Bookclub Wrap-Up

Oh boy, was I ever down on book club yesterday. There were a whole bunch of things going against me yesterday that started with pretty much complete lack of sleep on Sunday night and working all day Monday. Being so tired I can barely string two thoughts together does not put me in the mood for chatty get-togethers. Half of the women stay home with their kids full time so they are all ready for adult interaction whereas I just want to discuss the book and go to sleep. Additionally, an old member recently rejoined our group, a person that I really like, but whose participation skews the conversation in curious ways. Towards camping and yearly trips to Disney World, extreme exercise routines, and long talks about dogs. We are cat people here.



Do I sound cranky? Boy was I ever cranky yesterday. I composed 10 different emails telling everyone that I'm Not Coming! but didn't send any of them. My husband finally convinced me to go and leave early. I'm glad I did. All my complaints melted away as I enjoyed the company of old friends.

The book we discussed last night was Child 44by Tom Rob Smith. It was universally liked my my book club in varying levels.

In a nutshell: Child 44 is set in Stalin-era Russia. Everyone is looking over their shoulder and trying not to draw attention to themselves, for if you are suspected, then you are guilty. And if your child is found dead, they weren't murdered, because there is no crime in the Soviet Union. Leo is a MGB agent and thinks he and his wife safe, until they aren't. On the sly, Leo begins investigating a series of child murders, which puts him family into even greater jeopardy. What he finds, is, well, surprising.

This is a thriller in every sense of the word. It felt like every time I turned the page, there were more twists and turns, and even knowing something was coming didn't damper my enthusiasm for finding out what it was. Setting this story in Stalin-era Russia was a brilliant decision. I found the entire setting so fascinating. I sort of knew that living under this regime wasn't a good thing, but didn't really have any idea of what went on behind the scenes, how citizens were brutalized and lived in fear. It was frightening, creepy, and disturbing. A great read, if you're into that sort of thing!

Spotlight on: The Blue Orchard

{The subject matter of this book is not for everyone. I'm not looking to have a moral or political discussion here, I simply want to tell you about this book.}


Jackson Taylor had me at Hello.

But let me go back to the beginning. You browse in bookstores, right? And the people that work there often ask if they can help you. Here is what passes through my mind, but not my lips, when this happens:

1. Me? Need help in a bookstore?

and

2. Yes, perhaps you can show me a fabulous book, one that I'll love and adore, that I've Never Seen or Heard of Before.

Good luck with that.

It's pretty rare that I come across a book that I've never heard of or noticed but that's just what happened with The Blue Orchard: A Novel. There it was, on the new fiction table with its appealing cover and heaps of praise. As they say, There's an app for that (Snaptell in this case), so I used my dear friend and looked up this book. All signs pointed to me taking this book home, and that is just what happened.



From the very beginning, we know a few things. Middle aged nurse Verna Krone has been arrested for assisting with illegal surgery performed on a woman. It is the 1950s and the doctor she has been working for happens to be a widely respected, community serving, politically involved black man. How did Verna get to be this woman? That is what we are to find out.

Verna Krone grew up in poverty, removed from school to go out to work and support the family. Also to be abused. Life is rough, but Verna perseveres, working at this job and then that. Finally a little bit of luck comes to this long suffering woman and she is able to train to be a nurse. Verna loves being a nurse, she is conscientious and takes pride in her work. Along comes another opportunity, a chance to make what is to most people quite a lot of money. Verna begins assisting Dr Crampton with his surgeries on women. These woman come from near and far, some are strangers, others familiar. They are all looking for the same thing. Eventually, the arrests come.

Jackson Taylor has done a sublime job of telling this story, that of the life of his grandmother. This is the story of one woman's life but it is so much more. It's a picture of a time in history, when politics and race and the law collided, and Verna Krone just happened to have lived through it. This is storytelling, folks, in its purest form. This is a long and meaty book, one to take your time with and savor and one that I was sad to see come to an end.

Just For Me

I'm still gorging myself on D.E. Stevenson around here. These books are so perfect and simple at the end of the day when I'm tired. Here's what I've read lately:

Summerhills is the sequel to the very wonderful Amberwell, which remains my favorite Stevenson book so far. Summerhills was a good read and I enjoyed finding out what happened to all those familiar characters, as well as some new ones, but this book was not perfect in the way Amberwell was. Summerhills focuses on siblings Nell and Roger Ayrton. Roger decides to open a local school for boys, in part for his own son Stephen who Nell has been raising since the war. The Ayrtons are a few of the single people featured and we get to see how they sort themselves out and couple off. The most curious character in Summerhills is Miss Glassford, nanny to Stephen. Everyone is very surprised by her. She wears pants! And her favorite hobby is running! Early in the morning! They all think her very odd and cannot quite articulate why they simply do not like her or consider her romantically. She is obviously ahead of her time and I felt a little bit bad for her. All ends well for everyone else, though.

Celia's House was written in 1943; what is perhaps most curious about this book is that of course, the war was going on, and while it's definitely in the background here nobody knows what is going to happen. The first Celia is an elderly lady who aggravates her nephew when she decides to leave her estate to another relative, Humphrey Dunne, and his family. She does make a rather unusual stipulation though, as to the future owners of the home. I read this a few weeks ago so I am a little thin on details here. This nice family grows up in the house and the children become successful adults and their is romance and it is all quite nice and enjoyable.

Finally for today, we have Bel Lamington. Bel is slightly different from the usual Stevenson heroines as she begins with a rather sad and lonely existence. She is an orphan who lived with her aunt until adulthood when she died and now Bel is all alone in London, missing the country and working as a secretary to earn her keep. Lots of things happen to Bel in a short time: she meets an artist whom she cares for but who turns out to be a cad, her boss goes out of the country and Bel unexpectedly is fired from her job. This leaves Bel able to accept an invitation to Scotland to join her friend and Bel recuperates there, finds work, and finally true love comes calling.

If you're tired of these old books I've been reading, come back another day as I've read an excellent modern book.

From the Reviewer's Stack

I've been quiet here but not here in real life. Busy with a long stretch at work, then getting the house back in order afterwords-still working on this, being the second in command for girl scout cookies sales...all this has made for a busy week. Speaking of cookies, those Samoas are like crack. Is there another cookie out there sold year round that approximates this? Please advise.

Well, I wrote late last year about how things are going to change around here, blah blah blah, and that I was going to greatly cut down on the number of review copies I accept and write about. I have been successful in this. There aren't exactly people banging down my door begging me to review their book, but I do get requests, perhaps a few a week and sure it's flattering, and nice to have such fun mail. Some of the requests are admittedly odd, for books outside any genre I read - self help, romance, etc. Then there was the illegible request that was formatted in some crazy way. I mean, AOL has a habit of making email look wonky by the time I receive it, but I could seriously not even read the text between the crazy http&^%$ stuff. And then the publicist contacted me again, saying 'how else can we get the word out' and I almost emailed back and said 'how bout start by sending me an email I can actually read!' but I didn't.

All this to say, that I'll be trying to keep my ARC reading to 12 books this year, that's one per month (I'm good at math too!) and here are the first two books of the year.

I actually received Melanie Benjamin's Alice I Have Been: A Novellast year. I was drawn to this story primarily by the Victorian period in which it is set, and secondly to it's literary nature. Benjamin was inspired by a photograph of Alice Liddell - the girl who inspired Alice in Wonderful - and was moved to think and write about who she actually was.



Alice I Have Been is divided into three sections, in the first Alice is young girl and counts teacher Charles Dodgson aka Lewis Carroll among her friends. There is a strong sense of unease in this section of the book, as we discover that Mr. Dodgson's favorite companions are young girls. When you think about the photograph above, that Dodgson took this photo of a child of a respectable Victorian family in such a state of undress -those couldn't have been her clothes, and with such an expression on her face, well it certainly seems that to an outsider something was Not.Quite.Right.

Something Happens.

Something really did happen to cause a break in the relationship between Dodgson and the Liddell family, but history does not tell us exactly what. The second section of the book deals features Alice as a young woman, having a romance with Prince Albert and meeting Mr. Dodgson again. It is uncomfortable. And finally, we see Alice as an older woman, somewhat surprised by the attention she still garners as Alice in Wonderland.

I liked Alice I Have Been very much. The period felt authentic to me and I thought the author used her imaginative powers very well here, conjuring up what Alice might have been like.

Next we have One Amazing Thingby Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni. This woman really knows how the spin a sentence and I wanted to read this book after enjoying Sister of My Heart: A Noveland The Vine of Desire: A Novelso much.

One Amazing Thing takes place in a visa/passport office in the basement of a building in the US. San Francisco perhaps? There is an earthquake and the 9 people trapped inside this office must find a way to stay safe and survive until they can hopefully escape. One way they take their minds off their troubles is to each share 'one amazing thing' from their own lives and through this we see into each of their hearts and minds.

Despite the beautiful writing this was just an okay read for me. It was hard to get to know so many characters in so little time and really care about their stories. I was often mystified when the stories would go from first person to third person in one paragraph. Between stories, the survivors would deal with the immediate effects of the earthquake. I think the stories coming out of the earthquake in Haiti really lessened the impact of this part of the story.

Ultimately, what I got out of this book is being reminded that everyone has a story and a motivation that we'll probably never know nor understand. It is that story that makes each person who they are and may affect their daily life in ways we can never understand.

Many thanks to Delacorte Press and Hyperion Books for providing these books for review.

Around the Neighborhood - A Snow Sculpture

Dying to Know

Well. Perhaps you've been dying to know what books were bugging me last week. Maybe not! In either case, here they are:

1939: The Last Season




I was expecting something different, I think, in this book by Anne De Courcy. I thought it would be about British 'Society', debutante balls, the last hurrah before WW2 intervened. It was sometimes about those things. I enjoyed chapters about what the process was to be presented at court, health and medical care at the time, the lives of servants and the upkeep of those enormous country estates. I did not so much enjoy chapters about particular parties, and who attended, and what they wore and what was served for dinner, all told in a dry journalistic tone. I suppose that is what bothered me about this book - it was very dry and almost too 'stick to the facts' in form. I wanted personal stories and anecdotes; that is what brings history to life, I think, and it was not really achieved here in my opinion. Certainly I learned some things, but reading this became a chore.

Adam and Eve and Pinch Me


It surprises even me that Ruth Rendell wrote a book that was at times yawn inducing. This is the story of several women whose boyfriends and husband have died or disappeared and how they are all connected. Then there are a series of murders (we know the culprit) that affect all of these women, and we peer over the shoulders of police as they discover who-done-it. This book feels like Rendell and if you've read her, you know what that means. It's suspenseful and mysterious, people are a little bit...off. At first the reader is in the dark and is let in on the secret a few chapters in. Then we wait for things to come to a head. They do. Then I wondered what on earth is going to happen in the second half of this book. This is actually a good book and a decent read, it's just not up there with the other Rendell/Vine books I've read. It's much, much more psychological novel than it is a straight mystery/suspense/detective story. Published in 2001, I think it might be the most current Rendell/Vine book I've read and it's worth reading - it's just not her best or most typical book.

Ouch!

I pulled something in my back again and I'm on the third day of gingerly moving around the house. Standing is okay, so is laying down, but sitting is not so good. Computer = not good.

On the bright side I am in The Good Book Zone. I have a few deliciously good books on the nightstand and just in the past 24 hours have read what will likely wind up on my 'Best Reads of the Year' list. That book is Still Aliceby Lisa Genova.



I'd wanted to read Still Alice for some time and recommended it to my bookclub who chose The Help instead. Now that I've read it, I know that everyone who raved about it was right. It brought me to tears at least twice. I woke up a couple times last night and the first thought I had was about Alice, and what would happen to her in the last part of this book.


I'm sure you've read enough reviews of Still Alice to last you a lifetime, instead I will just share a few random thoughts I had while reading this amazing book about a 50 year old Harvard professor who is diagnosed with Early Onset Alzheimer's.

*First of all, I haven't had much exposure to anyone living with Alzheimer's disease so this book was really an eye opener for me in terms of how it is diagnosed and how quickly the disease can progress. That shocked me, actually.

*Alice really gave me cause for thought when she thought about the fact that she'd rather have cancer, something you can at least fight instead of something that just gets worse until you finally lose yourself. She thought about how having and fighting cancer would lead society to perceive her as a hero; having Alzheimer's just makes you an outcast. People are afraid of what is perceived to be mental illness.

*This is a terrifying book. Any one of us could get Alzheimer's and there is NOTHING WE CAN DO to stop it or make it better. That is so frightening to me. The idea of not being present inside my body is so scary as is being a complete burden on everyone around me.

Still Alice is beautifully written and completely heart wrenching. I recommend it to everyone.