A new book review!  Finally!  Right before Christmas I had that aching need to go to a real bookstore – an honest brick and mortar independent bookstore – to buy one book. If you also find this book interesting, or you don't mind reading more, order an essay after reading my article to analyze the paper in its entirety. We have sworn off buying new books and are really trying to get rid of our library to declutter and downsize our stuff.  The book store we chose was Appletree Books on Cedar Road and, on the recommendation of one of the store clerks, I chose The World of Tomorrow by Brendan Mathews.  The book is more than 500 pages, I finished it today as freezing temperatures have settled in and my husband, David, was making a pot of his best chili.

I hardly choose historical novels, but something about the bold futurism of the 1939 World’s Fair appealed to me, as did the cover flap indication that it was a family saga about three Irish brothers reunited for one week in New York City.  Martin is a musician who has made a home for his family in America.  Francis, formerly an inmate in an Irish jail, has come to American with his mute and ailing brother Michael, formerly a seminary student in Ireland.  Francis and Michael were reunited for their father’s funeral, and after a serious of treacherous events, find themselves richer than kings and able to afford passage to America on an ocean liner where they pose as Scottish aristocrats.

The cast of secondary characters includes an IRA assassin, a forlorn Czech photographer, real aristocrats, the hotel staff at the opulent Plaza Hotel and the ghost of William Butler Yeats.  Surprisingly, the ghost character was one of my least favorite.

Elements of a thriller were over-shadowed by the lush prose and unhurried pace of the novel, that looped into back story and back into the posh modernism of the present.  I lost myself in the book and when I put it down, I googled images of the 1939 World Fair – which looks amazing by today’s standards.

This is Brendan Mathews first novel, and a good bookstore recommendation.  I imagine it would make a good movie, but mostly I just like that it made me imagine the “world of tomorrow”.

Intrigued by the opening credits to the new HBO series Big Little Lies that I saw while waiting to watch another HBO show, I decided to look into Liane Moriarty’s novel which is the basis for the show.  Starring Reese Witherspoon, Nicole Kidman, Shailene Woodley and Laura Dern, how can this show not be amazing?  So I set out to read the book first.  It is a page turner with short chapters, many of which begin or end the police interrogation dialogue, as it is established a murder has occurred in Chapter One.  The female characters played by Hollywood’s finest all are mothers of kindergartners at Pirriwee Peninsula Public School, although HBO has moved the location from Sydney, Australia to LA.  The mothers are all “pretty people” and the competition among them is pretty fierce at times.  Woodley’s character, Jane, is a single mom who has moved to town with her son, Ziggy.  Their arrival and assimilation into the mother-crowd throws off the group dynamics.

I thought this would be fluff-chick, Stepford Wives type reading, but there are larger issues surrounding the “big, little lies” moneyed mothers tell to keep up the facade of perfection.  Past and present relationships are far from perfect, and Moriarty makes some pretty strong social statements throughout.

I can’t wait to watch the series.  I had Amazon send copies of the paperback to my daughter and daughter-in-law and I am hoping for some discussion to come from our little mother/daughter book club.  By the last quarter of the book, I was entirely sucked in and could not put it down.

I am a huge Olive Kitteridge fan, so I assumed I must be a huge Elizabeth Strout fan.  Unfortunately, My Name is Lucy Barton was a disappointment, mostly because of the fundamental questions it did not answer for me.  Lucy spends the whole first half of the novel in the hospital – but there is never the slightest hint what is wrong with her.  That bothered me enough to over shadow the charming parts of the book.  While she is in the hospital, her mother, from whom Lucy as been estranged for a long time, comes to visit.  She sits at the foot of her daughter’s bed, calls her by her childhood nickname, Wizzle, and the two recount old stories and reminisce about forgotten personalities from the old neighborhood.  Occasionally a doctor or nurse comes in to check on something ? ? and abruptly her mother announces she must leave.

Lucy has a husband and daughters, who play very minimal roles in the story.  And even Lucy herself never rises to the role of a fully fleshed character in my mind.  She goes to classes to learn to write from a legendary teacher, Sarah Payne, who teaches her that we each have one single story to tell.  But Lucy Barton’s story is told in fragments, always with some necessary portion hidden behind the mysterious hospital curtain.

I was gifted this book for Christmas, but it was the paperback Target Club Pick edition with a cool looking trailer on the cover.  The best sentence in the whole book is the first one – “Every night, Frank played harmonica for the cats”.  Except Frank doesn’t make it past the first chapter!  The trailer park neighbor kid, Jake, is told he shouldn’t be seeing this, as they haul Frank’s body out, but Jake takes the harmonicas and keeps them under his bed.

What happens in the rest of the novel which is set in Quinn, Montana – population 956?    Rachel Flood,  the town home wrecker returns after a self-imposed leave to sober up.  She tries to make amends with her mother who runs the local bar, The Dirty Shame.  Rachel ends up paying her dues by being forced to tend bar AND play on her mother’s soft ball league.

Unfortunately, I found the book to be flat.  I kept waiting for a big thing to happen that would propel me through the rest of the book.  Bar night, followed by bar brawl, followed by too much drinking, followed by hungover softball game – repeat.

My favorite character was misunderstood and neglected Jake, who drew his understanding of life from Jackie Collins novels and Rocky Horror Picture Show.  He had a sewing machine that was his source of solace.  What happens with him at the end of the novel made me want the throw the book across the room.  I guess the dilapidated trailer on the cover should have been enough warning.

I have been so negligent about writing book reviews lately but this one needs to be done immediately.  I finished reading Emma Cline’s The Girls today after being riveted by the novel for a few days.  I had read a NY Times review of the book earlier this summer, and patiently waited for the ebook to be available from the library.   I am not curiously drawn to anything having to do with cults or Charles Manson, but the early press about the manuscript leading to a bidding war among a dozen publishers and the seven figure, three book deal made me awfully interested.

I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the story is tightly focused on the girls – of course.  The central character, Evie, is fourteen in the summer of 1969.  Her divorced parents seem preoccupied, her best friend seems distant, her town seems disenchanted – she is ripe for the allure of Suzanne, an older girl she sees one day with a few other girls harvesting food from a dumpster.  When Suzanne eyes Evie with a lingering glance, Evie is struck.  What follows are multiple trips and extended stays at the Mansonesque commune where a haunting musician named Russell commands.  Of course there is plenty of sex and drugs and music, but the focus is on the relationship between Evie and Suzanne.  Of course there is a climactic event of violence and a lifetime of lingering guilt by association for Evie, who is an older adult in the opening chapter and subsequent sections.

Cline knows girls and can expose the fragility of innocence with beautifully crafted prose.  This is a book that people will be talking about and girls will be reading.

All of my favorite things – smart characters, descriptions of exotic dishes, recipes, menus – come together in Kitchens of the Great Midwest.  Eva, the central character, is born in the first chapter and ages rapidly in subsequent chapters where she sometimes plays only a minor role.  Eva has a talent for food – knowing ingredients, putting together a meal, and even using food as a weapon.  I loved watching her grow into an enigmatic chef so popular people would pay thousands of dollars and endure years on a waiting list just to eat at one of her mysterious pop-up dinners.  The chapter titled “Bars” is all about those delicious 9 x 13 pan-baked creations and was the tastiest of the whole book for me.

This slim little novel is so fast paced, I almost finished it in a day.  Told entirely in second person, Vida’s narrator has her laptop and identification stolen while checking in to a hotel in Morocco.  After some wrangling with the local police, she accepts another woman’s ID and thus begins a series of events, new names and personalities so entangled it will leave “you” wondering who “you” are.   I listened to an interview with Vendetta Vida, who is Dave Eggers’ wife, and she said the book was prompted by a similar experience that she had with a stolen laptop that contained an unfinished manuscript.  She also said second person narration was the only way she could tell this story.  I was hooked from the opening scene and laughed aloud at the last line.  Highly recommend!