Sept 2006

But Enough About Me By Jancee Dunn

J ancee Dunn subtitled her rock chick memoir "A Jersey Girl's Unlikely Adventures Among the Absurdly Famous." She delivers with fresh prose that pops with energy. And then there's the dish on all those famous rock and roll and movie types from Madonna to Bono to Brad Pitt.

Dunn is shy but she loves to write. And when she gets a chance to write for Rolling Stone, she grabs it. A jet-set lifestyle ensues as she flies all around the world for in-person interviews with famous folk. There are also insider writing tips about how to get your interview subject to open up, how to add color to a dull story, who to go to for the dirt on public icons who guard their private details like pit bulls.

Dunn doesn't just dish on stars, she also gives a true account of herself, how she was seduced by the rock chick persona and lifestyle, how she always seemed to get mixed up with the wrong guys, and how--after more than a decade of chasing every story that came her way, she finally found true love and a happy balance of work and play.

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Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian
By Marina Lewycka

Despite the somewhat alarming title, Marina Lewycka's novel is smart and funny. Only a born storyteller could make tractors amusing, even interesting.

Nadezhda, the main character, is the younger daughter in a family of Ukrainian immigrants. Nadezhda was born in Britain, but her older sister, Vera, was born in the old country, just before WWII.

The family doesn't talk about the horrors they endured during the war, so Nadezhda knows nothing of their history. After their beloved mother dies, the sisters feud over money and jewelry. When a comically portrayed gold digger from the old country seeks to wed their besotted octogenarian dad, the spatting sisters join forces. And little by little Nadezhda learns the sad facts of the family history, and also some stuff about tractors.

The tractor conceit is an effective metaphor for the way events have unforeseeable consequences. I, who never thought of tractors as anything but dull, was charmed by the book Nadezhda’s dad is writing.

This novel has a bit of a Russian feel to it; the characters have many derivative names and there’s something of the old country’s wisdom-- and the harshness of its heritage--that flavors Lewycka’s delicately comic prose.

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July2006

The List By Aneva Stout

I love making lists. Love the listing, the crossing off, the feeling of accomplishment when the list is over and I can begin another on a fresh page. In The List : A Love Story in 781 Chapters, Aneva Stout has taken list-making to new heights, turning the utilitarian to-do into a work of art.

Wry, witty, and piercingly real, this list takes on boyfriends, best friends, and pets. The boyfriend bond is fragile--an edifice of heady romance for the first few weeks, a stereotype from boyfriend hell near the end of the affair. The best friend honors all the female rituals: shopping, ice cream, large quantities of truth. And the cat is a prime example of woman's other best friend, a furry purring presence always available for cuddling and comic relief.

A breezy read that would make a perfect gift, a pick-me-up that won't cause a hangover, a self-help guide to the other sex, this is a list sublime. It will make you smile in rueful recognition, and just might mend a broken heart.

Goodnight Nobody By Jennifer Weiner

This engrossing, addictive read is quite the departure for Jennifer Weiner, and not just because this story is a murder mystery and her previous books were comic novels. Weiner's trademark humor is still intact, it's just a shade or so darker than usual. And while her other novels are set in the city, this time she moves to suburbia where her less than svelte main character is a housewife and mother of three, an outsider looking in to the seemingly perfect lives of the other perfectly put together moms.

Except that one of them just might be a murderer.

The mystery plot is well developed; you'd never know this was a new genre for Weiner. She fills the novel with witty insights and interesting characters who ring true to life. And that's my only complaint about this book. The ending rings a little too true to life, as in lots and lots of loose ends. Yes, we find out who murdered the unfortunate Mommy, but almost everything else is left dangling. Maybe she'll do a sequel.

Riding With The Queen By Jennie Shortridge

This is one of those rare books that makes me want to study it, really pull it apart to see how it ticks, because I just read it and think how much I love it and wonder how does she do that???

The Queen of the title is a dead blues singer who's the sort of guardian angel to an alcoholic thirty-something singer so down on her luck that she's run out of options. Almost. Her crazy mom gets her a gig at a sing-along piano bar in her hometown, but everything about the place she left so long ago gives her the creeps. From her family that feel more like strangers to her job that's a soul-sucking sell-out, Tallie has hit rock bottom, and she's living there.

It's fascinating to watch her try to pull herself up by her strappy sandals...there's so much heart to her, but it's crusted over with scars that just won't heal. I am a total sucker for redemption stories and this is one of the best I've ever read. I love all the music in this, the whole allure of the rock and roll lifestyle loses it's mystery when seen from the seamy side of town. And Shortridge's writing is impossibly beautiful without calling attention to itself in the least.

I really liked Eating Heaven, but this one stole my heart.

The Art of Possibility By Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander
May 12, 2006

The subtitle of this one is "Transforming Professional and Personal Life." The authors, Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander, are married, and each brings their own perspective to the ideas and anecdotes in this amazing book. A reader recommended it to me, and I can't thank you enough! It's just my kind of book, inspirational and practical at the same time.

There are 12 practices, or ways of seeing new solutions to old problems. I loved them all, but yesterday "Lighting a Spark" and "Being the Board" really wowed me. "Being the Board" is a cool concept that uses the image of a chessboard and can be applied in any situation where you think someone is causing you upset for whatever reason. Their action or inaction is hindering your own ability to do what you want or need to do in the moment.

Ben Zander conducts the Boston Philharmonic and his example of being the board (and that's another thing to love about this book, all the examples clarify things nicely) involves a member of his band. She was an integral part of the performance and she wasn't showing up for practice and he was furious. He found her in another part of the building and ripped into her for being so thoughtless. She quit on the spot. This is just before a big performance, so it really messed things up for Ben and the entire orchestra. How could she be so selfish? Not just to Ben, but to the rest of the group and to the audience and even to the recording people who were making a CD from the important performance? And this one girl has some other less important stuff to do and she blows it for everyone! He was livid.

As Ben saw it, she was the total problem. He asked Roz to help him figure out how he could "be the board." That is, instead of a chess piece that can only move certain ways, be the entire board, see the big picture of how Ben contributed to his problem. It seemed to come all from the performer. How could he be the board? Roz suggested that maybe his attitude had something to do with it. He was anxious and angry and that contributed to the musician's quitting. Also, his attitude even if he got her to come back for the performance, would make her resentful and she probably wouldn't play with her full heart. She wouldn't be able to give it her all if she was holding resentment against the conductor. So eventually Ben saw that it would be better to have a less than full orchestra playing 100% than a full orchestra playing less than 100%.

He wrote her a letter, saying he was sorry for his attitude, that it was uncalled for and that he accepted full responsibility for her quitting the band. And it was a great letter, filled with humble truth, but it didn't beg her to come back. He wished her well in whatever she did next with her life and her music. And guess what? She came back, played the performance, and the recording was brilliant.

That chapter alone was a revelation to me. I never want to see how I contributed to the problem. I always want to blame someone else. But that just breeds anger and resentment and bitterness. Which is really no fun. By being the board, I can lighten up and let things go. Being the board is a winning situation, a peaceful place to get to. I would never have believed it before reading this book. And every chapter has stuff like this, new ways to see old stuff. And heal it. And move onward and upward.

This Book Will Save Your Life By A. M. Homes
May 07, 2006

Before beginning This Book Will Save Your Life by A. M. Homes, I studied the dust jacket. 11 images are imprinted in purple. An ant. A donut with one bite out of it. A swimmer. A horse. A UFO. A saber-tooth tiger. A firey trash can. The images seemed too random to mean anything. Now I've finished the book and know different. Every image is an incredible bite of this slice of L.A. life.

I had read Music for Torching and liked it. Wasn't crazy about it, but didn't hate it. I'm not sure I would have bought this one in hardcover had it not been for Stephen King's enthusiastic review in Entertainment Weekly. I buy that magazine just for King's last page essays. He's an astute social observer, so when he said this book was fabulously luscious (not in those words, he wouldn't be so purple) I made a mental note.

The novel in one sentence: rich guy who is so insular and isolated that he needs nobody until one day he wakes up and feeling rushes in compelling him to venture into the world and interact with other people. Reading this book is exactly like coming out of a long illness or imposed jail sentence. Through Richard's eyes we see the world made new again in all its crazy richness and irritating splendor. I really loved this book. It goes on the keeper shelf. I may need to read it again tomorrow, because the title doesn't stretch the truth by much.

We Are All Welcome Here By Elizabeth Berg
April 30, 2006

The thing I like about Elizabeth Berg is that she wrote for magazines for a long time before she was able to publish a novel. And she wrote a lot of novels before Oprah picked Open House for her book club. So Berg has paid her dues. She's entitled to write books that come in at under 200 pages and get paid for them.

We Are All Welcome Here is a different thing for Berg. It's a novel inspired by the story of a real woman's life. Her daughter wrote to Berg and asked her to write about a woman like her mother, a woman who had contacted polio when she was pregnant and spent years in an iron lung. She had her daughter in the lung, a medical miracle, and then, when her husband left, raised the child herself. She then went to college, got a counseling degree, and worked for many years in her chosen field. The woman who wrote to Berg said her mom's story was incredible and she thought the world should know it.

Berg wrote back and said that the woman should hire a non-fiction writer to tell her mother's story, or she should write it herself. The woman persisted that she wanted Berg to write it. And finally, with the understanding that she would fictionalize the story--imagine all but the barest bones--Berg did. We Are All Welcome Here is that story. And it's really good. I had reservations, but like all of Berg's work, it drew me in. Her prose is quiet and unassuming but her themes are mighty. She tackles discrimination in a couple of its worst forms, and pairs it with a sort of Zen serenity the main character, she of the complete paralysis, has about her condition. All of this seen through the eyes of a sensitive girl coming of age, a signature Berg character.

And as for the page number, I thought there were just enough to tell the story. Not too many, not too few. I'm grateful Berg has earned the literary right to tell her stories in their own time, at their exact pace, without publisher strictures about how many pages it takes to build a novel. And I loved the ending. I won't spoil it, but let me just say that the story takes place in Tupelo, Mississippi, and a young and famous Elvis Presley makes an appearance. In the flesh.

My Latest Grievance By Elinor Lipman
April 25, 2006

My latest grievance is that Elinor Lipman's new release has already been gobbled up by the reading machine. ie. me. It's also the title of the book, one of the best titles to come along in a long time. How does La Lipman know that cranky but charming characters with a history of complaints and a sense of humor about themselves are irrisistable? Fredrica Hatch lives in a college dorm with her parents, who are professors at said school and also dorm parents. They're very involved in school union activities, which does not endear them to the President. They have one of those types of relationships with their daughter that sound better on paper than actually work in real life: that is, full disclosure about sex and angst. They do the probing, psychoanalytical thing. It's funny, trust me. There's one secret that they haven't disclosed and it's about to shake the tiny girl's school to it's pink toenails. Vivid, intense characters, smart humor, exciting and unexpected plotting--why can't I write like that?

April 14, 2006 Ann Marlowe

Ann Marlowe calls The Book of Trouble a romance. While romance is the central idea of this book, it is love not so much for a man as for an entire culture. Marlowe has always been fascinated by the Middle East and her love of all things Arabic eventually lead her to an affair with a Princeton educated Afghani man.

Amir fled Pakistan in 1982 when he was 14. He desires nothing more than to return and take a young cousin for a bride. Marlowe is a savvy journalist and world traveler, someone who has always been drawn to the danger of unstable societies. This unlikely couple has a brief but passionate affair that forces Marlowe to reconcile her feminist distaste for patriarchal custom with her attraction to the Arabic world.

When a friend suggests that Marlowe’s interest in the Arab world is really a way of reclaiming her Jewish roots, she isn’t so sure. After all, she’d rather visit post-Taliban Afghanistan than Israel. She’s learning Farsi, not Hebrew.

Near the finish of this fascinating memoir, Marlowe’s travels take her to war-torn Baghdad where her romance with Arabic culture becomes tainted with guilt, illuminating hard-won truths about her own nature. Marlowe has an interesting point of view; she makes the unfamiliar less strange. Her keen observations and cool insights turn her obsessions into lessons in love.

February 2006
Saul and Patsy
by Charles Baxter

I resisted reading this Charles Baxter novel for a long time, just because of the summary: a married couple living in rural Michigan in roughly the 70s-90s era. It just didn't sing to me. Baxter himself admitted in an interview that he wasn't sure he could sustain his own interest in such a story. But I finally bought it and read it because I trust this writer to take me on a word journey I will love no matter the subject. And he did. There's something about the way Baxter sees the world that I find very attractice and affirming. He does interesting things with the narrative, too. I like writers who surprise me. And despite the dull-sounding marriage plot, I fell quite in love with these characters. They are not your typical suburbanites by any means. And the crisis with alienated youth in their community seems like it could happen anywhere in the country, not just the midwest. Also, it's funny. Baxter brightens up his more or less dreary setting with sharp ironic eyes.

January 02, 2006
The Penelopiad
by Margaret Atwood

The Penelopiad is part of a series - a new revisionist myths by some of today's most respected fiction writers. In this one, Margaret Atwood puts her unique spin on the Odysseus story, through Penelope's point of view. Because it's Atwood, you can count on some humor--Atwood's trademark is a kind of bittersweet irony that sings even as it stings.

The section of this pastiche (there's the narrative, a trial transcript, "choruses" from Penelope's maids, poems and songs) that shows this to best effect is a mock anthropology lecture marked by distinct matriarchal and feminist ideas. It's funny, it's cynical, it's compelling. It makes me think about Odysseus in a whole new way, which really is the point of this series: to shed fresh light on old stories.

Atwood gives credit to the idea that Penelope might have been a female goddess cult leader to Robert Graves's Greek Myths , but she's expanded on Grave's ideas and fleshed them out and made them, to me at least, quite real possibilities. As much as I've read the Odysseus stories and enjoyed them through the years, I was amazed at the degree to which Atwood made the set pieces, from Odysseus's journeys to the slaying of Penelope's suitors, new.

The premise for Penelope's story rests with the 12 maids Odysseus hanged after he slew the suitors. I'd never paid much attention to this segment of the legend, just put it down to the general blood lust of the times. People treated their slaves terribly. They were superstitiuous, too, and liked to sacrifice living things to their gods. Men had the power and used and abused women as if they were disposble. Add to this Homer's version, which didn't tell Penelope's side of the story, but showed the maids in a mutinous light, and I didn't much question the murder of the maids.

Atwood did. And what she made of those murders is a stunning, sparkling, excellent adventure.

January 02, 2006
Four Souls
by Louise Eldrich

Micki picked this one for the book group now that it's out in trade paperback. I'd already read it in hardcover when it first came out, as I realized after the first sentence. After checking my bookshelf, yep, there it was along with the rest of Erdrich's titles, I decided to keep the paperback so I could write in it. And I had to reread the book even though I remembered reading it before because the details were sketchy and I forgot how it ends.

Rereading is a weird thing. There's just as much pleasure, but it's different. The stories are familiar and not at the same time. I had forgotten how comical Nanapush, one of the narrators, is. He's the tribe's elder but he's a big goof in his private life with acid-tongued common law wife Margaret. Nanapush's pov alternates with that of Polly Elisabeth, a sort of sister-in-law to Fleur, Nanapush's adopted daughter, who is the protagonist of this tale. The story really concerns a journey Fleur takes from the reservation to the big city. She seeks revenge for a wrong done not only to her but to many of her people, but things turn out different than she expects.

So the story moves back and forth, from the rez to the city, "branching off and looping back" the way Nanapush says Indian stories do. It's not the easiest novel to follow, but I found myself totally engrossed in the happenings at both settings all over again. Erdrich's storytelling abilities make it difficult to put her books down, despite some questions in my mind, mainly "how does this all connect?" Also, "what is she saying about Native American spiritual beliefs?" Her language in passages about vision quests and souls and the power of ancestors is lyrical and mystic but not exactly clear. I'm still trying to figure out the "four souls" part.

Maybe her message is something as simple as this: for the Ojibwe, every soul is connected. Far-reaching actions have consequences close to home. Destiny is inescapable and magic is powerful. I think she's saying this and more. She's writing down a history of a lost people. A nation that is disappearing. She's citing the wrongs done to the Native Americans, lest anyone forget. She's honoring their ways. And she is, most of all, keeping the magic of their storytelling methods alive. That she can do all this and at the same time be highly entertaining is exactly why she's so widely read and respected.

December 31, 2005

Me Talk Pretty by David Sedaris

Me Talk Pretty One Day is my first Sedaris experience. It will not be the last. I laughed so much, so hard, so loud, my husband caught my laughs. Every time I cracked up, Al would laugh at me laughing and say "what?" but it's hard to explain Sedaris's humor. He's the kind of writer who builds the story, linking smirk after smirk with his funny phrasing and comically wonderous brain, and then, as the story concludes, things get funnier, the punchlines he's been building toward are elegantly weird and way more than not, they strike the exact right note.

And the other thing is that after reading his stories, I started to get a little bit of his weird point of view and could see the humor in things that normally would have breezed right by--like the girl in the commercial for "Solid Gold Do-wop" who was wearing these cat's eye sunglasses at a concert hall full of old people and solemnly bopping her head without a trace of irony. Normally, she would have scanned right past my radar, but after Sedaris, she cracked me up for a good 10 minutes.

Why does laughing feel so good? I don't know and really, I don't care. Unlike the usual feel good substances, it will not make me gain weight, give me a hangover, or cause me to break the law. So I'm happy to know Sedaris has several other books out, happy to know there are many more laughs coming my way, all because of him.

The Optomist's Daughter
Suzanne Mars December 25, 2005

Somehow, when reading Suzanne Mars biography of Eudora Welty, I got the impression that The Optimist's Daughter was a comic novel. Well, it's not. It's all about an illness and a funeral and how the survivors, a daughter and a stepmother younger than she is, cope. There are certainly comic moments, Welty is so good with characters who are Characters with a capitol C. You've got the white trash of the stepmom's clan and the genteel southern gossips who beg the daughter to stay home (she's an artist who lives in Chicago) and take the stepmom in hand.

Welty, as usual, does not take cheap shots at the trashy folk, but instead gives them a heartbreaking humanity that goes a long way to explaining the weird theatrics of the stepmom. And she doesn't let the genteel southern folks off easily either, shining a sly light on their own prejudices and fobiles. But the thing that struck me most about this short novel is the way Welty digs deep into loss, how she follows her main character, Laurel, to the darkest places of grief, and doesn't shy away from the memories, both sad and sweet, or even the horrors being a survivor often entails.

The other thing I have to say about this book is that Welty's reputation was well deserved. She's a timeless storyteller who captured my attention and interest with the first line of this story and didn't let go until the very last word. I read this a few days ago and lingers still.

November 11, 2005

Broken For You
Stephanie Kallos

This novel by Stephanie Kallos blew me away. She says it took seven years to write, but wow. It's art. Not every novel is. So many books I read are pure entertainment, and that's fine. Lots of books I read have a beautiful underlying theme with a surface entertaining story. But in this book, the surface and what's underneath are so perfectly matched, so exquisitely rendered, that the plot takes on a kind of heroic poignancy.

I am not making sense, waxing all eloquent about this book. It's beautiful, but beautiful in the way that life is beautiful, with all it's cracks and bad parts and sharp edges poking through. There's a story--two strange, lonely, and wholly lovable character's lives intertwine when one (Wanda) rents a house in the mansion of the other (Margaret). Both Wanda and Margaret have pasts that have left them broken. Although outwardly they are successful enough, neither has been able to do much more than barely hold it together emotionally for a very long time. Wanda is the younger woman. She's a great little tyrant of a stage manager who has a routine so tight and gripping it breaks your heart. Distress is starting to show through the cracks in her emotional life, though, and Margaret, the older character with a terminal condition that forces her to action, recognizes the chinks in Wanda's armour, maybe because in some strange way that has nothing to do with age or background or anything other than sensibility, they are damaged in the same way. And it is Margaret who shows Wanda how to heal herself, and in the process, finds her own redemption.

But this book is so much more than the narrative thru-line suggests. Stephanie Kallos digs deep into the psyche for insights and truths that fill these pages with so much more than story, so much more than just the facts of what has happened to these people. It's truly a joyous celebration of what it means to be alive, if people give themselves the opportunity to follow their desires into whatever dark places they have to go to finally, triumphantly, get to the light.

January 28, 2005

Luck's Map of Vegas
Barbara Samuel

Barbara Samuel's new novel is a treat. No calories, just luscious layers of plot and sinfully rich characters. The story unfolds as sixty-something Eldora takes pregnant daughter India on a nostalgic trip down Route 66 in her vintage Thunderbird. What India doesn't know is that Eldora's life is pretty much a pack of lies, and she's chosen her daughter as the one person in the world to whom she'll reveal the truth. Meanwhile, the two are searching for India's troubled twin sister, Gypsy. The travel motif is particularly apt as India and Eldora relive a similar trip taken with Gypsy thirty years ago.

India also has some present-day trouble to take care of: she's forty and pregnant and not sure she should keep the baby. Some of Eudora's revelations will weigh even more on the side of abortion, while India's long-distance lover tips the scales in favor of family, love and marriage. One of the things India has yet to discover is whether Jack is up for the whole domestic scene. They've had a good relationship, but it's been based on the premise that they'd each remain free, all options open.

The deeper themes of this novel have to do with the risks and sure bets you take in life, and the way those decisions follow you forever. What Eldora already knows, and India has yet to learn, is that the longer you live, the more ramifications every single choice you make will have. Not just for your own life, but for the lives of everyone you love, too.

Because her wisdom and open heart informs every word she writes, all Barbara Samuel novels are a journey of self-discovery--for the reader as well as the characters. And Lady Luck's Map of Vegas is one trip you don't want to miss.

February 07, 2005

How to Be Good

This one's dark. High Fidelity is more optimistic. But they're both equally funny. Both are about monogamy, long-term relationships, the wearing away of newness that happens, stuff like that. In How To Be Good Hornby's protagonist is a woman!

As usual when reading female protagonists created by male authors, I thought I detected a bit of guy-masking-as-girl moments, but for the most part, I bought the character. I did keep waiting for her to take some action, though. She put up with a lot from her husband, who was a complete jerk before having a spiritual conversion and then became a complete jerk but in another way.

He moved homeless people in with the family, made the kids give away their computer and toys and stuff, gave all the money in his wife's purse to people on the street, etc. It was horrific, actually. A suburban nightmare.

Hornby got to talk about social issues and chew over the solutions or ways in which we put the hungry and disenfranchised from our minds because it's not comfortable and being middle class is all about comfort, a full belly and a night in front of the television set. So there was some deeper thoughtfulness to this one. With large doses of humor.

The Language of Sycamores
by Lisa Wingate

The Language of Sycamores kept me up very late last night. And made me cry. Twice. I've been having a fiction dry spell lately. For the last two weeks, I either chose a non-fiction book, or if I did pick up some fiction to read, I didn't finish it, because it didn't hold my interest.

All that changed yesterday when I picked up Lisa Wingate's latest release. I've known for a while that this writer is seriously talented, because I reviewed her Texas Cooking for RT way back when and made it a "top pick."

And then I sort of forgot about Lisa's work until her publisher sent me The Language of Sycamores. Al was asking me just other day what I wanted for my birthday and I didn't have a clue. Now I know. I want Lisa Wingate's backlist. Her stories are gorgeously told, full of hope and deep compassion for this fragile race we call humanity.

Karen is an over-forty, married, successful business exec with a "perfect" life in Boston and a "perfect" airline pilot husband. In one day she gets fired from her high powered job at a company she helped create and also hears a diagnosis that may mean the cancer that took so much from her eight years ago is back. In a move totally unlike the woman she's become, Karen goes home to her grandmother's farm. Her spiritual and emotional journey will change her life forever.

Lisa Wingate is a powerful writer. I'm feeling very blessed this morning. Not only do I have a wonderful story to carry around with me, but I have several more I cannot wait to read.

April 06, 2005

The Ice Queen
by Alice Hoffman

Some day, I want to make a list of my favorite novelists, the ones I've read and loved for years, most since their very first novel. Alice Hoffman is in my top five. So are Jennifer Crusie, Barbara Samuel, Sara Lewis, Louise Erdrich, and Barbara Kingsolver. Yeah, I know that's six. If I throw in Erica Jong, Susan Elizabeth Phillips, Patricia Gaffney and Barbara Delinsky, it's clear I need a top ten. At least.

So, Hoffman's latest was a wonderful birthday surprise a week or so ago when I wandered into the New Books section of my local B&N. Even though I was in the middle of reading a lot of books that I needed to review, I stopped and savored her first chapter. And then I put it down for a week. Yes, I had to, but also, it wasn't as difficult as it might have been, as I expected it to be.

Reviews were written and turned in Monday. The same day, I picked up The Ice Queen again. Finished it yesterday. It was exquisitely wrought, as all Alice Hoffman novels are. If I don't read her for story, I read her for the luscious prose and count myself lucky. Happily, about halfway through the book, the intensity of the up-until-then slowly moving story went up several notches. Also, the action picked up its pace, and the lyricism went almost but not quite over the top. Just the way I like it.

This book combines fairy tale, magic, and fascinating facts about lightening to tell the story of one woman's life. She's unnamed through the book, but that doesn't mean we never get to know her. We do. Intimately.

This small town librarian is afraid to love because she has suffered a terrible loss as a small child. (This is Chapter One, so I'm not giving any shocking backstory wound away.) Later, she's struck by lightening, with results both dire and wonderful. How she goes from someone who doesn't know how to connect to someone who participates more fully in the human experience is what this book is all about. The magic is in the details and of course in the way Hoffman tells the story.

June 17, 2005

A Long Way Down
by Nick Hornby

I can always count on Nick Hornby to deliver a novel full of laughs and wry observations that hit my heart in all the right places. His latest is no exception. There are four points of view, two men and two women, all of them very different except in one way--they all contemplate a particular sort of suicide on the same night.

Instead, they band together, sort of, with hilarious results. Jess, at 18 is the youngest, and her bits are the funniest. She's a relentless curmudgeon, but also the leader of the motley crew. JJ is an ex-musician who can't imagine a life without music. He's got a swell epiphany, tempered by an ironic epilogue. Martin's your typical middle-aged minor celebrity who's been brought through the mud. And then there's 51 year old Maureen, who proves Hornby's brilliance by her utter believability.

One funny bit comes about when the group decides to form a book group, but they'll only read books by writers who have committed suicide. (The pile's shorter.) They only read one book, however, because, in Jess's words "We started with Virginia Woolf, and I only read like two pages of this book about a lighthouse, but I read enough to know why she killed herself. She killed herself because she couldn't make herself understood. You only have to read one sentence to see that..."

And I only have to read one sentence of Hornby to know I am safe with him, even in a book peopled with depressed nutters who have nothing in common but are exactly alike in their bittersweet humanity.

June 15, 2005

The Sad Truth About Happiness
by Anne Giardini

I bought this book because I loved the title. Also, the premise intrigued me. A 32 year old woman takes a magazine quiz that says she's going to die before the year is out. The one question in the quiz that skewed her results was "Are you happy?" She had answered no, because she wasn't always all the time happy. Had she answered yes, she would live to be like 90.

Anyway, the book intrigued me but I have a rule about not buying new authors in hardcover. For one thing, I have no room on my shelves for more keepers, and then there's the expense. So the first time I looked this book over, I didn't buy it. Then the next time I came to the bookstore, I did. And I read the whole thing not knowing anything about the author except that she was Canadian and a lawyer and that she had once written a newspaper column. In other words, she was way too accomplished.

Then I read the book and it was a strange read. The first half of the book, except for the premise I mentioned, seemed fairly plotless. There was a good deal of background information given, about the protagonist's childhood, her combative sisters, and other stuff that just seemed somehow pointless. I kept waiting for Maggie to embark upon a course of Being Happy but that really never happened. Or maybe Giardini was just being subtle.

That first half of the book seemed floaty and without, it must be said, much plot. As I age, I have become a fan of plot, and tend to disapprove of novels that flail around, however literarily. Happily, the second half of the novel has Plot Galore. It becomes clear that what happened in the first half of the book was setting the stage for what was to come.

It still remains an uneven book, but a haunting one nevertheless. There was a place in the first third of the book, another scene from Maggie's past, that made me cry. I was surprised and sobbing and had to put the book down until I'd cried that whole whatever it was out. I actually know what it is, but I don't want to spoil the book by saying what. Also, other people might not react as strongly; the scene evoked some of my personal stuff.

So I thought it was a meditative, curious book, but a good one. I'm glad I read it. And then checking the net for a photo, I found out that Anne Giardini is Carol Shields daughter! Now the homeless girl in the novel makes way more sense. There was one is Shield's last book, Unless. So it's like a mother/daughter motif.

June 13, 2005

Someone Like You
by Barbara Bretton

Her bio claims that Barbara Bretton is an "award winning author of more than 40 books." How is it that I've never heard of this talented woman's fiction author before? Bretton is the kind of writer who gets her metaphorical claws in early and deep and doesn't let go until the story ends. I like that in a writer.

I'm always trying to figure out what makes excellent writers so good. Is it the plot? The characters? The author's voice? The setting? Descriptive power in general? Of course, it's all of these, and something more. Something that is more than the sum of its parts. And Bretton has it all in spades.

The story starts out with two sisters, living in different countries, living lives devoid of true emotional committment despite the fact that they both have lovers of long-standing. The sisters are afraid of love because they've seen how deep love destroys people. Their mother fell down a hole when their dad left and she's never pulled herself out. Then a medical emergency forces the sisters to deal with the mother who was always distant and missing the absent dad, and to deal with other aspects of their past when the news media decides to reissue a version of ancient history.

Cat and Joely's parents were a famous folk duo from the 60s, truly magical icons who still have fans. Their misfortunes are the stuff of tabloid TV, and all of this serves to bring the guys in their lives to the sticking point. There's more. It's richer than I'm explaining. Bretton knows how to pace things so that the pot is never off the boil for long.

And I loved everything about this book except one part at the very end that I just didn't buy. But other than that, it was a super read. Another author to add to my list. Oh goody.

August 20, 2005

Confession of an Ugly Stepsister
by Gregory Maguire

I'm hopping on the Gregory Maguire bandwagon late, but that's fine, because I don't have to wait until October for the sequel to Wicked, all I have to do is choose another title (Mirror, Mirror and Lost are purchased and in my TBR pile).

Just like Wicked, I loved, loved, loved Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister. Maguire's writing offers so many gifts: gorgeous sentences, lush plots, complicated characters, thoughtful themes. I can't say enough good things about this guy's work.

Cinderella is my favorite fairy tale, maybe because of my name, maybe because as a girl I intuitively knew that it would be easier to be rescued by a prince than scrabble my own way up the corporate ladder. What I didn't know until I'd been divorced twice is that rescue comes with its own price.

This is something the characters in Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister will discover, too. Maguire's genius is that he brings the reader right along so that you're part of the discovery process. "We're all mysteries, even to ourselves," says one character, the mentor/artist who helps Iris, the more articulate and social of the two ugly sisters.

As expected, Maguire brilliantly incorporates the Cinderella myth we all know, making it his own wholly believable alternative tale. There are many engrossing diversions along the way to the ball, including a sweet love story. A nifty little narrative twist at the end brings the novel full cirlce. I didn't want it to end. It's one of those kinds of books: a little history, a little mystery, a lot of wisdom and even more heart.

August 26, 2005

Almost
by Elizabeth Benedict

Elizabeth Benedict also teaches creative writing, which I did not know when I bought this book. I didn't know anything about the author or her writing, but the story sounded interesting. And it was. Benedict is a fabulous writer, all through the novel I just wanted to eat her lush, lovely words. Some writers do this to me.

The other notable thing about this book from a writerly standpoint is that she has wonderful ways of expressing her character's emotions, of going deeply into the felt life of main character, Sophy Chase, so that the sensation of reading is almost physcial. I kept thinking, I need to learn how to do this. This is great.

But this isn't simply a writer's story. It's reader-friendly, too. The story opens with Sophy's seeming dilemma. Here's the first line: "I have this boyfriend who comes to visit me--it's mostly a sex thing." Readers find out that Sophy is in the midst of a divorce she feels guilty about, that she loves her boyfriend's children, that she needs more of a relationship than he's willing to give. There's a turn fairly early in the book that changes just about everything, including the urban New York setting to an island full of rich people in summer and the poorer folk who live there year round.

Benedict deftly handles her unusual plot, more interesting characters are added, and Sophy gets some clarity about a few things, but not before she digs herself a little deeper into an emotional mess that includes but is not limited to her drinking and infertility problems. I loved Sophy (who is, by the way, a writer) all the way and was rooting for her to come out of the mess intact. She does more than that, with a graceful and wholly satisfying last chapter.

I need to immediately buy all of Elizabeth Benedict's books. She's that good.

September 19, 2005

The Summer He Didn't Die
by Jim Harrison

Unfortunately, Jim Harrison and I are not related. I love his books anyway. This one is three novellas, two of which I've read in the past week or so. The first one is about a familiar Harrison character, a half-breed named Brown Dog. Harrison is funny and profound at the same time, seemingly without trying. He writes really gorgeous sentences, too.

Brown Dog is an endearing character, he's a drunk, horny, poor trailer dweller who cuts trees for a living and depends on social services for stuff like dental bills. He's also taking care of two kids, because their mom, his common-law wife, is in prison. One kid is damaged by fetal alcohol syndrome and the other one is a genius, or at least knows higher math. The story is concerned with how Brown Dog will handle the smart one going off to school in Lower Michigan and what he's going to do to stop the impaired kid from being put in a special school that he's sure will be the end of her.

Then "Republican Wives" uses three female points of view to talk about another dog of a man, this one a writer who likes to cause trouble and have random sex with married people. One of Harrison's more astonishing achievements is his ability to enter the uptight upper middle class female mind as seamlessly as he does the poor, uneducated, boozed up psyche of Brown Dog. He did it with "Woman Lit by Fireflies" which to me is still his best short story ever, and he does it with "Republican Wives."

And I really wish we were related. It would make family get-togethers so much more interesting.

September 29, 2005

The Secret Lives of Fortunate Wives
by Sharon Strohmeyer

Series mystery author Sharon Strohmeyer has switched writing gears with The Secret Lives of Fortunate Wives. There's a glimmer of a mystery in Strohmeyer's new release, just no Bubbles. Which is fine. I enjoy the Bubbles Yablonsky mysteries, but hey, every writer is entitled to do something different.

And this is really different. Less cartoonish, more realistic. Less comic plot twists, more drama and true tension. Less funny, but just as fun. Think Desperate Housewives and you've got the core plot set-up. Strohmeyer has written about how she worried about the Emmy-winning television series' debut, but her galleys were already at the printer by the time she learned of the show that had so much in common with her book. There was not much she could do but to hope for the best.

Surface similarities to a wildly popular televison program aside, Strohmeyer's skillful storytelling and expert pacing had me anxiously racing through the pages to see how things turn out for the fortunate wives of the title. Interesting characters, subtle irony and a few hard-learned lessons for the upper-crusted cast stop this novel from being mere melodrama.

Former journalist Strohmeyer has come a long way in the writing world. This book signals another turning point in her already colorful career. ive themselves the opportunity to follow their desires into whatever dark places they have to go to finally, triumphantly, get to the light.