,” Winn Van Meter “would die.”  If it had been up to Daphne, though, she would not have gotten married so soon. “If I really had my way,” Daphne confesses, “We’d wait a while so I wouldn’t have to be pregnant in the pictures.”  More than anything else, Daphne does not want to be a “fat bride.”  However, she acquiesces to her father, because she knows how much appearances matter to him.

Winn is truly the novel’s main character.  Winn Van Meter is a 59-year-old, Harvard-educated, wealthy WASP enduring a mid-life crisis.  As Shipstead writes, “people get weird at weddings,” and that is certainly true of Winn.

Shipstead, a 29-year-old woman, ably gets readers into the head of Winn using flashbacks and streams of consciousness.  She uses Winn to satirize New England’s upper-crust culture, but her writing turns serious and somber when we realize how alone Winn feels and how he just wants to be liked.

Seating Arrangements, in my view, is a metaphor.  Seating charts at weddings are complicated affairs.  Just ask Winn’s wife, Biddy, who agonizes over the seating arrangements.  Preparing them means enemies and exes may find themselves seated next to each other, although this is to be avoided at all costs.  Some guests will be downgraded to the “leftovers table.”  Winn prepares his own kind of seating arrangements in this novel as he takes stock of the people in his life: how they have rewarded him, remained loyal to him, disdained him, slighted him, and excluded him.  Nearing sixty, he places them in certain niches, exactly where he thinks they should belong.

Above all, Winn appreciates exclusivity; he yearns for it, in fact.  For that reason, he “summers” on private Waskeke island.  Only the very best will do for him and his family.  Tradition is important to Winn, just as it was imperative to his father.  While at Harvard, Winn joined the elite club called the “Ophidian.”  He worries an old rival, Jack Fenn, who did not get into the Ophidian, may be blackballing his acceptance into the “Pequod,” a privileged golf club.  “People,” Winn knows, “will go to great lengths for revenge on those who have excluded them.”

Worst of all, Winn fears his exclusion from the Pequod may have something to do with his younger daughter, Livia.  Since he spends a great deal of time worrying over what is correct and proper, he cannot help but wonder if his daughters are disparaging his good name.  Just look at Daphne, seven-months pregnant on her wedding day.  A similar, yet different, thing happened to Livia.  While at Harvard, Livia got pregnant by her boyfriend Teddy Fenn, the son of Winn’s would-be nemesis.  Winn went through the roof.  In the end, Livia got an abortion and Teddy broke up with her.  Winn worries this incident will forever bar him from gaining acceptance to the Pequod.  How he wishes for sons when he thinks of all his daughters have put him through.

Despite Winn’s preoccupation with appearances, he contemplates a fling with Agatha, one of Daphne’s bridesmaids.  Agatha is in her twenties and woos and is wooed by Winn.  For Winn, Agatha is like “the fountain of youth.”  He describes any romance the two would have as a “May-December” one.  Winn feels as though Agatha truly likes him and understands him, qualities he appreciates, especially in a young, beautiful woman.  He and his wife have grown apart, and he idolizes Agatha just as much as he idealizes her.  Agatha, though, has a roving eye and roving hands.

Hilarious scenes such as when Winn and Livia catch Agatha with a groomsman inflagrante delicto contrast sharply with the novel’s serene island setting.  Hoopla abounds in this tale, whether it is when Winn gets run over at the golf course and wonders if he can take advantage of the accident to get into the Pequod or when the groom’s brother causes a dead whale’s carcass to explode.  The whole novel makes for good social satire.  Shipstead’s intention is to make your mouth fall open agape while reading what someone said or did.

Interestingly, one of Shipstead’s characters also responds to the Van Meters in this way.  With uncanny and masterful ability, Shipstead shifts perspective in one chapter, showing how a situation or issue looks different based on one’s viewpoint, age, gender, and class.  Nowhere is this more apparent than when Shipstead writes for Dominique, a bridesmaid from Egypt.  Dominique has known Daphne and her family for years.  She knows how the Van Meters and others like them work: “They were set up to accommodate feigned ignorance, unspoken resentment, and repressed passion the way their houses had back stairways and rooms tucked away behind the kitchen for the feudal ghosts of their ancestors’ servants.”  Dominique was “surprised Winn had not leapt from a bridge or gutted himself with a samurai sword after his daughters got knocked up back to back.”  ”Daphne’s condition,” Dominique thinks, “would be grandfathered into the boundaries of propriety by the wedding, but Livia’s phantom pregnancy, the missing buldge under her green dress at the front of the church, was a void that could not be satisfactorily filled in and smoothed over.”  In her view, Winn “had the Pequod to take his mind off things” and “set out on his quest for membership like Don Quixote without a Sancho.”

Dominique’s reaction is our reaction.  She is, by turns, fascinated by them and repulsed by them.  So are we.  But, Dominique does her duty.  She will be the supportive bridesmaid and keep her judgments to herself.  Perhaps Dominique’s character also symbolizes Shipstead herself.  Shipstead graduated from Harvard and met hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Van Meter-like families.  Maybe Dominique’s take on the Van Meters was exactly what Shipstead thought of the New England families she came into contact, obsessed with social status, elitism, and correctness.

            Seating Arrangments is THE read of the summer, but this is no fluff piece.  Shipstead constructs a many-layered story in the same way a baker creates a layered wedding cake or a designer sews a wedding gown.  There are layers upon layers, and we must peel them back chapter by chapter. There are debut novels, and then there are debut novels.  Messy, disorganized jumbles lacking cohesion.  Unrealized characters with nothing to drive them.  Settings that fall flat.  A plot that isn’t.  This is not one of those debut novels.

Coming of Age in the 60s

Are you looking for a great summer read?  Are you a fan of Fannie Flagg?

If you answer “yes” to any of those questions, please add Red Ruby Heart in a Cold Blue Sea by Morgan Callan Rogers to your summer reading list.  You will be glad you did!

I reviewed Rogers’s novel for the Mobile Press-Register.  To read my review of the novel, please go here.