en-US Sat, 11 Jan 2025 17:45:43 -0800 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 149789
Drawing on his own childhood experience of genteel poverty, Trollope gives a painstakingly realistic depiction of the trials of a family striving to maintain its standards at all costs. With its sensitive portrayal of the proud and self-destructive figure of Crawley, this final volume is the darkest and most complex of all the Barsetshire novels.]]> 890 Anthony Trollope 0140437525 Sara 5
But this book is not only about revisiting the stories we already know; it is also about another clergyman, Mr. Crawley. Accused of stealing a check and unable to explain his possession of it, he is brought before the Magistrates and bound over for trial. His own confusion about both his acquisition of the check and as to how he has landed it such a strait, being a very honest and upstanding man who has sacrificed everything for the good of his parish, is at the center of this last tale. Perhaps the saddest part is that Crawley is made to doubt himself.

“There are different kinds of sickness. There is sickness of the body, and sickness of the heart, and sickness of the spirit;—and then there is sickness of the mind, the worst of all.�

The consequences of this prosecution, and sometimes persecution, reverberates through the entire community and we are able to see the hearts of so many in how they react to Crawley’s misfortunes. I could not help feeling that, given the same set of circumstances, the wealthy man would have been treated much differently than the poverty stricken Crawley.

I was brought to tears and to moments of rage as the story wound itself down. As he so often does, Trollope gives us people, with all their wondrous kindness and horrible pretension, none of them perfect or perfectly evil. At the same time that you want to hug them, you want to smack them. They throw away their own happiness with stubbornness and dogged determination not to yield or admit mistakes. They push one another beyond the brink, or cling to a pride or sense of injustice, until they cannot escape the holes they have dug themselves.

They come very easily, these quarrels, but the quittance from them is sometimes terribly difficult. Much of thought is necessary before the angry man can remember that he too in part may have been wrong; and any attempt at such thinking is almost beyond the power of him who is carefully nursing his wrath, lest it cool! But the nursing of such quarreling kills all happiness.

I have loved every moment of the six books in this series. As I have closed the pages on each one, I have whispered to myself that it was the best. In fact, they are all top-notch, and this last is not the least. I am looking forward to starting The Pallister novels next and hoping they will be a fraction as good as this. I am grateful that Anthony Trollope was so prolific. Loads of good reading in my future.]]> 4.16 1867
author: Anthony Trollope
name: Sara
average rating: 4.16
book published: 1867
rating: 5
read at: 2022/10/12
date added: 2025/01/11
shelves: 19th-century-literature, classics, family, literary-fiction, victorian, 2022-aty-challenge
review:
How masterfully Trollope brought this series full cycle. We began in The Warden with a good man, in Mr. Harding, being mistreated and purposefully misunderstood, met his extended family, as his girls settled their lives with the men who were to be their husbands. In this last book of the series, we see how Mr. Harding has settled in his old age and where the girls, now women, have landed. We take up all the characters we met throughout the series and feel a great sense of closure as all the plot lines are brought to a close.

But this book is not only about revisiting the stories we already know; it is also about another clergyman, Mr. Crawley. Accused of stealing a check and unable to explain his possession of it, he is brought before the Magistrates and bound over for trial. His own confusion about both his acquisition of the check and as to how he has landed it such a strait, being a very honest and upstanding man who has sacrificed everything for the good of his parish, is at the center of this last tale. Perhaps the saddest part is that Crawley is made to doubt himself.

“There are different kinds of sickness. There is sickness of the body, and sickness of the heart, and sickness of the spirit;—and then there is sickness of the mind, the worst of all.�

The consequences of this prosecution, and sometimes persecution, reverberates through the entire community and we are able to see the hearts of so many in how they react to Crawley’s misfortunes. I could not help feeling that, given the same set of circumstances, the wealthy man would have been treated much differently than the poverty stricken Crawley.

I was brought to tears and to moments of rage as the story wound itself down. As he so often does, Trollope gives us people, with all their wondrous kindness and horrible pretension, none of them perfect or perfectly evil. At the same time that you want to hug them, you want to smack them. They throw away their own happiness with stubbornness and dogged determination not to yield or admit mistakes. They push one another beyond the brink, or cling to a pride or sense of injustice, until they cannot escape the holes they have dug themselves.

They come very easily, these quarrels, but the quittance from them is sometimes terribly difficult. Much of thought is necessary before the angry man can remember that he too in part may have been wrong; and any attempt at such thinking is almost beyond the power of him who is carefully nursing his wrath, lest it cool! But the nursing of such quarreling kills all happiness.

I have loved every moment of the six books in this series. As I have closed the pages on each one, I have whispered to myself that it was the best. In fact, they are all top-notch, and this last is not the least. I am looking forward to starting The Pallister novels next and hoping they will be a fraction as good as this. I am grateful that Anthony Trollope was so prolific. Loads of good reading in my future.
]]> 227002 186 Barbara Pym 0330326481 Sara 4
For each one of us could be (or might become) Edwin, Norman, Letty or Marcia. They are ordinary people who have reached their sixties and, for various reasons, find themselves alone. Their main focus in life has been their jobs, but that is about to end. Being co-workers is what binds them to one another, and the thread seems very tenuous, but even with the two ladies retiring, the four seem to find the thread is strong enough to resist breaking.

I loved this book particularly because it addresses the problems we find, so unexpectedly, when we reach a certain age. It is almost like those formative years, when the world is before you and you are trying to decide what path you want to take, with the difference being that we are all trying to figure out how we can best see the end of the trip we are on.

The wit here is subtle, but sometimes sharp, like a stick of butter with a knife hidden in it. You laugh, and then you realize you have just been cut, as when Letty and Marcia are treated to their shabby little retirement party.

If the two women feared that the coming of this date might give some clue to their ages, it was not an occasion for embarrassment because nobody else had been in the least interested, both of them having long ago reached ages beyond any kind of speculation.

This quartet is painted in grays. They blend into the background for those around them, they are superfluous to the world at large, they are so insignificant that when they leave their jobs it isn’t required that they be replaced, and yet Pym shows us that they are individuals, with lives and hopes, searching for happiness and sometimes just for an uncondescending recognition that they are there.

Just a Note: I thought I had read Barbara Pym before, but couldn’t remember what book I had read, so I went to my book list to find that I have six of her books in my Kindle library waiting and yet had never read a single one. Awfully glad I liked this one!

]]> 3.90 1978
author: Barbara Pym
name: Sara
average rating: 3.90
book published: 1978
rating: 4
read at: 2022/06/14
date added: 2024/08/07
shelves: archive-org, 2022-aty-challenge, english-fiction, literary-fiction, women-writers, aging
review:
Barbara Pym has a unique voice, very quiet and subtle, very astute. She is a humorist who gets to the heart of her subject and finds the sadness beneath the laughter. Watch out, she seems to say, because before you realize it, the laugh is on you.

For each one of us could be (or might become) Edwin, Norman, Letty or Marcia. They are ordinary people who have reached their sixties and, for various reasons, find themselves alone. Their main focus in life has been their jobs, but that is about to end. Being co-workers is what binds them to one another, and the thread seems very tenuous, but even with the two ladies retiring, the four seem to find the thread is strong enough to resist breaking.

I loved this book particularly because it addresses the problems we find, so unexpectedly, when we reach a certain age. It is almost like those formative years, when the world is before you and you are trying to decide what path you want to take, with the difference being that we are all trying to figure out how we can best see the end of the trip we are on.

The wit here is subtle, but sometimes sharp, like a stick of butter with a knife hidden in it. You laugh, and then you realize you have just been cut, as when Letty and Marcia are treated to their shabby little retirement party.

If the two women feared that the coming of this date might give some clue to their ages, it was not an occasion for embarrassment because nobody else had been in the least interested, both of them having long ago reached ages beyond any kind of speculation.

This quartet is painted in grays. They blend into the background for those around them, they are superfluous to the world at large, they are so insignificant that when they leave their jobs it isn’t required that they be replaced, and yet Pym shows us that they are individuals, with lives and hopes, searching for happiness and sometimes just for an uncondescending recognition that they are there.

Just a Note: I thought I had read Barbara Pym before, but couldn’t remember what book I had read, so I went to my book list to find that I have six of her books in my Kindle library waiting and yet had never read a single one. Awfully glad I liked this one!


]]> 10222 958 M.M. Kaye 031215125X Sara 4 “Thou art everywhere, but I worship thee here; Thou art without form, but I worship thee in these forms; Thou needest no praise, yet I offer thee these prayers and salutations.�
The prayer for the sins of human limitations.

When I was planning my year of reading and mentioned including this book, scores of people told me how wonderful it was and that they were excited for me. I now understand why I got that reaction. This is what an epic novel ought to be: characters that sing, a plot that twists and turns and always surprises, a foreign culture that you feel completely immersed in, history, over the top adventures, and of course, love.

Have you ever seen the movie Secondhand Lions? Well, the first part of this book feels like a real life version of the spectacular tale Garth tells Walter about Hub. Ash is larger than life, but then he is very lifelike. We believe in him and his abilities, but he isn’t always right or always able to pull it off, or always cool headed; what he is is always true to himself, filled with an innate courage, and blessed with the luck that only the gods can bestow.

Perhaps what makes this expansive book work so beautifully is that India of this era is such an expansive country, containing ancient places and ancient people of different religious and cultural backgrounds. M.M. Kaye lived in the country and knew its people, and her understanding of the complicated minds involved is always evident. I completely appreciated that none of the three distinct groups, the Hindi and Muslim natives nor the British Christians, is portrayed as either pure, innocent or evil.

This book spans India during the time of the Raj, and explores the parts and pockets that have not yet succumbed to the British influence. It centers on the royal houses, Ranas, Ranis, and Maharajas who are still in control of territory and bow only in appearance to the rule of the foreigners, then it sweeps into the problematic world of Afghanistan, where cultural miscalculation is deadly. What makes it special and completely believable is that the main character, Ash, is a Brit who was raised as a Hindi until he was twelve. He is truly part of both worlds and he understands India in a way that his peers do not, which enables him to go and do what it would normally seem a British soldier could not. All of the Indian characters are marvelous and we get to see an intimate side of both the Hindu and the Muslim nationals.

The novel takes a turn about midway, and it almost seems like we leave one book behind and enter another. It is done seamlessly, it is part of the plot that has already been established, but it has a feel and a significance that overpowers the first half of the book for me. There is a dedication at the beginning of the book that lets me know how important and close to the heart Mary Margaret Kaye held this portion of her tale.

The writing itself is beautiful throughout:

The years that had once seemed to drift by so slowly were now passing with ever-increasing swiftness, like a sluggish train that pants and jerks and puffs as it draws away from a station platform, and then, gathering speed, rattles forward faster and faster on the iron rails, eating up the miles as time eats up the years. And Ash, sitting cross-legged on the mud floor and gazing unseeingly at a white-washed wall, looked back down the long corridor of those years and saw many Zarins.

With the beauty of her writing, we readers look down that corridor and see all those Zarins as well.

It cannot be said of every 950 page book that nothing should or could have been edited out, but that was exactly how I felt about this one. Every word, every description, every nuance is deftly included and adds to the vision of this time, this history, this country, and these people.

The second half of this book, that was set in Afghanistan felt eerily like it might have come from the headlines of the 21st Century.

�...you know as well as I do that I must go on with it as long as there is a ghost of a chance that even at this eleventh hour reason may prevail; because Afghanistan is no country to fight a war in–and an impossible one to hold if you win.

I’m always finding examples of lessons we ought to have learned from history but fail to. This book was written in 1978, so I couldn’t help thinking these were events in which the past might have informed the future, but seem to have been ignored. I wonder if it isn’t because we always believe the other guy just didn’t do it right and we can do it better.

One of the best series of books ever written about India is The Raj Quartet by Paul Scott, and it was interesting to me to find that Scott was Kaye’s literary agent. The Raj Quartet is unforgettable and truly amazing. This book comes the closest to touching it of anything else I have ever read set in this period of India under British rule. From just a historical perspective it is a no-miss read. And, if your idea of a great book is an all-encompassing love story, gird your loins and dive right in, for it is surely that!]]> 4.20 1978
author: M.M. Kaye
name: Sara
average rating: 4.20
book published: 1978
rating: 4
read at: 2022/05/10
date added: 2023/01/03
shelves: 2022-aty-challenge, adventure, english-fiction, historical-fiction, india, literary-fiction, romance, war, epic
review:
“Thou art everywhere, but I worship thee here; Thou art without form, but I worship thee in these forms; Thou needest no praise, yet I offer thee these prayers and salutations.�
The prayer for the sins of human limitations.

When I was planning my year of reading and mentioned including this book, scores of people told me how wonderful it was and that they were excited for me. I now understand why I got that reaction. This is what an epic novel ought to be: characters that sing, a plot that twists and turns and always surprises, a foreign culture that you feel completely immersed in, history, over the top adventures, and of course, love.

Have you ever seen the movie Secondhand Lions? Well, the first part of this book feels like a real life version of the spectacular tale Garth tells Walter about Hub. Ash is larger than life, but then he is very lifelike. We believe in him and his abilities, but he isn’t always right or always able to pull it off, or always cool headed; what he is is always true to himself, filled with an innate courage, and blessed with the luck that only the gods can bestow.

Perhaps what makes this expansive book work so beautifully is that India of this era is such an expansive country, containing ancient places and ancient people of different religious and cultural backgrounds. M.M. Kaye lived in the country and knew its people, and her understanding of the complicated minds involved is always evident. I completely appreciated that none of the three distinct groups, the Hindi and Muslim natives nor the British Christians, is portrayed as either pure, innocent or evil.

This book spans India during the time of the Raj, and explores the parts and pockets that have not yet succumbed to the British influence. It centers on the royal houses, Ranas, Ranis, and Maharajas who are still in control of territory and bow only in appearance to the rule of the foreigners, then it sweeps into the problematic world of Afghanistan, where cultural miscalculation is deadly. What makes it special and completely believable is that the main character, Ash, is a Brit who was raised as a Hindi until he was twelve. He is truly part of both worlds and he understands India in a way that his peers do not, which enables him to go and do what it would normally seem a British soldier could not. All of the Indian characters are marvelous and we get to see an intimate side of both the Hindu and the Muslim nationals.

The novel takes a turn about midway, and it almost seems like we leave one book behind and enter another. It is done seamlessly, it is part of the plot that has already been established, but it has a feel and a significance that overpowers the first half of the book for me. There is a dedication at the beginning of the book that lets me know how important and close to the heart Mary Margaret Kaye held this portion of her tale.

The writing itself is beautiful throughout:

The years that had once seemed to drift by so slowly were now passing with ever-increasing swiftness, like a sluggish train that pants and jerks and puffs as it draws away from a station platform, and then, gathering speed, rattles forward faster and faster on the iron rails, eating up the miles as time eats up the years. And Ash, sitting cross-legged on the mud floor and gazing unseeingly at a white-washed wall, looked back down the long corridor of those years and saw many Zarins.

With the beauty of her writing, we readers look down that corridor and see all those Zarins as well.

It cannot be said of every 950 page book that nothing should or could have been edited out, but that was exactly how I felt about this one. Every word, every description, every nuance is deftly included and adds to the vision of this time, this history, this country, and these people.

The second half of this book, that was set in Afghanistan felt eerily like it might have come from the headlines of the 21st Century.

�...you know as well as I do that I must go on with it as long as there is a ghost of a chance that even at this eleventh hour reason may prevail; because Afghanistan is no country to fight a war in–and an impossible one to hold if you win.

I’m always finding examples of lessons we ought to have learned from history but fail to. This book was written in 1978, so I couldn’t help thinking these were events in which the past might have informed the future, but seem to have been ignored. I wonder if it isn’t because we always believe the other guy just didn’t do it right and we can do it better.

One of the best series of books ever written about India is The Raj Quartet by Paul Scott, and it was interesting to me to find that Scott was Kaye’s literary agent. The Raj Quartet is unforgettable and truly amazing. This book comes the closest to touching it of anything else I have ever read set in this period of India under British rule. From just a historical perspective it is a no-miss read. And, if your idea of a great book is an all-encompassing love story, gird your loins and dive right in, for it is surely that!
]]> 60353768 An alternative cover edition for this ISBN can be found here.

The author of award-winning Hamnet brings the world of Renaissance Italy to jewel-bright life in this unforgettable fictional portrait of the captivating young duchess Lucrezia de� Medici as she makes her way in a troubled court.

Florence, the 1550s. Lucrezia, third daughter of the grand duke, is comfortable with her obscure place in the palazzo: free to wonder at its treasures, observe its clandestine workings, and devote herself to her own artistic pursuits. But when her older sister dies on the eve of her wedding to the ruler of Ferrara, Modena and Reggio, Lucrezia is thrust unwittingly into the limelight: the duke is quick to request her hand in marriage, and her father just as quick to accept on her behalf.

Having barely left girlhood behind, Lucrezia must now enter an unfamiliar court whose customs are opaque and where her arrival is not universally welcomed. Perhaps most mystifying of all is her new husband himself, Alfonso. Is he the playful sophisticate he appeared to be before their wedding, the aesthete happiest in the company of artists and musicians, or the ruthless politician before whom even his formidable sisters seem to tremble?

As Lucrezia sits in constricting finery for a painting intended to preserve her image for centuries to come, one thing becomes worryingly clear. In the court’s eyes, she has one duty: to provide the heir who will shore up the future of the Ferranese dynasty. Until then, for all of her rank and nobility, the new duchess’s future hangs entirely in the balance.

Full of the beauty and emotion with which she illuminated the Shakespearean canvas of Hamnet, Maggie O’Farrell turns her talents to Renaissance Italy in an extraordinary portrait of a resilient young woman’s battle for her very survival.]]> 355 Maggie O'Farrell Sara 4 My Last Duchess, so I was immediately interested when I knew Maggie O’Farrell was writing a book based on the life of Lucrezia de Medici, whose portrait is said to have inspired the poem.

The book seemed to get off to a slow start, where O’Farrell normally pulls me in immediately, so I was in fear of disappointment, but I need not have worried. By the time Lucrezia married and headed off to Ferrara, I began to feel as if I knew her intimately. I became very invested in her struggle to make sense of her husband and her marriage and her efforts to maintain her identity in the face of the cruelties around her.

Lucrezia suddenly sees that some vital part of her will not bend, will never yield. She cannot help it—it is just the way she is built. And Alfonso, possessed of such a swift and perceptive way of reading people, must have sensed this. Why else would he have become so furious with her, if not to try to break down the walls of that citadel, capture it and declare himself victor?

While reading, I kept thinking about having all this happen, this ritual of marriage to a stranger and separation from every part of your world; the helplessness of being reared as a political pawn. This was, in truth, a way of life for women of royal birth for centuries upon centuries. I thought how frightening it would be for a woman, then I thought of what that would have felt like to a fifteen year old, and I quaked.

Maggie O’Farrell’s writing is powerful, her descriptions flawless.

And then it is done. The dress is on her. It reaches her ankles, it covers her wrists, it stands up on all sides of her, a fortress of silk. Above it is her piled hair, the ruby collar, below it her feet, now in satin shoes. In the mirror, she sees a girl surrounded by a sea of blue and gold, like an archangel fallen to earth.

I might have been present for this wedding, it was described so perfectly. I might have been the girl carrying the weight of that dress and those jewels.

This is historical fiction, not history, so liberties were taken, and that is always fine with me, as long as the author does not alter the basic facts that are known to be true. O’Farrell can be counted on for that, and then she can be counted on to supply the unknown details in such a way that they feel they might be the truth. Her imagination never fails her or her reader.
]]> 3.97 2022
author: Maggie O'Farrell
name: Sara
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2022/11/05
date added: 2022/11/29
shelves: borrowed-from-library, historical-fiction, italy, women-writers, family, 2022-aty-challenge
review:
4.5 stars. One of my favorite poems is Browning’s My Last Duchess, so I was immediately interested when I knew Maggie O’Farrell was writing a book based on the life of Lucrezia de Medici, whose portrait is said to have inspired the poem.

The book seemed to get off to a slow start, where O’Farrell normally pulls me in immediately, so I was in fear of disappointment, but I need not have worried. By the time Lucrezia married and headed off to Ferrara, I began to feel as if I knew her intimately. I became very invested in her struggle to make sense of her husband and her marriage and her efforts to maintain her identity in the face of the cruelties around her.

Lucrezia suddenly sees that some vital part of her will not bend, will never yield. She cannot help it—it is just the way she is built. And Alfonso, possessed of such a swift and perceptive way of reading people, must have sensed this. Why else would he have become so furious with her, if not to try to break down the walls of that citadel, capture it and declare himself victor?

While reading, I kept thinking about having all this happen, this ritual of marriage to a stranger and separation from every part of your world; the helplessness of being reared as a political pawn. This was, in truth, a way of life for women of royal birth for centuries upon centuries. I thought how frightening it would be for a woman, then I thought of what that would have felt like to a fifteen year old, and I quaked.

Maggie O’Farrell’s writing is powerful, her descriptions flawless.

And then it is done. The dress is on her. It reaches her ankles, it covers her wrists, it stands up on all sides of her, a fortress of silk. Above it is her piled hair, the ruby collar, below it her feet, now in satin shoes. In the mirror, she sees a girl surrounded by a sea of blue and gold, like an archangel fallen to earth.

I might have been present for this wedding, it was described so perfectly. I might have been the girl carrying the weight of that dress and those jewels.

This is historical fiction, not history, so liberties were taken, and that is always fine with me, as long as the author does not alter the basic facts that are known to be true. O’Farrell can be counted on for that, and then she can be counted on to supply the unknown details in such a way that they feel they might be the truth. Her imagination never fails her or her reader.

]]> 54120408
In Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro looks at our rapidly changing modern world through the eyes of an unforgettable narrator to explore a fundamental question: what does it mean to love?]]> 340 Kazuo Ishiguro 059331817X Sara 4 Never Let Me Go, mainly because it explores the feelings of those who are meant to have none--those who are meant to simply serve.

Klara is artificial intelligence carried to its logical extreme; she is an AF, artificial friend. It seems to me that she is, in fact, a true friend and exhibits far more feeling and moral character than the flawed humans around her. But then, isn’t that what it is to be human? To be human is to be flawed, confused, selfish, irrational. She is Mr. Data, but with a bit less grasp of her place in the scheme of things, and no Geordie to explain things or make her feel more like her human counterparts. She is solar powered, and for her the Sun is God. It would be easy to dismiss her childish misunderstanding, but her faith is strong, so what you feel as a reader is not dismissive, it is hopeful.

I enjoyed this, as I have enjoyed all the Ishiguro’s I have read. He is a superb writer, and while I keep hoping he will someday repeat for me the magic of Remains of the Day, I know that is just measuring him against his own best work…against others he always gets high marks.
]]> 3.71 2021
author: Kazuo Ishiguro
name: Sara
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2022/10/02
date added: 2022/11/29
shelves: borrowed-from-library, literary-fiction, sci-fi, speculative-fiction, 2022-aty-challenge
review:
If there is one thing you can say about Kazuo Ishiguro, it is that each novel he writes is different from the last. This one bears the most resemblance to Never Let Me Go, mainly because it explores the feelings of those who are meant to have none--those who are meant to simply serve.

Klara is artificial intelligence carried to its logical extreme; she is an AF, artificial friend. It seems to me that she is, in fact, a true friend and exhibits far more feeling and moral character than the flawed humans around her. But then, isn’t that what it is to be human? To be human is to be flawed, confused, selfish, irrational. She is Mr. Data, but with a bit less grasp of her place in the scheme of things, and no Geordie to explain things or make her feel more like her human counterparts. She is solar powered, and for her the Sun is God. It would be easy to dismiss her childish misunderstanding, but her faith is strong, so what you feel as a reader is not dismissive, it is hopeful.

I enjoyed this, as I have enjoyed all the Ishiguro’s I have read. He is a superb writer, and while I keep hoping he will someday repeat for me the magic of Remains of the Day, I know that is just measuring him against his own best work…against others he always gets high marks.

]]> 20834209 44 Charles Dickens 1495466914 Sara 4 essays, 2022-aty-challenge 3.46 2014
author: Charles Dickens
name: Sara
average rating: 3.46
book published: 2014
rating: 4
read at: 2022/08/16
date added: 2022/11/29
shelves: essays, 2022-aty-challenge
review:
Two lovely essays by Dickens on his family's favorite seaside vacation spots, one Broadstairs in England, and the other Boulogne in France. With his always delightful sense of fun and powers of description, Dickens makes you feel as if you, too, have visited these lovely towns and participated in the activities available there. I could not help thinking how wonderful it would be to have the resources to spend so much time in such a place that it begins to feel like a second home.
]]> 56294820
So Lucy is both surprised and not surprised when William asks her to join him on a trip to investigate a recently uncovered family secret—one of those secrets that rearrange everything we think we know about the people closest to us. What happens next is nothing less than another example of what Hilary Mantel has called Elizabeth Strout’s “perfect attunement to the human condition.� There are fears and insecurities, simple joys and acts of tenderness, and revelations about affairs and other spouses, parents and their children. On every page of this exquisite novel we learn more about the quiet forces that hold us together—even after we’ve grown apart.

At the heart of this story is the indomitable voice of Lucy Barton, who offers a profound, lasting reflection on the very nature of existence. “This is the way of life,� Lucy says: “the many things we do not know until it is too late.”]]> 240 Elizabeth Strout 0812989430 Sara 5
“Oh, William,� she said. And from there she told me about a trip they had recently taken together to Maine…but you can’t start there, you have to know some back story or the trip won’t make sense, so she began to tell me about her life, the one with William and the one without. She is a very good storyteller, my Lucy, she makes you want to sit and listen, and to listen between the lines.

Elizabeth Strout is so good at character creation that this is exactly what I felt as I was reading. I felt I knew Lucy and that she was simply telling me her story because the easiest way to sort yourself sometimes is to lay the feelings before a friend.

I wonder how anyone can read this book and not stumble across feelings that they recognize intimately. It might be different bits for different people, but every kind of humanity is buried in there somewhere. Lucy is so genuine in her efforts to understand herself. She knows her lack of confidence and self-worth come from her sorry childhood, but she cannot help feeling them anyway. Don’t we all carry those kinds of useless images in our heads?

I have always thought that if there was a big corkboard and on that board was a pin for every person who ever lived, there would be no pin for me.

That isn’t self-pity, it is self-awareness.

But when I think Oh William!, don’t I mean Oh Lucy! too? Don’t I mean Oh Everyone, Oh dear Everybody in this whole wide world, we do not know anybody, not even ourselves!

The older I get, the more resonance this statement has for me. We humans are such complicated creatures. We say what we do not mean, we put up fronts, we draw conclusions on only half the story, and we punish ourselves for other people’s faults.

I have no idea how Elizabeth Strout does it so effortlessly, but she seems to hold up a mirror to each of us and dare us to find the reflection there. There is already another Lucy story out there, waiting for me, and I will happily dive into it as soon as the library list whittles itself down to my name, because Lucy Barton is welcomed at my breakfast table any time.]]> 3.79 2021
author: Elizabeth Strout
name: Sara
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2022/10/13
date added: 2022/11/29
shelves: contemporary-fiction, family, borrowed-from-library, 2022-aty-challenge
review:
My friend, Lucy, came for a visit today. We sat down at the kitchen table, I poured the coffee, we debated about whether we ought to have a muffin to go with it, then I asked her about her ex-husband, William.

“Oh, William,� she said. And from there she told me about a trip they had recently taken together to Maine…but you can’t start there, you have to know some back story or the trip won’t make sense, so she began to tell me about her life, the one with William and the one without. She is a very good storyteller, my Lucy, she makes you want to sit and listen, and to listen between the lines.

Elizabeth Strout is so good at character creation that this is exactly what I felt as I was reading. I felt I knew Lucy and that she was simply telling me her story because the easiest way to sort yourself sometimes is to lay the feelings before a friend.

I wonder how anyone can read this book and not stumble across feelings that they recognize intimately. It might be different bits for different people, but every kind of humanity is buried in there somewhere. Lucy is so genuine in her efforts to understand herself. She knows her lack of confidence and self-worth come from her sorry childhood, but she cannot help feeling them anyway. Don’t we all carry those kinds of useless images in our heads?

I have always thought that if there was a big corkboard and on that board was a pin for every person who ever lived, there would be no pin for me.

That isn’t self-pity, it is self-awareness.

But when I think Oh William!, don’t I mean Oh Lucy! too? Don’t I mean Oh Everyone, Oh dear Everybody in this whole wide world, we do not know anybody, not even ourselves!

The older I get, the more resonance this statement has for me. We humans are such complicated creatures. We say what we do not mean, we put up fronts, we draw conclusions on only half the story, and we punish ourselves for other people’s faults.

I have no idea how Elizabeth Strout does it so effortlessly, but she seems to hold up a mirror to each of us and dare us to find the reflection there. There is already another Lucy story out there, waiting for me, and I will happily dive into it as soon as the library list whittles itself down to my name, because Lucy Barton is welcomed at my breakfast table any time.
]]> 63040 109 Victor Hugo 1843910071 Sara 3
The argument against the death sentence, I find, has changed very little from his time to ours. It is, indeed, excruciating to spend this time walking beside the convict as he is put through the ordeal of going to meet his execution at the guillotine. We are told nothing of the reason or circumstances of his crime beyond the fact that he is guilty, by his own admission, of murdering someone.

I am not making an argument for this being the correct or moral course of action for the state, but I could not help, when reading his laments about how his innocent mother, wife and child would suffer from his punishment, thinking that he might have thought of them before committing the crime, knowing what the sentence would surely be. Also, some thought should be given to the death sentence he has pronounced on another person, who surely had a mother, and perhaps a wife and daughter, as well.

The treatise is meant to make the issue seem simple, when in truth I wonder if there could possibly be a more complicated issue, or one that torments the minds of society more. I found the read both interesting and disturbing. It is not the first time I have contemplated the issue, nor, I'm sure, will it be the last. To say that every case is very individual might sound naive, but I do think circumstances matter and that capital punishment should never be given unless there is 100% proof of guilt. At this time, the guillotine was in much too frequent use, executions were public, and the blood that had run in the streets during the revolution was not forgotten. I think Hugo a brave man to take on the system and thought of Mr. Dickens, who was pressing the same case in England.]]> 4.04 1829
author: Victor Hugo
name: Sara
average rating: 4.04
book published: 1829
rating: 3
read at: 2022/10/31
date added: 2022/11/29
shelves: philosophy, death, 19th-century-literature, french, short-stories-novellas, 2022-aty-challenge
review:
Victor Hugo's examination of the mind of a condemned man was doubtless a very shocking and moving epistle in its time. He obviously took some time to research and know every step of a condemned man's last days, from the time he was sentenced to the day of execution, which in those days was a very brief interval. The reader is meant to feel the anguish and despair of the situation, and it is apparent that Hugo, himself, decried capital punishment.

The argument against the death sentence, I find, has changed very little from his time to ours. It is, indeed, excruciating to spend this time walking beside the convict as he is put through the ordeal of going to meet his execution at the guillotine. We are told nothing of the reason or circumstances of his crime beyond the fact that he is guilty, by his own admission, of murdering someone.

I am not making an argument for this being the correct or moral course of action for the state, but I could not help, when reading his laments about how his innocent mother, wife and child would suffer from his punishment, thinking that he might have thought of them before committing the crime, knowing what the sentence would surely be. Also, some thought should be given to the death sentence he has pronounced on another person, who surely had a mother, and perhaps a wife and daughter, as well.

The treatise is meant to make the issue seem simple, when in truth I wonder if there could possibly be a more complicated issue, or one that torments the minds of society more. I found the read both interesting and disturbing. It is not the first time I have contemplated the issue, nor, I'm sure, will it be the last. To say that every case is very individual might sound naive, but I do think circumstances matter and that capital punishment should never be given unless there is 100% proof of guilt. At this time, the guillotine was in much too frequent use, executions were public, and the blood that had run in the streets during the revolution was not forgotten. I think Hugo a brave man to take on the system and thought of Mr. Dickens, who was pressing the same case in England.
]]> 37732
But none of them can believe Margaret doesn’t have religion, and that she isn’t going to the Y or the Jewish Community Center. What they don’t know is Margaret has her own very special relationship with God. She can talk to God about everything—family, friends, even Moose Freed, her secret crush.

Margaret is funny and real, and her thoughts and feelings are oh-so-relatable—you’ll feel like she’s talking right to you, sharing her secrets with a friend.]]> 149 Judy Blume 0689841582 Sara 2
It is the story of young Margaret, who moves from her New York home to a New Jersey suburb and begins a new life with new friends there. In her efforts to find her place, she struggles to determine what religion she wishes to be, because she is a product of a Jewish-Christian marriage, and her parents follow no religion at all.

I felt the book rather strongly disparaged any religion and painted both sets of grandparents as narrow-minded and bigoted because of their beliefs, but the Christian couple were portrayed as truly obnoxious. It conflicts with my own views too much to garner much praise from me and I would not be handing it to my own child to read without having a lot of discussion about the values of both faith and tolerance. I also think a sixth grader is old enough to know that a religious faith is more than a decision between whether you want to belong to the YMCA or the Jewish Center, so I think the premise of this book also sells children of this age short.
]]> 3.93 1970
author: Judy Blume
name: Sara
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1970
rating: 2
read at: 2022/11/13
date added: 2022/11/18
shelves: 2022-aty-challenge, children-s-literature, coming-of-age, religion
review:
I find it so difficult to judge a book that I know, in part, does not appeal to me because I was never its intended audience. This is no doubt an interesting read for a 9-12 years old child, but without much to hold an adult reader. I have heard so much about this author and the substance of her writing that I was surprised to find so little to admire.

It is the story of young Margaret, who moves from her New York home to a New Jersey suburb and begins a new life with new friends there. In her efforts to find her place, she struggles to determine what religion she wishes to be, because she is a product of a Jewish-Christian marriage, and her parents follow no religion at all.

I felt the book rather strongly disparaged any religion and painted both sets of grandparents as narrow-minded and bigoted because of their beliefs, but the Christian couple were portrayed as truly obnoxious. It conflicts with my own views too much to garner much praise from me and I would not be handing it to my own child to read without having a lot of discussion about the values of both faith and tolerance. I also think a sixth grader is old enough to know that a religious faith is more than a decision between whether you want to belong to the YMCA or the Jewish Center, so I think the premise of this book also sells children of this age short.

]]> 6991058 Requiem by Fire, Caldwell returns to the same fertile Appalachian ground that provided the setting for his first novel, recalling a singular time in American history when the greater good may not have been best for everyone.

    In the late 1920s, Cataloochee, North Carolina, a settlement tucked deep in the Great Smoky Mountains, is home to nearly eleven hundred souls—many of them prosperous farmers whose ancestors broke the first furrows a century earlier. Now attorney Oliver Babcock, Jr., has been given the difficult task of presenting the locals with two options: sell their land to the federal government for the creation of a national park or remain behind at their own financial peril. 

    While some of the area’s inhabitants seem ready to embrace a new and modern life, others, deeply embedded in their rural ways, are resistant. Silas Wright’s cantankerous unwillingness to sell or to follow the new rules leads to some knotty and often amusing predicaments. Jim Hawkins, hired by the Parks commission, has relocated his reluctant wife, Nell, and their children to Cataloochee, but Nell’s unhappiness forces Jim to make a dire choice between his roots and his family. And a sinister force is at work in the form of the deranged Willie McPeters, who threatens those who have decided to stay put.

    Requiem by Fire is a moving, timeless tale of survival and change. With humor and pathos, this magnificent novel transports readers to another time and place—and celebrates Southern storytelling at its finest.]]> 352 Wayne Caldwell 1400063442 Sara 5 Cataloochee.

Requiem by Fire is the continuation of the Cataloochee story and deals directly with the establishment of the Park and the almost cruel way in which people were evicted from their homes to make it happen. Caldwell is one of the most even-handed writers I have ever encountered. He does not draw black and white pictures, he paints in color. He lays all the facts and feelings before you and he lets you decide. After all, these are human beings and there are all kinds of motivations and emotions that go with that. I understood the desire to protect the area and build the Park, but I mostly felt the anguish of the men and women who had already invested lifetimes into this soil and these mountains, being told they might not even be allowed to be buried next to their kin in their own family cemeteries.

The mountain flavor here is genuine, the dialog perfection. Silas Wright, an old timer, says these words to Jim Hawkins, the newly minted warden who also happens to be born and raised in Cataloochee himself:

”What’s fine at seven in the morning can be awful at midnight. Seven in the morning, a man’s got some small reason to hope he’ll have a good day. Come dark, he knows he ain’t had one, and he’s got eight more hours to put up with whatever ghosts his mind might care to entertain.�

For me, this rang so true.

There is a way of life being lost, and as the older Cataloochians reminisce, we realize it was a way of life already abandoned in the valley, years ago. I became very attached to several of these characters, Silas, Mary Carver, and Jim; I cringed at at least one of them, the despicable Willie McPeters, and pitied the young ones, riding off to the city, who would never know what they had lost.

Wayne Caldwell is an amazing writer and a consummate storyteller. I hope to see many more gripping tales penned by his hand before he is through. I know he admires Wendell Berry, he quotes him in his opening to this book, and he is one of a rare handful of writers who might be able to fill his shoes.
]]> 3.88 2010
author: Wayne Caldwell
name: Sara
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2010
rating: 5
read at: 2022/07/14
date added: 2022/08/22
shelves: american, appalachian, depression-era, favorites, historical-fiction, literary-fiction, nature, southern-lit, 2022-aty-challenge
review:
I have made countless treks into the Blue Ridge Mountains, growing up in North Georgia and having people in Tennessee. To my shame, I don’t believe I ever gave a thought to how many people were displaced by the establishment of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, how their land was taken from them, or the personal heartache that was suffered in order to give the land over to the enjoyment of the population in general. That is, I never gave it a thought until I stumbled across Wayne Caldwell’s Cataloochee.

Requiem by Fire is the continuation of the Cataloochee story and deals directly with the establishment of the Park and the almost cruel way in which people were evicted from their homes to make it happen. Caldwell is one of the most even-handed writers I have ever encountered. He does not draw black and white pictures, he paints in color. He lays all the facts and feelings before you and he lets you decide. After all, these are human beings and there are all kinds of motivations and emotions that go with that. I understood the desire to protect the area and build the Park, but I mostly felt the anguish of the men and women who had already invested lifetimes into this soil and these mountains, being told they might not even be allowed to be buried next to their kin in their own family cemeteries.

The mountain flavor here is genuine, the dialog perfection. Silas Wright, an old timer, says these words to Jim Hawkins, the newly minted warden who also happens to be born and raised in Cataloochee himself:

”What’s fine at seven in the morning can be awful at midnight. Seven in the morning, a man’s got some small reason to hope he’ll have a good day. Come dark, he knows he ain’t had one, and he’s got eight more hours to put up with whatever ghosts his mind might care to entertain.�

For me, this rang so true.

There is a way of life being lost, and as the older Cataloochians reminisce, we realize it was a way of life already abandoned in the valley, years ago. I became very attached to several of these characters, Silas, Mary Carver, and Jim; I cringed at at least one of them, the despicable Willie McPeters, and pitied the young ones, riding off to the city, who would never know what they had lost.

Wayne Caldwell is an amazing writer and a consummate storyteller. I hope to see many more gripping tales penned by his hand before he is through. I know he admires Wendell Berry, he quotes him in his opening to this book, and he is one of a rare handful of writers who might be able to fill his shoes.

]]> 1040722 216 May Sinclair 1840224924 Sara 4 Chilling story of the consequences of sin. What makes it most frightening is that you know the main character, Harriott Leigh, could too easily be you.

The Token - 4
A ghostly visit in search of love.

The Flaw in the Crystal - 3
Agatha has a power of which she is not in control but with which she heals others. This one got a bit out there and parts of it didn’t even make sense to me.

The Nature of the Evidence - 4
You might not want to be the second wife if the dead first wife isn’t quite finished yet.

If The Dead Knew - 5
I loved this one. What do the dead know of what we who are left behind think and feel? Wilfrid loves his mother, but it is only with her death that he can afford to marry, so he has a heart at war with itself.

The Victim - 4
Reminded me of the Tell-Tale Heart initially, but took a very different turn before the end. I found the end a little impractical, but then who expects a practical ghost story, I suppose.

The Finding of the Absolute - 2
This one was both weird and a little above me. I never understood Kant very well on earth, in heaven his theories seem even murkier.

The Intercessor - 5
I found this the best story in the book. Mr. Garvin seeks a quiet place to lodge and work and finds himself referred to the home of the Falshaw’s. It is obvious that something sinister has happened here and in the room where he sleeps at night, he hears the mysterious cries of a child. What ensues is eventually a story of child abandonment, parental misdeeds, and a mother’s remorse. This story has a more gothic feel than the others, and put me in mind of Emily Bronte and the loneliness of the heaths.




]]> 3.70 1923
author: May Sinclair
name: Sara
average rating: 3.70
book published: 1923
rating: 4
read at: 2022/07/26
date added: 2022/08/22
shelves: short-stories-novellas, gothic, ghost, fantasy, 20th-century-literature, women-writers, 2022-aty-challenge
review:
Where Their Fire is Not Quenched - 5
Chilling story of the consequences of sin. What makes it most frightening is that you know the main character, Harriott Leigh, could too easily be you.

The Token - 4
A ghostly visit in search of love.

The Flaw in the Crystal - 3
Agatha has a power of which she is not in control but with which she heals others. This one got a bit out there and parts of it didn’t even make sense to me.

The Nature of the Evidence - 4
You might not want to be the second wife if the dead first wife isn’t quite finished yet.

If The Dead Knew - 5
I loved this one. What do the dead know of what we who are left behind think and feel? Wilfrid loves his mother, but it is only with her death that he can afford to marry, so he has a heart at war with itself.

The Victim - 4
Reminded me of the Tell-Tale Heart initially, but took a very different turn before the end. I found the end a little impractical, but then who expects a practical ghost story, I suppose.

The Finding of the Absolute - 2
This one was both weird and a little above me. I never understood Kant very well on earth, in heaven his theories seem even murkier.

The Intercessor - 5
I found this the best story in the book. Mr. Garvin seeks a quiet place to lodge and work and finds himself referred to the home of the Falshaw’s. It is obvious that something sinister has happened here and in the room where he sleeps at night, he hears the mysterious cries of a child. What ensues is eventually a story of child abandonment, parental misdeeds, and a mother’s remorse. This story has a more gothic feel than the others, and put me in mind of Emily Bronte and the loneliness of the heaths.





]]> 32051912
1947. In the chaotic aftermath of World War II, American college girl Charlie St. Clair is pregnant, unmarried, and on the verge of being thrown out of her very proper family. She's also nursing a desperate hope that her beloved cousin Rose, who disappeared in Nazi-occupied France during the war, might still be alive. So when Charlie's parents banish her to Europe to have her "little problem" taken care of, Charlie breaks free and heads to London, determined to find out what happened to the cousin she loves like a sister.

1915. A year into the Great War, Eve Gardiner burns to join the fight against the Germans and unexpectedly gets her chance when she's recruited to work as a spy. Sent into enemy-occupied France, she's trained by the mesmerizing Lili, code name Alice, the "queen of spies", who manages a vast network of secret agents right under the enemy's nose.

Thirty years later, haunted by the betrayal that ultimately tore apart the Alice Network, Eve spends her days drunk and secluded in her crumbling London house. Until a young American barges in uttering a name Eve hasn't heard in decades, and launches them both on a mission to find the truth...no matter where it leads.]]> 503 Kate Quinn 0062654195 Sara 4
The historical elements of this book are both fascinating and surprising, for me. I had no idea that there were networks of female spies during World War I. I think of that as an activity more geared to World War II and times when women were breaking free a bit from the stereotypes of domesticity. The Alice Network existed, as did one of the central characters here, Louise de Bettignies. Even Eve Gardiner, a fully fictional character, sprang from a very real event that occurred during the operation of the Alice Network itself.

There is a second timeline working in this novel, and this one is set in the aftermath of World War II. Quinn sets up a remarkably clever way of linking the war and the people from the two timelines together. It worked. What is also helpful is that her incorporation of true historical events from World War I is carried over into her depiction of World War II. The massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane took place exactly in the manner it is given to us in the novel.

It is this devotion to historical fact that makes the fictional pieces of the novel work so well for me. I had no problem fitting our little American girl, Charlie St. Claire, or the Scotsman, Finn Kilgore, into the tapestry Quinn has woven. There are a few implausible plot devices, which I think are unavoidable in this kind of novel, after all chasing down the past is never as easy in life as it is in fiction and some coincidence is almost required. I suppose in life we would call it good fortune if we always found the end of the string we were tugging.

I thoroughly enjoyed this read and will put the other Quinn’s a bit up the ladder. I always feel I have so much catch-up to do, and yet I am reading as fast as these old eyes can manage or time will allow. It is nice to have a go-to author that can be fitted between the reads that are deep and sober…something light and fun.
]]> 4.30 2017
author: Kate Quinn
name: Sara
average rating: 4.30
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2022/07/30
date added: 2022/08/22
shelves: pleasure-reading, world-war-1, women-writers, historical-fiction, spy-thriller, borrowed-from-library, 2022-aty-challenge
review:
I put The Alice Network on my reading list back in 2017, where it has languished, getting an occasional glance and a promise to self to “get to it.� Meanwhile, Kate Quinn has released several other books and all my GR friends have read them and rated them highly. So, this week I plucked The Alice Network from obscurity and made Kate Quinn an author that I have finally read.

The historical elements of this book are both fascinating and surprising, for me. I had no idea that there were networks of female spies during World War I. I think of that as an activity more geared to World War II and times when women were breaking free a bit from the stereotypes of domesticity. The Alice Network existed, as did one of the central characters here, Louise de Bettignies. Even Eve Gardiner, a fully fictional character, sprang from a very real event that occurred during the operation of the Alice Network itself.

There is a second timeline working in this novel, and this one is set in the aftermath of World War II. Quinn sets up a remarkably clever way of linking the war and the people from the two timelines together. It worked. What is also helpful is that her incorporation of true historical events from World War I is carried over into her depiction of World War II. The massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane took place exactly in the manner it is given to us in the novel.

It is this devotion to historical fact that makes the fictional pieces of the novel work so well for me. I had no problem fitting our little American girl, Charlie St. Claire, or the Scotsman, Finn Kilgore, into the tapestry Quinn has woven. There are a few implausible plot devices, which I think are unavoidable in this kind of novel, after all chasing down the past is never as easy in life as it is in fiction and some coincidence is almost required. I suppose in life we would call it good fortune if we always found the end of the string we were tugging.

I thoroughly enjoyed this read and will put the other Quinn’s a bit up the ladder. I always feel I have so much catch-up to do, and yet I am reading as fast as these old eyes can manage or time will allow. It is nice to have a go-to author that can be fitted between the reads that are deep and sober…something light and fun.

]]> 139069 The harrowing tale of British explorer Ernest Shackleton's 1914 attempt to reach the South Pole, one of the greatest adventure stories of the modern age.

In August 1914, polar explorer Ernest Shackleton boarded the Endurance became locked in an island of ice. Thus began the legendary ordeal of Shackleton and his crew of twenty-seven men. When their ship was finally crushed between two ice floes, they attempted a near-impossible journey over 850 miles of the South Atlantic's heaviest seas to the closest outpost of civilization.

In Endurance, the definitive account of Ernest Shackleton's fateful trip, Alfred Lansing brilliantly narrates the harrowing and miraculous voyage that has defined heroism for the modern age.

First edition: here.]]> 282 Alfred Lansing Sara 5 But the sea is a different sort of enemy. Unlike the land, where courage and the simple will to endure can often see a man through, the struggle against the sea is an act of physical combat, and there is no escape. It is a battle against a tireless enemy in which man never actually wins; the most that he can hope for is not to be defeated.

Wow, who knew an account of a failed expedition across Antarctica could be so emotional. I feel I crossed a continent with these men and that I was cold and hungry and wet, always wet. And, it was miserable, but these men were amazingly optimistic and congenial and stoic. I am sure I would have been worthless and depressed just watching the ship, the Endurance, fall into the sea, crushed by ice pressure. I know I would have been devastated by some of the difficult tasks they had to perform and some of the things they were required to eat.

The heart of this journey was Ernest Shackleton himself, a man who led quietly and competently and never despaired; a man who showed great care and concern for his men and made tough decisions without looking backward; and a man who never gave up his faith or tenacity in the face of unbelievable odds.

When I had finished reading the book, I went online to find the pictures were taken on the voyage and survived. They were amazing and reinforced, even more, the courage and resilience needed to endure this catastrophe.



I enjoyed every page of this book, and as I always say when I have finished such an historical account, I need to read more non-fiction!
]]> 4.42 1959
author: Alfred Lansing
name: Sara
average rating: 4.42
book published: 1959
rating: 5
read at: 2022/08/20
date added: 2022/08/22
shelves: non-fiction, seafaring, adventure, exploration, 2022-aty-challenge
review:
But the sea is a different sort of enemy. Unlike the land, where courage and the simple will to endure can often see a man through, the struggle against the sea is an act of physical combat, and there is no escape. It is a battle against a tireless enemy in which man never actually wins; the most that he can hope for is not to be defeated.

Wow, who knew an account of a failed expedition across Antarctica could be so emotional. I feel I crossed a continent with these men and that I was cold and hungry and wet, always wet. And, it was miserable, but these men were amazingly optimistic and congenial and stoic. I am sure I would have been worthless and depressed just watching the ship, the Endurance, fall into the sea, crushed by ice pressure. I know I would have been devastated by some of the difficult tasks they had to perform and some of the things they were required to eat.

The heart of this journey was Ernest Shackleton himself, a man who led quietly and competently and never despaired; a man who showed great care and concern for his men and made tough decisions without looking backward; and a man who never gave up his faith or tenacity in the face of unbelievable odds.

When I had finished reading the book, I went online to find the pictures were taken on the voyage and survived. They were amazing and reinforced, even more, the courage and resilience needed to endure this catastrophe.



I enjoyed every page of this book, and as I always say when I have finished such an historical account, I need to read more non-fiction!

]]> 51190 Oroonoko reflects the author's romantic views of native peoples as being in "the first state of innocence, before man knew how to sin." The novel also reveals Behn's ambiguous attitude toward slavery: while she favored it as a means to strengthen England's power, her powerful and moving work conveys its injustice and brutality.]]> 144 Aphra Behn 0140439889 Sara 3
I think this is worthwhile as a measure of how early the use of slave labor was recognized as being immoral in truth. Written in the 1600's there can be no doubt that Behn was bothered by the institution as it existed. There is a morbid fascination you feel while reading it. I wanted to put it aside, and yet I wanted to finish to the bitter end.]]> 3.01 1688
author: Aphra Behn
name: Sara
average rating: 3.01
book published: 1688
rating: 3
read at: 2022/07/05
date added: 2022/08/22
shelves: english-fiction, classics, slavery, africa, south-america, 2022-aty-challenge
review:
The story of Oroonoko, a prince, and his wife, Imoinda. Imoinda is a beauty and Oroonoko's grandfather, the king, wishes to have her for his own. Both Imoinda and Oroonoko are subsequently enslaved. Inspired by a trip to Surinam, Aphra Behn's view of slaves is very much of her time--a sort of mingling of the noble savage, fierce warrior myth and the born to serve myth.

I think this is worthwhile as a measure of how early the use of slave labor was recognized as being immoral in truth. Written in the 1600's there can be no doubt that Behn was bothered by the institution as it existed. There is a morbid fascination you feel while reading it. I wanted to put it aside, and yet I wanted to finish to the bitter end.
]]> 690442
Charlie is by no means the typical cowboy hero. Self-sufficient, courageous, with a strong sense of right and wrong, he is also old and overweight, a thoroughly believable human being who has trouble communicating with the wife who loyally struggles to keep life in its pattern, the son who has no feel for the land but yearns for the rodeo circuit, the Mexican family who has worked for him for years and whose help he can no longer afford.

Although Charlie never loses his dignity and never quits, he does not win out in the end. When the drought breaks, it has lasted too long and he is too old. There is no surprise ending to this story, no magical solution to the harsh realities of life in West Texas. The reading of this novel lies not in what happens next but in the unfolding depth of a strong character and the clear picture of a time and a place.]]> 416 Elmer Kelton 0812574516 Sara 5 A year like this one anything you do is a mistake. Just being a rancher is a mistake. Only real difference I see between ranching and poker is, with poker you got some chance.

This is an age-old story of man against nature, man against man, and man against government; and Elmer Kelton tells it so well that you can feel that he has lived much of it in his own lifetime. There is a drought in West Texas, where Charlie Flagg owns a ranch and leases another large section of land to run cattle and sheep. Drought is not a new experience for Charlie, he has lived through the big drought of 1933, but this drought is to prove different, this one continues beyond the limits of memory and leaves few men standing in its wake.

It was a comforting sight, this country. It was an ageless land where the past was still a living thing and old voices still whispered, where the freshness of the pioneer time had not yet all faded, where a few of the old dreams were not yet dark and tarnish.

Charlie loves this land and he lives in the memories of the old days, when the line between right and wrong was less gray and more black and white. He is a bit of an anachronism, but that is because he still has the honor and dignity of the best of his generation. He pulls his own weight, and he doesn’t want a handout.

His son, Tom, has a young man’s view of life. He wants to make the rodeo circuit. He doesn’t understand his father’s brand of pride and principle, and he certainly fails to have his wisdom.

Tom Flagg said behind him, “I’d testify to anything for a free trip to Washington.� Charlie grumbled, “There’s damn little in this life that ever comes free. One way or another, you pay for what you get.�

Charlie’s hired man is Lupe Flores, who has lived in the house next door to Charlie’s, raised his large family, and managed the ranch, working alongside Charlie for years. Through Lupe, and his son, Manuel, we get a chance to look at Mexican-Anglo relationships and the fight a man like Charlie has between what is expected, which is to look down at the Mexican population, and what he truly feels, which is respect and a knowledge of how much he depends on this good man who works beside him.

To make things worse, the government programs that were promised as help for the farmers and ranchers in the region are proving to be a sand trap in themselves, and those who might have survived otherwise are being pulled down by them.

There was a time when we looked up to Uncle Sam; he was something to be proud of and respect. Now he’s turned into some kind of muddle-brained sugar daddy givin� out goodies right and left in the hopes everybody is going to love him…It’s divided us into little selfish groups, snarlin� and snappin� at each other like hungry dogs, grabbin� for what we can get and to hell with everybody else.

This book might be labeled as a “western�, but like so many great books, it is more than the label it is slapped with…it is a book about humanity, about struggle and about perseverance; it is a book about survival–it just happens to be set in the West.

My thanks to the Southern Literary Trail for making this our August selection and to Howard, whose remarkable review let me know that regardless of what I had planned, this book was not one I wanted to miss reading.

Howard’s Review]]> 4.29 1973
author: Elmer Kelton
name: Sara
average rating: 4.29
book published: 1973
rating: 5
read at: 2022/07/31
date added: 2022/08/17
shelves: 20th-century-literature, american, american-west, archive-org, historical-fiction, literary-fiction, southern-lit, survival, western, 2022-aty-challenge
review:
A year like this one anything you do is a mistake. Just being a rancher is a mistake. Only real difference I see between ranching and poker is, with poker you got some chance.

This is an age-old story of man against nature, man against man, and man against government; and Elmer Kelton tells it so well that you can feel that he has lived much of it in his own lifetime. There is a drought in West Texas, where Charlie Flagg owns a ranch and leases another large section of land to run cattle and sheep. Drought is not a new experience for Charlie, he has lived through the big drought of 1933, but this drought is to prove different, this one continues beyond the limits of memory and leaves few men standing in its wake.

It was a comforting sight, this country. It was an ageless land where the past was still a living thing and old voices still whispered, where the freshness of the pioneer time had not yet all faded, where a few of the old dreams were not yet dark and tarnish.

Charlie loves this land and he lives in the memories of the old days, when the line between right and wrong was less gray and more black and white. He is a bit of an anachronism, but that is because he still has the honor and dignity of the best of his generation. He pulls his own weight, and he doesn’t want a handout.

His son, Tom, has a young man’s view of life. He wants to make the rodeo circuit. He doesn’t understand his father’s brand of pride and principle, and he certainly fails to have his wisdom.

Tom Flagg said behind him, “I’d testify to anything for a free trip to Washington.� Charlie grumbled, “There’s damn little in this life that ever comes free. One way or another, you pay for what you get.�

Charlie’s hired man is Lupe Flores, who has lived in the house next door to Charlie’s, raised his large family, and managed the ranch, working alongside Charlie for years. Through Lupe, and his son, Manuel, we get a chance to look at Mexican-Anglo relationships and the fight a man like Charlie has between what is expected, which is to look down at the Mexican population, and what he truly feels, which is respect and a knowledge of how much he depends on this good man who works beside him.

To make things worse, the government programs that were promised as help for the farmers and ranchers in the region are proving to be a sand trap in themselves, and those who might have survived otherwise are being pulled down by them.

There was a time when we looked up to Uncle Sam; he was something to be proud of and respect. Now he’s turned into some kind of muddle-brained sugar daddy givin� out goodies right and left in the hopes everybody is going to love him…It’s divided us into little selfish groups, snarlin� and snappin� at each other like hungry dogs, grabbin� for what we can get and to hell with everybody else.

This book might be labeled as a “western�, but like so many great books, it is more than the label it is slapped with…it is a book about humanity, about struggle and about perseverance; it is a book about survival–it just happens to be set in the West.

My thanks to the Southern Literary Trail for making this our August selection and to Howard, whose remarkable review let me know that regardless of what I had planned, this book was not one I wanted to miss reading.

Howard’s Review
]]> 32080126 Olive Kitteridge in its richness, structure, and complexity, Anything Is Possible explores the whole range of human emotion through the intimate dramas of people struggling to understand themselves and others.

Here are two sisters: One trades self-respect for a wealthy husband while the other finds in the pages of a book a kindred spirit who changes her life. The janitor at the local school has his faith tested in an encounter with an isolated man he has come to help; a grown daughter longs for mother love even as she comes to accept her mother’s happiness in a foreign country; and the adult Lucy Barton (the heroine of My Name Is Lucy Barton, the author’s celebrated New York Times bestseller) returns to visit her siblings after seventeen years of absence.

Reverberating with the deep bonds of family, and the hope that comes with reconciliation, Anything Is Possible again underscores Elizabeth Strout’s place as one of America’s most respected and cherished authors.]]> 254 Elizabeth Strout 0812989406 Sara 4 How did you ever know? You never knew anything, and anyone who thought they knew anything—well, they were in for a great big surprise.

What a lot of sad and broken lives Strout gives us in what is billed as the second of the Lucy Barton novels. Lucy is here, but it isn’t exclusively about her this time, it is about so many others and so much more. I began, not having read any blurbs, and not realizing this was meant to be loosely connected short stories. Lacking that information ahead of time, I felt initially that the book “bounced� too much. I would be interested in a character or story and then be propelled to someone else entirely. But there was a thread of sadness that ran throughout and a kind of desperate grasping for hope among so many of these downtrodden people, that it began to feel cohesive in a strange sort of way.

In the end, what I saw were two kinds of people, well-maybe three. There are those who have a tough life and strive to rise above it, to live a life that is better and to free themselves, in whatever small way they can, from the past and/or the horrible. There are also those who build their lives around the disasters, take their entire meaning from them, chew on them like a pleasant, juicy bone. And, there are those who cause the misery; broken themselves, they seem to want to break anyone and everyone else around them. Dividing the people in the book into these three categories isn’t as easy as it might seem.

I find Elizabeth Strout a great observer of the human soul, a writer who can, and is not afraid to, look beneath the surface. I cannot help wondering what horrors she has seen or experienced in life, but it really matters not a whit, because she knows them as they exist in others and has a crafty way of putting them on paper.


]]> 3.74 2017
author: Elizabeth Strout
name: Sara
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2022/08/17
date added: 2022/08/17
shelves: borrowed-from-library, contemporary-fiction, short-stories-novellas, women-writers, 2022-aty-challenge
review:
How did you ever know? You never knew anything, and anyone who thought they knew anything—well, they were in for a great big surprise.

What a lot of sad and broken lives Strout gives us in what is billed as the second of the Lucy Barton novels. Lucy is here, but it isn’t exclusively about her this time, it is about so many others and so much more. I began, not having read any blurbs, and not realizing this was meant to be loosely connected short stories. Lacking that information ahead of time, I felt initially that the book “bounced� too much. I would be interested in a character or story and then be propelled to someone else entirely. But there was a thread of sadness that ran throughout and a kind of desperate grasping for hope among so many of these downtrodden people, that it began to feel cohesive in a strange sort of way.

In the end, what I saw were two kinds of people, well-maybe three. There are those who have a tough life and strive to rise above it, to live a life that is better and to free themselves, in whatever small way they can, from the past and/or the horrible. There are also those who build their lives around the disasters, take their entire meaning from them, chew on them like a pleasant, juicy bone. And, there are those who cause the misery; broken themselves, they seem to want to break anyone and everyone else around them. Dividing the people in the book into these three categories isn’t as easy as it might seem.

I find Elizabeth Strout a great observer of the human soul, a writer who can, and is not afraid to, look beneath the surface. I cannot help wondering what horrors she has seen or experienced in life, but it really matters not a whit, because she knows them as they exist in others and has a crafty way of putting them on paper.



]]> 43800725 482 Nevil Shute 1773234145 Sara 4
World War Two has ended, but rations are still on in England, and life in Europe seems to have no opportunities left, particularly for the young. Jennifer Morton is one of those young Londoners, working away at a job that has no future and a life that seems unpromising, but a twist of fate provides her with an opportunity to visit Australia, and everything in her life changes.

Carl Zlinter is a Czechoslovakian doctor who emigrated to Australia after the war. As an immigrant, he is not allowed to practice medicine in his new country, and he must work a two-year stint as a laborer with a logging concern. He isn’t allowed to practice, but his skills as a doctor are much needed in the remote area in which he is working, so his fellow workers come to know him as a man who can be called on when first aid is needed.

Jenny and Carl meet, but as might be expected, the situation is not ideal, nor is it easy to imagine what future they might have together, given the circumstances they are in. Just the kind of love story that Nevil Shute is so very good at writing!

I was caught up in this tale from beginning to end. It is obvious that Shute, himself a new Australian, was enamored of his adopted land and distressed at the direction he felt his home country of England was taking. This is Australia the way I would have imagined it at this time, and I’m sure it was a land of plenty and a land of opportunity after the ravages of a World War. The descriptions of both the land and its people are part of what pulls you into the novel immediately. The contrasts he draws between Australia and England make it all the more enticing.

Another down in my quest to read all of Shute’s novels. This one earns a thumbs up.
]]> 4.47 1952
author: Nevil Shute
name: Sara
average rating: 4.47
book published: 1952
rating: 4
read at: 2022/07/22
date added: 2022/07/22
shelves: obscure, 2022-aty-challenge, 20th-century-literature, australia, historical-fiction, kindle-purchase, romance
review:
4.5 Stars.

World War Two has ended, but rations are still on in England, and life in Europe seems to have no opportunities left, particularly for the young. Jennifer Morton is one of those young Londoners, working away at a job that has no future and a life that seems unpromising, but a twist of fate provides her with an opportunity to visit Australia, and everything in her life changes.

Carl Zlinter is a Czechoslovakian doctor who emigrated to Australia after the war. As an immigrant, he is not allowed to practice medicine in his new country, and he must work a two-year stint as a laborer with a logging concern. He isn’t allowed to practice, but his skills as a doctor are much needed in the remote area in which he is working, so his fellow workers come to know him as a man who can be called on when first aid is needed.

Jenny and Carl meet, but as might be expected, the situation is not ideal, nor is it easy to imagine what future they might have together, given the circumstances they are in. Just the kind of love story that Nevil Shute is so very good at writing!

I was caught up in this tale from beginning to end. It is obvious that Shute, himself a new Australian, was enamored of his adopted land and distressed at the direction he felt his home country of England was taking. This is Australia the way I would have imagined it at this time, and I’m sure it was a land of plenty and a land of opportunity after the ravages of a World War. The descriptions of both the land and its people are part of what pulls you into the novel immediately. The contrasts he draws between Australia and England make it all the more enticing.

Another down in my quest to read all of Shute’s novels. This one earns a thumbs up.

]]> 79550
Full of brusque humour and wisdom, The Summer Book is a profoundly life-affirming story. Tove Jansson captured much of her own experience and spirit in the book, which was her favourite of the novels she wrote for adults. This new edition sees the return of a European literary gem—fresh, authentic and deeply humane.]]> 192 Tove Jansson 0954221710 Sara 4
There is a kind of serene loveliness to this book, which is more a series of vignettes than an actual novel. It is summer and Sophia and her grandmother share adventures, break the rules, and befriend one another; one on a path of discovery and the other contemplating and sharing all the things she has gleaned over a lifetime. And, sometimes it is the young who have the wisdom.

It's funny about love', Sophia said. 'The more you love someone, the less he likes you back.'
'That's very true,' Grandmother observed. 'And so what do you do?'
'You go on loving,' said Sophia threateningly. 'You love harder and harder.

Jansson transports us to this island and helps us to see it through the loving eyes of a person who has known it forever and the wondering eyes of a person who is just discovering all its hidden treasures. I kept thinking of another work of this type, The Country of the Pointed Firs and Other Stories, in which the natural environment is almost a character itself. The Summer Book gave me that same immersed feeling.

We end the book with the first indicators that fall is approaching.

It is still summer, but the summer is no longer alive. It has come to a standstill; nothing withers, and fall is not ready to begin. There are no stars yet, just darkness.

And we know, if the child does not, that the summers of her grandmother are limit; she has already passed into the autumn of her life and winter is nipping at her heels. But what a blessed thing this time is for them both, for Grandmother has a chance to see the wonder that her life has been and Sophia is building memories that will someday stand in for this person she must surely lose.

This is not a melancholy book, but there is a trace of melancholy that runs beneath its surface, and a current of joy as well.
]]> 4.05 1972
author: Tove Jansson
name: Sara
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1972
rating: 4
read at: 2022/06/29
date added: 2022/06/29
shelves: 2022-aty-challenge, aging, archive-org, family, multi-generational, women-writers
review:
Perhaps children and the very elderly are closer to God, or at least closer to nature, because one is newly born and knows little and the other is near death and knows too much. While reading this sweet story of a grandmother and grandchild sharing their summer on a Finnish island, I kept thinking of them as opposite ends of a spectrum and yet as alike as two newly-minted pennies.

There is a kind of serene loveliness to this book, which is more a series of vignettes than an actual novel. It is summer and Sophia and her grandmother share adventures, break the rules, and befriend one another; one on a path of discovery and the other contemplating and sharing all the things she has gleaned over a lifetime. And, sometimes it is the young who have the wisdom.

It's funny about love', Sophia said. 'The more you love someone, the less he likes you back.'
'That's very true,' Grandmother observed. 'And so what do you do?'
'You go on loving,' said Sophia threateningly. 'You love harder and harder.

Jansson transports us to this island and helps us to see it through the loving eyes of a person who has known it forever and the wondering eyes of a person who is just discovering all its hidden treasures. I kept thinking of another work of this type, The Country of the Pointed Firs and Other Stories, in which the natural environment is almost a character itself. The Summer Book gave me that same immersed feeling.

We end the book with the first indicators that fall is approaching.

It is still summer, but the summer is no longer alive. It has come to a standstill; nothing withers, and fall is not ready to begin. There are no stars yet, just darkness.

And we know, if the child does not, that the summers of her grandmother are limit; she has already passed into the autumn of her life and winter is nipping at her heels. But what a blessed thing this time is for them both, for Grandmother has a chance to see the wonder that her life has been and Sophia is building memories that will someday stand in for this person she must surely lose.

This is not a melancholy book, but there is a trace of melancholy that runs beneath its surface, and a current of joy as well.

]]> 48862 ISBN 9780099478478 moved to this edition.
A gang war is raging through the dark underworld of Brighton. Seventeen-year-old Pinkie, malign and ruthless, has killed a man. Believing he can escape retribution, he is unprepared for the courageous, life-embracing Ida Arnold. Greene's gripping thriller, exposes a world of loneliness and fear, of life lived on the 'dangerous edge of things'.

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY J.M. COETZEE]]> 269 Graham Greene Sara 4
Rose is a young girl who knows something she should not know, information that might threaten Pinkie. He needs to keep her close, so he pretends to woo her, and in her naivety, she believes. Her involvement with Pinkie leads her into places a young innocent should not go, and we see her struggle with her feelings and beliefs.

At one point in the story, Pinkie pushes a group of blind musicians off the roadside because they are blocking his way.

but he hadn’t realized they were blind, he was shocked by his own action. It was as if he were being driven too far down a road he only wanted to travel a certain distance.

What Greene seems to be saying in much of the book is that once we begin to depart into the path of evil, we find ourselves trapped on a road that has no exit.

As he so often does, Graham tackles the question of morality and sin, personal responsibility, and Roman Catholic doctrine through several of his characters: The ruthless Pinkie, the naive and innocent Rose, and the worldly but good-hearted Ida. He explores the difference between religion and morality and the nature of mercy. The surface of the tale might be rather simple, the underside, of course, is not. Greene is nothing if not complex and insightful.

Despite the depths Greene attempts to plumb, this is not his best work, from my point of view. I did not find a single character to relate to or invest in, and I even found the story tedious in spots. But, a lesser Greene novel is better than many another author’s best work, for he always has something of import to say. It is an early work, with the spark of genius skimming the surface and never truly reaching the heights that his later works do. Brighton Rock does not have the humor that underpins Our Man in Havana, the emotional impact of The End of the Affair, the character development of The Quiet American, or the philosophical intelligence of The Power and the Glory. I have come, in fact, to expect so much excellence from Greene that anything less than tremendous seems a letdown. I am still quite glad to have read this, and excited to see what his other novels that I have yet to read will have to offer.]]> 3.69 1938
author: Graham Greene
name: Sara
average rating: 3.69
book published: 1938
rating: 4
read at: 2022/01/23
date added: 2022/06/27
shelves: kindle-purchase, literary-fiction, murder, religion, 2022-aty-challenge
review:
Graham Greene has many different faces, as I have discovered in reading his other novels, and Brighton Rock seemed to me to offer yet another side of a multi-faceted writer. Brighton Rock is a murder story, which follows the brief career of Pinkie, a seventeen year old who has taken over as leader of the mob after the murder of its previous leader, Kite. Pinkie is a paranoid who has obviously had a rough life and has learned the ways of the street. He is overconfident, cruel minded, and in over his head. He is a ruthless character.

Rose is a young girl who knows something she should not know, information that might threaten Pinkie. He needs to keep her close, so he pretends to woo her, and in her naivety, she believes. Her involvement with Pinkie leads her into places a young innocent should not go, and we see her struggle with her feelings and beliefs.

At one point in the story, Pinkie pushes a group of blind musicians off the roadside because they are blocking his way.

but he hadn’t realized they were blind, he was shocked by his own action. It was as if he were being driven too far down a road he only wanted to travel a certain distance.

What Greene seems to be saying in much of the book is that once we begin to depart into the path of evil, we find ourselves trapped on a road that has no exit.

As he so often does, Graham tackles the question of morality and sin, personal responsibility, and Roman Catholic doctrine through several of his characters: The ruthless Pinkie, the naive and innocent Rose, and the worldly but good-hearted Ida. He explores the difference between religion and morality and the nature of mercy. The surface of the tale might be rather simple, the underside, of course, is not. Greene is nothing if not complex and insightful.

Despite the depths Greene attempts to plumb, this is not his best work, from my point of view. I did not find a single character to relate to or invest in, and I even found the story tedious in spots. But, a lesser Greene novel is better than many another author’s best work, for he always has something of import to say. It is an early work, with the spark of genius skimming the surface and never truly reaching the heights that his later works do. Brighton Rock does not have the humor that underpins Our Man in Havana, the emotional impact of The End of the Affair, the character development of The Quiet American, or the philosophical intelligence of The Power and the Glory. I have come, in fact, to expect so much excellence from Greene that anything less than tremendous seems a letdown. I am still quite glad to have read this, and excited to see what his other novels that I have yet to read will have to offer.
]]> 13760 167 Conrad Richter 0821409786 Sara 5 The Trees is the first of a trilogy in Conrad Richter’s American saga, The Awakening Land: The Trees, The Fields, & The Town. Whenever I read about the settling of this country, I am taken with the strength of the people who forged ahead to unknown places and dangers, leaving all they knew behind them forever. Such a family are the Luckett’s, Worth, Jary, and their five children, who leave Pennsylvania for the uncharted forests of Ohio, and such a family stands behind all of us whose families founded the U.S. and Canada.

The main character followed through the book is the oldest daughter, Sayward, who is a monument to strong women everywhere. She is physically able and quick, but it is her mental endurance that left me awed. Even one of the tragedies she faces would be too much for many of us, but we know that only the strong survive and only the strongest build. For if Sayward is anything, she is a builder, a worker, and a woman who will leave more behind her than she finds.

I had no difficulty in relating to each of the characters in the book. The rugged loner, that is Sayward’s father, Worth; the reluctant mother who follows him into places she never wishes to go, the children who adapt to whatever environment they are thrown into, and the good and evil people that come to populate their world–all seem real. There are no stereotypes here, even though several of the characters could easily have become that.

There are, of course, nuggets of truth sprinkled among these pages. When Sayward is wishing to make some Moss Tea, her Mother’s recipe, she can only remember pieces of the procedure and she reflects, “What moss it was and what you did then was forever buried now under the big white oak.� Do you think we all die with things we know that nobody else ever will? I do. I wish there were a million things I had thought to ask my Mama when she was here with me, and my Daddy was a fountain of folklore and family stories that have disappeared except in snatches over the years. Like Sayward, we don’t often think of it until it is too late.

This novel reads easily and feels very authentic, as if Richter might have lived in those times himself. If I had a complaint it would be that it ends abruptly, but then that wouldn’t be a valid complaint because it is part of a trilogy and Sayward and all the others are just waiting for me to pick them up again in The Fields, which I am quite anxious to do.
]]> 3.99 1940
author: Conrad Richter
name: Sara
average rating: 3.99
book published: 1940
rating: 5
read at: 2022/06/27
date added: 2022/06/27
shelves: 20th-century-literature, american, coming-of-age, family, historical-fiction, nature, pioneers, siblings, archive-org, 2022-aty-challenge
review:
The Trees is the first of a trilogy in Conrad Richter’s American saga, The Awakening Land: The Trees, The Fields, & The Town. Whenever I read about the settling of this country, I am taken with the strength of the people who forged ahead to unknown places and dangers, leaving all they knew behind them forever. Such a family are the Luckett’s, Worth, Jary, and their five children, who leave Pennsylvania for the uncharted forests of Ohio, and such a family stands behind all of us whose families founded the U.S. and Canada.

The main character followed through the book is the oldest daughter, Sayward, who is a monument to strong women everywhere. She is physically able and quick, but it is her mental endurance that left me awed. Even one of the tragedies she faces would be too much for many of us, but we know that only the strong survive and only the strongest build. For if Sayward is anything, she is a builder, a worker, and a woman who will leave more behind her than she finds.

I had no difficulty in relating to each of the characters in the book. The rugged loner, that is Sayward’s father, Worth; the reluctant mother who follows him into places she never wishes to go, the children who adapt to whatever environment they are thrown into, and the good and evil people that come to populate their world–all seem real. There are no stereotypes here, even though several of the characters could easily have become that.

There are, of course, nuggets of truth sprinkled among these pages. When Sayward is wishing to make some Moss Tea, her Mother’s recipe, she can only remember pieces of the procedure and she reflects, “What moss it was and what you did then was forever buried now under the big white oak.� Do you think we all die with things we know that nobody else ever will? I do. I wish there were a million things I had thought to ask my Mama when she was here with me, and my Daddy was a fountain of folklore and family stories that have disappeared except in snatches over the years. Like Sayward, we don’t often think of it until it is too late.

This novel reads easily and feels very authentic, as if Richter might have lived in those times himself. If I had a complaint it would be that it ends abruptly, but then that wouldn’t be a valid complaint because it is part of a trilogy and Sayward and all the others are just waiting for me to pick them up again in The Fields, which I am quite anxious to do.

]]> 754792 501 Catherine Marshall 0380440326 Sara 3
There is much truth, and dozens of truisms, in this book. Catherine Marshall was married to a famous pastor and she has a serious purpose in mind in writing this book. It is a Christian story and meant to be a serious search into what Christianity entails for the individual.

Already I could see that although I tried to capture truth, truth could never be wholly contained in words. All of us know it: at the same moment the mouth is speaking one thing, the heart is saying another; or events are carrying us in one direction when all the while the real life of the spirit is marching in another.

Embedded in the novel are some beautiful observations and descriptions of life in the mountains of Tennessee and the troubles and joys that come with an isolated life. Living among descendants of Scottish clansmen, the girl, Christy, is forced to look at life through a different lens and put aside some of the ideas that come from a privileged, educated city life.

Once I began to notice I heard the old ballads everywhere. Strange how music and poetry can preserve the feel of another way of life. Sitting on a cabin porch, I’d see an English manor house with clipped lawns and lords and ladies strolling arm in arm.

The first half of the book seemed quite lovely to me. The weight of the second half was at times overwhelming. It simply went on too long. The religious philosophy stretched itself into passages that seemed more like sermons. I agreed with Marshall’s points and themes, but I admit to wanting to get back to the story, and ultimately to the end.

So many people never pause long enough to make up their minds about basic issues of life and death. It’s quite possible to go through your whole life, making the mechanical motions of living, adopting as your own sets of ideas you’ve picked up some place or other, and die–never having come to any conclusion for yourself as to what life is all about.

On how to justify a belief in immortality:

Because man’s a part of the natural order, and dying each winter and being resurrected each spring is part of the rhythm, the normal ebb and flow of life. Surely if it happens to mere flowers and trees, it happens to us.�

There is wisdom in both those passages, and one that struck me as quite significant to today’s world circumstances was this one:

I’d long since learned that no difference in viewpoint should ever be allowed to cause the least break in love. Indeed, it cannot, if it is real love.

I am not sorry to have read this book, and I would heartily recommend it to anyone who is soul searching or trying to understand the nature of God and the struggles of what God might have planned for your life that you cannot know to plan for yourself.



]]> 4.23 1967
author: Catherine Marshall
name: Sara
average rating: 4.23
book published: 1967
rating: 3
read at: 2022/03/07
date added: 2022/06/19
shelves: religion, southern-lit, appalachian, american, coming-of-age, historical-fiction, archive-org, 2022-aty-challenge
review:
I first read this book when I was a teenager, and I remembered really nothing of the story except that Christy was a girl who left her home in Asheville to work at a mission in the Appalachians and that I had liked the book. I think this book was more geared to my younger self, that youthful person still searching for her own path in life and wanting to codify her beliefs.

There is much truth, and dozens of truisms, in this book. Catherine Marshall was married to a famous pastor and she has a serious purpose in mind in writing this book. It is a Christian story and meant to be a serious search into what Christianity entails for the individual.

Already I could see that although I tried to capture truth, truth could never be wholly contained in words. All of us know it: at the same moment the mouth is speaking one thing, the heart is saying another; or events are carrying us in one direction when all the while the real life of the spirit is marching in another.

Embedded in the novel are some beautiful observations and descriptions of life in the mountains of Tennessee and the troubles and joys that come with an isolated life. Living among descendants of Scottish clansmen, the girl, Christy, is forced to look at life through a different lens and put aside some of the ideas that come from a privileged, educated city life.

Once I began to notice I heard the old ballads everywhere. Strange how music and poetry can preserve the feel of another way of life. Sitting on a cabin porch, I’d see an English manor house with clipped lawns and lords and ladies strolling arm in arm.

The first half of the book seemed quite lovely to me. The weight of the second half was at times overwhelming. It simply went on too long. The religious philosophy stretched itself into passages that seemed more like sermons. I agreed with Marshall’s points and themes, but I admit to wanting to get back to the story, and ultimately to the end.

So many people never pause long enough to make up their minds about basic issues of life and death. It’s quite possible to go through your whole life, making the mechanical motions of living, adopting as your own sets of ideas you’ve picked up some place or other, and die–never having come to any conclusion for yourself as to what life is all about.

On how to justify a belief in immortality:

Because man’s a part of the natural order, and dying each winter and being resurrected each spring is part of the rhythm, the normal ebb and flow of life. Surely if it happens to mere flowers and trees, it happens to us.�

There is wisdom in both those passages, and one that struck me as quite significant to today’s world circumstances was this one:

I’d long since learned that no difference in viewpoint should ever be allowed to cause the least break in love. Indeed, it cannot, if it is real love.

I am not sorry to have read this book, and I would heartily recommend it to anyone who is soul searching or trying to understand the nature of God and the struggles of what God might have planned for your life that you cannot know to plan for yourself.




]]> 3359564 599 Ken Kesey 0553121820 Sara 5 To know a thing you have to trust what you know, and all that you know, and as far as you know in whatever direction your knowing drags you.

One of the things I know is that Ken Kesey was a one of a kind writer, who knew his craft and invented his own style. Beginning this book can be off-putting, because there isn’t a narrator for the story--Kesey bounces around inside the heads of a dozen characters, switching without warning from one to the other, and making you dizzy with trying to sort out whose thoughts you are following. He also does nothing as mundane as telling a story in a linear fashion, oh no, he bounces time frames almost as much as he does characters in the beginning. But read on! When you have settled into the rhythm of what he is doing, he begins to tell a more linear tale and it becomes obvious to you who is speaking and why it is important not to follow this story through the eyes of only one character or even an omniscient being.

I found his descriptions and language beautiful. It was as close to being on an Oregon river in the winter as I would ever want to come; it was closer than I would ever want to get to a logging operation. The prose is beautiful, but there is also a touch of the poetic in his writing, as I think is demonstrated in this passage:

But the breath of memory still plucks such instances, setting the whole web shaking. People fade up the stairs, but to dream of each other’s dreams; of days coming gone and nights past coming; of hard sun-rods crisscrossing back and forward across outspreading circles of water, meaningless-seeming�

The Stamper family are loggers and rugged individualists. They don’t ask for anything and they give little thought to anyone outside their family circle. Henry Stamper is the patriarch of the clan and son, Hank is the heart and the driving force. When all the logging operations unionize and go out on strike, the Stamper’s non-union business takes up the major contract in the area, defying the strikers. Everyone is against them; the town is against them. Youngest son, Leland, is a college kid, raised in the city, away from this world, since the age of twelve. He has a decided problem with his older brother, and much of the angst and tension is heightened by the silent duel Lee is constantly fighting in his mind. He has come home, ostensibly to help with fulfilling the contract, but mostly for the personal satisfaction of proving he is able to dethrone his older brother. As if it were needed to add to the edginess, there is a woman involved.

This is a very long book and not a wasted page in it, with themes that are as large as the outdoorsmen who inhabit it. Sibling rivalry, individuals vs. organizations, brotherhood and the love between men who share daily dangers, how the needs of a woman differ from those of a man, and what love really is anyway, play out in the unwinding of the novel.

For there is always a sanctuary more, a door that can never be forced, a last inviolable stronghold that can never be taken, whatever the attack; your vote can be taken, you name, you innards, or even your life, but that last stonghold can only be surrendered. And to surrender it for any reason other than love is to surrender love.

If you like books that literally transport you to another world and hold you there, this book is for you. I thought about it after I turned the lights out at night. It haunted my sleep and distracted me from my duties. It consumed me. And, it made me twitch with the restlessness of these men and shake and worry for their safety from the environment, from the people around them, and from one another. This is a masterpiece.
]]> 4.28 1964
author: Ken Kesey
name: Sara
average rating: 4.28
book published: 1964
rating: 5
read at: 2022/06/13
date added: 2022/06/19
shelves: american, archive-org, family, favorites, literary-fiction, siblings, survival, tragedy, 2022-aty-challenge
review:
To know a thing you have to trust what you know, and all that you know, and as far as you know in whatever direction your knowing drags you.

One of the things I know is that Ken Kesey was a one of a kind writer, who knew his craft and invented his own style. Beginning this book can be off-putting, because there isn’t a narrator for the story--Kesey bounces around inside the heads of a dozen characters, switching without warning from one to the other, and making you dizzy with trying to sort out whose thoughts you are following. He also does nothing as mundane as telling a story in a linear fashion, oh no, he bounces time frames almost as much as he does characters in the beginning. But read on! When you have settled into the rhythm of what he is doing, he begins to tell a more linear tale and it becomes obvious to you who is speaking and why it is important not to follow this story through the eyes of only one character or even an omniscient being.

I found his descriptions and language beautiful. It was as close to being on an Oregon river in the winter as I would ever want to come; it was closer than I would ever want to get to a logging operation. The prose is beautiful, but there is also a touch of the poetic in his writing, as I think is demonstrated in this passage:

But the breath of memory still plucks such instances, setting the whole web shaking. People fade up the stairs, but to dream of each other’s dreams; of days coming gone and nights past coming; of hard sun-rods crisscrossing back and forward across outspreading circles of water, meaningless-seeming�

The Stamper family are loggers and rugged individualists. They don’t ask for anything and they give little thought to anyone outside their family circle. Henry Stamper is the patriarch of the clan and son, Hank is the heart and the driving force. When all the logging operations unionize and go out on strike, the Stamper’s non-union business takes up the major contract in the area, defying the strikers. Everyone is against them; the town is against them. Youngest son, Leland, is a college kid, raised in the city, away from this world, since the age of twelve. He has a decided problem with his older brother, and much of the angst and tension is heightened by the silent duel Lee is constantly fighting in his mind. He has come home, ostensibly to help with fulfilling the contract, but mostly for the personal satisfaction of proving he is able to dethrone his older brother. As if it were needed to add to the edginess, there is a woman involved.

This is a very long book and not a wasted page in it, with themes that are as large as the outdoorsmen who inhabit it. Sibling rivalry, individuals vs. organizations, brotherhood and the love between men who share daily dangers, how the needs of a woman differ from those of a man, and what love really is anyway, play out in the unwinding of the novel.

For there is always a sanctuary more, a door that can never be forced, a last inviolable stronghold that can never be taken, whatever the attack; your vote can be taken, you name, you innards, or even your life, but that last stonghold can only be surrendered. And to surrender it for any reason other than love is to surrender love.

If you like books that literally transport you to another world and hold you there, this book is for you. I thought about it after I turned the lights out at night. It haunted my sleep and distracted me from my duties. It consumed me. And, it made me twitch with the restlessness of these men and shake and worry for their safety from the environment, from the people around them, and from one another. This is a masterpiece.

]]> 49011 126 Angela Carter 014017821X Sara 4
The Bloody Chamber is a retelling of Perrault’s Bluebeard fairy tale. I had recently read a collection of stories by Margaret Atwood in which this story was retold, so it was interesting to contrast what the two authors did with the same tell. Angela Carter has a marvelous skill for describing the eerie and setting the mood, and she is all suggestion and atmosphere.

“Soon�, he said in his resonant voice that was like the tolling of a bell, and I felt, all at once, a sharp premonition of dread that lasted only as long as the match flared and I could see his white, broad face as if it were hovering, disembodied, above the sheets, illuminated from below like a grotesque carnival head.

We know our lady is in peril from the outset, but we little expect how the rest of her story will unfold. Carter is inventive.

I particularly enjoyed the next two tales, The Courtship of Mr. Lyon and The Tiger’s Bride. Both are retellings of Beauty and the Beast, with The Tiger’s Bride being a reverse tale in which the girl changes into a beast at the end, rather than the other way around. It is not the only reversal in the tale, and the contrasts were beautifully conceived and executed. Both have the rose of virginity, the sexual desire of the heroine exploited, the them of inner darkness, the insecurity of the beast, and the poor girl who is traded by her father to regain his lost fortune. What is amazing is how differently she constructs the plot elements, so that the tales, while essentially the same, are so vastly different. This isn't Disney's Belle.

My father, of course, believed in miracles; what gambler does not?

I drew the curtains to conceal the sight of my father’s farewell, my spite was sharp as broken glass.

A few less captivating, but well-written, tales follow: Puss in Boots; The Snow Child (which I found a bit disturbing); The Lady of the House of Love (a vampire tale); The Erl King (a tale of seduction and enlightenment); and Wolf-Alice.

Then another pair of tales that turn Little Red Riding Hood on its head. The Werewolf which has a sinister twist of betrayal, with the Grandmother paying the price, and The Company of Wolves which has Red submitting to sex with the wolf, which wins the day.

These stories served as bedtime fare for me, but they are far from being soothing or sleep-inducing. If you are not careful, they will, rather, induce nightmares.



]]> 3.96 1979
author: Angela Carter
name: Sara
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1979
rating: 4
read at: 2022/06/09
date added: 2022/06/19
shelves: short-stories-novellas, horror, retelling, fairytale, archive-org, 2022-aty-challenge
review:
This collection is a group of fairy tales, rewritten, reimagined, and given the sensual, sexual connotations that are only implied in the originals. They are not lewd, they are tactile. These are stories as familiar as our childhood beds, but these are not fairy tales for children.

The Bloody Chamber is a retelling of Perrault’s Bluebeard fairy tale. I had recently read a collection of stories by Margaret Atwood in which this story was retold, so it was interesting to contrast what the two authors did with the same tell. Angela Carter has a marvelous skill for describing the eerie and setting the mood, and she is all suggestion and atmosphere.

“Soon�, he said in his resonant voice that was like the tolling of a bell, and I felt, all at once, a sharp premonition of dread that lasted only as long as the match flared and I could see his white, broad face as if it were hovering, disembodied, above the sheets, illuminated from below like a grotesque carnival head.

We know our lady is in peril from the outset, but we little expect how the rest of her story will unfold. Carter is inventive.

I particularly enjoyed the next two tales, The Courtship of Mr. Lyon and The Tiger’s Bride. Both are retellings of Beauty and the Beast, with The Tiger’s Bride being a reverse tale in which the girl changes into a beast at the end, rather than the other way around. It is not the only reversal in the tale, and the contrasts were beautifully conceived and executed. Both have the rose of virginity, the sexual desire of the heroine exploited, the them of inner darkness, the insecurity of the beast, and the poor girl who is traded by her father to regain his lost fortune. What is amazing is how differently she constructs the plot elements, so that the tales, while essentially the same, are so vastly different. This isn't Disney's Belle.

My father, of course, believed in miracles; what gambler does not?

I drew the curtains to conceal the sight of my father’s farewell, my spite was sharp as broken glass.

A few less captivating, but well-written, tales follow: Puss in Boots; The Snow Child (which I found a bit disturbing); The Lady of the House of Love (a vampire tale); The Erl King (a tale of seduction and enlightenment); and Wolf-Alice.

Then another pair of tales that turn Little Red Riding Hood on its head. The Werewolf which has a sinister twist of betrayal, with the Grandmother paying the price, and The Company of Wolves which has Red submitting to sex with the wolf, which wins the day.

These stories served as bedtime fare for me, but they are far from being soothing or sleep-inducing. If you are not careful, they will, rather, induce nightmares.




]]> 8646 Crow Lake is that rare find, a first novel so quietly assured, so emotionally pitch perfect, you know from the opening page that this is the real thing—a literary experience in which to lose yourself, by an author of immense talent.

Here is a gorgeous, slow-burning story set in the rural “badlands� of northern Ontario, where heartbreak and hardship are mirrored in the landscape. For the farming Pye family, life is a Greek tragedy where the sins of the fathers are visited on the sons, and terrible events occur—offstage.

Centerstage are the Morrisons, whose tragedy looks more immediate if less brutal, but is, in reality, insidious and divisive. Orphaned young, Kate Morrison was her older brother Matt’s protegee, her fascination for pond life fed by his passionate interest in the natural world. Now a zoologist, she can identify organisms under a microscope but seems blind to the state of her own emotional life. And she thinks she’s outgrown her siblings—Luke, Matt, and Bo—who were once her entire world.

In this universal drama of family love and misunderstandings, of resentments harbored and driven underground, Lawson ratchets up the tension with heartbreaking humor and consummate control, continually overturning one’s expectations right to the very end. Tragic, funny, unforgettable, this deceptively simple masterpiece about the perils of hero worship leapt to the top of the bestseller lists only days after being released in Canada and earned glowing reviews in The New York Times and The Globe and Mail, to name a few.]]> 320 Mary Lawson 0385337639 Sara 4
Kate’s parents are killed very early in the narrative and the burden of raising two little sisters falls upon the two boys in the family, twenty year old Luke and eighteen year old Matt. Luke is poised to step off into the world and attend university and Matt is in his final year of high school. To say that their lives are turned upside-down is an understatement. The youngest daughter, Bo, is only two, very self-willed, thumb-sucking and in need of constant attention; Kate is just beginning to find her identity and shape her dreams; everyone is fragile.

From this tragedy, Lawson spins a magnificent tale of love, disappointment, and family dynamics. It is painful at times to watch these youngsters struggle with issues that would be too weighty for much older and cooler heads. The extra character in this book is the town of Crow Lake, itself. A small, isolated town, with one store, a church and scattered farms, it is described beautifully and plays as important a part in the unfolding history of the Morrisons as the children themselves.

A lovely read. Not my last Lawson, as I am happy to find I have one more already sitting on my physical bookshelf hoping to be picked soon.
]]> 3.96 2002
author: Mary Lawson
name: Sara
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2002
rating: 4
read at: 2022/06/19
date added: 2022/06/19
shelves: 2022-aty-challenge, family, pleasure-reading
review:
The story of Crow Lake is told to us by the third of four siblings, Kate Morrison, looking back on her eight year old self and the events of a summer that changed the trajectory of her life and the life of her beloved brother, Matt. The thing that Lawson does that makes this book sing is create the relationship between Kate and Matt in such a way that we feel their bond and their emotions, and we hurt for the older Kate who has let so much of what went wrong shape her feelings toward life and love.

Kate’s parents are killed very early in the narrative and the burden of raising two little sisters falls upon the two boys in the family, twenty year old Luke and eighteen year old Matt. Luke is poised to step off into the world and attend university and Matt is in his final year of high school. To say that their lives are turned upside-down is an understatement. The youngest daughter, Bo, is only two, very self-willed, thumb-sucking and in need of constant attention; Kate is just beginning to find her identity and shape her dreams; everyone is fragile.

From this tragedy, Lawson spins a magnificent tale of love, disappointment, and family dynamics. It is painful at times to watch these youngsters struggle with issues that would be too weighty for much older and cooler heads. The extra character in this book is the town of Crow Lake, itself. A small, isolated town, with one store, a church and scattered farms, it is described beautifully and plays as important a part in the unfolding history of the Morrisons as the children themselves.

A lovely read. Not my last Lawson, as I am happy to find I have one more already sitting on my physical bookshelf hoping to be picked soon.

]]> 467316 From Paulette Jiles, the acclaimed New York Times bestselling author of Enemy Women, comes a poignant and unforgettable story of hardship, sacrifice, and strength in a tragic time—and of a desperate dream born of an undying faith in the arrival of a better day

Oil is king of East Texas during the darkest years of the Great Depression. The Stoddard girls—responsible Mayme, whip-smart tomboy Jeanine, and bookish Bea—know no life but an itinerant one, trailing their father from town to town as he searches for work on the pipelines and derricks; that is, when he's not spending his meager earnings at gambling joints, race tracks, and dance halls. And in every small town in which the windblown family settles, mother Elizabeth does her level best to make each sparse, temporary house they inhabit a home.

But the fall of 1937 ushers in a year of devastating drought and dust storms, and the family's fortunes sink further than they ever anticipated when a questionable "accident" leaves Elizabeth and her girls alone to confront the cruelest hardships of these hardest of times. With no choice left to them, they return to the abandoned family farm.

It is Jeanine, proud and stubborn, who single-mindedly devotes herself to rebuilding the farm and their lives. But hard work and good intentions won't make ends meet or pay the back taxes they owe on their land. In desperation, the Stoddard women place their last hopes for salvation in a wildcat oil well that eats up what little they have left . . . and on the back of late patriarch Jack's one true legacy, a dangerous racehorse named Smoky Joe. And Jeanine, the fatherless "daddy's girl," must decide if she will gamble it all . . . on love.]]> 352 Paulette Jiles 0060537329 Sara 4 “Jeanine you’re just always messing with me.�
“I know it.�


The weather in Texas is stormy, but not with rain. This is the world of Texas oil fields, of dust-bowl drought, of abject poverty and the wildcat oil rigs and sleek race horses that promise to buy a reprieve from it. It is the world of the Great Depression and Jeanine Stoddard is a spunky young lady, unafraid of hard work and at home in the man’s world through which her charming ne'er-do-well father drags her.

Perhaps one of the themes of this book is how important it is to be an individual and lay your own course, but also how easily you can slip into the world you dream of and, doing so, lose your way in the world that is real. Nothing impressed this upon me like the following passage, in which it is impossible not to see Jack Stoddard as someone, like all the rest of us, who simply lost his way and cannot handle the responsibility he has taken on.

He had grown up on the land that is now Camp Wolters in Central Texas, near Mineral Wells. He had grown up there when it was open country covered with the wind-worn pelt of native grasses. Once he had come upon the skull of a Comanche with a bullet hole in the cheekbone and after some exploration he had found the thighbones and ribs and tangles of buckskin fringe. During high school in Mineral Wells he had memorized Travis� last letter from the Alamo and declaimed it at graduation. He used to ride the Mineral Wells street railway to Elmhurst Park where there was a racetrack and a casino and the wind made women’s long dresses fly up so you could see black stocking garters with the red marks they made and it moved him in inexplicable ways so that he laughed and elbowed Chigger Bates. He had seen Yellow Jacket run the 880. He shifted his feet and smoked and said we all wanted our parents to be better parents.

One of my favorite characters is Ross Everett. For me he exudes personality. He is strong and tough, but also sensitive and caring, with a quick wit and a dry sense of humor. I had an absolute idea of him in my mind, down to the tilt of his head when he dusts dirt off his stetson. The love affair here is a teasing game, and I read it knowing that I was being teased right along with the lovers.

Much of what makes this book special for me is the nostalgia it evokes for the world just before World War II, that was cruel, but in so many ways, so sweet. The strong family ties, the descriptions of the towns, the relationships that develop, and the haphazard nature of happiness, are drawn with such detail and credibility. There is the impossible nature of the Depression:

Nothing could ever be fixed, no matter how hard Jeanine tried. It all just broke again but there was no other way but to lay hands on the pieces and fit them together, make them work.

And the poignant observation of how precarious existence is:

Everything had a family to feed, it was just a matter of who ate who and devil take the hindmost.

And yet there is so much love on every page, Jack’s love for Jeanine and hers for him, the love of the girls for one another and their mother, the love that plays in and out between two of the main characters, and the simple love of the neighbors who plow the fields and lend a hand. I was caught up in it immediately and hated to reach the end and know the story was done.

Paulette Jiles is an astute and skilled storyteller. I have spent time with her in five books and I am anxious and ready to do it again. She has a penchant for penning characters that are as real as your neighbors or sisters, and choosing just the right elements from the history books and the fads of the time to make it something you live. Cultural references are everywhere, but placed within the details of the story so that there is nothing jarring or overdone in them. The times are hard, but what we know, that the characters do not, is that World War II is on the horizon and these hard times will constitute a sweet memory soon, a memory of youth and possibility before a storm of loss.


]]> 3.64 2007
author: Paulette Jiles
name: Sara
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2007
rating: 4
read at: 2022/06/04
date added: 2022/06/04
shelves: 2022-aty-challenge, american, depression-era, family, historical-fiction, romance, american-west
review:
“Jeanine you’re just always messing with me.�
“I know it.�


The weather in Texas is stormy, but not with rain. This is the world of Texas oil fields, of dust-bowl drought, of abject poverty and the wildcat oil rigs and sleek race horses that promise to buy a reprieve from it. It is the world of the Great Depression and Jeanine Stoddard is a spunky young lady, unafraid of hard work and at home in the man’s world through which her charming ne'er-do-well father drags her.

Perhaps one of the themes of this book is how important it is to be an individual and lay your own course, but also how easily you can slip into the world you dream of and, doing so, lose your way in the world that is real. Nothing impressed this upon me like the following passage, in which it is impossible not to see Jack Stoddard as someone, like all the rest of us, who simply lost his way and cannot handle the responsibility he has taken on.

He had grown up on the land that is now Camp Wolters in Central Texas, near Mineral Wells. He had grown up there when it was open country covered with the wind-worn pelt of native grasses. Once he had come upon the skull of a Comanche with a bullet hole in the cheekbone and after some exploration he had found the thighbones and ribs and tangles of buckskin fringe. During high school in Mineral Wells he had memorized Travis� last letter from the Alamo and declaimed it at graduation. He used to ride the Mineral Wells street railway to Elmhurst Park where there was a racetrack and a casino and the wind made women’s long dresses fly up so you could see black stocking garters with the red marks they made and it moved him in inexplicable ways so that he laughed and elbowed Chigger Bates. He had seen Yellow Jacket run the 880. He shifted his feet and smoked and said we all wanted our parents to be better parents.

One of my favorite characters is Ross Everett. For me he exudes personality. He is strong and tough, but also sensitive and caring, with a quick wit and a dry sense of humor. I had an absolute idea of him in my mind, down to the tilt of his head when he dusts dirt off his stetson. The love affair here is a teasing game, and I read it knowing that I was being teased right along with the lovers.

Much of what makes this book special for me is the nostalgia it evokes for the world just before World War II, that was cruel, but in so many ways, so sweet. The strong family ties, the descriptions of the towns, the relationships that develop, and the haphazard nature of happiness, are drawn with such detail and credibility. There is the impossible nature of the Depression:

Nothing could ever be fixed, no matter how hard Jeanine tried. It all just broke again but there was no other way but to lay hands on the pieces and fit them together, make them work.

And the poignant observation of how precarious existence is:

Everything had a family to feed, it was just a matter of who ate who and devil take the hindmost.

And yet there is so much love on every page, Jack’s love for Jeanine and hers for him, the love of the girls for one another and their mother, the love that plays in and out between two of the main characters, and the simple love of the neighbors who plow the fields and lend a hand. I was caught up in it immediately and hated to reach the end and know the story was done.

Paulette Jiles is an astute and skilled storyteller. I have spent time with her in five books and I am anxious and ready to do it again. She has a penchant for penning characters that are as real as your neighbors or sisters, and choosing just the right elements from the history books and the fads of the time to make it something you live. Cultural references are everywhere, but placed within the details of the story so that there is nothing jarring or overdone in them. The times are hard, but what we know, that the characters do not, is that World War II is on the horizon and these hard times will constitute a sweet memory soon, a memory of youth and possibility before a storm of loss.



]]> 2288934 Xingu and Other Stories, takes place in a shabby neighborhood in New York City. The two Bunner sisters, Ann Eliza the elder, and Evelina the younger, keep a small shop selling artificial flowers and small handsewn articles to Stuyvesant Square's "female population."

Ann Eliza gives Evelina a clock for her birthday. The clock leads the sisters to become involved with Herbert Ramy, owner of "the queerest little store you ever laid eyes on." Soon Ramy is a regular guest of the Bunner sisters, who realize that their "treadmill routine," once so comfortable, is now "intolerably monotonous."]]> 136 Edith Wharton 1421804298 Sara 5 The Bunner Sisters is a shop, run by the sisters themselves, who are on the verge of spinsterhood and poised to slide into a lonely, but comfortable, old age. They are happy together, have a small but thriving business, with little variety in their daily routine, and it seems to both of them that they have missed something important in life. At the opening of the story, the elder sister, Ann Eliza, buys a clock as a birthday gift for the younger, Evelina, and the purchase introduces them to the clockmaker, Mr. Ramy, and sets them on a course that will change their lives forever.

Edith Wharton is so amazing in the way in which she can draw you into the lives of her characters, regardless of what strata of life she pulls them from, and then pack the events of their lives with so much tragic meaning. Platitudes kept running through my mind as I was reading: The grass is always greener, be careful what you wish for, don’t fail to see the value in what you have, the best laid plans of mice and men, and love is an uneven thing, someone always loves and gives a bit more than the other.

For the first time in her life she dimly faced the awful problem of the inutility of self-sacrifice. Hitherto she had never thought of questioning the inherited principles which guided her life. Self-effacement for the good of others had always seemed to her both natural and necessary; but then she had taken it for granted that it implied the securing of that good. Now she perceived that to refuse the gifts of life does not ensure their transmission to those for whom they have been surrendered; and her familiar heaven was unpeopled. She felt she could no longer trust in the goodness of God, and that if he was not good he was not God, and there was only a black abyss above the roof of Bunner Sisters.

If you have read other Wharton novels, you will recognize the overall atmosphere that permeates this novella. Wharton often gives us characters who seem to be in the grasp of events they cannot control and who are being swept along to an end which they might have avoided had they read the signs and made different choices. Lily Bart from The House of Mirth kept coming to mind, even though these women are caught in a much different web than the one Lily struggled against.

I think there are few writers who have the skill of Edith Wharton. Her novels are both character and plot driven and I can never recall ending one feeling I had been cheated or that she had failed to stir my emotions. She has a brilliant control of language, never choosing the wrong word or using four when two would suffice. She paints pictures of the human soul, in all its complexity, and she gives us all the sadnesses we visit upon one another.




]]> 3.71 1916
author: Edith Wharton
name: Sara
average rating: 3.71
book published: 1916
rating: 5
read at: 2022/05/22
date added: 2022/05/22
shelves: 2022-aty-challenge, 20th-century-literature, american, death, family, literary-fiction, short-stories-novellas, siblings, women-writers
review:
The Bunner Sisters is a shop, run by the sisters themselves, who are on the verge of spinsterhood and poised to slide into a lonely, but comfortable, old age. They are happy together, have a small but thriving business, with little variety in their daily routine, and it seems to both of them that they have missed something important in life. At the opening of the story, the elder sister, Ann Eliza, buys a clock as a birthday gift for the younger, Evelina, and the purchase introduces them to the clockmaker, Mr. Ramy, and sets them on a course that will change their lives forever.

Edith Wharton is so amazing in the way in which she can draw you into the lives of her characters, regardless of what strata of life she pulls them from, and then pack the events of their lives with so much tragic meaning. Platitudes kept running through my mind as I was reading: The grass is always greener, be careful what you wish for, don’t fail to see the value in what you have, the best laid plans of mice and men, and love is an uneven thing, someone always loves and gives a bit more than the other.

For the first time in her life she dimly faced the awful problem of the inutility of self-sacrifice. Hitherto she had never thought of questioning the inherited principles which guided her life. Self-effacement for the good of others had always seemed to her both natural and necessary; but then she had taken it for granted that it implied the securing of that good. Now she perceived that to refuse the gifts of life does not ensure their transmission to those for whom they have been surrendered; and her familiar heaven was unpeopled. She felt she could no longer trust in the goodness of God, and that if he was not good he was not God, and there was only a black abyss above the roof of Bunner Sisters.

If you have read other Wharton novels, you will recognize the overall atmosphere that permeates this novella. Wharton often gives us characters who seem to be in the grasp of events they cannot control and who are being swept along to an end which they might have avoided had they read the signs and made different choices. Lily Bart from The House of Mirth kept coming to mind, even though these women are caught in a much different web than the one Lily struggled against.

I think there are few writers who have the skill of Edith Wharton. Her novels are both character and plot driven and I can never recall ending one feeling I had been cheated or that she had failed to stir my emotions. She has a brilliant control of language, never choosing the wrong word or using four when two would suffice. She paints pictures of the human soul, in all its complexity, and she gives us all the sadnesses we visit upon one another.





]]> 146151 The Art of the Commonplace gathers twenty essays by Wendell Berry that offer an agrarian alternative to our dominant urban culture. Grouped around five themes―an agrarian critique of culture, agrarian fundamentals, agrarian economics, agrarian religion, and geobiography―these essays promote a clearly defined and compelling vision important to all people dissatisfied with the stress, anxiety, disease, and destructiveness of contemporary American culture. Why is agriculture becoming culturally irrelevant, and at what cost? What are the forces of social disintegration and how might they be reversed? How might men and women live together in ways that benefit both? And, how does the corporate takeover of social institutions and economic practices contribute to the destruction of human and natural environments? Through his staunch support of local economies, his defense of farming communities, and his call for family integrity, Berry emerges as the champion of responsibilities and priorities that serve the health, vitality and happiness of the whole community of creation.]]> 352 Wendell Berry 1593760078 Sara 3 We have lived by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. And this has been based on the even flimsier assumption that we could know with any certainty what was good even for us.

The Art of the Commonplace is a collection of twenty-one essays written by Wendell Berry over an expanse of time. In the collection, he presents his philosophy regarding agrarian life vs. urban life, and sets a comprehensive case for why separation from the land leads the modern man into social, spiritual and economic desolation.

Within these pages, I found all those heart-warming, wholesome qualities that make Berry’s fictional books such a joy to read. The first section was a literal walk with him through his own farmland and into the woods that neighbor it, and I found that very enjoyable. His connection to the past, the present and nature herself is somehow very gratifying.

One of his greatest qualities is his ability to find the majestic in the mundane, the beauty in the everyday, the delight in the details. He is a sharp observer of life, and he knows how man ought to fit into the natural world and exactly where he has missed doing so. All the right questions are asked, and I believe we are further from the answers today than we were when this book was published. What is the cost of losing our farmland to conglomerates, allowing our families and communities to disintegrate, and leaving the bulk of our populations stranded in cities that are havens for stress and isolation?

The points being made here are both relevant and interesting, however, as I read one essay after another, I found them less captivating. Often the point was the same and expressed in much the same terms, so that it seemed repetitive and then almost evangelical. I agree with him on 95% of his points, and I knew if I had read each of these essays individually, as they were written and originally published, I would have probably enjoyed each and every one of them. It seemed to me the best way to read them was not as a collection, one after another, in too close succession, but spaced over time.

I have the utmost admiration for Wendell Berry, for who he is, how he lives, what he believes, and how he writes. There is no doubt, however, that he has my heart more soundly in hand when I am with him in Port William and the points are made subtly and soundly through the characters that I have come to love.

We would do well to listen to his voice, whether through his fiction or his non-fiction, for he is issuing a warning to us all that the life we are living is lacking something essential, something we were meant to have. The loss is ours.]]> 4.37 2002
author: Wendell Berry
name: Sara
average rating: 4.37
book published: 2002
rating: 3
read at: 2022/05/19
date added: 2022/05/19
shelves: 2022-aty-challenge, american, essays, kindle-purchase, non-fiction, philosophy, nature
review:
We have lived by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. And this has been based on the even flimsier assumption that we could know with any certainty what was good even for us.

The Art of the Commonplace is a collection of twenty-one essays written by Wendell Berry over an expanse of time. In the collection, he presents his philosophy regarding agrarian life vs. urban life, and sets a comprehensive case for why separation from the land leads the modern man into social, spiritual and economic desolation.

Within these pages, I found all those heart-warming, wholesome qualities that make Berry’s fictional books such a joy to read. The first section was a literal walk with him through his own farmland and into the woods that neighbor it, and I found that very enjoyable. His connection to the past, the present and nature herself is somehow very gratifying.

One of his greatest qualities is his ability to find the majestic in the mundane, the beauty in the everyday, the delight in the details. He is a sharp observer of life, and he knows how man ought to fit into the natural world and exactly where he has missed doing so. All the right questions are asked, and I believe we are further from the answers today than we were when this book was published. What is the cost of losing our farmland to conglomerates, allowing our families and communities to disintegrate, and leaving the bulk of our populations stranded in cities that are havens for stress and isolation?

The points being made here are both relevant and interesting, however, as I read one essay after another, I found them less captivating. Often the point was the same and expressed in much the same terms, so that it seemed repetitive and then almost evangelical. I agree with him on 95% of his points, and I knew if I had read each of these essays individually, as they were written and originally published, I would have probably enjoyed each and every one of them. It seemed to me the best way to read them was not as a collection, one after another, in too close succession, but spaced over time.

I have the utmost admiration for Wendell Berry, for who he is, how he lives, what he believes, and how he writes. There is no doubt, however, that he has my heart more soundly in hand when I am with him in Port William and the points are made subtly and soundly through the characters that I have come to love.

We would do well to listen to his voice, whether through his fiction or his non-fiction, for he is issuing a warning to us all that the life we are living is lacking something essential, something we were meant to have. The loss is ours.
]]> 43049 425 Jack London 1598184318 Sara 2
That London manages to make this character seem real instead of caricature is a bit of miracle in itself. As a foil, London has Larsen impress into service a shipwreck victim, Humphrey Van Weyden. To Hump, as he is called, Larsen expounds upon his philosophy and he and Hump argue the existence of the soul or the worth of a life that is not your own. For me, the repeated conversations became tiring. It was as if London was pounding the issue, but perhaps he was simply engaging in his own struggle with his own beliefs.

What I did like about this book were the passages related to life at sea. I could feel the rising of the storms and the swaying of the ship, and there is a very detailed description of an engineering feat that is so intricately described that you know it would be exactly how the maneuver would be achieved. There is extreme brutality, but it is necessary to the tale being told and it is not so graphic as to make it intolerable to read.

I try not to superimpose the beliefs of an author over the fiction that he writes, but that was hard to avoid with this book. London was an atheist and a socialist, and I am wondering how comfortable he was with either position based upon his arguments in this book.

Finally, there is a love story introduced late in the book that I found improbable, to say the least. I thought about the other London’s I have read and realized none of them contained any women or love stories; they are about rugged individualism and animal instinct. I think he is better suited to that subject.

All in all, I had hoped to like it better. I’m sure I would have liked it less had I been reading alone and not sharing the experience with a group of very savvy readers who helped to keep my interests alive and brought me a balanced view of the extreme philosophy expressed here.
]]> 4.05 1904
author: Jack London
name: Sara
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1904
rating: 2
read at: 2022/04/10
date added: 2022/05/19
shelves: 20th-century-literature, adventure, classics, philosophy, 2022-aty-challenge
review:
This novel is my first Jack London that is not an animal or nature tale, but then it mostly deals with the animal nature of a man, so maybe not that different. The Sea Wolf is Captain Wolf Larsen, a seaman who believes in nothing but his own welfare, and stops at no atrocity if he finds it to benefit his own desires. He is materialism and atheism run amok. He is intellectual, without emotion, values nothing but money, including anyone’s life aside from his own, and he has no moral code of any kind.

That London manages to make this character seem real instead of caricature is a bit of miracle in itself. As a foil, London has Larsen impress into service a shipwreck victim, Humphrey Van Weyden. To Hump, as he is called, Larsen expounds upon his philosophy and he and Hump argue the existence of the soul or the worth of a life that is not your own. For me, the repeated conversations became tiring. It was as if London was pounding the issue, but perhaps he was simply engaging in his own struggle with his own beliefs.

What I did like about this book were the passages related to life at sea. I could feel the rising of the storms and the swaying of the ship, and there is a very detailed description of an engineering feat that is so intricately described that you know it would be exactly how the maneuver would be achieved. There is extreme brutality, but it is necessary to the tale being told and it is not so graphic as to make it intolerable to read.

I try not to superimpose the beliefs of an author over the fiction that he writes, but that was hard to avoid with this book. London was an atheist and a socialist, and I am wondering how comfortable he was with either position based upon his arguments in this book.

Finally, there is a love story introduced late in the book that I found improbable, to say the least. I thought about the other London’s I have read and realized none of them contained any women or love stories; they are about rugged individualism and animal instinct. I think he is better suited to that subject.

All in all, I had hoped to like it better. I’m sure I would have liked it less had I been reading alone and not sharing the experience with a group of very savvy readers who helped to keep my interests alive and brought me a balanced view of the extreme philosophy expressed here.

]]> 59151
Travelers by ship from New York to Buenos Aires find that on board with them is the world champion of chess, an arrogant and unfriendly man. They come together to try their skills against him and are soundly defeated. Then a mysterious passenger steps forward to advise them and their fortunes change. How he came to possess his extraordinary grasp of the game of chess and at what cost lie at the heart of Zweig's story.

This new translation of Chess Story brings out the work's unusual mixture of high suspense and poignant reflection.]]> 104 Stefan Zweig 1590171691 Sara 5
There is an autobiographical element to this story that cannot be denied. Just like Dr. B, Zweig watched the Nazi’s take over his homeland of Austria and suffered very real tortures at the hands of the Gestapo. The result was to make him so fragile and isolated that he never quite recovered, always re-experiencing the tortures of the mind, and shortly after setting this story to paper, he committed suicide.

It is impossible not to see Dr. B as a stand-in for Zweig, himself, and the pompous, ignorant, manipulative Czentovic as the despotic Hitler, himself a madman with a penchant for only one thing, cruelty and war. To some extent Dr. B wins his chess game with the Nazis, after all he lives to tell, but on the other hand, he can never be free of this experience. As he battles Czentovic at the real chess board, he paces the length of his cell back and forth, held in by walls that are invisible to the observing crowd, but very real for him.

This is a very complicated and profound tale. That Zweig could reduce it to eighty-some pages and convey all the horror and lasting trauma is remarkable in itself. He makes every word meaningful and the ultimate meaning chilling.
]]> 4.31 1942
author: Stefan Zweig
name: Sara
average rating: 4.31
book published: 1942
rating: 5
read at: 2022/05/12
date added: 2022/05/19
shelves: 20th-century-literature, archive-org, autobiography, classics, short-stories-novellas, survival, world-war-2, 2022-aty-challenge
review:
Chess is a game of war, of strategy, of intellect. But when you are brought up against a war of brute force and psychological torture, can an intellect save you? Stefan Zweig had faced that question in his life and I think he set us the answer in Chess Story. It might appear to save you, but it never really can.

There is an autobiographical element to this story that cannot be denied. Just like Dr. B, Zweig watched the Nazi’s take over his homeland of Austria and suffered very real tortures at the hands of the Gestapo. The result was to make him so fragile and isolated that he never quite recovered, always re-experiencing the tortures of the mind, and shortly after setting this story to paper, he committed suicide.

It is impossible not to see Dr. B as a stand-in for Zweig, himself, and the pompous, ignorant, manipulative Czentovic as the despotic Hitler, himself a madman with a penchant for only one thing, cruelty and war. To some extent Dr. B wins his chess game with the Nazis, after all he lives to tell, but on the other hand, he can never be free of this experience. As he battles Czentovic at the real chess board, he paces the length of his cell back and forth, held in by walls that are invisible to the observing crowd, but very real for him.

This is a very complicated and profound tale. That Zweig could reduce it to eighty-some pages and convey all the horror and lasting trauma is remarkable in itself. He makes every word meaningful and the ultimate meaning chilling.

]]> 994799 272 John Ehle 187808674X Sara 5
If you have ever stood and looked out over a stretch of the Blue Ridge, you cannot help perfectly visualizing this scene:

He saw Young. He was leisurely walking toward the north. Now he paused to consider streaks of gold in the east. A holy morning, suitable for worship. Wayland walked over to the edge of the divide, to an overlook, with the North Carolina mountains stretching to the horizon. This morning clouds had slept late, were still filling in the valleys around the peaks, so that the peaks resembled toes of a prone giant.

There was a single hawk on the wing, bathing in sunlight, now it dipped down into the clouds to moisten its wings. Now it rose into sunlight again.

I was standing on that mountain in the first paragraph, but IMHO, the addition of the hawk was a bit of genius that made me want to reach out and touch that sky. At the end of Chapter Five, I could honestly say I have been on a bear hunt. By the end of the book, I had an ache in my chest from holding my breath.

Collie Wright is living alone in a cabin with her 6-month old baby. She has refused to tell anyone who the father of the baby is, and her brothers and father are nervous and anxious to know. Wayland Jackson comes down out of the mountains, where his car has stalled, with his teenage daughter in tow, and finds himself standing at Collie’s door.

We know immediately that this is going to get complicated. There are factions in the mountains, the Wrights, the Campbells and the MacGregors barely existing as neighbors and anything, like a stranger who is a clockmaker moving in with a woman and her child, can set a spark to the flame.

A vital nerve had been touched, old and buried, almost forgotten animosities had been laid bare; mindless were days like this one, and the fears rose out of the bowels, not the mind, and were vital, close to the quick. One death caused others.

This is my second Ehle, and not my last. He can truly spin a tale, as my grandpa would say.



.]]> 4.02 1982
author: John Ehle
name: Sara
average rating: 4.02
book published: 1982
rating: 5
read at: 2022/05/19
date added: 2022/05/19
shelves: american, appalachian, family, favorites, gothic, historical-fiction, southern-lit, siblings, 2022-aty-challenge
review:
Why is John Ehle so sparsely read? Is it because his books are hard to come by? This book has 330 ratings and 31 reviews, which is shameful, because it is marvelously written and packed with everything you want from Southern/Appalachian literature. A dynamite story, fear, tension, terrific character development, and descriptions that are heart-stopping.

If you have ever stood and looked out over a stretch of the Blue Ridge, you cannot help perfectly visualizing this scene:

He saw Young. He was leisurely walking toward the north. Now he paused to consider streaks of gold in the east. A holy morning, suitable for worship. Wayland walked over to the edge of the divide, to an overlook, with the North Carolina mountains stretching to the horizon. This morning clouds had slept late, were still filling in the valleys around the peaks, so that the peaks resembled toes of a prone giant.

There was a single hawk on the wing, bathing in sunlight, now it dipped down into the clouds to moisten its wings. Now it rose into sunlight again.

I was standing on that mountain in the first paragraph, but IMHO, the addition of the hawk was a bit of genius that made me want to reach out and touch that sky. At the end of Chapter Five, I could honestly say I have been on a bear hunt. By the end of the book, I had an ache in my chest from holding my breath.

Collie Wright is living alone in a cabin with her 6-month old baby. She has refused to tell anyone who the father of the baby is, and her brothers and father are nervous and anxious to know. Wayland Jackson comes down out of the mountains, where his car has stalled, with his teenage daughter in tow, and finds himself standing at Collie’s door.

We know immediately that this is going to get complicated. There are factions in the mountains, the Wrights, the Campbells and the MacGregors barely existing as neighbors and anything, like a stranger who is a clockmaker moving in with a woman and her child, can set a spark to the flame.

A vital nerve had been touched, old and buried, almost forgotten animosities had been laid bare; mindless were days like this one, and the fears rose out of the bowels, not the mind, and were vital, close to the quick. One death caused others.

This is my second Ehle, and not my last. He can truly spin a tale, as my grandpa would say.



.
]]> 45894065 208 Jean Rhys 0393357805 Sara 3 Good Morning, Midnight is the story of a young woman’s plunge into depression and loneliness in the years following World War I. Sasha Jensen, an English woman, who had spent the years immediately following the war with her husband, Enno, a Frenchman, in Paris, finds herself back there retracing her steps through their old haunts and reliving her past. Paris does not seem to be a city of lights in Rhys novel, but one of seediness and gutter trolling.

I’m not sure what I should say about this novel. I had read that it was vaguely autobiographical, and I sincerely hope that is not the case, for this is a book of so much despair and darkness that it was a struggle to continue to read. It is not melancholy that drives Sasha, it is utter despair, and how a person with this little connection to life keeps living is beyond explanation. The ending was just too, too bizarre and awful for my tastes. The haunting promise of the Dickinson poem the title is derived from came flashing to my mind.

Rating the book is equally difficult, because there is not one thing about it I could say I liked, but I can recognize the emotional investment Rhys has made in her character. I thought of A Farewell to Arms, because the desolation of the ending of that novel seems to permeate this one, but while Hemingway is fairly straightforward in the telling of his tale, Rhys writes in the most meandering way, with random thoughts that require a re-read sometimes just to make sure you have caught the sense of them. And, there is the temptation to believe that she mostly wanted to shock her audience by forcing them to view the depravity of the post-war Parisian society.

Perhaps this was just too much of an intellectual and emotional investment for me at this moment in time, or maybe this is Rhys taken too far into herself for my pleasure. I enjoyed Wide Sargasso Sea and think of it fondly, but that was written by an older, perhaps more mellow Rhys. This book was written in 1939, and having come through one World War, Rhys could surely see the world standing at the threshold of the second. I doubt I will think of this book again, and if I do there will not be any fondness. When I closed the cover, I believe the sensation I was feeling was nausea.
]]> 3.87 1939
author: Jean Rhys
name: Sara
average rating: 3.87
book published: 1939
rating: 3
read at: 2022/03/26
date added: 2022/05/19
shelves: literary-fiction, classics, women-writers, world-war-1, 2022-aty-challenge
review:

Good Morning, Midnight is the story of a young woman’s plunge into depression and loneliness in the years following World War I. Sasha Jensen, an English woman, who had spent the years immediately following the war with her husband, Enno, a Frenchman, in Paris, finds herself back there retracing her steps through their old haunts and reliving her past. Paris does not seem to be a city of lights in Rhys novel, but one of seediness and gutter trolling.

I’m not sure what I should say about this novel. I had read that it was vaguely autobiographical, and I sincerely hope that is not the case, for this is a book of so much despair and darkness that it was a struggle to continue to read. It is not melancholy that drives Sasha, it is utter despair, and how a person with this little connection to life keeps living is beyond explanation. The ending was just too, too bizarre and awful for my tastes. The haunting promise of the Dickinson poem the title is derived from came flashing to my mind.

Rating the book is equally difficult, because there is not one thing about it I could say I liked, but I can recognize the emotional investment Rhys has made in her character. I thought of A Farewell to Arms, because the desolation of the ending of that novel seems to permeate this one, but while Hemingway is fairly straightforward in the telling of his tale, Rhys writes in the most meandering way, with random thoughts that require a re-read sometimes just to make sure you have caught the sense of them. And, there is the temptation to believe that she mostly wanted to shock her audience by forcing them to view the depravity of the post-war Parisian society.

Perhaps this was just too much of an intellectual and emotional investment for me at this moment in time, or maybe this is Rhys taken too far into herself for my pleasure. I enjoyed Wide Sargasso Sea and think of it fondly, but that was written by an older, perhaps more mellow Rhys. This book was written in 1939, and having come through one World War, Rhys could surely see the world standing at the threshold of the second. I doubt I will think of this book again, and if I do there will not be any fondness. When I closed the cover, I believe the sensation I was feeling was nausea.

]]> 429024 The Old Curiosity Shop is edited with notes and an introduction by Norman Page in Penguin Classics.

Little Nell Trent lives in the quiet gloom of the old curiosity shop with her ailing grandfather, for whom she cares with selfless devotion. But when they are unable to pay their debts to the stunted, lecherous and demonic money-lender Daniel Quilp, the shop is seized and they are forced to flee, thrown into a shadowy world in which there seems to be no safe haven. Dickens's portrayal of the innocent, tragic Nell made The Old Curiosity Shop an instant bestseller that captured the hearts of the nation, even as it was criticised for its sentimentality by figures such as Oscar Wilde. Yet alongside the story's pathos are some of Dickens's greatest comic and grotesque creations: the ne'er-do-well Dick Swiveller, the mannish lawyer Sally Brass, the half-starved 'Marchioness' and the lustful, loathsome Quilp himself.

This edition, based on the original text of 1841, contains an introduction by Norman Page discussing the various contrasting themes of the novel and its roots in Dickens's own personal tragedy, with prefaces to the 1841 and 1848 editions, a chronology, notes and original illustrations produced for the serial version.

Charles Dickens is one of the best-loved novelists in the English language, whose 200th anniversary was celebrated in 2012. His most famous books, including Oliver Twist, Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities, David Copperfield and The Pickwick Papers, have been adapted for stage and screen and read by millions.

If you enjoyed The Old Curiosity Shop, you might like Dickens's Hard Times, also available in Penguin Classics.]]> 576 Charles Dickens 0140437428 Sara 4 The Old Curiosity Shop, while still a lovely read, introduces themes and writing that would become so much more mature and complex in Dickens� later novels, Little Dorrit and Dombey and Son. That this is one of his more sentimental efforts can be easily explained by knowing that Dickens was still grieving the premature loss of his young sister-in-law, Mary Hogarth, who died at the age of 17.

The death of Mary Hogarth was a blow that Dickens perhaps never recovered from. He was quite young himself, and Mary makes appearances in many of his novels, as angelic female characters, lost before their time. What the loss of one so young must undoubtedly trigger in anyone is a sense of their own mortality, an issue each of us grapples with daily.

That this was paramount in Dickens� mind at the time of this writing seems to me to be evidenced in the following passage from the book:

The child admired and praised his work, and shortly afterwards departed; thinking, as she went, how strange it was, that this old man, drawing from his pursuits, and everything around him, one stern moral, never contemplated its application to himself; and, while he dwelt upon the uncertainty of human life, seemed both in word and deed to deem himself immortal. But her musings did not stop here, for she was wise enough to think that by a good and merciful adjustment this must be human nature, and that the old sexton, with his plans for next summer, was but a type of all mankind.

The story of Little Nell is the central one of The Old Curiosity Shop, but it runs parallel to a second story, which I think of as Kit’s story. While the two tales overlap in places, they seemed to me to be two distinct threads, with only a tenuous attachment. What they do have in common is the same villainous enemy seeking to do them harm, the dwarf, Quilp. Quilp is a villain of no subtlety. He is rotten from the brim to the dregs, and his inner character is reflected in his outer visage. He is the frightful thing a child hopes is not lingering under the bed or in the closets when the light goes out. He is, in fact, almost a caricature of evil, which, for me, lessens his impact. I tend to be more frightened by the evil that lies hidden beneath kinder words and countenances.

In the same vein, Nell is so good and so sweet that she becomes almost a symbol of childhood innocence and virtue, instead of a real little girl in a precarious position. While I was moved to tears over Florence Dombey and Amy Dorrit, I shed none for Nell. This told me that she affected me in a less personal way. Her Grandfather is, I believe, meant to elicit our sympathies, but like Mr. Dorrit, he never completely redeems himself for me. Without him, exactly as written, however, the extent of Nell’s love and devotion could never be portrayed.

The book has been compared to a fairytale, and it fits the description well. The child is in peril, the evil forces pursue her, particularly in the form of a Rumpelstiltskin-like Quilp, good forces collude to save her. But there is more depth than that to this tale. There are the actions of the Grandfather, which bring himself and Nell into the clutches of such evil and leave them exposed to a world where even the elements of nature can be cruel. There are sharp contrasts between the bucolic countryside and the industrialized city, where the fires burn day and night and threaten to suck everyone into a nightmare existence.

Kit’s story, I believe, saves the book from being maudlin or saccharin. He adds both humor and reality to the story and as it progresses, his story becomes the meat of the tale–the portion where you begin to see the inner workings of the characters, both good and bad. It is primarily in this story line that we see my favorite character from the book, Dick Swiveler and the marvelous Marchioness. What I like about Dick is that he grows over the course of the story. He swivels, if you will, from not seeing clearly, or perhaps even caring about others, to being one of the most insightful and caring characters penned. With him comes the Dickensian humor that brightens the bleakest of Dickens� tales.

I thoroughly enjoyed this novel. It is an established fact that Dickens at his worst spreads a richer table than most authors at their best. If I were not comparing this to other Dickens novels, it would doubtless get a five-star rating. As it is, it is a smidgen below his best, so I give it four-stars and encourage everyone who hasn’t done so to read it.]]> 3.77 1840
author: Charles Dickens
name: Sara
average rating: 3.77
book published: 1840
rating: 4
read at: 2022/02/06
date added: 2022/05/19
shelves: 19th-century-literature, classics, death, fairytale, literary-fiction, victorian, 2022-aty-challenge
review:
Written in 1840, when Dickens himself was less than 30 years old, The Old Curiosity Shop, while still a lovely read, introduces themes and writing that would become so much more mature and complex in Dickens� later novels, Little Dorrit and Dombey and Son. That this is one of his more sentimental efforts can be easily explained by knowing that Dickens was still grieving the premature loss of his young sister-in-law, Mary Hogarth, who died at the age of 17.

The death of Mary Hogarth was a blow that Dickens perhaps never recovered from. He was quite young himself, and Mary makes appearances in many of his novels, as angelic female characters, lost before their time. What the loss of one so young must undoubtedly trigger in anyone is a sense of their own mortality, an issue each of us grapples with daily.

That this was paramount in Dickens� mind at the time of this writing seems to me to be evidenced in the following passage from the book:

The child admired and praised his work, and shortly afterwards departed; thinking, as she went, how strange it was, that this old man, drawing from his pursuits, and everything around him, one stern moral, never contemplated its application to himself; and, while he dwelt upon the uncertainty of human life, seemed both in word and deed to deem himself immortal. But her musings did not stop here, for she was wise enough to think that by a good and merciful adjustment this must be human nature, and that the old sexton, with his plans for next summer, was but a type of all mankind.

The story of Little Nell is the central one of The Old Curiosity Shop, but it runs parallel to a second story, which I think of as Kit’s story. While the two tales overlap in places, they seemed to me to be two distinct threads, with only a tenuous attachment. What they do have in common is the same villainous enemy seeking to do them harm, the dwarf, Quilp. Quilp is a villain of no subtlety. He is rotten from the brim to the dregs, and his inner character is reflected in his outer visage. He is the frightful thing a child hopes is not lingering under the bed or in the closets when the light goes out. He is, in fact, almost a caricature of evil, which, for me, lessens his impact. I tend to be more frightened by the evil that lies hidden beneath kinder words and countenances.

In the same vein, Nell is so good and so sweet that she becomes almost a symbol of childhood innocence and virtue, instead of a real little girl in a precarious position. While I was moved to tears over Florence Dombey and Amy Dorrit, I shed none for Nell. This told me that she affected me in a less personal way. Her Grandfather is, I believe, meant to elicit our sympathies, but like Mr. Dorrit, he never completely redeems himself for me. Without him, exactly as written, however, the extent of Nell’s love and devotion could never be portrayed.

The book has been compared to a fairytale, and it fits the description well. The child is in peril, the evil forces pursue her, particularly in the form of a Rumpelstiltskin-like Quilp, good forces collude to save her. But there is more depth than that to this tale. There are the actions of the Grandfather, which bring himself and Nell into the clutches of such evil and leave them exposed to a world where even the elements of nature can be cruel. There are sharp contrasts between the bucolic countryside and the industrialized city, where the fires burn day and night and threaten to suck everyone into a nightmare existence.

Kit’s story, I believe, saves the book from being maudlin or saccharin. He adds both humor and reality to the story and as it progresses, his story becomes the meat of the tale–the portion where you begin to see the inner workings of the characters, both good and bad. It is primarily in this story line that we see my favorite character from the book, Dick Swiveler and the marvelous Marchioness. What I like about Dick is that he grows over the course of the story. He swivels, if you will, from not seeing clearly, or perhaps even caring about others, to being one of the most insightful and caring characters penned. With him comes the Dickensian humor that brightens the bleakest of Dickens� tales.

I thoroughly enjoyed this novel. It is an established fact that Dickens at his worst spreads a richer table than most authors at their best. If I were not comparing this to other Dickens novels, it would doubtless get a five-star rating. As it is, it is a smidgen below his best, so I give it four-stars and encourage everyone who hasn’t done so to read it.
]]> 57109107 The bestselling author of A Gentleman in Moscow and Rules of Civility and master of absorbing, sophisticated fiction returns with a stylish and propulsive novel set in 1950s America

In June, 1954, eighteen-year-old Emmett Watson is driven home to Nebraska by the warden of the work farm where he has just served a year for involuntary manslaughter. His mother long gone, his father recently deceased, and the family farm foreclosed upon by the bank, Emmett’s intention is to pick up his eight-year-old brother and head west where they can start their lives anew. But when the warden drives away, Emmett discovers that two friends from the work farm have hidden themselves in the trunk of the warden’s car. Together, they have hatched an altogether different plan for Emmett’s future.

Spanning just ten days and told from multiple points of view, Towles’s third novel will satisfy fans of his multi-layered literary styling while providing them an array of new and richly imagined settings, characters, and themes.]]> 576 Amor Towles 0735222355 Sara 5
This book is a metaphor for life. Like life, you may plan the trip, think you know exactly where you are going and how to get there, in fact, plot it out neatly on a map, but it is not only unlikely, but impossible, that your plans will be followed, for life has a mind of its own. Just when you seem to be on track, life will throw you a detour, a roadblock, a missed turn or a side trip. What you will find, if you are perceptive, is that the journey is far more important than the destination, that what makes it worthwhile, or not, is usually the company you keep along the way, and one true friend to share your room in the Howard Johnsons is worth a suite of rooms in the Hilton alone. What you will also find is that you have your own destiny, with disappointment and heartache, and while you share the road with others, the choice for your future is yours alone.

Towles has created a cast of characters that are distinctive, believable, lovable and pitiable, but never dull. I find him to be the best of the modern writers, proving time and again that he can write about completely different subjects in equally enthralling ways. I count A Gentleman in Moscow and Rules of Civility among my favorite books. I wondered if he could do it again. I am not on the fence; I loved this book.
]]> 4.18 2021
author: Amor Towles
name: Sara
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2022/04/16
date added: 2022/05/19
shelves: adventure, american, borrowed-from-library, coming-of-age, favorites, literary-fiction, more-than-5-stars, 2022-aty-challenge
review:
When Emmett Watson is given an early release from Salina, a juvenile prison, due to the death of his father, he has a plan. He will take his younger brother, Billy, and they will head for Texas and a new life. But, he hasn’t figured on Billy, who has a plan of his own to find their long lost mother, whom he believes is in California. His plan involves following The Lincoln Highway from their home in Nebraska to San Francisco, but there is almost an immediate wrench in the works with the arrival of two of Emmett’s fellow inmates who have escaped Salina. What ensues is a mad road trip and a lot of character revelation.

This book is a metaphor for life. Like life, you may plan the trip, think you know exactly where you are going and how to get there, in fact, plot it out neatly on a map, but it is not only unlikely, but impossible, that your plans will be followed, for life has a mind of its own. Just when you seem to be on track, life will throw you a detour, a roadblock, a missed turn or a side trip. What you will find, if you are perceptive, is that the journey is far more important than the destination, that what makes it worthwhile, or not, is usually the company you keep along the way, and one true friend to share your room in the Howard Johnsons is worth a suite of rooms in the Hilton alone. What you will also find is that you have your own destiny, with disappointment and heartache, and while you share the road with others, the choice for your future is yours alone.

Towles has created a cast of characters that are distinctive, believable, lovable and pitiable, but never dull. I find him to be the best of the modern writers, proving time and again that he can write about completely different subjects in equally enthralling ways. I count A Gentleman in Moscow and Rules of Civility among my favorite books. I wondered if he could do it again. I am not on the fence; I loved this book.

]]> 5967548 358 Louis Maistros 1592642551 Sara 2 Hearing the sound of your own soul can be an enlightening and satisfying thing, even if it isn’t a pretty sound.

This novel was recommended to me by someone whose taste generally crosses with mine. I read the first chapter before deciding I would read the book, and I found it quite strange but somehow interesting. I took a leap of faith and chose it as a group read, and I might owe my apologies to the group! I’d say it isn’t for everyone.

It isn’t the worst thing I have ever read, in fact it is oddly mesmerizing, with some eloquent prose and some catchy characters. It is also just exceedingly weird and at times totally meaningless. I believe it is meant to be about death and the cycle of life, but it is a mix of too many floating ideas for me to be sure that is even the impetus. It no doubt falls into the Magical Realism category, which isn’t a favorite for me, although the magical part of this is part of the Louisiana bayou voodoo culture and seems to blend in believably with the environment it is set in.

Imaginary people real, too—in their way. If a person can remember or even dream up a face, then the face does exist in some kinda way. Things remembered are sometimes more real than what a person holds in his hand.

At about halfway through, courtesy of a fellow reader, I found out that one of the characters, Buddy Bolden, was a real person. He is held to be the first Jazz player and made his way through the seedier side of New Orleans nightlife and brothel areas, playing his trumpet in his own distinctive style. Somehow, knowing that at least one of these characters actually existed, added some grounding and credence to the novel itself.

When we think about death and New Orleans, there is a marked difference from death in other places. The way the dead are buried, the way they are seen to their graves in parades and with music, and the always sweeping threat of the water.

In this city there is a long and curious relationship with death, a closeness, a delicate truce. They say in New Orleans death is so close that the dead are mostly buried above ground, that the dead share altitude with the living.

This book is more about the dead than the living, but then, in this book, it is sometimes hard to tell which we are dealing with. In the end, it was just a little too strange for me. 2.5 Stars, rounded down.




]]> 3.88 2009
author: Louis Maistros
name: Sara
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2009
rating: 2
read at: 2022/04/29
date added: 2022/05/19
shelves: southern-lit, death, magical-realism, music, absurd, kindle-purchase, 2022-aty-challenge
review:
Hearing the sound of your own soul can be an enlightening and satisfying thing, even if it isn’t a pretty sound.

This novel was recommended to me by someone whose taste generally crosses with mine. I read the first chapter before deciding I would read the book, and I found it quite strange but somehow interesting. I took a leap of faith and chose it as a group read, and I might owe my apologies to the group! I’d say it isn’t for everyone.

It isn’t the worst thing I have ever read, in fact it is oddly mesmerizing, with some eloquent prose and some catchy characters. It is also just exceedingly weird and at times totally meaningless. I believe it is meant to be about death and the cycle of life, but it is a mix of too many floating ideas for me to be sure that is even the impetus. It no doubt falls into the Magical Realism category, which isn’t a favorite for me, although the magical part of this is part of the Louisiana bayou voodoo culture and seems to blend in believably with the environment it is set in.

Imaginary people real, too—in their way. If a person can remember or even dream up a face, then the face does exist in some kinda way. Things remembered are sometimes more real than what a person holds in his hand.

At about halfway through, courtesy of a fellow reader, I found out that one of the characters, Buddy Bolden, was a real person. He is held to be the first Jazz player and made his way through the seedier side of New Orleans nightlife and brothel areas, playing his trumpet in his own distinctive style. Somehow, knowing that at least one of these characters actually existed, added some grounding and credence to the novel itself.

When we think about death and New Orleans, there is a marked difference from death in other places. The way the dead are buried, the way they are seen to their graves in parades and with music, and the always sweeping threat of the water.

In this city there is a long and curious relationship with death, a closeness, a delicate truce. They say in New Orleans death is so close that the dead are mostly buried above ground, that the dead share altitude with the living.

This book is more about the dead than the living, but then, in this book, it is sometimes hard to tell which we are dealing with. In the end, it was just a little too strange for me. 2.5 Stars, rounded down.





]]> 25817900 Jane Eyre.

A fixture in the literary canon, Charlotte Brontë is revered by readers all over the world. Her novels featuring unforgettable, strong heroines still resonate with millions today. And who could forget one of literature’s best-known lines: “Reader, I married him� from her classic novel Jane Eyre?

Part of a remarkable family that produced three acclaimed female writers at a time in 19th-century Britain when few women wrote, and fewer were published, Brontë has become a great source of inspiration to writers, especially women, ever since. Now in Reader, I Married Him, twenty of today’s most celebrated women authors have spun original stories, using the line from Jane Eyre as a springboard for their own flights of imagination.

Reader, I Married Him will feature stories by:

Tracy Chevalier, Tessa Hadley, Sarah Hall, Helen Dunmore, Kirsty Gunn, Joanna Briscoe, Jane Gardam, Emma Donaghue, Susan Hill, Francine Prose, Elif Shafak, Evie Wyld, Patricia Park, Salley Vickers, Nadifa Mohamed, Esther Freud, Linda Grant, Lionel Shriver, Audrey Niffenegger, Namwali Serpell, and Elizabeth McCracken. 

Unique, inventive, and poignant, the stories in Reader, I Married Him pay homage to the literary genius of Charlotte Brontë, and demonstrate once again that her extraordinary vision continues to inspire readers and writers.]]> 295 Tracy Chevalier 0062447092 Sara 3
Grace Poole, Her Testimony - Helen Dunmore - borrows directly from Jane Eyre, and puts a new slant on Jane by giving us Grace Poole's observations of what occurs at Thornfield Hall.

Since First I Saw Your Face - Emma Donoughue - The love affair between Minnie Benson and Ellen Hall is based in fact. Minnie, tied, at the age of 18, in a marriage to a man who eventually became The Archbishop of Canterbury. Minnie said she “fell in love� with one woman after another, and apparently this encounter with Ellen Hall was the beginning of that. Beautifully imagined and written, but without any plot tie to Jane Eyre.

The Mirror - Francine Prose - A very strange little upside down story based on Eyre, in which she is about to be the next crazy woman in the attic.

Dorset Gap - Tracey Chevalier - Lovely little story with a tentative tie to Jane and a cute twist at the end.

The Orphan Exchange - Audrey Niffenegger - Plays on the early part of the Jane Eyre tale…about Helen and the orphanage. In this one, the girls are used as guinea pigs during a war.

Five stories I would have rated either 5-stars or 4-stars, but 16 that I would have rated 3-stars or less; so I have arrived at an overall rating of 3-stars and a recommendation of finding these stories individually and not investing in the entire collection.]]> 3.18 2016
author: Tracy Chevalier
name: Sara
average rating: 3.18
book published: 2016
rating: 3
read at: 2022/03/28
date added: 2022/05/19
shelves: retelling, short-stories-novellas, 2022-aty-challenge
review:
A mixed bag of stories. A few very good ones, and a few very mediocre ones. I was attracted to the idea of this being several well-known names writing from a Jane Eyre inspiration. There was, in fact, very little of that, and yet three of the four stories I would rate excellent had that obvious Eyre tie.

Grace Poole, Her Testimony - Helen Dunmore - borrows directly from Jane Eyre, and puts a new slant on Jane by giving us Grace Poole's observations of what occurs at Thornfield Hall.

Since First I Saw Your Face - Emma Donoughue - The love affair between Minnie Benson and Ellen Hall is based in fact. Minnie, tied, at the age of 18, in a marriage to a man who eventually became The Archbishop of Canterbury. Minnie said she “fell in love� with one woman after another, and apparently this encounter with Ellen Hall was the beginning of that. Beautifully imagined and written, but without any plot tie to Jane Eyre.

The Mirror - Francine Prose - A very strange little upside down story based on Eyre, in which she is about to be the next crazy woman in the attic.

Dorset Gap - Tracey Chevalier - Lovely little story with a tentative tie to Jane and a cute twist at the end.

The Orphan Exchange - Audrey Niffenegger - Plays on the early part of the Jane Eyre tale…about Helen and the orphanage. In this one, the girls are used as guinea pigs during a war.

Five stories I would have rated either 5-stars or 4-stars, but 16 that I would have rated 3-stars or less; so I have arrived at an overall rating of 3-stars and a recommendation of finding these stories individually and not investing in the entire collection.
]]> 51741 Sarah's Quilt, the long-awaited sequel to These Is My Words, continues the dramatic story of Sarah Agnes Prine. Beloved by readers and book clubs from coast to coast, These Is My Words told the spellbinding story of an extraordinary pioneer woman and her struggle to make a home in the Arizona Territories. Now Sarah returns.



In 1906, the badlands of Southern Arizona Territory is a desolate place where a three-year drought has changed the landscape for all time. When Sarah's well goes dry and months pass with barely a trace of rain, Sarah feels herself losing her hold upon the land. Desperate, Sarah's mother hires a water witch, a peculiar desert wanderer named Lazrus who claims to know where to find water. As he schemes and stalls, he develops an attraction to Sarah that turns into a frightening infatuation.

And just when it seems that life couldn't get worse, Sarah learns that her brother and his family have been trapped in the Great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906. She and her father-in-law cannot even imagine the devastation that awaits them as they embark on a rescue mission to the stricken city.

Sarah is a pioneer of the truest spirit, courageous but gentle as she fights to save her family's home. But she never stops longing for the passion she once knew. Though her wealthy neighbor has asked her to wed, Sarah doesn't entirely trust him. And then Udell Hanna and his son come riding down the dusty road. . . .]]> 402 Nancy E. Turner 0312332637 Sara 5
I love books like these that feel authentic to their times, that weave an adventure you would never want to live but enjoy participating in from afar. What a hard life our ancestors lead settling this country. It would have required a lot of courage, not to mention the perseverance to keep starting over disaster after disaster, loss after loss. I hardly came up for air while reading it and now I’m quite anxious to get to the third book in the series.

Another thank you to Lori for introducing me to this series of books. Great fun and totally memorable.


]]> 4.02 2005
author: Nancy E. Turner
name: Sara
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2005
rating: 5
read at: 2022/05/08
date added: 2022/05/10
shelves: 2022-aty-challenge, american, historical-fiction, pleasure-reading, women-writers, archive-org
review:
I was much afraid this book would not be able to live up to its predecessor, These is My Words. For one thing, I knew it would be missing one of its most dynamic characters and how could it have that same impact. It would be set in a later period as well, and that seemed to me to invite a less stirring tale. Ah, I have underestimated this terrific writer, for she wove this story and took me right back into Sarah’s world.

I love books like these that feel authentic to their times, that weave an adventure you would never want to live but enjoy participating in from afar. What a hard life our ancestors lead settling this country. It would have required a lot of courage, not to mention the perseverance to keep starting over disaster after disaster, loss after loss. I hardly came up for air while reading it and now I’m quite anxious to get to the third book in the series.

Another thank you to Lori for introducing me to this series of books. Great fun and totally memorable.



]]> 2641307
Rich in authentic everyday details and alive with truly unforgettable characters, These Is My Words brilliantly brings a vanished world to breathtaking life again.]]> 384 Nancy E. Turner 0061458031 Sara 5 How fragile our lives are anyways. How quickly things can change forever.

This is a splendid book, full of human trial and victory, and singing with love and endurance. I developed a deep respect and admiration for Sarah Prine. Living in the Arizona Territory in the second half of the 19th Century would have been a challenge that not everyone could survive. In fact, Sarah herself says

Anyone who hasn’t got some backbone has no business trying to live in the Territories.

I am pretty sure that there is no one who reads and appreciates this book who doesn’t end up in love with Captain Jack Eliot. He is the kind of man who would not escape the adoration of a woman or the approbation of a man. He is an enigma and an awakening for Sarah, and we are so privileged to see him through her eyes, for we recognize his wonderful character while she is still discovering it. His superb characterization is what makes this book a 5-star read. Like Sarah, I found myself always peering into the distance, waiting for Captain Eliot to return.

Captain Elliot has this recklessness about him, and a way of holding on that you don’t know he is holding on, and a way of laughing that is like he takes pleasure in the act of laughing itself. He is better to have around in a scrap than a trained wildcat, though.

All the secondary characters, Sarah’s mother, Jack’s father, Savannah and Albert, the brothers, the children, the myriad of people who pass through Sarah’s life, are painted with exacting care. We are given every sort of strength and weakness, tenderness and meanness alive in the human race, and it was hard to imagine the hardships and tribulations these people, particularly the women, endured.

I marked dozens of passages to remember, for Nancy Turner puts words of wisdom into Sarah’s diary entries that even Sarah does not wholly grasp the sageness of. In fact, one of the most appealing things about Sarah is that she is often still so innocent and naive for a woman who has had such a harsh and serious life experience; and that she has that ability of children to see right into the heart of things and people.

A few of my favorites:

…this has hurt my heart and spirit more than all the other trials, for being forsaken is worse than being killed.

The likes of her isn’t going to listen nor be changed in the mind just from hearing sense. Some people sense is wasted on, and that’s purely a fact.

After a couple of hours the children began playing. They just cannot be sad too long, it is not in them; as children mourn in little bits here and there like patchwork in their lives.

Sometimes I feel like a tree on a hill, at a place where all the wind blows and the hail hits the hardest. All the people I love are down the side aways, sheltered under a great rock, and I am out of the fold, standing alone in the sun and the snow. I feel like I am not part of the rest somehow, although they welcome me and are kind. I see my family as they sit together and it is like they have a certain way between them that is beyond me. I wonder if other folks ever feel included yet alone.

It seems there is always a road with bends and forks to choose, and taking one path means you can never take another one. There’s no starting over nor undoing the steps I’ve taken.

It fascinated me to think that Nancy Turner based this upon an actual diary left by her own ancestor, and that there was an element of truth to Sarah's experiences.

I am happy that there are two more books featuring Sarah to follow this one. I enjoy Nancy Turner’s writing style and her beautiful descriptions and characterizations. I do not, however, expect the next two will be able to hold up to this one. It is so hard to make lightning strike twice in the same place–let alone three times, and this book is pretty darned perfect to me. And, for anyone who has read it, there is an obvious reason to not expect the same delight can carry through.

My sincere thanks to my friend, Lori, for recommending this book to our little reading group. I am excited that there will be discussion of it and I will not have to let go of these people or this place quite yet.]]> 4.33 1998
author: Nancy E. Turner
name: Sara
average rating: 4.33
book published: 1998
rating: 5
read at: 2022/03/24
date added: 2022/03/27
shelves: american, historical-fiction, pioneers, romance, women-writers, american-west, archive-org, favorites, 2022-aty-challenge
review:
How fragile our lives are anyways. How quickly things can change forever.

This is a splendid book, full of human trial and victory, and singing with love and endurance. I developed a deep respect and admiration for Sarah Prine. Living in the Arizona Territory in the second half of the 19th Century would have been a challenge that not everyone could survive. In fact, Sarah herself says

Anyone who hasn’t got some backbone has no business trying to live in the Territories.

I am pretty sure that there is no one who reads and appreciates this book who doesn’t end up in love with Captain Jack Eliot. He is the kind of man who would not escape the adoration of a woman or the approbation of a man. He is an enigma and an awakening for Sarah, and we are so privileged to see him through her eyes, for we recognize his wonderful character while she is still discovering it. His superb characterization is what makes this book a 5-star read. Like Sarah, I found myself always peering into the distance, waiting for Captain Eliot to return.

Captain Elliot has this recklessness about him, and a way of holding on that you don’t know he is holding on, and a way of laughing that is like he takes pleasure in the act of laughing itself. He is better to have around in a scrap than a trained wildcat, though.

All the secondary characters, Sarah’s mother, Jack’s father, Savannah and Albert, the brothers, the children, the myriad of people who pass through Sarah’s life, are painted with exacting care. We are given every sort of strength and weakness, tenderness and meanness alive in the human race, and it was hard to imagine the hardships and tribulations these people, particularly the women, endured.

I marked dozens of passages to remember, for Nancy Turner puts words of wisdom into Sarah’s diary entries that even Sarah does not wholly grasp the sageness of. In fact, one of the most appealing things about Sarah is that she is often still so innocent and naive for a woman who has had such a harsh and serious life experience; and that she has that ability of children to see right into the heart of things and people.

A few of my favorites:

…this has hurt my heart and spirit more than all the other trials, for being forsaken is worse than being killed.

The likes of her isn’t going to listen nor be changed in the mind just from hearing sense. Some people sense is wasted on, and that’s purely a fact.

After a couple of hours the children began playing. They just cannot be sad too long, it is not in them; as children mourn in little bits here and there like patchwork in their lives.

Sometimes I feel like a tree on a hill, at a place where all the wind blows and the hail hits the hardest. All the people I love are down the side aways, sheltered under a great rock, and I am out of the fold, standing alone in the sun and the snow. I feel like I am not part of the rest somehow, although they welcome me and are kind. I see my family as they sit together and it is like they have a certain way between them that is beyond me. I wonder if other folks ever feel included yet alone.

It seems there is always a road with bends and forks to choose, and taking one path means you can never take another one. There’s no starting over nor undoing the steps I’ve taken.

It fascinated me to think that Nancy Turner based this upon an actual diary left by her own ancestor, and that there was an element of truth to Sarah's experiences.

I am happy that there are two more books featuring Sarah to follow this one. I enjoy Nancy Turner’s writing style and her beautiful descriptions and characterizations. I do not, however, expect the next two will be able to hold up to this one. It is so hard to make lightning strike twice in the same place–let alone three times, and this book is pretty darned perfect to me. And, for anyone who has read it, there is an obvious reason to not expect the same delight can carry through.

My sincere thanks to my friend, Lori, for recommending this book to our little reading group. I am excited that there will be discussion of it and I will not have to let go of these people or this place quite yet.
]]> 50536 Bluebeard'S Egg glows with childhood memories, the reality of parents growing old, and the casual cruelty men and women inflict on each other. Here is the familiar outer world of family summers at remote lakes, winters of political activism, and seasons of exotic friends, mundane lives, and unexpected loves. But here too is the inner world of hidden places and all that emerges from them-the intimately personal, the fantastic, the shockingly real...whether it's what lives in a mysterious locked room or the secret feelings we all conceal. In this dramatic and far-ranging collection, Margaret Atwood proves why she is a true master of the genre.]]> 244 Margaret Atwood 0385491042 Sara 4
Significant Moments in the Life of My Mother
A woman’s memories of her mother, which struck me as both poignant and true.

“I used to think that my mother, in her earlier days, led a life of sustained hilarity and hair-raising adventure. (That was before I realized that she never put in the long stretches of uneventful time that must have made up much of her life: the stories were just punctuation.)�

Betty
Told from an adolescent point of view, this is the story of Betty and Fred, the couple who live in the cottage next door during a beach summer. Betty is sweet, he is charming, and the young girls are crazy for him. What the girl, looking back, reflects on is how Betty was the nice one, but Fred was preferred. She comes to realize that Fred was just like a million others, while Betty was unique.

Bluebeard’s Egg
This becomes a bit of a retelling of a fairytale. The fairytale is one in which Bluebeard’s wives break their promise not to enter a forbidden room and pay by being butchered by him. He is then deceived into believing his final wife is honest and true, when in fact she is only clever. The parallel is the story of Ed and Sally. Ed is also not true or honest, only clever, but the fairytale is reversed, Sally is the victim not the Bluebeard.

The Sin Eater
This is the story of our narrator and her psychiatrist, Joseph. They talk about sin eaters before his death and she dreams of being asked to eat his sins after he unexpectedly dies in an accident that might be a suicide.

“This world is all we have, says Joseph. It’s all you have to work with. It’s not too much for you. You will not be rescued.�

The stories are full of beautiful prose and imagery and Atwood’s moments of proverbial wisdom.

“One of my sons has just reached the shower-and-shave phase, the other one hasn’t, but both of them leave a deposit every time they pass through a room. A sort of bathtub ring of objects–socks, paperback books left face-down and open in the middle, sandwiches with bites taken out of them, and, lately, cigarette butts.�

“The sunrise is not a thing, but only an effect of the light caused by the positions of two astronomical bodies in relation to each other. The sun does not really rise at all, it is the earth that turns. The sunrise is a fraud.�

]]> 3.76 1983
author: Margaret Atwood
name: Sara
average rating: 3.76
book published: 1983
rating: 4
read at: 2022/02/27
date added: 2022/03/18
shelves: short-stories-novellas, 2022-aty-challenge
review:
A collection of short stories by Margaret Atwood. Of the twelve, I have listed the ones I found exceptional below. There were a couple of mediocre ones (or perhaps just ones I didn't relate to as well). But, as I usually find with Atwood, the writing was universally superb.

Significant Moments in the Life of My Mother
A woman’s memories of her mother, which struck me as both poignant and true.

“I used to think that my mother, in her earlier days, led a life of sustained hilarity and hair-raising adventure. (That was before I realized that she never put in the long stretches of uneventful time that must have made up much of her life: the stories were just punctuation.)�

Betty
Told from an adolescent point of view, this is the story of Betty and Fred, the couple who live in the cottage next door during a beach summer. Betty is sweet, he is charming, and the young girls are crazy for him. What the girl, looking back, reflects on is how Betty was the nice one, but Fred was preferred. She comes to realize that Fred was just like a million others, while Betty was unique.

Bluebeard’s Egg
This becomes a bit of a retelling of a fairytale. The fairytale is one in which Bluebeard’s wives break their promise not to enter a forbidden room and pay by being butchered by him. He is then deceived into believing his final wife is honest and true, when in fact she is only clever. The parallel is the story of Ed and Sally. Ed is also not true or honest, only clever, but the fairytale is reversed, Sally is the victim not the Bluebeard.

The Sin Eater
This is the story of our narrator and her psychiatrist, Joseph. They talk about sin eaters before his death and she dreams of being asked to eat his sins after he unexpectedly dies in an accident that might be a suicide.

“This world is all we have, says Joseph. It’s all you have to work with. It’s not too much for you. You will not be rescued.�

The stories are full of beautiful prose and imagery and Atwood’s moments of proverbial wisdom.

“One of my sons has just reached the shower-and-shave phase, the other one hasn’t, but both of them leave a deposit every time they pass through a room. A sort of bathtub ring of objects–socks, paperback books left face-down and open in the middle, sandwiches with bites taken out of them, and, lately, cigarette butts.�

“The sunrise is not a thing, but only an effect of the light caused by the positions of two astronomical bodies in relation to each other. The sun does not really rise at all, it is the earth that turns. The sunrise is a fraud.�


]]> 1914593
Emily becomes increasingly aware of strange tensions, old enmities and new loves; as she explores the city, with its labyrinthine dungeons and tunnels and its ancient secrets, she comes ever closer to the mystery of what happened to both the Isabelles of Chinon's history.]]> 380 Susanna Kearsley 0770427189 Sara 3
Emily Bradon is meant to be on holiday with her cousin, Harry, in Chinon, France; Harry, however, fails to show. While Emily is alone at the hotel they have engaged, she meets a number of fellow tourists and several town inhabitants, among them two handsome and charming gentlemen. In true Mary Stewart fashion, we are sure one of them is a villain, but which? There has, of course, been a murder, Harry is missing, people are suspicious and there is an ancient mystery regarding a lost treasure. You get the drift…but as cliche as it sounds, it was fun and clever and enchanting.

Now, back to the reading list.
]]> 3.69 1995
author: Susanna Kearsley
name: Sara
average rating: 3.69
book published: 1995
rating: 3
read at: 2022/01/25
date added: 2022/03/18
shelves: archive-org, historical-fiction, murder-mystery, pleasure-reading, romance, women-writers, 2022-aty-challenge
review:
Sometimes when I feel a bit overwhelmed by the realities in life and too much serious literature, it is lovely to give my brain a rest with a Susanna Kearsley novel. This one is quite fun. I have never thought particularly of Mary Stewart when reading Kearsley, but this book reminded me of Stewart’s early romantic mysteries. Even if Kearsley denied the influence, I would not believe her.

Emily Bradon is meant to be on holiday with her cousin, Harry, in Chinon, France; Harry, however, fails to show. While Emily is alone at the hotel they have engaged, she meets a number of fellow tourists and several town inhabitants, among them two handsome and charming gentlemen. In true Mary Stewart fashion, we are sure one of them is a villain, but which? There has, of course, been a murder, Harry is missing, people are suspicious and there is an ancient mystery regarding a lost treasure. You get the drift…but as cliche as it sounds, it was fun and clever and enchanting.

Now, back to the reading list.

]]> 41821221 368 Susan Fletcher 0349007640 Sara 4
Another skill she has in spades is the ability to describe a scene or a person in only a few words and yet paint them vividly.

She faded like cloth, she shrank as if in water.

Clara Waterfield suffers from a genetic disease, a kind of brittle-bone syndrome, that makes her bones like glass, easily fractured, splintered to pieces by a touch or a fall. She is, therefore, a shielded child, knowing the world only through her books and her mother’s vivid descriptions. At twenty, having recovered enough to risk it, she ventures out into the world, cane in hand, willing to endure the stares and whispers in order to find her own life. She is employed at a crumbling manor house under restoration and the mysteries begin.

I turned out the light. I thought of his sleeves, rolled up. Of where his shirt had darkened with sweat–on either side of his spine, under his arms, the small of his back. And I knew, too, that books only offered the official terms. For, even as a child, I would stand before the map of India, learn its rivers and mountainous regions and the names of ancient capitals, and know that this was not enough; it was nothing compared to the country itself. � Knowing the route of the Ganges was not the same as standing in it.

This book has a ghost story that needs unraveling, but it is Clara’s observant and quick mind that makes the story sing. No one is what they seem to be, and in the best tradition of Daphne du Maurier and Mary Stewart, we are invited to try to navigate the under-currents along with our inexperienced narrator and sort the good from the evil, past and present.

I had everything figured out, until I didn’t. I knew where the story was going, but it didn’t. I could never have guessed the ending, but it was not that that made this so wonderful to read, it was the revelations about the characters, particularly the one who wasn’t there at all.

We can think with our hearts as much as our heads–and souls, for me, were the truth.]]> 3.87 2018
author: Susan Fletcher
name: Sara
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2022/03/18
date added: 2022/03/18
shelves: 2022-aty-challenge, english-fiction, ghost, gothic, mystery, world-war-1
review:
Susan Fletcher is a master at creating oddball characters that stir feelings of love and admiration in her readers. They are often, as in this case, physically deformed or physically weak, but they have inner strength that is both surprising and exhilarating. These women save themselves from their fate, albeit with the help of a few good men.

Another skill she has in spades is the ability to describe a scene or a person in only a few words and yet paint them vividly.

She faded like cloth, she shrank as if in water.

Clara Waterfield suffers from a genetic disease, a kind of brittle-bone syndrome, that makes her bones like glass, easily fractured, splintered to pieces by a touch or a fall. She is, therefore, a shielded child, knowing the world only through her books and her mother’s vivid descriptions. At twenty, having recovered enough to risk it, she ventures out into the world, cane in hand, willing to endure the stares and whispers in order to find her own life. She is employed at a crumbling manor house under restoration and the mysteries begin.

I turned out the light. I thought of his sleeves, rolled up. Of where his shirt had darkened with sweat–on either side of his spine, under his arms, the small of his back. And I knew, too, that books only offered the official terms. For, even as a child, I would stand before the map of India, learn its rivers and mountainous regions and the names of ancient capitals, and know that this was not enough; it was nothing compared to the country itself. � Knowing the route of the Ganges was not the same as standing in it.

This book has a ghost story that needs unraveling, but it is Clara’s observant and quick mind that makes the story sing. No one is what they seem to be, and in the best tradition of Daphne du Maurier and Mary Stewart, we are invited to try to navigate the under-currents along with our inexperienced narrator and sort the good from the evil, past and present.

I had everything figured out, until I didn’t. I knew where the story was going, but it didn’t. I could never have guessed the ending, but it was not that that made this so wonderful to read, it was the revelations about the characters, particularly the one who wasn’t there at all.

We can think with our hearts as much as our heads–and souls, for me, were the truth.
]]> 460635 The powerful, visionary, Booker Award–winning novel about the complicated relationships between three outcasts of mixed European and Maori heritage.

“This book is just amazingly, wondrously great.� —Alice Walker

In a tower on the New Zealand sea lives Kerewin Holmes: part Maori, part European, asexual and aromantic, an artist estranged from her art, a woman in exile from her family.

One night her solitude is disrupted by a visitor—a speechless, mercurial boy named Simon, who tries to steal from her and then repays her with his most precious possession.

As Kerewin succumbs to Simon’s feral charm, she also falls under the spell of his Maori foster father Joe, who rescued the boy from a shipwreck and now treats him with an unsettling mixture of tenderness and brutality.

Out of this unorthodox trinity Keri Hulme has created what is at once a mystery, a love story, and an ambitious exploration of the zone where indigenous and European New Zealand meet, clash, and sometimes merge.

Winner of both a Booker Prize and Pegasus Prize for Literature, The Bone People is a work of unfettered wordplay and mesmerizing emotional complexity.]]> 450 Keri Hulme 0140089225 Sara 4 Art and family by blood; home and family by love…regaining any one was worth this fiery journey to the heart of the sun.


Keri Hulme’s The Bone People is a complex story of love, isolation, and a search for identity, set in her native New Zealand. Much of the complexity of this novel rises from its treatment of opposites and how they interact and weave together in a life. How, for example, do love and cruelty exist within the same person and toward the same object? How does a person sort the good and bad and decide whether the one can ever offset the other? How does an individual balance his need for solitude with his need for companionship and understanding?

The three main characters are a half-Maori woman, Kerewin Holmes, who becomes involved in the lives of Joe, a Maori man, and his foster son, Simon, a white child. Kerewin is separated from her family and living an isolated life by choice, but in despair for the family she has lost.

A family can be the bane of one's existence. A family can also be most of the meaning of one's existence. I don't know whether my family is bane or meaning, but they have surely gone away and left a large hole in my heart.

Joe is grieving the loss of his wife and natural child to flu, and he is struggling with the difficulties that come with being a single parent to his foster son, who has disabilities and sometimes unbridled rage. Simon is unable to speak, an affliction that stems from his own loss of parents, and which is apparently psychosomatic rather than physical, but he has an intelligence that is sharp and so he rebels against not being understood or sometimes even acknowledged. Unlikely as it seems, the three form a bond that stems from some ability they have to understand one another, an ability that no doubt stems from their lonely, unfathomable similarities.

There is, at the heart of this novel, a dichotomy that I had difficulty dealing with, and that is the idea that a person could love deeply someone and yet hurt them repeatedly and severely. In order for the book to work, I believe this is a contradiction that you must accept. And, you must accept this as a path to self-discovery and self-recognition that can bring redemption. While I doubt I could ever believe this in the real world I live in, somehow I came to within the confines of this story.

Another aspect of the book that is very important, and which I admit to understanding only on a level that feels wholly inadequate, is the Maori culture and the search for identity within the peoples of New Zealand. Both Joe and Kerewin are a part of the Maori culture, and both are trying to live within the Pakeha (European) culture that has displaced it. The strength for each of them comes from the connection to their Maori roots and a large part of their hope for salvation lies in being able to reconnect to that lost part of themselves. I believe it is no accident that the pure Maori, the mixed Maori/Pakeha, and the pure Pakeha are represented in the three main characters, and that part of the struggle for them is to learn how to live together in harmony.

This is not an easy book. It is well-written, but written in an unusual style that incorporates various voices and the use of both prose, poetry and a vague stream of consciousness. It suffers a few times from being bogged down and repetitive, and would have benefited from being cut down in length by a good editor. However, it is a prodigious enterprise that leaves a stunning impression on the reader. Hats off to Keri Hulme. Definitely worth the reading!
]]> 4.05 1984
author: Keri Hulme
name: Sara
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1984
rating: 4
read at: 2022/03/12
date added: 2022/03/12
shelves: 2022-aty-challenge, archive-org, culture, family, indigenous-people, women-writers, oceania
review:
Art and family by blood; home and family by love…regaining any one was worth this fiery journey to the heart of the sun.


Keri Hulme’s The Bone People is a complex story of love, isolation, and a search for identity, set in her native New Zealand. Much of the complexity of this novel rises from its treatment of opposites and how they interact and weave together in a life. How, for example, do love and cruelty exist within the same person and toward the same object? How does a person sort the good and bad and decide whether the one can ever offset the other? How does an individual balance his need for solitude with his need for companionship and understanding?

The three main characters are a half-Maori woman, Kerewin Holmes, who becomes involved in the lives of Joe, a Maori man, and his foster son, Simon, a white child. Kerewin is separated from her family and living an isolated life by choice, but in despair for the family she has lost.

A family can be the bane of one's existence. A family can also be most of the meaning of one's existence. I don't know whether my family is bane or meaning, but they have surely gone away and left a large hole in my heart.

Joe is grieving the loss of his wife and natural child to flu, and he is struggling with the difficulties that come with being a single parent to his foster son, who has disabilities and sometimes unbridled rage. Simon is unable to speak, an affliction that stems from his own loss of parents, and which is apparently psychosomatic rather than physical, but he has an intelligence that is sharp and so he rebels against not being understood or sometimes even acknowledged. Unlikely as it seems, the three form a bond that stems from some ability they have to understand one another, an ability that no doubt stems from their lonely, unfathomable similarities.

There is, at the heart of this novel, a dichotomy that I had difficulty dealing with, and that is the idea that a person could love deeply someone and yet hurt them repeatedly and severely. In order for the book to work, I believe this is a contradiction that you must accept. And, you must accept this as a path to self-discovery and self-recognition that can bring redemption. While I doubt I could ever believe this in the real world I live in, somehow I came to within the confines of this story.

Another aspect of the book that is very important, and which I admit to understanding only on a level that feels wholly inadequate, is the Maori culture and the search for identity within the peoples of New Zealand. Both Joe and Kerewin are a part of the Maori culture, and both are trying to live within the Pakeha (European) culture that has displaced it. The strength for each of them comes from the connection to their Maori roots and a large part of their hope for salvation lies in being able to reconnect to that lost part of themselves. I believe it is no accident that the pure Maori, the mixed Maori/Pakeha, and the pure Pakeha are represented in the three main characters, and that part of the struggle for them is to learn how to live together in harmony.

This is not an easy book. It is well-written, but written in an unusual style that incorporates various voices and the use of both prose, poetry and a vague stream of consciousness. It suffers a few times from being bogged down and repetitive, and would have benefited from being cut down in length by a good editor. However, it is a prodigious enterprise that leaves a stunning impression on the reader. Hats off to Keri Hulme. Definitely worth the reading!

]]> 54404602 In the spirit of The Known World and The Underground Railroad, a profound debut about the unlikely bond between two freedmen who are brothers and the Georgia farmer whose alliance will alter their lives, and his, forever.

In the waning days of the Civil War, brothers Prentiss and Landry—freed by the Emancipation Proclamation—seek refuge on the homestead of George Walker and his wife, Isabelle. The Walkers, wracked by the loss of their only son to the war, hire the brothers to work their farm, hoping through an unexpected friendship to stanch their grief. Prentiss and Landry, meanwhile, plan to save money for the journey north and a chance to reunite with their mother, who was sold away when they were boys.

Parallel to their story runs a forbidden romance between two Confederate soldiers. The young men, recently returned from the war to the town of Old Ox, hold their trysts in the woods. But when their secret is discovered, the resulting chaos unleashes convulsive repercussions on the entire community. In the aftermath of so much turmoil, it is Isabelle who emerges as an unlikely leader, proffering a healing vision for the land and for the newly free citizens of Old Ox.

With candor and sympathy, debut novelist Nathan Harris creates an unforgettable cast of characters, depicting Georgia in the violent crucible of Reconstruction. Equal parts beauty and terror, as gripping as it is moving, The Sweetness of Water is an epic whose grandeur locates humanity and love amid the most harrowing circumstances.]]> 368 Nathan Harris 031646127X Sara 5 And perhaps that was the great ill of the world, that those prone to evil were left untouched by guilt to a degree so vast that they might sleep through a storm, while better men, conscience stained men, lay awake as though that very storm persisted unyieldingly in the furthest reaches of their soul.

It is post-Civil war Georgia, and the men have come home from the war in various states of mental and physical disrepair. The slaves have been freed, but few of them know how to embrace the new life they have found, and most of the townsmen and previous slave owners do not mean to see them succeed. Disarray is everywhere, loss is everywhere, and the scavengers have control of things.

Two of the freedmen released into the town of Old Ox, Georgia are brothers, Landrey and Prentiss, who make their way onto the land of George Walker and his wife, Isabelle. George is a good man, who recognizes that he and the brothers might fill one another’s needs: his to begin a field of peanuts (a task he is ill-equipped to perform), and theirs to make enough money to leave the town and find their way North to a new life. He has a genuine respect for these men, he pays a fair wage, neither of these facts is considered an attribute by his neighbors.

That this relationship should end in tragedy is almost a given. In fact, there is much these men have in common, but little they understand of one another, and they are all struggling to find their feet in a world that has just turned inside-out. Woven into this tale is another kind of struggle, experienced by two other men, but one that impacts directly the events that follow.

Harris has also created, along with this variety of male characters, a couple of female characters that make the book whole and complete. Isabelle, and her growth during the course of the novel, shows, for me, how truly adept a writer Nathan Harris is. She reacts in ways that I did not anticipate, but never in ways that do not ring true.

There is so much one wishes to say, but too difficult to do so without spoiling some aspects of the book for others, which I always strive to avoid. So, I will simply say this is a powerful read, it deserves the attention and award nominations it has received.

The Sweetness of Water is Nathan Harris� debut offering, and I hope it is a sign of things to come from this very talented and skillful writer.
]]> 4.08 2021
author: Nathan Harris
name: Sara
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2022/03/02
date added: 2022/03/02
shelves: american, borrowed-from-library, civil-war, family, historical-fiction, overdrive, siblings, slavery, southern-lit, 2022-aty-challenge
review:
And perhaps that was the great ill of the world, that those prone to evil were left untouched by guilt to a degree so vast that they might sleep through a storm, while better men, conscience stained men, lay awake as though that very storm persisted unyieldingly in the furthest reaches of their soul.

It is post-Civil war Georgia, and the men have come home from the war in various states of mental and physical disrepair. The slaves have been freed, but few of them know how to embrace the new life they have found, and most of the townsmen and previous slave owners do not mean to see them succeed. Disarray is everywhere, loss is everywhere, and the scavengers have control of things.

Two of the freedmen released into the town of Old Ox, Georgia are brothers, Landrey and Prentiss, who make their way onto the land of George Walker and his wife, Isabelle. George is a good man, who recognizes that he and the brothers might fill one another’s needs: his to begin a field of peanuts (a task he is ill-equipped to perform), and theirs to make enough money to leave the town and find their way North to a new life. He has a genuine respect for these men, he pays a fair wage, neither of these facts is considered an attribute by his neighbors.

That this relationship should end in tragedy is almost a given. In fact, there is much these men have in common, but little they understand of one another, and they are all struggling to find their feet in a world that has just turned inside-out. Woven into this tale is another kind of struggle, experienced by two other men, but one that impacts directly the events that follow.

Harris has also created, along with this variety of male characters, a couple of female characters that make the book whole and complete. Isabelle, and her growth during the course of the novel, shows, for me, how truly adept a writer Nathan Harris is. She reacts in ways that I did not anticipate, but never in ways that do not ring true.

There is so much one wishes to say, but too difficult to do so without spoiling some aspects of the book for others, which I always strive to avoid. So, I will simply say this is a powerful read, it deserves the attention and award nominations it has received.

The Sweetness of Water is Nathan Harris� debut offering, and I hope it is a sign of things to come from this very talented and skillful writer.

]]> 15802906 From the author of Drowning Ruth, a haunting, atmospheric novel set at the closing of the frontier about a young wife who moves to a far-flung and forbidding lighthouse where she uncovers a life-changing secret.

Trudy is a polished, college-educated young woman from a respectable upper middle-class family, and it’s only a matter of time before she’ll marry Ernst, the son of her parents� closest friends. All should be well in her world, and yet Trudy is restless and desperate for more stimulation than 1897 Milwaukee will allow. When she falls in love with enigmatic and ambitious Oskar, she believes she’s found her escape from the banality of her pre-ordained life. Alienated from Trudy’s family and friends, the couple moves across the country to take a job at a lighthouse in the eerily isolated Point Lucia, California. Upon arriving they meet the light station’s only inhabitants—the Crawleys, a family whose plain appearance is no indication of what lies below the surface. It isn’t long before Trudy begins to realize that there is more going on in this seemingly empty place than she could ever have imagined.

Gorgeously detailed, swiftly paced, and anchored in the lush geography of the remote and eternally mesmerizing Big Sur, The Edge of the Earth is a magical and moving story of secrets and self-transformation, ruses and rebirths, masterfully told by a celebrated and accomplished author.]]> 275 Christina Schwarz 1451683677 Sara 4
It is interesting to see Trudy develop her own interests and pursue her natural inclinations toward science. Schwarz does an excellent job of unveiling Trudy, and indeed all the other characters she invents for us. There is a “mermaid� (according to the children) on the island, living in the caves, and the mystery of this woman drives the plot. While I unraveled the main mystery well before the reveal, I still found the book riveting and was anxious to see how the truth would be exposed and how it would affect this group of lighthouse keepers. I think a secret is a hard thing to keep in such close quarters, and strangers do not remain such for long when the sounds of their living penetrate the walls between their homes.

The idea of living and caring for a lighthouse is one that has some very specific appeal for me. I cannot tell you why, but it seems it is a romantic notion that I have held onto from childhood, so there must have been a captivating lighthouse book in my youth somewhere. I thoroughly enjoyed this one, and welcomed the break from heavier reading into something that was sheer pleasure first to last.



]]> 3.59 2013
author: Christina Schwarz
name: Sara
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2013
rating: 4
read at: 2022/02/24
date added: 2022/02/24
shelves: 2022-aty-challenge, american, historical-fiction, pleasure-reading, women-writers
review:
The edge of the earth for Trudy Swann is a lighthouse in Point Lucia, California, where she is domiciled with her new husband, Oskar, the Crawley family consisting of the chief keeper, his wife and four children, and Mrs. Crawley’s brother, Archie Johnson. She has married impetuously, without knowing much about who her husband truly is, but what might reveal itself in bits and pieces under normal circumstances, comes in a rush in such an isolated setting.

It is interesting to see Trudy develop her own interests and pursue her natural inclinations toward science. Schwarz does an excellent job of unveiling Trudy, and indeed all the other characters she invents for us. There is a “mermaid� (according to the children) on the island, living in the caves, and the mystery of this woman drives the plot. While I unraveled the main mystery well before the reveal, I still found the book riveting and was anxious to see how the truth would be exposed and how it would affect this group of lighthouse keepers. I think a secret is a hard thing to keep in such close quarters, and strangers do not remain such for long when the sounds of their living penetrate the walls between their homes.

The idea of living and caring for a lighthouse is one that has some very specific appeal for me. I cannot tell you why, but it seems it is a romantic notion that I have held onto from childhood, so there must have been a captivating lighthouse book in my youth somewhere. I thoroughly enjoyed this one, and welcomed the break from heavier reading into something that was sheer pleasure first to last.




]]> 44139147 The riveting Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, available as an e-book for the first time.Wully McLaughlin returns to his family’s Iowa homestead at the end of the Civil War to find his sweetheart, Chirstie McNair, alone and in distress, her mother dead and her wayward father gone. Perplexed by a new aloofness in Chirstie, Wully soon discovers that she has been raped and is pregnant. To the shock of his parents and the tight-knit Scottish community in which they live, he marries Chirstie and claims the child, and the shame of its early birth, as his own. But the lingering presence of Chirstie’s attacker sets in motion a series of events that pit the desire for revenge against a reluctance to perpetuate the cycle of violence. Often compared to Willa Cather’s One of Ours and Edna Ferber’s So Big for its earthy realism, its portrait of an immigrant community, and its depiction of Midwestern farm life, Margaret Wilson’s provocative debut novel, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for 1924, is ripe for rediscovery. In a recent reappraisal Judy Cornes commends the novel’s “feeling for time and a sense of the unrelenting forces that both history and nature impose on the individual. . . . The Able McLaughlins remains an engrossing story with characters who constantly engage our attention.”]]> 156 Margaret Wilson 1598535935 Sara 3
Tears were running down Isobel McLaughlin’s face as she finished. Though she never doubted that God was infinitely kind, she wondered at times why that something else, called life, or nature, should be so cruel.

It isn’t that you cannot understand what Margaret Wilson hopes to achieve with this novel. She would like us to think about the nature of revenge and forgiveness. She intends, I think, to highlight the responsibility of the strong to the weak, the nature of self-sacrifice. She means to promote Christian values.

She is not particularly effective in her efforts, because she is strangely inconsistent. Her main character is a young man by the name of Wully McLaughlin. Wully returns from the Civil War to find things at home are not as he left them. Wully is, by turns, very strong, determined and angry, and very weak, wavering and sentimental. I had a hard time reconciling the early image of the young soldier with the later images Wilson paints. At the end of the book, I had little sense of who Wully really was.

There are chapters of little or no forward movement, in which, I assume, we are expected to build some affinity with the characters. Sadly, for me, this did not happen. There is an almost side narrative that seems to never fit within the main storyline. Reactions are overblown to the point of hyperbole, and often do not seem to fit with the situation. I found some of the feelings of the characters simply impossible to understand, not the least of these being those of the young girl who is at the heart of the plot.

In my final complaint, I wonder what world-shaking activity Margaret Wilson felt she had to run off to when she wrote the ending to this novel. After building to what should have been a climactic end, she simply folds her tent and exits with a whimper. I’m sure Wilson intended to show Wully struggling with himself and his feelings, but what was left to me was a confused sequence of antithetical emotions that seemed unrealistic, if not impossible. I felt faintly dissatisfied.

Had this book not won the Pulitzer prize I would have simply counted it as a mediocre read. One cannot help expecting more from a Pulitzer. Not every winner is a winner.
]]> 3.85 1923
author: Margaret Wilson
name: Sara
average rating: 3.85
book published: 1923
rating: 3
read at: 2022/02/21
date added: 2022/02/21
shelves: kindle-purchase, 2022-aty-challenge, 20th-century-literature, american, civil-war, pulitzer-prize-winners
review:
How do some of these books win the Pulitzer? Among the earlier ones, some just don’t wear well because the subject matter becomes outdated, but this isn’t one of those. This is a seriously underwhelming and ordinary book. It is not a bad read, there are parts of it, particularly those that describe the difficulties of this rural life and the environment, that are beautifully done.

Tears were running down Isobel McLaughlin’s face as she finished. Though she never doubted that God was infinitely kind, she wondered at times why that something else, called life, or nature, should be so cruel.

It isn’t that you cannot understand what Margaret Wilson hopes to achieve with this novel. She would like us to think about the nature of revenge and forgiveness. She intends, I think, to highlight the responsibility of the strong to the weak, the nature of self-sacrifice. She means to promote Christian values.

She is not particularly effective in her efforts, because she is strangely inconsistent. Her main character is a young man by the name of Wully McLaughlin. Wully returns from the Civil War to find things at home are not as he left them. Wully is, by turns, very strong, determined and angry, and very weak, wavering and sentimental. I had a hard time reconciling the early image of the young soldier with the later images Wilson paints. At the end of the book, I had little sense of who Wully really was.

There are chapters of little or no forward movement, in which, I assume, we are expected to build some affinity with the characters. Sadly, for me, this did not happen. There is an almost side narrative that seems to never fit within the main storyline. Reactions are overblown to the point of hyperbole, and often do not seem to fit with the situation. I found some of the feelings of the characters simply impossible to understand, not the least of these being those of the young girl who is at the heart of the plot.

In my final complaint, I wonder what world-shaking activity Margaret Wilson felt she had to run off to when she wrote the ending to this novel. After building to what should have been a climactic end, she simply folds her tent and exits with a whimper. I’m sure Wilson intended to show Wully struggling with himself and his feelings, but what was left to me was a confused sequence of antithetical emotions that seemed unrealistic, if not impossible. I felt faintly dissatisfied.

Had this book not won the Pulitzer prize I would have simply counted it as a mediocre read. One cannot help expecting more from a Pulitzer. Not every winner is a winner.

]]> 27405160
At the same time, Mission Specialist Sullivan is aboard the Aether on its return flight from Jupiter. The astronauts are the first human beings to delve this deep into space, and Sully has made peace with the sacrifices required of her: a daughter left behind, a marriage ended. So far the journey has been a success, but when Mission Control falls inexplicably silent, Sully and her crew mates are forced to wonder if they will ever get home.

As Augustine and Sully each face an uncertain future against forbidding yet beautiful landscapes, their stories gradually intertwine in a profound and unexpected conclusion. In crystalline prose, Good Morning, Midnight poses the most important questions: What endures at the end of the world? How do we make sense of our lives?]]> 218 Lily Brooks-Dalton 0812998901 Sara 4
During the course of the novel, we are unsure, as they are, of what has happened, but regardless, they must deal with the possibilities and as readers, so must we. This book is much more about the psychology of the situation than the question of what these people will find to be the truth, if and when they find out what has happened on earth.

Do you know what I do? I brush my teeth and think only of brushing my teeth. I replace the air filter and think only of replacing the air filter. I start a conversation with one of the others when I feel lonely, and it helps both of us. This moment, Sully, this is where we must live. We can’t help anyone on Earth by thinking about them.

What each of these people realizes is that whatever they might have intended to do, whatever they might have meant to say to someone, whatever relationships they thought might be repaired, it can suddenly be too late. You don’t have to be looking at a lost world to come to this place in life. Most of us discover this along the way, even if the world keeps spinning, unchanged.

We study the universe in order to know, yet in the end the only thing we truly know is that all things end—all but death and time. It’s difficult to be reminded of that”—he patted her hand where it lay on the table—“but it’s harder to forget.�

The story is well-written and the reader cannot help being invested in what will happen to these people or to contemplate what it would feel like to go to space (where you might expect to be at risk) and then find out your family and friends were at greater risk remaining at home. Or, in the case of Augustine, to discover at the end that you might have lived a life pursuing the wrong ends.

Just an aside: I bought this book by accident. I was trying to purchase Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys. I ended up with both books, and I enjoyed this one, so serendipity.
]]> 3.88 2016
author: Lily Brooks-Dalton
name: Sara
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2016
rating: 4
read at: 2022/02/16
date added: 2022/02/16
shelves: 2022-aty-challenge, dystopia, sci-fi
review:
If the whole world were destroyed and you could be one of five people left alive, would you want to be? What purpose would life serve? These are the questions I kept asking myself as I read this sci-fi, dystopian tale. Not a spoiler, five people are off on a mission to Jupiter and headed home when they lose all contact with the earth. No signals, no response, nothing. In a parallel story, a scientist, Augustine, refuses to be evacuated from a science station in the Arctic, and he loses all contact, as well.

During the course of the novel, we are unsure, as they are, of what has happened, but regardless, they must deal with the possibilities and as readers, so must we. This book is much more about the psychology of the situation than the question of what these people will find to be the truth, if and when they find out what has happened on earth.

Do you know what I do? I brush my teeth and think only of brushing my teeth. I replace the air filter and think only of replacing the air filter. I start a conversation with one of the others when I feel lonely, and it helps both of us. This moment, Sully, this is where we must live. We can’t help anyone on Earth by thinking about them.

What each of these people realizes is that whatever they might have intended to do, whatever they might have meant to say to someone, whatever relationships they thought might be repaired, it can suddenly be too late. You don’t have to be looking at a lost world to come to this place in life. Most of us discover this along the way, even if the world keeps spinning, unchanged.

We study the universe in order to know, yet in the end the only thing we truly know is that all things end—all but death and time. It’s difficult to be reminded of that”—he patted her hand where it lay on the table—“but it’s harder to forget.�

The story is well-written and the reader cannot help being invested in what will happen to these people or to contemplate what it would feel like to go to space (where you might expect to be at risk) and then find out your family and friends were at greater risk remaining at home. Or, in the case of Augustine, to discover at the end that you might have lived a life pursuing the wrong ends.

Just an aside: I bought this book by accident. I was trying to purchase Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys. I ended up with both books, and I enjoyed this one, so serendipity.

]]> 8692487 The First Violin is told in first person from two points of view. It begins with May Wedderburn living a quiet existence in a small town in England. Her quiet is disrupted when she attracts the attentions of the local wealthy landowner, Sir Peter. May has no interest in Sir Peter's offer of marriage and is even a bit afraid of him. Enter the town recluse Miss Hallam who offers to whisk May away to Germany where music and excitement await her immediately upon arrival.]]> 468 Jessie Fothergill 1409987809 Sara 5
All his lines were lines of beauty, but beauty which had power and much masculine strength; nowhere did it degenerate into flaccidity, nowhere lose strength in grace.

I was in absolutely the perfect mood for this perfect tale. I suppose you might say it is predictable, but this is one of those books where you are delighted to take the journey, even if you have already seen the destination. Jessie Fothergill has a fluid and captivating writing style and never bores the reader. She also knows her classical music and weaves it into the tale with precision and finesse. Again, I was never bored with the musical passages. I could easily picture the hall, the musicians, the excitement of the audience, the nerves of the performers–in short, I was so yearning to be there that I often put youtube to playing the music she mentioned while I was reading those chapters. (BTW, Shubert’s unfinished symphony in B-minor is terrifically stirring).

On art and music:

I do not think it ever entered our heads to remember that a man with a quick life throbbing in his veins, with feelings, hopes, and fears and thoughts, painted the picture, and that in seeing it we also saw him—that a consciousness, if possible, yet more keen and vivid produced the combinations of sound which brought tears to our eyes when we heard “the band”—beautiful abstraction—play them!

Bits of wisdom, like this one on idle hands and careless mistakes:

I believe that idleness is sometimes as strong as work, and stronger. You may do that in a few years of idleness which a life-time of afterwork won’t cover, mend, or improve. You may make holes in your coat from sheer laziness, and then find that no amount of stitching will patch them up again.

Before this novel, I had only read short fiction by this author, and had enjoyed it very much. I will now place her other long works high on my list of books to get to. Seems I have another Victorian author to be excited about. One of the reasons I never seem to make it to reading the latest releases!]]> 4.12 1877
author: Jessie Fothergill
name: Sara
average rating: 4.12
book published: 1877
rating: 5
read at: 2022/02/13
date added: 2022/02/13
shelves: kindle-purchase, 2022-aty-challenge, art, classics, english-fiction, favorites, gothic, music, mystery, romance, victorian, women-writers
review:
What fun it was to read this almost gothic novel by Jessie Fothergill! It is the story of May Wedderburn, a young English girl who flees her home for Germany to study music and develop her voice. Among the first encounters she makes in Germany is the acquaintance of the charming and mysterious Eugen Courvoisier. There is romance of the kind I so adore, it is a Bennett-Darcy romance, in that the two seem to be at cross purpose, but cannot seem to avoid the spin of gravity that pulls them together while pushing them apart.

All his lines were lines of beauty, but beauty which had power and much masculine strength; nowhere did it degenerate into flaccidity, nowhere lose strength in grace.

I was in absolutely the perfect mood for this perfect tale. I suppose you might say it is predictable, but this is one of those books where you are delighted to take the journey, even if you have already seen the destination. Jessie Fothergill has a fluid and captivating writing style and never bores the reader. She also knows her classical music and weaves it into the tale with precision and finesse. Again, I was never bored with the musical passages. I could easily picture the hall, the musicians, the excitement of the audience, the nerves of the performers–in short, I was so yearning to be there that I often put youtube to playing the music she mentioned while I was reading those chapters. (BTW, Shubert’s unfinished symphony in B-minor is terrifically stirring).

On art and music:

I do not think it ever entered our heads to remember that a man with a quick life throbbing in his veins, with feelings, hopes, and fears and thoughts, painted the picture, and that in seeing it we also saw him—that a consciousness, if possible, yet more keen and vivid produced the combinations of sound which brought tears to our eyes when we heard “the band”—beautiful abstraction—play them!

Bits of wisdom, like this one on idle hands and careless mistakes:

I believe that idleness is sometimes as strong as work, and stronger. You may do that in a few years of idleness which a life-time of afterwork won’t cover, mend, or improve. You may make holes in your coat from sheer laziness, and then find that no amount of stitching will patch them up again.

Before this novel, I had only read short fiction by this author, and had enjoyed it very much. I will now place her other long works high on my list of books to get to. Seems I have another Victorian author to be excited about. One of the reasons I never seem to make it to reading the latest releases!
]]> 77954 The Last Gentleman) is a lonely widower suffering from a depression so severe that he decides he doesn't want to continue living. But then he meets Allison, a mental hospital escapee making a new life for herself in a greenhouse. The Second Coming is by turns touching and zany, tragic and comic, as Will sets out in search of God's existence and winds up finding much more.]]> 360 Walker Percy 0312243243 Sara 4
His main character, Will Barrett, has everything material a man could want. He has had a satisfying marriage, although he has recently lost his wife, and he has a daughter that he barely understands, and whose idea of a connection to God is an over-zealous religiosity. He is, in fact, a man involved in a soul search. He is looking for God, for some proof of God, for some meaning in a world of evil and indifference, and a definition of moral purpose. He seems to recognize in his fellow Christians that there are more of those who “join� because being a Christian furthers their contacts or gets them into the right golf game, than those who actually embrace the presence of a higher power. There are a lot of church-goers but really very few Christians in Will Barrett's world. In fact, if these people are Christians, they would inspire in us all the hope to never be one.

What Will does to determine whether he should believe or not is devise a sort of challenge to God himself.

“my death, if it occurs, shall occur not by my own hand but by the hand of God. Or rather the handlessness or inaction of God.�

Even in this, I think the reader is allowed to choose. Does Will receive his answer? Does God speak? You really have to read the book and decide for yourself. What we tend to forget, as human beings, is that faith is by definition believing without proof. If you can see it, touch it, know it, no faith is required. Thomas needed to see the wounds in Christ’s body to believe in His resurrection. Thomas may have been a believer, but he lacked faith.

There is much that is cynical and depressing in this story. One could make a very good case for the two main characters being off their rockers. Different is not always worse, sometimes it is just different, and that is how I see Allie and Will, both of whom seem to have better perception than their sane but greedy families and friends. What I also loved about the book is that, while in the beginning there seems to be nothing but desperation, in the end, there is hope.

This is an eminently quotable book. I marked dozens of passages, including one that is a direct reference to Matthew Arnold’s poem Dover Beach (the second time in a week that that poem has been brought to my attention while reading another work. I do not believe in coincidence, so I have to call that serendipity.)

Percy is said to have a great deal in common with Flannery O’Conner, but it was Graham Greene who kept springing to my mind. Both Percy and Greene are Catholics struggling with their faith, and while they take different roads, I think they arrive at the same destination. I am now anxious to go back in time and read Percy’s earlier work about Will Barrett, The Last Gentleman.



]]> 3.94 1980
author: Walker Percy
name: Sara
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1980
rating: 4
read at: 2022/02/10
date added: 2022/02/10
shelves: kindle-purchase, 2022-aty-challenge, 20th-century-literature, american, kirk-s-list, literary-fiction, religion, southern-lit
review:
The Second Coming is a deeply spiritual book, though not a religious one, and I believe its writer, Walker Percy, wrote it to draw exactly that distinction. I think Percy would have said that faith is essential, in fact innate, in humanity, but that we have buried our impulse to truly know and understand it so deep that we mostly founder, like a lost ship, throughout our lives.

His main character, Will Barrett, has everything material a man could want. He has had a satisfying marriage, although he has recently lost his wife, and he has a daughter that he barely understands, and whose idea of a connection to God is an over-zealous religiosity. He is, in fact, a man involved in a soul search. He is looking for God, for some proof of God, for some meaning in a world of evil and indifference, and a definition of moral purpose. He seems to recognize in his fellow Christians that there are more of those who “join� because being a Christian furthers their contacts or gets them into the right golf game, than those who actually embrace the presence of a higher power. There are a lot of church-goers but really very few Christians in Will Barrett's world. In fact, if these people are Christians, they would inspire in us all the hope to never be one.

What Will does to determine whether he should believe or not is devise a sort of challenge to God himself.

“my death, if it occurs, shall occur not by my own hand but by the hand of God. Or rather the handlessness or inaction of God.�

Even in this, I think the reader is allowed to choose. Does Will receive his answer? Does God speak? You really have to read the book and decide for yourself. What we tend to forget, as human beings, is that faith is by definition believing without proof. If you can see it, touch it, know it, no faith is required. Thomas needed to see the wounds in Christ’s body to believe in His resurrection. Thomas may have been a believer, but he lacked faith.

There is much that is cynical and depressing in this story. One could make a very good case for the two main characters being off their rockers. Different is not always worse, sometimes it is just different, and that is how I see Allie and Will, both of whom seem to have better perception than their sane but greedy families and friends. What I also loved about the book is that, while in the beginning there seems to be nothing but desperation, in the end, there is hope.

This is an eminently quotable book. I marked dozens of passages, including one that is a direct reference to Matthew Arnold’s poem Dover Beach (the second time in a week that that poem has been brought to my attention while reading another work. I do not believe in coincidence, so I have to call that serendipity.)

Percy is said to have a great deal in common with Flannery O’Conner, but it was Graham Greene who kept springing to my mind. Both Percy and Greene are Catholics struggling with their faith, and while they take different roads, I think they arrive at the same destination. I am now anxious to go back in time and read Percy’s earlier work about Will Barrett, The Last Gentleman.




]]> 16058610
When Starla is grounded on the Fourth of July, she sneaks out to see the parade. After getting caught, Starla’s fear that Mamie will make good on her threats and send her to reform school cause her to panic and run away from home. Once out in the country, Starla is offered a ride by a black woman, Eula, who is traveling with a white baby. She happily accepts a ride, with the ultimate goal of reaching her mother in Nashville.

As the two unlikely companions make their long and sometimes dangerous journey, Starla’s eyes are opened to the harsh realities of 1963 southern segregation. Through talks with Eula, reconnecting with her parents, and encountering a series of surprising misadventures, Starla learns to let go of long-held dreams and realizes family is forged from those who will sacrifice all for you, no matter if bound by blood or by the heart.]]> 307 Susan Crandall 1476707723 Sara 4 Starla Claudelle is a nine-year old dynamo with red hair, who has a lot to learn about the way things are in the 1963 Mississippi she inhabits. She lives with her grandmother, Mamie, who is far from kind and loving, and she dreams of life with her mother, who she believes is a career singer in Nashville. When events unfold in a way that makes her feel she must run away, she heads out to Nashville alone and is given a ride by a black woman, Eula Littleton.

Eula is a damaged soul, but a sweet and caring person, and her meeting with Starla is God’s way of watching out for both of them. They are both misunderstood, but in understanding one another, they come to grips with what it means to be a complete human being.

He’d called her stupid, but she wasn’t stupid. She was just empty.

What ensues is a series of adventures that cause Starla to see first hand the racial divide in a way that she had never seen it before. As she comes to question the way of life she has always known, she develops a bond with Eula that is touching and scary for both of them.

I couldn’t explain the tangled up way things was making me feel. Mamie said I’d understand when I got older. But the older I was getting, the more confused I got.

As you get older, I guess the assumption is that the prejudices have been well taught and whether you understand better or not, you will at least understand the consequences of not adhering and accept this as just the way things are. Thank God for some brave people who stood up and said “no� despite the consequences, like Miss Cyrena, but also those, like Starla, who stand up for what they know is right, without knowing the possible consequences.

As she comes into contact with the Jim Crow world around her, she meets the worst of the white people and the worst of the black, she sees the fear that each can cause in the other, and she recognizes the basic human injustice that is taken for normal in her own world. But, she also sees the best of both, and that many struggle to be good and decent in a world that does not place enough value on those qualities. It is genius to see this through the eyes of a child, an innocent, not yet taught to hate someone for the color of their skin.

I had to hold on to the mad so the sad didn’t drown me.

I love the characters Susan Crandall has invented for this story, particularly Starla, Eula and Miss Cyrena. As improbable as the story was at times, they all seemed uncannily real and the predicaments strangely believable. The book reminded me of The Secret Life of Bees, another coming-of-age tale that addressed these issues. The mood and subject are the same, the story is quite different. Well worth the read.



]]> 4.08 2013
author: Susan Crandall
name: Sara
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2013
rating: 4
read at: 2022/02/01
date added: 2022/02/01
shelves: 2022-aty-challenge, american, archive-org, coming-of-age, family, historical-fiction, southern-lit, women-writers
review:

Starla Claudelle is a nine-year old dynamo with red hair, who has a lot to learn about the way things are in the 1963 Mississippi she inhabits. She lives with her grandmother, Mamie, who is far from kind and loving, and she dreams of life with her mother, who she believes is a career singer in Nashville. When events unfold in a way that makes her feel she must run away, she heads out to Nashville alone and is given a ride by a black woman, Eula Littleton.

Eula is a damaged soul, but a sweet and caring person, and her meeting with Starla is God’s way of watching out for both of them. They are both misunderstood, but in understanding one another, they come to grips with what it means to be a complete human being.

He’d called her stupid, but she wasn’t stupid. She was just empty.

What ensues is a series of adventures that cause Starla to see first hand the racial divide in a way that she had never seen it before. As she comes to question the way of life she has always known, she develops a bond with Eula that is touching and scary for both of them.

I couldn’t explain the tangled up way things was making me feel. Mamie said I’d understand when I got older. But the older I was getting, the more confused I got.

As you get older, I guess the assumption is that the prejudices have been well taught and whether you understand better or not, you will at least understand the consequences of not adhering and accept this as just the way things are. Thank God for some brave people who stood up and said “no� despite the consequences, like Miss Cyrena, but also those, like Starla, who stand up for what they know is right, without knowing the possible consequences.

As she comes into contact with the Jim Crow world around her, she meets the worst of the white people and the worst of the black, she sees the fear that each can cause in the other, and she recognizes the basic human injustice that is taken for normal in her own world. But, she also sees the best of both, and that many struggle to be good and decent in a world that does not place enough value on those qualities. It is genius to see this through the eyes of a child, an innocent, not yet taught to hate someone for the color of their skin.

I had to hold on to the mad so the sad didn’t drown me.

I love the characters Susan Crandall has invented for this story, particularly Starla, Eula and Miss Cyrena. As improbable as the story was at times, they all seemed uncannily real and the predicaments strangely believable. The book reminded me of The Secret Life of Bees, another coming-of-age tale that addressed these issues. The mood and subject are the same, the story is quite different. Well worth the read.




]]> 54621208 A critically acclaimed novelist pulls Nick Carraway out of the shadows and into the spotlight in this "masterful" look into his life before Gatsby (Richard Russo, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Empire Falls and Chances Are). 

Before Nick Carraway moved to West Egg and into Gatsby's periphery, he was at the center of a very different story-one taking place along the trenches and deep within the tunnels of World War I.Floundering in the wake of the destruction he witnessed firsthand, Nick delays his return home, hoping to escape the questions he cannot answer about the horrors of war. Instead, he embarks on a transcontinental redemptive journey that takes him from a whirlwind Paris romance-doomed from the very beginning-to the dizzying frenzy of New Orleans, rife with its own flavor of debauchery and violence.An epic portrait of a truly singular era and a sweeping, romantic story of self-discovery, this rich and imaginative novel breathes new life into a character that many know but few have pondered deeply. Charged with enough alcohol, heartbreak, and profound yearning to paralyze even the heartiest of golden age scribes, Nick reveals the man behind the narrator who has captivated readers for decades. ]]> 305 Michael Farris Smith 0316529753 Sara 4 And if there is one thing the lost are able to recognize it is the others who are just as wounded and wandering.

This book purports to be a prequel to The Great Gatsby, an exploration of the earlier life of Nick Carraway, Gatsby’s narrator. While some might say we learn little of Nick in Gatsby, I would disagree. I have always felt I knew exactly who he was, so I was in a bit of trepidation at picking up this novel. I’m not a fan of retelling stories or expanding on characters. It is seldom done well.

I address that first, because I want to say emphatically that this is NOT a retelling or in my opinion even an expansion of an existing character. I felt this Nick had no correlation to Fitzgerald’s Nick, in fact, I would have been more persuaded that he was Nick Adams than Nick Carraway. You need not have even read Gatsby to fully appreciate this story. Not to beat a dead horse, but if I could change anything about this novel it would be this unnecessary and tenuous tie-in that seems in truth to be more of a marketing decision–Michael Farris Smith does not need to attach his books to F. Scott Fitzgerald to make them have appeal!

What made me read this novel, in fact, was its author, Michael Farris Smith. I have read several of his other novels and found them excellent fare. This one is no exception, it is reflective of his style and his ability to spin a great story and hold you on the edge of your seat. Everything in this novel is uniquely his, from the vivid and painful war scenes to the dual love stories…if you can call them that. He has an uncanny way of making a strange or unusual character seem very real and acceptable, in fact, downright relatable.

We find ourselves, upon opening the book, on the battlefields of World War I France. As brutal wars go, WWI was particularly horrid, with far reaching effects on those who fought and survived.

And this was the worst time of day. After the fight and after the recovery and before nightfall. Those who remained waited for the sounds and they came, the voices from no man’s land. The calls for help. The strained cries of dying.

Nick is no exception to this rule, he is suffering. A brief encounter with a girl while on leave in Paris complicates matters even further, and sets in motion a haunting that he carries home with him to the States. Unable to take up his life with his parents in the midwest, he finds his way to New Orleans, where he finds his days of being a front-row witness to tragedy are not over.

...he folded the paper and set it on the floor next to the chair and he said to the attic the world repeats itself. He said it with certainty as if it was something he had always known but just now found the courage to admit. I have been here before and I will be here again.

Perhaps the question this book poses is How do you live through a trauma, an unspeakable horror, and then find the way to fashion a life that is not a reflection of that? Takes the ultimate in courage, I think, and yet so many people have done it throughout history. Maybe one of the side effects is that you know what can be lost and you appreciate life so much more for it.
]]> 3.31 2021
author: Michael Farris Smith
name: Sara
average rating: 3.31
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2022/01/30
date added: 2022/01/30
shelves: american, historical-fiction, kindle-purchase, world-war-1, 2022-aty-challenge
review:
And if there is one thing the lost are able to recognize it is the others who are just as wounded and wandering.

This book purports to be a prequel to The Great Gatsby, an exploration of the earlier life of Nick Carraway, Gatsby’s narrator. While some might say we learn little of Nick in Gatsby, I would disagree. I have always felt I knew exactly who he was, so I was in a bit of trepidation at picking up this novel. I’m not a fan of retelling stories or expanding on characters. It is seldom done well.

I address that first, because I want to say emphatically that this is NOT a retelling or in my opinion even an expansion of an existing character. I felt this Nick had no correlation to Fitzgerald’s Nick, in fact, I would have been more persuaded that he was Nick Adams than Nick Carraway. You need not have even read Gatsby to fully appreciate this story. Not to beat a dead horse, but if I could change anything about this novel it would be this unnecessary and tenuous tie-in that seems in truth to be more of a marketing decision–Michael Farris Smith does not need to attach his books to F. Scott Fitzgerald to make them have appeal!

What made me read this novel, in fact, was its author, Michael Farris Smith. I have read several of his other novels and found them excellent fare. This one is no exception, it is reflective of his style and his ability to spin a great story and hold you on the edge of your seat. Everything in this novel is uniquely his, from the vivid and painful war scenes to the dual love stories…if you can call them that. He has an uncanny way of making a strange or unusual character seem very real and acceptable, in fact, downright relatable.

We find ourselves, upon opening the book, on the battlefields of World War I France. As brutal wars go, WWI was particularly horrid, with far reaching effects on those who fought and survived.

And this was the worst time of day. After the fight and after the recovery and before nightfall. Those who remained waited for the sounds and they came, the voices from no man’s land. The calls for help. The strained cries of dying.

Nick is no exception to this rule, he is suffering. A brief encounter with a girl while on leave in Paris complicates matters even further, and sets in motion a haunting that he carries home with him to the States. Unable to take up his life with his parents in the midwest, he finds his way to New Orleans, where he finds his days of being a front-row witness to tragedy are not over.

...he folded the paper and set it on the floor next to the chair and he said to the attic the world repeats itself. He said it with certainty as if it was something he had always known but just now found the courage to admit. I have been here before and I will be here again.

Perhaps the question this book poses is How do you live through a trauma, an unspeakable horror, and then find the way to fashion a life that is not a reflection of that? Takes the ultimate in courage, I think, and yet so many people have done it throughout history. Maybe one of the side effects is that you know what can be lost and you appreciate life so much more for it.

]]> 931843 –Charles Frazier

Against the breathtaking backdrop of Appalachia comes a rich, multilayered post—Civil War saga of three generations of families–their dreams, their downfalls, and their faith. Cataloochee is a slice of southern Americana told in the classic tradition of Flannery O’Connor and William Faulkner.

Nestled in the mountains of North Carolina sits Cataloochee. In a time when “where you was born was where God wanted you,� the Wrights and the Carters, both farming families, travel to the valley to escape the rapid growth of neighboring towns and to have a few hundred acres all to themselves. But progress eventually winds its way to Cataloochee, too, and year after year the population swells as more people come to the valley to stake their fortune.

Never one to pass on opportunity, Ezra Banks, an ambitious young man seeking some land of his own, arrives in Cataloochee in the 1880s. His first order of business is to marry a Carter girl, Hannah, the daughter of the valley’s largest landowner. From there Ezra’s brood grows, as do those of the Carters and the Wrights. With hard work and determination, the burgeouning community transforms wilderness into home, to be passed on through generations.

But the idyll is not to last, nor to be inherited: The government takes steps to relocate folks to make room for the Great Smoky Mountain National Park, and tragedy will touch one of the clans in a single, unimaginable act.

Wayne Caldwell brings to life the community’s historic struggles and close kinships over a span of six decades. Full of humor, darkness, beauty, and wisdom, Cataloochee is a classic novel of place and family.


From the Hardcover edition.]]> 368 Wayne Caldwell 1400063434 Sara 5
Wayne Caldwell’s debut novel, Cataloochee, is an ambitious enterprise, for he seeks to tell not just the story of multi-generations of a family, but the tale of an isolated region of the North Carolina Appalachians, how it was settled and all its inhabitants, as well. The mountains of Cataloochee are as much a character in this novel as the ignoble Ezra Banks or any of the many families that are chronicled between its pages.

That Caldwell pulls off this epic tale so well is little short of a miracle, since it involves the introduction of enough characters to need a family tree to keep track of them, stories within the stories to bring each individual to life, and an almost meandering plotline. Still, it somehow hangs together so beautifully that you never feel any part of that until you have closed the book and are reflecting on its contents.

The character that glues all the stories together is Ezra Banks, who comes to the area at the age of 16, while fighting for the Confederacy at the end of the Civil War, and recognizes it as his own idea of paradise. He returns there when he is able to buy land, marries into the Carter family, well-established landowners and apple farmers, and begins a saga that is laced with foreboding from the beginning. Ezra is a difficult man, and a complex character. I hated him mostly, but there was a part of me that gave him grudging credit for the life he created through hard work and tenacity.

I am so impressed with Wayne Caldwell’s skill as a writer; he paints a picture with his prose that is soft and lyrical, but also hard and concrete. That he understands this region and its people is evident from word one. One of the issues he addresses is the coming of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and the upheaval that represented for those who lived in these mountains. I have been to this paradise many times, and while I felt and mourned the loss this represented to its inhabitants, I was eternally grateful that it was preserved and is there for ordinary people like me to see and share just a little.

While reading, I was constantly reminded of one of my very favorite writers, Wendell Berry. Caldwell has his own style, which is very different from Berry’s, but he takes the best of Berry’s rural tradition and incorporates it into his own fiction, flawlessly. Caldwell acknowledges this influence openly, and it makes me happy to feel that Berry’s vision is being passed on in Southern Literature and will not be lost to us when he is gone.

Caldwell should be quite proud to have written a novel that is a sweeping saga with an extremely intimate feel. Some of the events might seem mundane or ordinary, like Hannah’s purchase of a Burdick sewing machine, but they are the moments in the book that made me feel attached to these people and ready to celebrate or mourn with them. There is no condescension, no caricature, and no belittling of the people or their way of life, even when those negative traits emerge, which are too often portrayed as defining mountain people.

In short (I know, you are saying “too late for that�), but, in short, it is a great piece of literature, don’t miss it.
]]> 3.79 2007
author: Wayne Caldwell
name: Sara
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2007
rating: 5
read at: 2022/01/01
date added: 2022/01/13
shelves: 2022-aty-challenge, southern-lit, appalachian, american, favorites, historical-fiction
review:
4.5 - I love to visit the Smokies - stars.

Wayne Caldwell’s debut novel, Cataloochee, is an ambitious enterprise, for he seeks to tell not just the story of multi-generations of a family, but the tale of an isolated region of the North Carolina Appalachians, how it was settled and all its inhabitants, as well. The mountains of Cataloochee are as much a character in this novel as the ignoble Ezra Banks or any of the many families that are chronicled between its pages.

That Caldwell pulls off this epic tale so well is little short of a miracle, since it involves the introduction of enough characters to need a family tree to keep track of them, stories within the stories to bring each individual to life, and an almost meandering plotline. Still, it somehow hangs together so beautifully that you never feel any part of that until you have closed the book and are reflecting on its contents.

The character that glues all the stories together is Ezra Banks, who comes to the area at the age of 16, while fighting for the Confederacy at the end of the Civil War, and recognizes it as his own idea of paradise. He returns there when he is able to buy land, marries into the Carter family, well-established landowners and apple farmers, and begins a saga that is laced with foreboding from the beginning. Ezra is a difficult man, and a complex character. I hated him mostly, but there was a part of me that gave him grudging credit for the life he created through hard work and tenacity.

I am so impressed with Wayne Caldwell’s skill as a writer; he paints a picture with his prose that is soft and lyrical, but also hard and concrete. That he understands this region and its people is evident from word one. One of the issues he addresses is the coming of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and the upheaval that represented for those who lived in these mountains. I have been to this paradise many times, and while I felt and mourned the loss this represented to its inhabitants, I was eternally grateful that it was preserved and is there for ordinary people like me to see and share just a little.

While reading, I was constantly reminded of one of my very favorite writers, Wendell Berry. Caldwell has his own style, which is very different from Berry’s, but he takes the best of Berry’s rural tradition and incorporates it into his own fiction, flawlessly. Caldwell acknowledges this influence openly, and it makes me happy to feel that Berry’s vision is being passed on in Southern Literature and will not be lost to us when he is gone.

Caldwell should be quite proud to have written a novel that is a sweeping saga with an extremely intimate feel. Some of the events might seem mundane or ordinary, like Hannah’s purchase of a Burdick sewing machine, but they are the moments in the book that made me feel attached to these people and ready to celebrate or mourn with them. There is no condescension, no caricature, and no belittling of the people or their way of life, even when those negative traits emerge, which are too often portrayed as defining mountain people.

In short (I know, you are saying “too late for that�), but, in short, it is a great piece of literature, don’t miss it.

]]> 469959
One family, the Levins, fights to stay alive in their small apartment, held together by the unlikely courage and resourcefulness of twenty-two-year-old Anna. Though she dreams of an artist's life, she must instead forage for food in the ever more desperate city and watch her little brother grow cruelly thin. Their father, a blacklisted writer who once advocated a robust life of the mind, withers in spirit and body. At such brutal times everything is tested. And yet Dunmore's inspiring story shows that even then, the triumph of the human heart is that love need not fall away.]]> 294 Helen Dunmore 0802139582 Sara 5 I didn't understand until now. My eyes fill with tears, and I don't know why. But I know that it's by these things, and nothing else, that we survive. Poetry doesn't exist to make life beautiful. Poetry is life itself.

The Siege is the story of a Russian family trapped in Leningrad in the long siege by Nazi troops that took place between September 8, 1941 and January 27, 1944. The book covers the first year of the siege, including the first relentless winter. I knew, of course, that the Germans had attacked Russia and that German soldiers paid a huge price for that error, but I had no idea that it lasted for over two years and had truly given no thought to what it was like for those being blockaded behind the line.

The story revolves around Anna, a young woman in her early twenties, who is already raising her younger brother because her mother has died giving him life. Her father is a writer, who is out of favor in Stalin’s Russia. An actress, also out-of-favor, a tough red-head who becomes Anna’s friend, and a young doctor named Andrei round out the cast of characters. The details we are given regarding the effects of the winter and the absence of food make the suffering palpable.

It is hard, indeed, to imagine how anyone endures the hardships and keeps their sanity.

Anna doesn't like going past the park anymore. There are people sitting on benches, swathed in snow, planted like bulbs to wait for spring. They stay there day after day. No one comes to take them away.

One of the things history does is inform us. The past can be a warning to the future, for it has that uncanny way of repeating itself if you dare to forget the lesson it has offered you. The moment you say, “this cannot happen to us�, it might.

Pre-Covid, this might have just read like a World War II history, but post-Covid, when I got to the section where Dunmore began to talk about the city, the danger, the complacency of the people, who had always been supplied and believed they could not be completely without, I shivered with a sense that history was talking to me, directly.

Suddenly and sharply, it's obvious that cities only exist because everyone agrees to let them exist. It's crazy, when you think of it, for millions of mouths to pack themselves into a couple of hundred square kilometers, without a pig or a potato patch between them.

I fear cities are even less self-sufficient these days.

For city people it is hard to grasp that the supply chain is broken. It’s kept them going all their lives, even though the system sometimes dissolves into chaos, and prices go up and down like an undertaker's hat.

I think about how crazy people went when they thought there was going to be a shortage of toilet paper. Imagine being rationed to two pieces of bread a day—total.

This book is as tactile as a book can get. I smelled the stale breath, felt the cold, tasted the jars of jam and wedges of honey they so carefully hoarded, heard the cries of the hungry babies, and saw the hanging flesh and gaunt faces. It is a story of hardship, but it is also a story of sacrifice and survival and transcendent love.

What a remarkable way to begin a new year of reading.

]]> 4.00 2001
author: Helen Dunmore
name: Sara
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2001
rating: 5
read at: 2022/01/04
date added: 2022/01/13
shelves: death, historical-fiction, literary-fiction, more-than-5-stars, russia, war, women-writers, world-war-2, 2022-aty-challenge
review:
I didn't understand until now. My eyes fill with tears, and I don't know why. But I know that it's by these things, and nothing else, that we survive. Poetry doesn't exist to make life beautiful. Poetry is life itself.

The Siege is the story of a Russian family trapped in Leningrad in the long siege by Nazi troops that took place between September 8, 1941 and January 27, 1944. The book covers the first year of the siege, including the first relentless winter. I knew, of course, that the Germans had attacked Russia and that German soldiers paid a huge price for that error, but I had no idea that it lasted for over two years and had truly given no thought to what it was like for those being blockaded behind the line.

The story revolves around Anna, a young woman in her early twenties, who is already raising her younger brother because her mother has died giving him life. Her father is a writer, who is out of favor in Stalin’s Russia. An actress, also out-of-favor, a tough red-head who becomes Anna’s friend, and a young doctor named Andrei round out the cast of characters. The details we are given regarding the effects of the winter and the absence of food make the suffering palpable.

It is hard, indeed, to imagine how anyone endures the hardships and keeps their sanity.

Anna doesn't like going past the park anymore. There are people sitting on benches, swathed in snow, planted like bulbs to wait for spring. They stay there day after day. No one comes to take them away.

One of the things history does is inform us. The past can be a warning to the future, for it has that uncanny way of repeating itself if you dare to forget the lesson it has offered you. The moment you say, “this cannot happen to us�, it might.

Pre-Covid, this might have just read like a World War II history, but post-Covid, when I got to the section where Dunmore began to talk about the city, the danger, the complacency of the people, who had always been supplied and believed they could not be completely without, I shivered with a sense that history was talking to me, directly.

Suddenly and sharply, it's obvious that cities only exist because everyone agrees to let them exist. It's crazy, when you think of it, for millions of mouths to pack themselves into a couple of hundred square kilometers, without a pig or a potato patch between them.

I fear cities are even less self-sufficient these days.

For city people it is hard to grasp that the supply chain is broken. It’s kept them going all their lives, even though the system sometimes dissolves into chaos, and prices go up and down like an undertaker's hat.

I think about how crazy people went when they thought there was going to be a shortage of toilet paper. Imagine being rationed to two pieces of bread a day—total.

This book is as tactile as a book can get. I smelled the stale breath, felt the cold, tasted the jars of jam and wedges of honey they so carefully hoarded, heard the cries of the hungry babies, and saw the hanging flesh and gaunt faces. It is a story of hardship, but it is also a story of sacrifice and survival and transcendent love.

What a remarkable way to begin a new year of reading.


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