Book Review: The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah

C'est très belle, n'est-ce pas?

"If I have learned anything in this long life of mine, it is this: In love we find out who we want to be; in war we find out who we are."

These are the opening lines to Kristin Hannah's new novel, The Nightingale, and they are an excellent two sentence summary of this novel. Hannah, known up until now primarily for her emotional relationship fiction (á la Nicholas Sparks, with perhaps a touch less romance), takes on new ground in this book, published today by St. Martin's Press.

I'm pretty selective in the commercial fiction that I read, but a few months ago I was invited to a pre-publication dinner party with Kristin Hannah, so I promptly picked this book up to read.  Or rather, I picked up an advance audio version of the book to listen to on my commute.  This was a mistake, because while the reader herself was quite good, the audio direction was a little lacking.  Because most of this book takes place in France, the reader was apparently directed to render all of the dialogue with a French accent, despite the fact that the French characters would presumably be speaking French, and therefore a French-accented English is entirely unnecessary.

 I stopped listening to the audio and picked up the book to read instead. And man, this is a good story.  Let me be clear here, since I tend to review literary fiction on this blog.  This is not literary fiction, so please do not pick up The Nightingale and expect finely crafted prose.  Frankly, if that's the only thing you're looking for in your novels, you probably should not be reading my blog anyway. With this book, Hannah gets to the emotional heart of war and the human existence, and I'm not sure that you can ask for more than that out of a novel. What's more, she has brought to light for the first time in English the story of various French women and their resistance efforts during World War II, and any time that women's stories become less marginalized is a victory in my book.

Vianne and Isabelle are two sisters with very different sensibilities and priorities. After the Nazis invade France and the Vichy government takes over, they have polar opposite reactions.  Isabelle refuses to play by the new rules, preferring instead to thumb her nose at the new authorities while Vianne keeps her head down and tries to get by, knowing that with her husband fighting at the front, it is up to her to keep food on the table for her daughter, Sophie. Growing apart quickly, and with not much trust or love lost between them, little does the other suspect that each sister will eventually serve the resistance effort in her own way.

I think it's fair to say that when it comes to war stories, I've always been as interested in the stories of those who are left behind as I am in the narratives of those who actively fight at the front, if not more so. Not least because those are often women's stories, stories that become anonymous in the face of time, lacking the active glamorization of war that often accompanies men's stories.  Not to detract from any soldier's experience -- they were harrowing and defined by deprivation, I'm sure -- but Hannah's novel hits on the heart of war at home and the devastating choices one has to learn to make.

Unlike many wartime settings, Hannah leaves room for characters who are neither obviously heroic nor cowardly, but somewhere in between. It demands readers to think about what they would (or would not) do to keep their loved ones safe from harm: Would you feed another starving human if it means your own child will go without food? Would you risk your home as a safe house? Would you turn away from the torture or murder of a neighbor if interfering means capital punishment? How do you raise your child to be a moral person when you cannot set the example you wish to, because to do so is to risk your life or your child's? Above all, how can you possibly atone for the betrayal, albeit inadvertent, of a loved one?

More than anything else, I would say that this book demonstrates that the lines drawn in the sand between what we are and are not capable of doing are ever-shifting under the weight of our complicated humanity. Vianne's and Isabelle's narratives stayed with me for many weeks after I turned the last page, and I'm thankful to Kristin Hannah for giving their stories a place on my shelf.

I never did make it to the author dinner to which I'd been invited; it took place in Boston, about two hours away from me, on a night when the forecast was calling for a 100% chance of freezing rain & snow, and I've regretted not being able to attend ever since. My wonderful sales rep, Bob, managed to attend, however, and procure for me a signed copy in my absence. The book itself is quite beautiful, and it goes on sale in the US today, courtesy of St. Martin's Press.

Lovely map endpapers

Book Review: Leaving Time by Jodi Picoult

I'm feeling a little whiny today -- in the "writing books reviews is hard" kind of way -- but it's a good coping/procrastination mechanism for me.  It's been over three weeks since I last posted a book review, and the longer I go in between those posts, the more difficult it is for me to sit myself down and talk about a book.  I often wonder why that is, since I'm obviously comfortable working with books and talking to customers every single day about them as a means of supporting myself.  Part of it results from finding so many other things to do with my time on my precious days off, but let's be perfectly clear: most of it is the result of laziness and an utter lack of self-discipline.

So, I'm going to ease back into book reviewing with a book that I liked, but whose content has become a little vague because I read it five months ago on the train ride home from BEA in May. I'll preface it by saying that while I've read a handful of Jodi Picoult's novels over the years, I've never self-identified as a particular fan of hers.  She is, I think, a good storyteller but overall is a bit too commercial to dovetail more than occasionally with my own reading preferences. The first book of hers that I've ever read was My Sister's Keeper, and until now, that one was probably my favorite, despite my serious dislike of the book's ending.

With the publication of Leaving Time, Picoult has changed publishers, and therefore editors, and I think that, combined with the fact that her new book revolves largely around elephants, has created a new reading experience for me.  Picoult never has been, and perhaps never will be, a writer of literary fiction, but she has an easy style that moves the story along without getting in the way of itself.

A psychic, a private investigator, and a teenage girl walk into a mental hospital...

...it sounds like the beginning of a bad joke, but this scenario actually plays a crucial role in Leaving Time. Jenna is said teenager who has retained the services of a psychic named Serenity Jones and a private investigator named Virgil Stanhope, both of whom are down & out, to help find her mother, Alice.  Alice disappeared one night after a traumatic accident in the elephant sanctuary where she worked, leaving her husband so mentally unbalanced that Jenna is left to be raised by her grandmother. This trio of unlikely comrades combs through Alice's journal and her papers on elephant research as a means of tracing her current whereabouts.

Along the way, the reader is treated to astonishing situations of elephant empathy, grief, and memory. Picoult's research for this book is amazing, and when I was invited to an author dinner with her a few months ago, she regaled our table with stories, including many that didn't make it into the book.  I have always loved elephants, and no doubt that is partly why this book resonated with me in a way that none of her previous books have.  But I'd also suggest that incorporating animal empathy into her novel gives it an emotional heft that is lacking in her previous books.

I mean, really. Look at that little tyke go.  

Picoult uses her trademark multiple narrative storytelling here, mostly to good effect, and there are the usual twists and turns along the way.  I anticipated many of the minor ones, and if I had been as enthralled with the human elements as much as I was to the elephant ones, I might have anticipated the major reveal at the end, but I did not.  I think it's pretty clear that if you already love Jodi Picoult, this book will renew your love for her, but if you've never read her, I think this book's depths may pleasantly surprise you. I admit that it took a goodly amount of suspending my disbelief to accept some of the plot at face value -- count me among the population who is skeptical about psychics, for example -- but in the end, my enthusiasm for All Things Pachyderm completely overruled my feelings for everything else.

It is my earnest hope that that this novel will do for captive elephants what the shocking documentary, Blackfish, has done for captive dolphins & whales around the world.  It is perhaps naïve of me to think so, but Picoult's readership is so large, and so international, that they could easily effect a social change in the way elephants are treated around the world. I hope that it becomes true. In the meantime, she educates her readers about the Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee, the only place in the US (and maybe the world? I'm not sure) where circus and zoo elephants can be rehabilitated (or can retire to), and for now, at least, this book has moved me to make donations to help sustain them.  Fuck zoos and circuses, and don't even get me started on poachers and the Asian markets that keep said poachers employed.  For them, my sentiment is more like, poke out their eyes and skull fuck them.  Not that I have strong feelings about these things.

The cute factor here -- I just can't even.

Book Review: Someone Else's Love Story by Joshilyn Jackson

I had the opportunity a couple of weeks ago to attend a publisher dinner in Boston sponsored by William Morrow publishing.  These things are generally a lot of fun--or at least they are when I don't arrive late and a trio of drunk librarian bookblocks me (kinda like cockblocking, but with bookish things), but this one was especially fun for a variety of reasons: my husband was able to come with me as my date, I got to chat briefly with a Rhode Island bookseller I've been wanting to meet, I knew two of the authors personally (Beth Ann Fennelly and Tommy Franklin, the most gorgeous literary couple you could ever wish to meet), and I came away wanting to read an author whose books I've never paid attention to before.  In other words, that night for me was all winning, all the time.

So, Joshilyn Jackson...As I mentioned, I'd never read her before.  But then she walked into the room and started talking about her new book and kinda made me wonder why my head had been up my ass for so long.  This woman is funny.  Damn funny.  And smart.  And did I mention the funny?  She's also Southern, so when she sat down across from me, we got our drawl on, much to the amusement (and possible dismay) of the Yankee booksellers surrounding us.

Someone Else's Love Story is very much a relationship book.  Not necessarily a romance book, because just as much of the time it's about the relationship between a parent and a child or two best friends from childhood. Since most of the fiction I read could open with the line, "It was a dark and literary night," this book was something of a revelation. It's snappily written without necessarily being literary, and though there are some darker moments, it is, overall, a lighter read. I also think that children are particularly difficult to write well in books for adults, but Jackson succeeds on that front.

There are two narrators in this book: A first person narration from Shandi, who is young mother to little Natty, best friend to Walcott, and daughter of a whacked out and divorced set of parents.  Then there's a third person narration telling the story of William, a genetics scientist who is somewhere on the autistic/Asperger's spectrum and grieving from the loss of his wife and little girl from a car crash.   Thank goodness his own best friend, Paula, is there to help pick up the pieces.

One year to the date after said car crash, William and Shandi cross paths in a Circle K during an armed robbery, an event that binds them together for the rest of the novel. The moment William puts himself directly between Natty and the barrel of the gun, Shandi falls for him. Nobody is happy about this, least of all Shandi's friend Walcott or William's friend Paula.  In the mean time, Shandi and Natty have moved out of her mother's place in the country to move into her father's townhouse in, well, town in an effort to be closer to her school--she's gone back to school to finish her degree after taking time off for Natty's birth.

Amidst the trauma of being held at gunpoint and living in the city again, Shandi makes the decision to enlist William's help in discovering the boy who sexually assaulted her when she was in high school.  Here's where it gets a bit complicated.  You see, technically Shandi was a virgin when she gave birth to Natty.  Yes, she'd been assaulted, but her would-be rapist got his jollies on, er, prematurely and thus the virgin birth.

Anxieties, middle class mayhem, a Molotov cocktail, and unconventional love letters ensue. In the end, the author throws a couple of twists (one of which I actually did not see coming).  I loved this book up until the last 40 pages or so, and then I downshifted into merely liking it, but I have to say, this was one of those books that kept distracting me whenever I wasn't reading it. This book definitely wasn't my usual read, but I'm awfully glad that I broke through and discovered this author. Her writing is infused with warmth and humor, and who says a book where nothing truly terrible happens is a bad thing?  (Well, Cormac McCarthy probably says that...)

Here is an excerpt from her acknowledgements, which is a fairly representative sample of her writing. I kind of love this, not least because she thanks booksellers like me and uses the word "posse":

 I cannot function as a human, much less as a writer, without the following four posses: My reader posse: That's pretty much you, Person Who Bought This Book.  You are letting me keep this job I love.  Thank you. If you're one of those passionate and miraculous bookstore handsellers or big-mouthed, wonderful readers who recommend my books to other people, then I feel so warmly toward you, we should probably make out a little.

See what I mean?  Funny stuff.  She goes on to thank her writer posse, her family posse, and her Jesus posse, and immediately ends with "Shalom, y'all."  Joshilyn Jackson is a person I want to know.  And maybe make out with a little.

NB: This book will be published in December 2013 by William Morrow. I read an ARC that I received upon my request. 

Book Review: A Week in Winter by Maeve Binchy

I had never read Maeve Binchy before and had no real intentions of starting, but I somehow ended up on a mailing list for Random House Audio, and now those good folks send me a few audiobooks each month. Or at least, for the last two months.  I sure hope it continues!

Knowing very little about the book or the writer, other than she died last year and wrote the book Circle of Friends, the movie adaptation of which I have seen, I didn't really know what to expect, beyond the vague notion of Something Irish. A Week in Winter is the story of several disparate characters who come together for a holiday week at a place called Stone House in the west of Ireland (A-ha! I was right!). Each chapter tells the story of a different character, sometimes beginning in childhood, sometimes picking up in adulthood, and the reader learns of their hopes/dreams/aspirations.  Something happens to each character, ranging in scale from mild to pretty intense, that, conveniently enough, only their time at Stone House can heal.

Some of the characters were quite interesting, especially Chicky Starr, the Irish woman who returns to her homeland after a few decades in the US, nursing a secret and looking for a way back to her roots.  It is she who purchases Stone House and turns it into a charming inn, despite having no background in the hospitality industry.  She entered into the enterprise so naively that I had to quite forcefully suspend my disbelief, but I enjoyed her character nonetheless.  I would have greatly preferred that the book followed her instead of devoting each chapter to a new character, incorporating the stories each new guest who stayed at Stone House in a more organic way.

The audio reader, Rosalyn Landor, was perfectly serviceable. I would have preferred a greater differentiation in accents, as the people from Ireland, America, England, and Sweden all sounded roughly the same, but she rendered her male voices pretty well (I find that voicing a gender opposite of one's own is the hardest to do convincingly, among the scores of audio readers I've listened to).

I don't think ever would have purchased this book to read, but I am often willing to listen to audio versions of books I would never pick up, so in that case I'm happy to have listened to it.  A Week in Winter is not the book for me, but I can think of a lot of people for whom it would be.  If you don't mind reading books with a constantly shifting point of view, and if you tend to enjoy stories where nothing truly terrible happens and it all works out in the end, this just may be the book for you.  In light of the events in Boston this week, that might hold a greater appeal than usual right now. 

Three Mini Book Reviews

My blog has been on the dormant side recently, but my reading has not.  Here are three mini reviews of books that I've read that are recently (or soon to be) published, and by "mini reviews," I essentially mean that these are the small shelf tags that accompany these books in my bookstore. 

Frances & Bernard by Carlene Bauer. Has a letter ever changed your life?  When Frances and Bernard meet at an artists’ colony, they are not quite certain what to make of each other, but one letter changes everything. Bernard’s first letter to Frances leads to a deep and intense friendship. Not-so-loosely based on Flannery O’Connor and Robert Lowell, Frances and Bernard navigate the tricky waters of publishing, romance, religion, and mental illness in this hauntingly beautiful story. If you enjoy the works of Marilynne Robinson or 84 Charing Cross Road, or if you appreciate the bittersweet aspects of life, give this one a spin. 

The Mothers by Jennifer Gilmore. I had to remind myself several times while reading this book that it’s a novel and not a memoir—that’s how realistic and heartbreaking it feels. After years of unsuccessful fertility treatments, Jesse and Ramon desperately want to adopt a child, but they never could have imagined the difficulties lying in wait for them in the process, not least of which is determining how willing they’d be to adopt a child born with Down’s syndrome, fetal alcohol, blindness, deafness, spina bifida, or any combination thereof. This is an emotional and compelling read.

The Dinner by Herman Koch.  What starts off as a rather Bourgeois novel quickly takes a darker turn and descends into the realm of menace, both underhanded and overt.  Clearly there is more to our unnamed, mild-mannered narrator than first meets the eye, and as he learns more about his son’s new and disturbing hobby, the reader learns more about him.  The further this insidious father-son story unfolded, the faster I was compelled to turn the pages.  This book is a bestseller in Europe and recently translated for English-speaking audiences. 

Book Review: The Promise of Stardust by Priscille Sibley

When I first heard about this novel several months ago when I was deciding which new winter '13 fiction titles my store should carry, I thought the promise sounded interesting: Elle falls off a ladder and hits her head, causing severe brain trauma, so her devastated husband, Matt, has to make the call to take her off life support.  But wait! Blood work shows that Elle is, in fact, pregnant, so Matt decides to keep Elle on life support until the baby can be born. But wait, part deux! Elle's mother-in-law produces a piece of paper saying dating from two decades ago that says she is Elle's health care proxy, and that she is going to take Elle off life support (acto her advanced health directive), because Elle's wishes should outweigh everything else. Mother is thus pitted against son in this modern medical feud.

Sounds intriguing, no?

Well, if you're a savvier reader than I am, then you will have already anticipated the immediate direction the book takes once the conflict between Matt and his mother arises. I, however, was entirely too naive to anticipate the political melee that broke out, with the militant pro-lifers backing Matt's position and vilifying his mother.  Matt's attorney agrees to take the case because he is eager to set precedent in this arena, heavily hinting that he would love to be one of those people credited with overturning Roe v. Wade.

I almost stopped reading at that point, as I wasn't at all interested in spending the next several hours of my free time immersed in the vitriol that marks this issue, and I certainly didn't want to immerse myself among characters who want to defeat one of the single biggest victories in the women's movement.  No, indeed! Then I had second thoughts; I didn't really know how the book would end, so I decided to stick with it. I had a good idea that the book wouldn't be for me, but I also thought that it was a book I could probably sell and therefore finishing the book would not equate to time wasted.

My biggest issue with the story, and one that I thought was a pretty gaping hole in the plot, was Matt's general disinterest in the unborn child.  He never really gives any indication that he wants to keep Elle alive so that he can be a father to that child, or that so he can still have a tie to Elle after she dies.  He mostly wants to keep Elle on life support because she was desperate to have a child--desperate to the point of being willing to risk her health in order to carry one to term after several miscarriages. Matt is a neurology surgeon and he never indicates that he is the type of person who would be willing to put his life on hold in order to raise a child by himself.  What's more, the hospital didn't realize Elle was pregnant when she arrived via ambulance, so she was pumped full of meds, then put on general anesthesia in a surgical last-ditch attempt to save her.  Goodness only knows how the trauma and the drugs would impact the fetus.

So yeah, I never quite bought into the fact that Matt wanted to be a parent to this baby that, in all likelihood, would be born with all kinds of health issues, if it even lived to term at all.  And since he was perfectly prepared to take Elle off life support before discovering her pregnancy, it was a pretty big sticking point in my being able to read the book at face value.

Looking beyond Matt, though, there were some real complications on both sides of the story, and everybody who knew Elle wants to have their say.  Each family member draws lines: Elle's dad takes Matt's side, Elle's brother sides with Matt's mom. Even Elle's old lover from college shows up with an advance directive that is several years old, from when he and Elle were working for NASA in Texas: this is key, because Texas state law overrides a woman's right to be removed from life support if she is pregnant. It's a big brouhaha all over.

This definitely wasn't the book for me, but I have a pretty good idea the kinds of readers who would: those who love Jodi Picoult, Kristin Hannah, Nicholas Sparks and other issue-driven romances. I will say that I appreciated the author's choice to tell the book from a single point of view (Matt's, via a first person narrative) rather than resort to Picoult's style of using different narrators (and, ugh, different typefaces for each one). I've not read a ton of books by Picoult, Hannah, or Sparks, so this may be grossly generalizing, but I also felt that Sibley's book was slightly more nuanced than those works.  I know several family members, friends, and/or customers who will like this book, I feel.

NB: William Morrow published this book as a paperback original in February of this year. I read an ARE provided to me at my request from my sales rep.

Book (P)Review: Me Before You by Jojo Moyes

I find it interesting that within the course of two short weeks, I saw a film (the brilliant "The Intouchables") and read two books about wheelchair-bound patients and their caregivers, becoming just another instance of book synchronicity. One of the two novels was Me Before You by Jojo Moyes, whose previous book was the wildly popular (at least in the UK) The Last Letter From Your Lover. I said it once before, but it bears repeating: while I don't mind romance as a by-product in my fiction, I rarely turn to books where it is the raison-d'etre. This book is not only a romance, it's a tragic one, but that's not giving anything away if you've already read the back jacket (which proclaims that it's "a Love Story for this generation"). Which means, basically, that while it shares much of the same subject matter with "The Intouchables,"it lacks that film's pure joie de vivre.  Man, I am apparently all about using the French phrases today.

This novel should come with a warning: do NOT pick this book up unless you have a box of tissues by your side and several hours to spare. Because once you start reading it, you're not going to want to put it down, and once you do put it down, you're going to be a soggy, wet mess. Believe me, my cat Murray was quite concerned with my state of mind. Then again, anything that interrupts the administering of chin scratches concerns him.

Up until the motorcycle accident that made him a quadriplegic, Will Traynor was both a go-getter and a player--wealthy, handsome, charismatic, and a thill-seeker to boot.  Lou, on the other hand, is from an economically challenged working class family--bright enough to have gained university admittance, but required to join the workforce to help her family pay the rent when her sister gets pregnant and her father gets laid off. When the cafe where she's been working as a waitress for the last several years closes, she desperately accepts a six-month contact taking care of Will. Will and Lou couldn't be more different on the surface, so when they form an uneasy alliance that grows into the truest friendship either has ever known, nobody is more surprised than they are.

The catch, and of course there's a catch, is that Will and his mother are keeping a secret from Lou, and when she discovers what it is, she reacts with her characteristic passion, matched only by her pigheadedness.  But might Will's secret haunt Lou to the point she makes the biggest mistake of her life?

Let me clear: this is not a book with complicated twists and turns that will keep the reader guessing.  If you pick this book up to read, you will have a fair idea of the story-arc before you're even fifty pages into it, as it's the story itself that pulls you in; but the class issues, the family relationships, and the importance of having somebody to believe in you when you no longer believe in yourself give this book a heft that matches its heart.

NB: This book is already available in the UK, but it will be published in the US in January 2013 by Pamela Dorman Books, a division of Viking.  I read an advance reading copy of the book provided by my sales rep. 

Book (P)Review: The Ashford Affair by Lauren Willig

Sadly, The Ashford Affair by Lauren Willig wasn't the book for me.  It was just good enough to finish reading at night when I was tired from work but not yet ready to fall asleep, and it was one of those books that I kept expecting was going to get better in the next chapter, but that time never came. Admittedly, I had high hopes when it was described as "Out of Africa meets Downton Abbey", and really, it reminded me of neither. Spoilers abound here, so if you think you  might want to read this book and you care about knowing things ahead of time, don't read on. But if you're only mildly curious about this book because you like either Out of Africa or Downton Abbey, read on because I'll tell you the gist of everything and you don't have to waste time reading it yourself unless you really, really want to.

The story weaves back & forth between Addie in the 1920s in England and Kenya (though precious little of Kenya), who is a cast-off cousin of a wealthy aristocratic family, and Clementine (called Clemmie, which is a name that grosses me out) in 1999 New York City, who is Addie's granddaughter.  Or is she?  The book spends a lot of time going back & forth between these two timelines, I suppose to create tension, but really it's only a mildly frustrating gimmick. Addie is the short, dark, poor cousin to the tall, beautiful, and ethereally blonde  and fabulously wealthy Bea, and thus in the first chapter the author has taken advantage of every available cliche. They are as close as sisters, but Bea is a nasty piece of work from the get-go with few earned moments of sympathy, while Addie is the earnest, do-good child who wants to make a difference in the world.

When Addie falls in love with Frederick, recently returned from WWI, it seems that for once a man notices her instead of Bea, but not for long. Wicked times ensue between Bea and Frederick and the whole family is driven apart because, oops, Bea was using Frederick as revenge against her own cheating shitbag of a husband, but her husband discovers Bea's infidelities and because he is a MAN and this is the 1920s and double standards were A-okay, HE divorces HER amid much scandal.  And gin.  Lots of gin. Her family blames Addie for introducing Bea & Frederick in the first place and both young women are outcast and not spoken of.

So OF COURSE the only thing to do is for Addie to become a businesswoman and swear off Bea forever, whilst pregnant Bea marries Frederick and they move to Kenya to start a coffee plantation because hey, Frederick read a book once about coffee farming and thought, How hard can that be? Also he probably wanted to be able to write a book one day and have the opening line be, "I had a farm in Africa." And five years down the road Addie decides to visit them, because how could THAT go wrong? Bea is learning to fly from a bush pilot who reads strikingly like Robert Redford's character in OoA and having affairs with any young man who flatters her because she is OLD at twenty-eight and Kenya is stealing the bloom of her youth and her husband doesn't so much like her anymore and is pining away secretly for Addie.

Then they all go on safari and Bea disappears, and she may or may not have been eaten by a lion. Two years later, with no body ever found because of the whole eaten by lions thing, Bea is declared dead, Addie and Frederick marry, and Addie becomes mother to Bea's two little girls

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Clementine keeps wondering indignantly, and with more than a little whining, why her step-cousin knows more about her family history than she does. When Jon the knowledgable step-cousin responds to her petulance with I AM INTERESTED IN PEOPLE OTHER THAN MYSELF, PERHAPS YOU SHOULD TRY IT SOME TIME, Clemmie flounces off. Then there's a bizarre little subplot involving Clemmie's travels to London where she meets a step-cousin thrice removed who is the current marquess of something-or-other and it turns out that he is the grandson of Bea's first husband and they exchange private glances at the expense of Clemmie's hard-ass boss who doesn't promote her to partner even after she worked 80 hours/week for him, even on New Year's Day and Easter, for the last several years.

I think there is supposed to be a lot of suspense surrounding the real story of Addie and Bea and how one came to pose as Clemmie's grandmother, but as the reader actually know the entire time where they stand in relation to each other, I can't imagine anyone feeling anything beyond mild interest. Clemmie certainly took the revelation badly, but she's a spoiled workaholic attorney in her thirties who can't see beyond herself and can't figure out that the reason she can't make any personal relationships work is because she's not present for them.

For me, Addie was the more interesting character and I'd much rather have seen more of her than of Clemmie, but it was not to be.

I've now spent more time writing this review than I ever thought I would, but as it felt slightly therapeutic, I guess that's all right. This book will be published in April 2013 by St. Martin's Press and I got an advance reading copy of it from my sales rep, Bob.  Thank goodness it didn't end up in my vacation suitcase!

Book (P)Review: The Aviator's Wife by Melanie Benjamin

A few years ago I picked up a book called Alice I Have Been, an interesting novel of the imagined inner life of Alice Liddell, the girl behind Lewis Carroll's famous books, and liked it very much. Thus when I heard that the author, Melanie Benjamin, had a forthcoming book about Anne Morrow Lindbergh, I was excited to read it.  Even now that I've finished with it, I'm not sure what, precisely, my thought are.

The Aviator's Wife started out to be both a serious drag and a disappointment: poorly edited, with lots of bad grammar unbefitting a 1920s woman who is both an ambassador's daughter and a Smithie, for such was the young Anne Morrow. After about 80 pages or so, I even put the book down with the intention of not finishing. Charles Lindbergh was an arrogant asshole and a troubled man raised to believe that showing any emotion was a sign of weakness, and I never was convinced why Anne Morrow instantly fell in love with him.  But apparently the story was sticking with me more than I thought, and I kind of wanted to at least get to the kidnapping part of the story, so I picked the book up once more over breakfast and that's when the interest level kicked in for me.

Anne Lindbergh still made me want to slap her on every other page. She's smart and bright and articulate and from a socio-economic background that could let her accomplish *anything*, yet she wastes her life complaining to herself that she lets her husband control her and push her away and mistreat both her and her children.  I had so very little patience for her.

She could write, she could fly, she could have used her power as one of the most famous women alive to wreak some good during international times of strife, and there wasn't a door in the world that wouldn't have opened to her if she'd asked.  Instead, she lurks in her husband's shadow, utterly incapable of forming her own opinions of things, even going so far as to incorporate his isolationist, anti-Semitic feelings into her own worldview, despite knowing they're morally insupportable.

On the other hand, she was often a sympathetic character: the kidnapping of her first born, the utterly foolish and asinine way her husband dealt with the kidnapping, the death of her beloved sister and father, learning about the existence of her husband's multiple secret families, and having to live the rest of her life with grown men writing to her, pretending to be her missing son, and wondering why she never searched hard enough to find them. It was truly a life where personal heartache balanced out her privilege.

So I have to wonder if maybe that's exactly what Melanie Benjamin intended all along: to present a problematic character and invoke reader sympathy just often enough to get them through the book. If so, then well played, Ms Benjamin. Well-played, indeed.

This book will be published by Delacorte in February 2013 and I received an advance reading copy upon my request from one of my sales reps.

It's Fall Cleaning Time + Multiple Book Giveaway Where Everybody Wins

Some folks like to do spring cleaning, but around my house spring = mud season, so autumn is the time of year we start to clear up the clutter around the house. My husband and I are both bibliophiles, so books seem to accumulate more than we're able to keep up with. Yesterday I started working on the downstairs level, clearing out books from my kitchen table:

...the bathroom:

Notice that the entire top shelf is clear (though not for long)!

...the end of the hallway, where we had books double-stacked on top of the case beyond the crossbar of the, er, cross

Roxie gives the photo some scale. She's 150 pounds.

and the back hallway, where both of us just seem to unload armfuls of books at a time whenever we walk in the door:

Note that there are only a few double stacks now

 At first I thought it was going to feel brutal; after all, books are friends and we don't throw away friends, do we? After the first half hour it felt easier, and not long after that I moved through the shelves ruthlessly like Sherman through Atlanta, though with decidedly less burning.  I may give books away, but I trust I'll never be a book burner.

These are for donation. 

By the end of the afternoon, I had culled the herd and rearranged the keepers, created a section of Caribbeana, created stack upon stack of books to be donated, and even four boxes of books to sell back to my bookstore's used book buyer for store credit. (Hah!  I may be getting rid of books, but that doesn't mean that I don't want more.)

These four boxes are to sell for store credit.

Now we get to the FREE BOOKS part. There's a local charity program that will accept ARCs as donations, and I'm happy to donate them, but if you see a particular title in the close-ups below that you'd like to be reading, I'll send it to you by snail mail if you live in the US or Canada. Just drop me a comment below and send me an email with your physical address.  My blog doesn't have hundreds of followers (though apparently there are lots of lurkers out there), so I don't anticipate going broke with this request, but I will set a time limit on it: one week from today's post.

YA & middle grade. Mock not the Twilight books

Stack #1

Stack #2

Stack #3

Stack #4

Stack #5, part 1

Stack #5, part 2

If you want a free book but don't know which one you want, I'll pick one for you based on what you tell me your interests are. I've got lots of literary fiction, lots of commercial fiction, and a couple of stacks of YA (do NOT judge me for those Twilight books, peoples). I've not read every book in these stacks, and some I'm only giving away because I have multiple copies (I'm looking at YOU, Wiley Cash and Andre Dubus).

So, um, yeah.  Pick yer book. Let me know. I'll send it to you.  That's pretty much as easy as it gets.
Send your address to me at ejcrowe42 [at] aol [dot] com with a subject line of Book Giveaway or similar.

Book Review in Brief: Mr. Churchill's Secretary by Susan Elia MacNeal

Maggie Hope, born in England but raised in America, returns to her homeland to settle the estate of a grandmother she doesn't remember, where she must oversee the sale of her grandmother's house in order to fulfill the terms of the will. In the meantime, things are heating up all over Europe,  Hitler is cutting a wide and lethal swathe across the continent, and not enough folks are raising their voice in protest.

Determined to stay on in London, despite having to give up her PhD program in MIT's mathematics department, Maggie makes friends and takes in roommates to cover her cost of living while looking for work.  She reluctantly takes a position as a secretary at Number 10 Downing Street, knowing that her intellect could be better used as a codebreaker in the War Department rather than typing up the prime minister's memos.

There are two important people in Maggie's life who are not what they seem, and in a race against time, she must crack a German code hidden in plain sight and uncover their true selves before one of them is killed and the other one puts the entire city of London in peril.

I tremendously enjoyed this paperback original, which is the start of a new mystery series.  This book is fun and frothy, offering a little bit of everything: an evocative wartime setting, secret identities, gender politics, light romance, lots of gin drinking, a narrowly-avoided assassination, and a brilliant and saucy heroine.  Don't pick this one up if you're looking for something substantial or are in need of a beautiful prose style, but if you like historical fiction or if you prefer you mysteries to be decidedly soft-boiled, give this book a spin.

NB: I purchased my own copy Susan Elia McNeal's Mr. Churchill's Secretary to read on my summer vacation for lighter antidote to the heavier fiction I brought with me. 

Some lighter options for summer reading

It's no secret that I tend to be drawn to darker, literary tomes that carry some weight, both literally and figuratively, but what's less known is what a colleague of mine (not from my store, will remain nameless) refers to as my "book slumming." (She's hardcore when it comes to her reading. If there's even a hint of commercialism, she's not likely to pick it up.) I don't see it as slumming, actually. When there are so few people out there who make reading a priority in our lives, why on earth would we want want to denigrate readers who read books written by authors who will never, ever win a literary prize?

Which leads me to my post today. Books for entertainment. Books for fun. Books that might even be, dare I say it, funny. Perfect for those days when you don't really want to be burdened with more depressing insights into the human condition. These are not books where you will be blown away by the beautiful prose stylings of the artiste.

Hothouse Flower and the Nine Plants of Desire by Margot Berwin, published by Vintage in paperback. A woman recovering from a divorce reluctantly gets involved in helping a friend search the Yucatan peninsula for nine plants with a mythical collective power. Along the way she encounters an ethereal orchid grower, a mystical marijuana cultivator, and a man who will stop at nothing to get the nine plants first. In this delightfully distracting read, the author takes us for a romp that is equal parts romance, adventure, magical realism, and self-discovery. It’s a colorful, frothy, well-paced novel perfect for summer escapist reading. Think any of the Indiana Jones movies or Romancing the Stone and you'll have a pretty good idea where this book is coming from.

The Leisure Seeker by Michael Zadoorian, published in paperback by Harper. Ella and John, a couple in their 80s, want to experience one last hurrah. Despite their children's horror and their doctors' warnings (she has late-stage cancer and he has Alzheimer's), they head west in their RV on Route 66 in search of lost time. Full of laughter and poignant moments, this book is a reminder that a life well-lived to the very end is a rare, sweet thing, indeed.


Dawn of the Dreadfuls by Steve Hockensmith and Jane Austen, published in paperback by Quirk Books. If you thought Pride & Prejudice & Zombies was just a tantalizing in media res novel, this is the book for you. You'll discover Br. Bennet's dark past, uncover the secret of the unholy plague, and swoon with Elizabeth Bennet's debut is interrupted by a legion of the undead! Good fun all around.

Two new books to consider!

Gearing up for inventory at the bookstore, both the intense behind-the-scenes prep work and the actual counting of every item for sale in the store, has taken up a lot of my time this month. So I'm abandoning the Anguilla trip report for now and telling y'all about a couple of new books that are just published that I hope will enjoy a wide readership.


THE MOST BEAUTIFUL BOOK IN THE WORLD by Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt is a new paperback original from Europa Editions, the good folks who brought us The Elegance of the Hedgehog. I don't read very much short fiction, as I prefer to really sink my teeth into a book and get absorbed by its world. However, if all short stories were as good as this collection, I would have to change my reading habits. These stories are exquisite, elegant, and enchanting--perfect little gems of literature that explore the nature of happiness across age, gender, and class boundaries. Each story left me with a sigh of satisfaction and contenment.



LABOR DAY by Joyce Maynard. Imagine, if you will, the loneliness and alienation of an unconventional and withdrawn single mother, and then picture her 13 year-old son who will try anything to make her smile. Over the course of a holiday weekend their lives change irrevocably when they meet an injured man who turns out to be an escaped convict. Part coming-of-age, part love story, this moving tale is about learning how to trust yourself and others and about the devastating consequences even the most seemingly harmless actions can have. This title was selected as the top August publication by independent bookstores across America and featured in the most recent IndieNext List.

What I'm reading now...

In a nod to Nick Hornby and in an effort to get by with a small(ish) blog, I'm just going to list the books I've read recently or am reading now.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies was a laugh-a-minute.  The Bennet daughters form the Pentagram of Death!  Darcy thinks Jane has been stricken by the Satanic plague!  Lady Catherine de Bourgh is the nation's pre-eminent defender and lady of the Deathly Arts!  This book was pure-dee entertainment and I'm glad I read it.  Though the vomiting and those Most English Bits were a bit much.  I know, right?  Something over the top in a Jane Austen/zombie fanfiction is so highly unexpected!

An Embarrassment of Mangoes by Ann Vanderhoof.  

I've actually read this book a few times before, but it always makes me happy so I'm revisiting it to get in the mood for my upcoming trip to Grenada.  Sure, this book has all of the obligatory recipes for conch and coconut shrimp, as well as the tales of peril on the high seas.  But unlike so many other travelogues written about living and/or working in the Caribbean, this author and her husband really got into the local groove of whatever island they were on--volunteering, going to political rallies, exploring every inch of the islands, befriending locals, joining in the various Carnivals and Jouverts and other festivals, and in general becoming a part of the community everywhere they traveled.  Makes other books, such as one about opening a restaurant on Anguilla, seem backwards and colonial.  

Random House sent me a copy copy of Olive Kitteridge that I finally read this weekend.  I hadn't realized that it's actually a novel of connected short stories where the titular character is only occasionally the protagonist.  This way we get a fuller version of Olive, a woman of a certain age who lives in a small coastal town in Maine--she's complicated and ornery, smart & sharp spoken, weary of fools and wary of change.  Her influence over the town is both distant and far-reaching, as she taught seventh-grade math to most of its denizens.  She's respected but not well liked, but she surprises everyone, including the reader, with her periodic bursts of insight and compassion.  Definitely an interesting read, this book should please both short story readers and those who prefer novel-length fiction.

Last weekend I went down to Memphis to visit my two best friends and over the course of the weekend I got a few books read.  I read Zoe Klein's forthcoming Drawing in the Dust from Pocket Books on the way down there.  It's a story that combines archaeology, religious fundamentalism, romance, and ghost stories in modern day Israel.  Fun, frothy, and easy to read, it made my day of travel much less tedious than if I hadn't read it.  Don't worry--the cover of the advance reading copy is quite pretty, showing a woman's hair blowing in the breeze with the desert blurred and faded in the background.  I'm not sure why it's not been "unveiled" yet, but there you go.  Fans of The Red Tent and People of the Book will probably find much to enjoy in this debut novel.

Of  April and Oliver, the least said, the better.  One night after an uncalculatedly large dose of caffeine, I read this book straight through.  I wanted to be able to fall asleep.  But short of that, I wanted to be able to care for April, one of the most messed-up characters I've read about in a long time.  But the book was more like a trainwreck--in between wanting to slap her, I couldn't stop reading to see what self-destructive thing she would do next.  I'm being admittedly a bit harsh about it, but I suspect that fans of Jodi Picoult's The Pact will find much to recommend it.  We can't all like the same things, alas.  What a dull world that would be!

Scent of Sake by Joyce Lebra.  This well-researched first novel tells the story of Rie, a woman born into a sake-brewing dynasty in early 19th century Japan.  A bright young girl with natural business acumen, Rie bristles under the extreme sexist mores that dictate her behavior.  Saddled with a boorish husband, she discovers ways of quietly undermining his power.  Little does she realize, however, that as time goes by she demands the same sort of sacrifices from her family and employees that she herself was forced to make, effectively becoming just as domineering as the men against whom she was rebelling.  An interesting read.

I did finish reading two wonderful books that I've mentioned earlier in this blog.  One was just as good as I hoped it would be and the other was just as good as I'd remembered it (isn't it nice when that happens?).  Stephen Fry's wonderfully funny book about visiting every state in the US was a delight.  And finishing Without Reservations was like saying goodbye to an old friend.  I hope that one day when I'm on my own again that I'll have the courage to pick up and travel like she did.