Whale Rider

Ihimaera, Witi. Whale Rider. New York: Harcourt. 1987. Print.

First Sentences:

In the old days, in the years that have gone before us, the land and sea felt a great emptiness, a yearning.


Description:

This first sentence in Witi Ihimaera's Whale Rider perfectly exemplifies what the book will bring to each and every reader: a dreamy tone, a personification of powerful elements, and an intriguing concept that those elements are somehow feeling unfulfilled. There is the teasing hint that this story will poetically describe the reasons behind the feeling of the land and sea, the journey to address this sadness, and the resolution, whatever that might be.

I was grabbed immediately by the writing. It reads as if you were eavesdropping on the retelling of an oral history of an ancient folk legend that was a key part of the Maori people and culture of New Zealand. I just settled into a comfy chair, curled up, and let myself be absorbed by the rich narration and the musicality of the Maori words sprinkled in. It seemed a privilege to overhear this story from the words of a master storyteller like Witi Ihimaera.

The sea had looked like crinkled silver foil smoothed right out to the edge of the sky....This was the well at the bottom of the world, and when you looked into it you felt you could see to the end of forever.

The story outlines two narratives. One, of the current life of the people of the coastal village of Whangara, New Zealand. It is guided by its ancestral leader, Koro Apirana, and his granddaughter Kahu. The second parallel story recounts the legend of Kahutia Te Rangi, the ancestral Whale Rider, who could talk with animals and, while astride the back of a huge bull whale, rode from the ancient grounds of Hawaiki to settle Koro's village of Whangara. The Whale Rider is said to return someday to re-establish the Maori culture that is fast being lost in the modern world.

The village leader, Koro Apirana, a descendent of founder Kahutia Te Rangi, is concerned that there is no male heir to take over his leadership role and preserve the Maori traditions. Only Kahu, his granddaughter and a girl, is a direct issue of his blood. But as a girl, Koro feels she is ineligible to fulfill that blood destiny. He rejects her love, bars her from his school where he teaches boys the Maori knowledge, and prays that his son and wife will give birth to another child, this one a male.

But Kahu has boundless love for her old Paka grandfather and sneaks around outside the school to learn for herself the Maoi lessons before being run off by Koro. She has a sensitivity to her environment and even seems to be intricately tapped into the Maori culture.

Maybe you saw the 2002 movie, Whale Rider, based on this book. While it's a visually stunning depiction of this story. But as is the case with every movie-from-a-book, the written tale is vastly superior. The details, conversation sprinkled with Maori words, the reverence for the legends, and the power of internal thoughts makes the book deeply involving. Still, I highly recommend watching the movie after reading the book as it gives viewers a beautiful image of the people, events, and elements. And hearing the Maori language spoken is wonderful.

I highly recommend this book for his poetic style, its familiarization of Maori culture, and its strong depiction of a people striving to understand the world and people they live with while trying to remain true to the ancient traditions and history of their culture.

 

Happy reading. 

 

Fred

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Goldsberry, Steven. Maui, the Demigod: An Epic Novel of Historical Hawaii   

Retelling the story of the Hawaiian gods, from the history of Maui, the Trickster. (Disclaimer: I met author Goldsberry in Hawaii while he was writing this, so wanted to give his fine book a plug. I found it a fascinating storytelling and a highly informative read. FR)

 

Go As a River

Read, Shelley. Go As a River. New York: Spiegel & Grau 2023. Print.

First Sentences:

He wasn't much to look at. Not at first, anyway.


Description:

It's an intriguing title to Shelley Read's debut novel: Go As a River. In this compelling story of a young woman's life in the tiny town of Iola, Colorado in the late 1940's and beyond, this phrase pops up to describe a way to survive and continue living:

I had tried...to go as a river, but it had taken me a long while to understand what that meant. Flowing forward against obstacle was not my whole story. For, like the river, I had also gathered along the way all the tiny pieces connecting me to everything else, and doing this had delivered me here, with two fists of forest soil in my palms and a heart still learning to be unafraid of itself.

Victoria Nash, a seventeen-year-old girl, lives with her father, uncle, and younger brother on their generational peach ranch, serving the men in her family and helping with the crops after the deaths of her mother, aunt, and older brother in a auto accident five years earlier. She has no dreams of another life or the world outside her home and nearby woods until a young stranger drifts through town...and she is smitten.

God will bring two strangers together on the corner of North Laura and Main and lead them toward love. God won't make it easy. 

The consequences of her love for this outsider drive the remainder of the story as she leaves her home and family to be with this young man. But soon the reality of life in that era intrudes on the couple's world and both young people and their lives are forever changed.

 

That's all I will reveal of the compelling plot. But please know this is a very special tale of choices, survival, love, and family as seen through the narrator's (Victoria's) eyes and senses. She is passionate about her family and the natural world that surrounds her, and works to nurture and preserve both by whatever means available to her strength and determination. Her voice is true and strong, whether describing her surroundings or contemplating her doubts and obstacles she faces in her present and future life.

The old house smelled like only old houses do, like stories, like decades of buttery skillet breakfasts and black coffee and dripping faucets, like family and life and aging wood.

This is completely Victoria's story, although other major characters are depicted with skill and honesty by author Read. It is a dreamy book in some ways, but always under laid with the reality of the challenging world surrounding this young girl and her later adult years.

I was completely caught up in Victoria and her world, her intense will to survive as well as her heartfelt doubts about whichever road she decides to take. read's prose is simple and clear as the orchard and woods Victoria inhabits, exactly setting the tone on both innocence and gritty determination.

He would teach me how true a life emptied of all but its essentials could feel and that, when you got down to it, not much mattered outside the determination to go on living. 

Happy reading. 

 

Fred

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Doig, Ivan. The Whistling Season.   

A young, mysterious woman takes on work as housekeeper to a man and his sons on a small Montana farm. Along with her brother, she ingratiates herself into the family and community with long-reaching affects. Narrated by one of the young sons, it is a highly descriptive, delightful story of the people and events in a rural town. Absolutely one of the best books I have ever read. Highest recommendation.  (previously reviewed here)

 

She's Come Undone

Lamb, Wally. She's Come Undone. New York: Washington Square Press 1992. Print.

First Sentences:

In one of my earliest memories, my mother and I are on the front porch of our rented Carter Avenue house watching two deliverymen carry our brand-new television set up the steps. I'm excited because I've heard about but never seen television. The two men are wearing work clothes the same color as the box they're hefting between them. Like the crabs at Fisherman's Cove, they ascend the cement stairs sideways. Here's the undependable part: my visual memory stubbornly insists that these men are President Eisenhower and Vice President Nixon.


Description:

Wally Lamb's debut novel, She's Come Undone, follows Dolores Price, a challenging narrator to say the least, from age four until early adulthood. She has more than her share of obstacles in life, including a father who deserts her to start a new life and family elsewhere; a mother who plies her with sweets and junk and eventually is admitted to a mental institution; and a strict grandmother who ends up raising her. Dolores deals with her world cynically and judgmentally from the confines of her bedroom until her depressed eating brings her weight to over 270 pounds. Although she is accepted into a college, this is her mother's dream, not hers, and she is reluctant to attend.

 

She does meet and retain several acquaintances and eventually a husband who assists her mentally and later financially. But really she meets the world alone, on her terms, and confidently chooses her own pathways.

Sounds depressing, huh? Well, it can be. But honestly, you just have to pull for Dolores amid all her troubles, both those inflicted on her by circumstances as well as those she pursues willingly to disastrous ends. You just have to stick with her and see how she can find a way to pull herself into the woman she has inside her, buried under layers of cynicism, doubt, fear, and false confidence.

 

Lamb is a captivating writer, a master of inner stream-of-consciousness narration, dialogue, and insightful depictions of characters. He keeps you reading page after page to see what new dilemma or person will come into Dolores' life that she will have to examine (often superficially), judge (usually harshly), and react to (angrily). Lamb makes readers feel the conflicts, fears, and hope of Dolores with every situation she finds herself thrown into.

I was fully invested in Dolores and this book for its honest presentation of a young girl coming of age, trying to find herself, and confronting the world and people she faces. It's a modern re-imagining of The Catcher in the Rye, but with a female lead who reveals herself and her angst much more clearly and empathically, in my mind, that Holden Caulfield ever did. 

[P.S. For another great coming of age novel, please read one of my favorites, Brewster by Mark Slouka (see below)]

 

Happy reading. 

 

Fred

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Slouka, Mike. Brewster.   

My favorite coming of age book with four remarkable, memorable characters who loosely bond together and battle against their personal struggles as teens. A fine successor to The Catcher in the Rye. (previously reviewed here)

The Plague and I

MacDonald, Betty. The Plague and I. New York: Lippincott 1948. Print.

First Sentences:

Getting Tuberculosis in the middle of your life is like starting downtown to do a lot of urgent errands and being hit by a bus. When you regain consciousness you remember nothing about the urgent errands. You can't even remember where you were going. The important things now are the pain in your leg; the soreness in your back; what you will have for dinner; who is in the next bed.


Description:

Can a person have a deadly disease and write an in-depth memoir of the experience, yet keep a sense of humor in the narrative? Well, I'm here to tell you that Betty MacDonald's The Plague and I, does just that. 

It is a deeply personal, introspective, self-deprecating immersion into the journey through the world of serious illness that begins with her getting fed up with a recurring cough and feeling weak, several doctors' diagnosis (or lack thereof), then takes us through daily life a tuberculous sanitarium from a patient who just happens to be a gifted, humorous writer.

MacDonald is the author of The Egg and I which wittily documents her life with her husband on a chicken farm with no electricity and no running water. She is clearly a survival-type person who can still keep her sense of humor while experiencing outrageous conditions.

Our family motto was "People are healthy and anybody who isn't is a big stinker.

MacDonald's parents and siblings were all extremely healthy. Her father made the children run around the block and do calisthenics to music before breakfast every day (and chew each bite of food 100 times), and a weekly ice bath, even on freezing days when they lived in Montana.

But in the 1930s, divorced and the mother of small children, MacDonald contracts tuberculous, an extremely communicable disease which at that time was usually considered a death sentence. Treatments focused on absolute bed rest in a quiet place, to let lungs recover without exertion. That meant laying around in bed all day, usually in one position, with no reading, talking, reaching, sitting up, or walking without a nurse's permission and help.

So MacDonald begins her stay at The Pines sanatorium in upstate Washington and soon learns the rigorous routine and very strict rules enforced by the doctors and nurses (one fierce Charge Nurse she refers to as "Granite Eyes"). Any deviation from this behavior is considered being uncooperative and are grounds to be sent home (it was a sanatorium that accepted MacDonald and a few other patients free of charge).

The staff at The Pines had but one motivating factor -- to get the patients well. This motivating factor, like a policeman's nightstick, was twirled over our heads twenty-four hours a day....'We are going to make you well and the shortest distance between two points is a straight line,' we were told. 'Here is the line, either follow it or get out.'

That meant absolutely no deviation from the schedule and conditions that produced quiet. Day by day, truly hour by hour, MacDonald passes the time waiting for the next meal, whispering secretly to her roommates, having infrequent tests done (without her ever learning the results or any progress, good or bad), and trying to sleep during the twice daily 2-hour rest periods. Visitors were allowed for only a few minutes once a week, no more than three people at a time, and no children permitted. 

The night went on and on and on and I grew progressively colder and sadder. 'The one thing to be said in favor of life at The Pines,' I thought, as I tried futilely to warm a small new area at the bottom of the bed, 'it's going to make dying seem a like a lot of fun.'

I'm not making this memoir sound funny, I know, but believe me that MacDonald, although faced with many unfriendly people, restrictions, boredom and medical tests, retained her wry sense of the world and people around her. She records that her roommates offered her some wise words: "The first hundred years here are the hardest."

Being sent to an institution, be it penal, mental, or tuberculous, is no game of Parchesi, and not knowing when, or if, you'll get out doesn't make it any easier. At least a criminal knows what his sentence is.  

Not knowing how long she would be in the sanitarium, not ever being told whether her health was improving or getting worse, and living under the constant threat that to not follow the rules meant being sent home and her bed given to someone more willing to try to get well were challenges she faced daily. But overall, her memoir of the experience is a fascinating, entertaining, sobering, and wonderfully witty experience.

From my stay at The Pines I learned that a stiff test for friendship is: "Would she be pleasant to have t.b. with?"

Happy reading. 

 

Fred

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Diamond, John.  Because Cowards Get Cancer Too: A Hypochondriac Confronts His Nemesis.  

Times of London writer and admitted hypochondriac Diamond details with humor and fear his bout with throat cancer via his newspaper columns. (previously reviewed here)

 

The Old Woman with the Knife

Gu, Byeong-Mo. The Old Woman with the Knife. Toronto: Hanover Square Press. 2013. Print.

First Sentences:

So this is what it's like on the subway on Friday nights. You feel grateful to discover space just wide enough to slide a sheet of paper between bodies stuck together like mollusks. You're bathed in the stench of meat and garlic and alcohol anytime anyone opens their mouth, but you're relieved because those scents signify the end of your workweek.

Description:

I cannot recommend Gu Byeong-Mo's assassination novel, The Old Woman with the Knife, to just everyone. Some readers may be put off by the idea of the elderly woman narrator who is actively-employed as a professional assassin. 

 

But for those who are intrigued by this concept of a 65-year-old "disease control specialist" (as the company terms its contracted killers), this is a calm, not-very-violent story that will keep you alert right up to the last sentences. It might help to know she has an equally old dog named "Deadweight." Well, maybe not.

 

Hornclaw, the elderly female assassin, is the founder along with her lover Ryu, of this "disease control" elimination business forty years ago. She was the first person Ryu trained to effectively knock off evil people. The motto on their business cards is: "Extermination of vermin and pests." Corporate enemies, double crossers, cheating spouses all fall into these categories, so are contracted by outsiders to have them eliminated. 

 

Hornclaw often uses a variety of razor sharp knives, hence her nickname. The book opens with her completion of an assignment in a crowded subway. Naturally, no one notices, much less suspects an elderly woman of utilizing a quick, poisoned jab into an unknown passenger, or pays attention to a man who seemingly faints in the crush to exit the subway.

She is anonymous and prefers to know little about her victims. But an accident causes her to seek medical attention and contact an outsider doctor, potentially risking her anonymous life and profession. Throw in an upcoming, brash fellow assassin from her organization who brags of his own prowess and boldly hints that Hornclaw should retire due to her age, diminishing speed and skills, and you have the barest bones of this gripping story.

 

Don't worry, there's less blood and graphic violence than in any Jack Reacher novels or Jo Nesbo's detective tales. The Old Woman with the Knife is subtle, quiet, almost soothing read in its precision and spare style.

Despite the many possible roads she could have taken to relax and sink into an armchair, she has insisted on hands-on disease control work all this time....What gets in the way of safe retirement is the unique nature of disease control....Trying to picture someone who has been killing people for forty-five years frying chicken or dry-cleaning clothes is like trying to imagine an old wolf incubating an egg.

If it sounds interesting, it definitely is. If it sounds intriguing, mesmerizing, subtle, unpredictable, and captivating, it is all of these and much more. A rare gem of a story, with plenty of action and complex characters to fully engulf you.

Happy reading. 

 

Fred

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Swanson, Peter. The Kind Worth Killing.   

A thrilling, suspenseful yarn of pride, disrespect, and revenge involving a woman plotting to kill the men who wronged her. (previously reviewed here)

 

Outlawed

North, Anna. Outlawed. New York: Bloombury. 2021. Print.

First Sentences:
 

In the year of our Lord 1894, I became an outlaw. Like a lot of things, it didn't happen all at once. First I had to get married.

Description:

 

Interesting first sentence, especially when readers quickly discover the "outlaw" is a woman in Anna North's novel, Outlawed. Set in the 1890's Old West, the story is narrated by Ada, a seventeen-year-old woman, joyous in the first months of her young marriage to her handsome husband. That is until he, his family, and the town suspect she is unable to become pregnant. 

In a world where barren women are hanged as witches, Ada is forced to flee to a convent and later runs away again to join the notorious Hole in the Wall gang (not the Paul Newman/Robert Redford one) led by the bigger-than-life figure known as "The Kid."

Ada is allow to join the small gang due to her medical skills learned in her youth while assisting her midwife mother. The Kid provides Ada shelter and a new family as part of the gang. She learns to ride and shoot a gun under the tutelage of other members until she is deemed skilled enough to accompany them on a stagecoach holdup, which leads to disastrous results. 

 

But The Kid has bigger plans for the gang than small time heists. That plan, while promising great rewards, involves deadly risks for everyone who participates. And the sheriff from Ada's hometown is still hunting for her to answer charges of putting curses other women to affect their childbirths, and jailing her for life.

 

I loved every one of these characters, from the sensitive Ada to the mythical Kid to all the members of the Hole in the Wall gang. And their tale is beautifully written by author North: descriptive, energetic, melancholy, and hopeful in the same paragraph. This is truly a book to be savored for its style, characters, setting, and story - each first rate, in my opinion. 

I'll leave you with one of Ada's reflections in the early morning light before a job.

The sky went from blue-black to royal blue to aquamarine and then, in the sudden manner of the mountain regions, bright with streaks of gold and pink like the tails of gleaming horses. The meadowlarks awoke, with songs that, on another day, would have made me smile. Coyotes chuckled in the predawn and then went silent, shamed out of the scavenging by the light of day.

Highly recommended.

 

Happy reading. 

Fred

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Elwes, Cary. As You Wish: Inconceivable Tales from the Making of the Princess Bride

Recollections from the star of the wonderful adventure comedy, The Princess Bride, about the making of the movie, from ad-libbed comments by Billy Crystal that made Mandy Patinkin laugh so hard he broke a rib, to the weeks of sword fighting instruction, to Andre the Giant plowing around the landscape on a motorcycle, breaking Elwes toe in the process. Delightful.

Lessons in Chemistry

Garmus, Bonnie. Lessons in Chemistry. New York: Doubleday 2022. Print.

First Sentences:

Back in 1961, when women wore shirtwaist dresses and joined garden clubs and drove legions of children around in seatbeltless cars without giving it a second thought; back before anyone knew there'd even be a sixties movement, much less one that its participants would spend the next sixty years chronicling; back when the big wars were over and the secret wars had just begun and people were starting to think fresh and believe everything was possible, the thirty-year-old mother of Madeline Zott rose before dawn every morning and felt certain of just one thing: her life was over.

Despite that certainty, she made her way to the lab to pack her daughter's lunch.

Description:

I don't often read books off a best-seller list, but somehow Bonnie Garmus's Lessons in Chemistry snuck into my To-Be-Read notebook and wow, did I ever enjoy it. It is quirky, character-driven, funny, thoughtful, and always unexpected, my favorite kind of reading.

Elizabeth Zott, the main character of the novel, is a scientist, first and foremost, working as a researcher in 1961, a time when women scientists were few and those in the profession were generally delegated to bringing coffee to men scientists. This role would never do for Elizabeth Zott, a powerfully-driven woman who demands the same facilities, pay, responsibilities, and respect as her fellow (men) workers routinely receive.

She is the mother of the precocious Madeline, who "had been reading since age three and now, at age five, was already through most of Dickens". Madeline despertely wants to fit in with the other students, so tosses away her mother's daily inspirational lunchbox notes ("Play sports at recess but do not automatically let the boys win"). She trades her nutritionally balanced, but odd, food as well so as not appear any stranger. She was just starting kindergarden, so what could go wrong with this strategy?

The other day [Harriet] suggested they make mud pies and Madeline frowned, then wrote 3.1415 with a stick in the dirt. "Done," she said. 

Elizabeth deals with her own chemical research doggedly, but with little encouragement. Her boss steals her research papers and publishes them under his own name. Her lab equipment is reduced and her chances of promotion ignored.

Her grudges were mainly reserved for a patriarchal society founded on the idea that women were less. Less capable. Less intelligent. Less inventive. A society that believe men went to work and did important things---discovered planets, developed products, created laws---and women stayed at home and raised children.

That environment all changes, for better and for worse, when she sneaks into five-star researcher Calvin Evans' lab and steals some of his beakers. Soon, they become a couple.

They were more than friends, more than confidants, more than allies, and more than lovers. If relationships are a puzzle, then theirs was solved from the get-go---as if someone shook out the box and watched from above as each separate piece landed exactly right, slipping one into the other, fully interlocked, into a picture that made perfect sense. They made other couples sick.

Inevitably, (not really a spoiler since it is mentioned on the first page), Elizabeth Zott moves out of her lab. She is coerced into hosting a TV cooking show based on science and respect for women who cook for their families. While it is unlike any show and goes against the expressed ideas of the station manager, Supper at Six becomes a huge hit.

 

But Elizabeth Zott is miserable. And always, there are the challenges of childrearing as a single parent.

Every day she found parenthood like taking a test for which she had not studied. The questions were daunting and there wasn't nearly enough multiple choice. Occasionally she woke up damp with sweat, having imagined a knock at the door and some sort of authority figure with an empty baby-sized basket saying, "We've just reviewed your last parental performance report and there's really no nice way to put this. You're fired."

I cannot give away any more. All I have mentioned happens in the first chapters, so there is a lot of ground to cover in this off-beat novel of a women fighting to do what she is trained to do and for what she knows is right, a woman who faces obstacles and antagonists in every corner. And there's still more in this captivating story about rowing, cooking, and a dog named Six-Thirty who is trained to understand hundreds of words.

My highest recommended as a thought-provoking, highly enjoyable look into the 1960's era from the eyes and words of a whipsmart woman. 

Happy reading. 

 

Fred

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Semple, Maria. Where'd You Go, Bernadette?

A fiercely-independent architect walks away from her eccentric life, neighbors, and family and heads for an unknown destination after a series of misadventures in her current life. (previously reviewed here)

 

Simsion, Graeme. The Rosie Project.   

An eccentric geneticist creates a 100-point questionaire to find the perfect wife. Unbeknownst to him, a young grad student is mistakenly identified as a potential mate, and the fun begins as the serious woman faces off with a highly-exacting man.  (previously reviewed here)

 

  

Housekeeping

Robinson, Marilynne. Housekeeping. New York: Picador 1980. Print

First Sentences:
 

My name is Ruth. I grew up with my younger sister, Lucille, under the care of my grandmother, Mrs. Sylvia Foster, and when she died, of her sisters-in-law, Misses Lily and Nona Foster, and when they fled, of her daughter, Mrs. Sylvia Fisher.


Description:

As you probably noticed, I haven't posted any book recommendations for several months. Chalk it up to a severe case of reader's block. Nothing I tried to read during the COVID pandemic seemed to capture my attention. Fiction seemed too frivolous. Non-fiction too detailed. Humor? Forget it with everything going on politically and health-wise.

 

So what to do? I decided to pick up some old reliable favorite from past reading experience that never fails to satisfy. I have several of these that I turn to when desperate for the restorative power of great writing, characters, plot, and setting. My favorite reliables? J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, Farley Mowat's Never Cry Wolf, P.G. Wodehouse's The Golf Omnibus, Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles, and W. Somerset Maugham's Complete Short Stories 

 

This time I returned (after too many years away) to Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping. It's a very quiet, but unsettling novel about two young girls: narrator Ruth and younger sister Lucille, who are placed in the care of a quirky, distant aunt, Sylvia, after the suicide of their mother.

 

Sylvia is a drifter, a wanderer, living her life (by choice) riding trains, with no home, no ties, and no plans for the future. But she is coerced into settling back into her family home with these two young girls who need an adult. They live in their family home in the bone-chilling isolation of Fingerbone, Colorado on the shores of a mighty lake, the very same water that claimed the lives of their grandfather in a spectacular train wreck and their mother who drove off a cliff into it.

 

Sylvia is definitely not a homemaker, with her casual attention to orderliness, schedules, promises, food, and clothing. She is taken to wandering the neighborhoods through the night, "borrowing" a boat and rowing to secret locations. and hoarding newspapers stacked high in the house. But when her actions are questioned by authorities enough to removed the girls from her care, she proves to be fiercely protective of their small family and her role in it.

 

Eventually the girls respond to her lifestyle, each one choosing to either rebel or accept her quirks into their own lives. Their adolescent development and growth in trying to understand the mysteries of Sylvia slowly, steadily work to portray a picture of survival, family, and choices.

 

I loved this book, although, fair warning, it may not be for everyone. It paints a picture of life among people struggling to understand their place in the world, how choices affect them and others, all  set in a very cold, grey, vaguely ominous environment. But for readers interested in storytelling and writing at its best, I highly recommend Housekeeping.

Happy reading. 

Fred

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Doig, Ivan. The Whistling Season.   

A Chicago woman in 1909 answers an advertisement for a housekeeper from a widower and his three young sons living in an isolated Montana town. She writes that she "Can't cook, but doesn't bite," and gets the job sight unseen (by both of them). She brings her brother with her on the train and he reluctantly becomes a unique schoolteacher. Simply wonderful, a great read not to be missed.  (previously reviewed here)

The Giver of Stars

Moyes, Jojo. The Giver of Stars. New York: Viking 2019. Print.

First Sentences:

Listen.

Three miles deep in the forest just below Arnott's Ridge, and you're in silence so dense it's like you're wading through it. There's no birdsong past dawn, not even in high summer, and especially not now, with the chill air so thick with moisture that it stills those few leaves clinging gamely to the branches.


Description:

Who can resist a title like The Giver of Stars by Jojo Moyes? And those wonderfully descriptive first sentences shown above? And then you find out the plot focuses on library books and the women who deliver them on horseback (actually, muleback) to families buried deep in the woods of Appalachia. Even better, you learn this novel is based on a real-life library system...well, how can you not pick this historical novel up and gobble it down?

Alice, an British woman living England in the 1930s, meets and falls in love with Bennett Van Cleve, a wealthy American coal baron. They marry and move to a small town in Kentucky to live with Bennett's father near the coal mines he and Bennett oversee with a cold hand.

As Alice becomes more bored with her subserviant, sequestered life expected by these two men, she decides on a whim to join several women starting a Books by Mule program. Started by Eleanor Roosevelt as part of the Works Progress Administration to provide Depression jobs, this program employed women to deliver library books to poverty-stricken families living deep in the woods of Kentucky hills. (Note: This was an actual program in the 1930s, developed and completely operated by women.)

Alice learns to ride a mule -- her first -- and navigate the twisting, rocky, unmarked trails in all weather, forming friendships with families along the way. Children love the picture and alphabet books she brings, while mothers are grateful for the spare time Alice provides them while she reads to the youngsters. 

Bennett and his father naturally do not approve of this occupation, feeling it unsuitable for a woman to leave her home responsibilities to ride off into the wilderness and intermingle with people who are not her status. As their marriage becomes more distant, Alice begins to blossom in her new job. Together with the other women, they organize the library holdings and expand their routes to reach more readers.

And of course, there are complications with other townspeople, her husband, other townswomen, and even some of the backwoods residents. Love relationships enter and leave so naturally throughout the plot.

The writing, like the characters, is wonderfully rugged and beautiful at the same time. And coupled with the local phrases, the atmosphere of the book seems Both delightful and honest. 

- That Mack McGuire, he makes my heart flutter like a clean sheet on a long line.

- It's hot enough out here to fry a snake.

Sometimes you just need a good, solid book with admirable characters leading realistic yet challenging and loving lives. The Giver of Gifts is such a book. Highly recommended.

Happy reading. 

Fred

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If this book interests you, be sure to check out:

Doig, Ivan. The Whistling Season.   

A Chicago woman in 1909 answers an advertisement for a housekeeper for a widower and his three young sons living in an isolated Montana town. She writes that she "Can't cook, but doesn't bite," and gets the job sight unseen (by both of them). She brings her brother with her on the train and he reluctantly becomes a unique schoolteacher. Simply wonderful, a great read not to be missed.  (previously reviewed here)

The Silent Patient

Michaelides, Alex. The Silent Patient. New York: Celadon 2019. Print

First Sentences:

Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. 

Description:

There is no doubt in anyone's mind that Alicia Berenson, the famous painter, has shot killed her photographer husband, Gabriel. She is found standing in the room with his dead body when the police arrive. Only her fingerprints on the rifle left beside his body, And she is covered in his blood as well as her own.

But she is completely silent during her arrest, trial, conviction, sentencing, and then during the six years of her commitment to a psychiatric ward. Why doesn't she talk, plead her case, or at least tell everyone what went on? It will be up to Theo Farber, a forensic psychotherapist, to try to convince her to speak and reveal the events surrounding this murder.

Thus begins Alex Michaelides' intriguing new mystery, The Silent Patient. The criminal psychiatrist Farber has been intrigued by the Berenson's case since it first appeared in the newspapers. He applies for a position at The Grove psychiatric unit where Alicia is being held in hopes of having her assigned as his patient.

But his efforts to win her trust, to get her to even acknowledge his presence or change her deadpan expression, prove both fruitless and controversial for other staff members. Can Faber get some results before the board of executives for The Grove shut down the facility as non-profitable?

This is a very quiet mystery despite the underlying violence of the opening murder. It presents the struggles that medical staff have with conflicting treatment methods, publicity, and funding. While the murder itself seems an open-and-shut case, Alicia and her motivation behind the act are complete blanks. She continues to appear unable or unwilling to make a sound either as a confession or plea for innocence.

But then Alicia's diary comes to light, and it is her writings that we, as readers, have been following in the story all along. Slowly, we begin to unravel the truth. But will Farber and the staff of The Grove be able to piece together her ramblings to understand all the events? And if so, what happens to Alicia?

And believe me, there are some unexpectedly delicious surprises in store, right up to the final pages. 

Loved the suspense, the mystery, the unreliable voices, the silent character, and especially the final solution presented by author Michaelides. A really compelling, interesting read. 

Happy reading. 

Fred

Other book recommendations
About The First Sentence Reader blog

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If this book interests you, be sure to check out:

Lutz, Lisa. The Passenger  

In the opening sentences, we meet Tonya who is looking down at her husband's body after he had fallen down the stairs. Pushed? Fell? It is unknown, but Tonya decides to take off, not willing to answer to the police. She travels across the country protecting this and other secrets, taking on new names, jobs, and fellow travelers right up to the unexpected revelations in the last pages. Highly recommended. (previously reviewed here)

Little

Carey, Edward. Little. New York: Riverhead 2018. Print

First Sentences:

In the same year that the five-year-old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote his Minuet for Harpsichord, in the precise year when the British captured Pondicherry in India from the French, in the exact year in which the melody for "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" was first published, in that very year, which is to say 1761, whilst in the city of Paris people at their salons told tales of beasts in castles and men with blue beards and beauties that would not wake and cats in boots and slippers made of glass and youngest children with tufts in their hair and daughters wrapped in donkey skin, and whilst in London people at their clubs discuss the coronation of King George III and Queen Charlotte: many miles away from all this activity, in a small village in Alsace, in the presence of a ruddy midwife, two village maids, and a terrified mother, was born a certain undersized baby. 

Description:

Whew! Quite a loooong, convoluted first sentence. But it captures the detailed style and the slightly formal language that composes Edward Carey's new novel, Little. Like Carey's first book, Observatory Mansions, (about a man who acts as a living-statue and lives in his run-down family among eccentrics and who, as a hobby, steals precious minutia from strangers for his private museum), Little is chock full of strange characters both troubling and compelling.

As he pushed [the door] open a bell attached to it sounded twice, a loud noise in all that hush. It was a sad sound, two dolorous clangs, that seemed to say, That. Hurt.

Little takes place in the late 1700s, focusing on the life of Marie, an undersized child, naturally nicknamed "Little," and her difficult life in France. With both parents dead, she lives in Paris with a poor, reclusive doctor named Curtius who sculpts human organs out of wax for display in hospitals. This uncomfortably quiet man teaches Little the art of wax sculpture while he demystifies the organs of the human body. They find some fame by taking life molds of the heads (living and dead) of famous Frenchmen like Voltaire. 

Wax gives us light; without wax we would like in the darkness. How much of our lives have we seen because of wax? How would we illuminate theaters and ballrooms without it? How would the little boy with monsters under his bed dispel them without wax....We strike a match and burn a candle and a little bit of daylight is restored to us, because of wax.

Little is provided escape from this poverty-stricken life when Elizabeth, the cousin of the King, requests she move to Versailles to teach her art. Little lives in a cupboard as do many other servants who aren't sufficiently important to deserve a room, and is only allowed out when summoned by the princess. But a deep friendship and learning relationship is formed between the two girls.

But that life is short-lived when the Revolution starts and the royal family is under siege. Little finds herself removed from the palace by Elisabeth herself, but whether out of anger or for Little's protection is unknown.

I learned not only that your loved one may be forbidden you, given away to someone else, but also that though you love someone they may run from  you, and you may open your arms but they shall not come in. The Elisabeth I loved was no longer. What was left was a shell, a plaster personage. Hollow. Inside was nothing but stale air unable to get out. How I wished to crack her open.

The fighting destroys most of Paris and Little must forge a new life on her own wits and wax-figure skills while avoiding the guillotine herself for her association with the palace. The results of these struggles are both surprising and satisfying.

It is a challenging, intriguing story of eccentric characters living in poverty, abuse, innovation, and triumph over adversity. Readers will be buried deeply in this eighteenth century world of Paris and Revolution, but it is a strangely compelling world that provides fascination on each page. I found it a compelling story about a historical figure and her era.

Happy reading. 

Fred

Other book recommendations
About The First Sentence Reader blog

____________________

If this book interests you, be sure to check out:

Carey, Edward. Observatory Mansions.   

The sprawling familial house of Francis Orme is now apartments filled with very odd people. Orme himself is quite a character, with a job as a living statue and a collection of items he stole from other people to add to his private museum. Dizzily unpredictable and unique, Observatory Mansions is challenging and compelling at the same time: a book you are unable to put down, no matter how much you may want to, simple to find out how these people and their stories play out.