Stunningly beautiful novel about Vietnam from the 1930s to 1980, told in the voices of a granddaughter and grandmother.

Dreamy/nightmarish

21stc, BRITISH, fantasy, witches, London, Kindle

A historical novel set in the Old West, The Strange Courtship of Kathleen O'Dwyer is in no way an American cowboy saga or tale of pioneers. Kathleen O'Dwyer, the daughter of Irish immigrants, becomes a school teacher, determined to escape the fate of wife and mother. She steadily moves west from Boston to Kansas City, and when offered a position in Santa Fe, NM, eagerly joins the trader's wagon-train journey through Texas to New Mexico and eventually into the Rocky Mountains.

This is not the American West. It is 1828, long before the Mexican-American War of 1846-48 when the United States claimed the area. The land belongs to the Comanches, Apaches, Tewa, other Native tribes, and Spanish missionaries and soldiers from Mexico. Mountain men who have roamed and hunted the area trading for pelts, know the territory better than anyone but the Natives. These are the peoples Kathleen encounters and interacts with -- Temple seems to know them well, as he does the landscape. I was particularly struck by the description of the Pueblo in Taos where Kathleen teaches the Tewa children -- perhaps because I have been there, and the landscape has changed little.

There is a definite episodic quality to Kathleen's journey, and it would make a terrific TV mini-series. Take note producers at Netflix and Prime!

Set mostly in Oxford during the compiling of the Oxford English Dictionary (1884-1928), the Dictionary of Lost Words is a wonderful tangle of language, sufragettes, WWI soldiers, changing social mores, love and sorrow. Highly recommended for for anyone word-struck.

A well written fictional biography of the young Marjory Stoneman. Raised by her maternal grandparents and aunt in Staunton, MA after her mother went mad, she went to Wellsley where she discovered her love of writing. After graduation she made an unfortunate marriage to a con man, Kenneth Douglas, from which she was eventually rescued by her uncle and her father. Moving to Miami, she began working for father at the Miami Herald which he had recently founded, and she falls in love with a young reporter. WW I looms, he goes to war, she goes to Paris to work for the Red Cross, and they both eventually return to Miami where Marjory is faced with the choice of a life with a needy veteran or one of independence.

The best parts of the book were the descriptions of a vibrant, undeveloped Miami,bursting with energy and a mostly untouched, but threatened Everglades. The story was a bit heavy on the romance aspects (her marriage was real, but the love affair in Miami is probably fictional). I was disappointed the book ended before Stoneman Douglas became effective activist she was.

I picked this up because I was thinking of going to see the film.

Well, it's not Green Mansions by W.H. Hudson or Girl of the Limberlost by Gene Stratton Porter, it kept me reading despite the rather preposterous situation of a 6 year old child, andandoned and living in the wilderness alone. How in the middle of the 20th c. did Social Services not take her into custody?? It's a fast read, but I think I'll skip the film until it streams on TV.

I thoroughly enjoyed the first two-thirds of this book -- through the Wife's first four marriages. Brooks' fleshing out of the the growth and character of the Wife, as well as the other characters, including Chaucer was great fun. However, I think she went astray from Chaucer's intent and spirit with her extreme version of Jankyn. Chaucer's satire, good humor and humanity are lost. The combination of the Wife's Prologue and her Tale focus on the power of "Sovranty/sovereignty" in a relationship between the partners -- the Sovranty that is not the rule of one partner over another, but the recognition by each that the other is an autonomous, independent being.

This biography of Anna Madgigine Jai Kingsley covers her life pretty much as the subtitle declares. Captured from the royal Wolof famiy in Senegal as a teenager by the slave trader and Florida plantation owner, Zephanah Kingsley, she becomes his mistress/wife and bears him a number of children. On his death, her son inherits the plantation which she manages with him. The book is an illuminating history of slavery in NW Florida from the early part of the 19th c through the Civil War and of the free back community in Jacksonville during Reconstruction. It provides a glimpse into the history of slavery and gender relations not often seen. Highly recommended for anyone interested in the period and place.

An amusing short story about a witchy mother, told by her daughter.

A bleak, beautiful coming of age tale set in NW Alaska and Anchorage during the last quarter of the 20th c.

Set in Harlem in the 1920s. this historicalmystery is the first in a proposed series, and I'm sure it's the author's first published book. Frankly, it needs a good editor. A quick read, it's somewhat entertaining and gives the reader a glimpse into the nightlife of the times,but there are glaring holes in the plot and the author sometimes points the reader, not to a red herring, but to warnings that decrease the suspense. The protagonist, Louise "Lovie" Lloyd is a likeable young woman making her way in a dangerous world.

I bought this book on a Kindle 99 cents deal, and if a sequel appears as a similar bargain book, I'll probably pick it up.

Ken Bugul. the protagonist and pseudonym of Mariétou M'Baye, a Senegalese author born in 1947, chronicles her coming of age in the late 1960s and 1970s with flashbacks to her youth at a French school in Dakar and her early childhood in a small Senegalese village. Her somewhat fictionalized chronicle begins with her journey to Brussels, where she has won a scholarship to study: "The North of dreams, the North of illusions, the North of allusions. The frame of reference North, the Promised Land North."

But the book is framed within that childhood village and the family compound shaded by a baobab sprouted from a seed children left behind. A baobab, a compound, and a village eventually abandoned.

Indeed the overarching theme of the book is abandonment -- an abandoned child, an abandoned childhood, an abandoned culture and religion superseded by colonial values, even the abandoned idea of a new kind of life. Ken's sense of displacement is heightened by the drug use and sexual freedom of the era's counter-culture. While the book is revelatory and important, it is often agonizing to read. Not for the faint of heart.

"Transit of Venus" is a book about the passion of love -- young love, middle-aged love, shared love, unrequited love, carnal love, disappointed love, disillusioned love, fulfilled love. It has been praised as multi-layered and mysterious.

The language is baroque and upper-class English, more flavored by the 19thc, not really in keeping with the the time period of the 1950s-70s -- though one would be hard put to distinguish one decade from another.

In describing the megaliths at Avebury:
"The little charchyard slabs -- child-height, companionable -- among which Caro and Paul had once sauntered became, by contrast with these huge and mighty forms, epemeral leaflets promulgating a forgotten cause. Compared with this scene, all the rest of Creation appeared a flutter of petals and pebbles, a levity in which the most massive tree was insubstantial. The sweet village itself, through which the farthest monoliths were posted, suggested, with its few thatched and slated centuries, a frail masking of reality. Not that the dark boulders supplied, by their outlasting, any triumphant sense of durability in man's intentions. There could be no winning or even mattering here. You have to pit some larger reason than mere living against these rocks: it was your mortality, your very capacity to receive the wound, against their indifference."

Honestly, I found it all rather tedious and somewhat laughable. By the end of the novel, I really didn't care much about any of the characters. Maybe show more I'm just too old or have read too many much better novels. show less

I got a bit over half way through Robinson's latest Gilead novel and quit. Maybe I'll come back to it sometime.... Set in the 1950s, it's a love story of sorts between a two preachers' children: Jack,a white drunken bum and and Della, an attractive young black school teacher. The only things they seem to have in common are their love of poetry and their religious childhoods. Unlike some of the reviewers, I found their night's long conversation in a graveyard the most interesting part of the book. After that, it bogged down in an examination of Jack's ruminations, self-loathing and religious doubts. Just too plodding for me.

While I found Groff's novel engaging, it really has nothing to do with Marie de France, the purported protagonist. The character Groff creates, half-sister to Henry II (this may be true of Marie), is a virago -- born into a family of Amazon-like women, orphaned and sent to the Angevin court in England, and banished by Eleanor of Aquitaine to a poverty-stricken nunnery, first as prioress and then abbess.

Marie's great literary achievement, her "Lais" are dismissed in a few pages early on in the novel as a series of love-sick poems addressed to Eleanor as a plea to bring her back to court.

Suffice it to say, the prioress/abbess Marie takes the convent in hand, makes it not only thriving but one of the most powerful religious institutions in England, is inspired visions of the Virgin, but writes no more poetry.

Glorious lyrical writing.

"For people of my age, the places that they truly loved and to which they once belonged are no longer there. The places of their childhood and youth have ceased to exist, the villages where they went on holiday, the parks with uncomfortable benches where their first loves blossomed, the cities, cafes and houses of their past. And if their outer form has been preserved, it's all the more painful, like a shell with nothing inside it anymore. I have nowhere to return to. It's like a state of imprisonment. The walls of the cell are the horizon of what I can see. Beyond them exists a world that's alien to me. So for people like me the only possible is here and now, for every future is doubtful, everything yet to come is barely sketched and uncertain, like a morage that can be destroyed by the slightest twitch of the air."

Pretty much what you would expect if you've been reading the newspapers, watching the news (not Fox) and have seen Mary Trump interviewed. She analyzes the dysfunction of the Trump family focusing on Fred Trump Sr.'s genuine business acumen building a real estate fortune (while cheating the government of taxes), his marriage and their disastrous failure in raising their 5 children: Maryanne, Fred Jr., Elizabeth, Donald and Robert. Little is learned about how the children's spouses and children coped, with the exception of herself, her mother and to some extent her brother. It's a quick read and will certainly disabuse the reader of any notion that Donald Trump succeeded at anything from making money to running the government.

An evocative account of a young boy growing up in the Bronx in the 1930s: as much memoir as novel.

This is a sprawling multi-generational book of two families, the Devines and the Sellers, set in a the small Newfoundland fishing village, Paradise Deep, from the mid 19th c. through World War I. It begins with a miraculous "birth" of a naked, pale, white man rescued from the belly of a beached whale. But the history of the families goes back further to the mysterious feud between the Widow Devine and "King-me" Sellers the matriarch and patriarch of the two families. Crummey explores the hard-scrabble Newfoundland life through times of plenty and times of scarcity. The stories of the families are told through multiple viewpoints that work to keep the reader engaged in the lives and trials of a surprising variety of characters. A highly entertaining read.

I downloaded the PDF file of The Mueller Report because I thought I should read it for myself. It was a bit of a slog, though coherently and even succinctly written -- it took me 2 weeks to get through it. I can't say I learned a whole lot that was new as I've become a bit of a news junky, following this Presidency both on TV and in newspaper reports. The number of contacts among trump campaign operatives and Russians as described in Volume I is staggering, and in Volume II, the evidence that the the president has tried to obstruct justice in both the Mueller investigation and in congressional investigations is totally convincing to me. But go and read it for yourself.

This is a coming-of-age story set in a small Mennonite town, East Village, in southern Manitoba. The narrator-protagonist, Nomi (Naomi) Nickel, lives with her father Ray as she completes her senior year of high school -- envisioning nothing in her future except killing chickens in the local slaughter house. Her elder sister Tash (Natasha) had escaped the town three years earlier with her boyfriend, and her mother, Trudi, left shortly afterward under unexplained circumstances. She's not doing well in school, especially in her English class, as her teacher refuses to accept any of the subversive topics she wants to write about. The events of the year mirror that of millions of teenagers in small towns -- taking up with a new boyfriend, smoking pot, going to wild parties, worrying about her hospitalized best friend, but Nomi also takes care of the household and her father, a devout Mennonite whose life has been shattered by the loss of his wife and his life as he knew it. I found the book beautifully written with descriptions of the natural world, Nomi's speculations about her parents' lives, and her periodic pondering of how she navigates her own life. The novel is funny and sad, but not the least bit sentimental.

So we were in Key West a few weeks ago and, of course, visited the Hemingway house. My husband picked this one up at the bookstore. It turns out that neither of us had read it though we had seen the film, which is to put it lightly, a very loose adaptation. No place for Bogey and Bacall in this novel.

To Have and Have Not, published in 1937, is Hemingway's gritty panoramic vision of Key West in depression era Key West -- a time when he lived there, but was also travelling in Europe, involved in the Spanish Civil War, and perhaps flirting with some Communist ideology. The plot hangs on the story of Harry Morgan, a down-on-his luck boat captain who is forced by economic circumstances to charter his boat for illegal smuggling activities. It all ends violently and badly.

However, the aspect of the book I found most interesting was that wide angle lens on Key West:

the frame houses with their narrow yards....Conch town, where all was starched, well shuttered, virtue, failure, grits and bleached grunts, under-nourishment, prejudice, inter- breeding and the comforts of religion,; the open-doored, lighted Cuban bolito houses ...the pressed stone church, its steeples sharp, ugly triangles against the moonlight... a filling station and a sandwich place, brightly lighted beside a vacant lot where a miniature golf course had been taken out; past the brightly lit main street with the three drug stores, the music store, the five Jew Stores, three poolrooms, two barbershops, five beer show more joints, three ice cream parlors, the five poor and one good restaurant, two magazine and paper places, for second-hand joints...and....

We see WWI Vets brawling in a bar; the wealthy, sleeping soundly, or not so soundly, on their yachts; writers and pseudo-intellectuals drinking and womanizing too much; the Conchs, scrabbling for any kind of a living -- and Hemingway's prejudice-tinged view of blacks, Cubans and Asians (not a pretty picture).

Not a great book, but an interesting peek into a particular time and place. show less

I wish I liked this book better than I did because I think the writing is quite brilliant. It's a stream-of-consciousness narrative of a coming-of age story of an Irish Girl probably in the 1970s-80s, though both the time and place of the novel are generic, rather than specific. Likewise, the characters, the Girl, her Brother, her Mammy, her Uncle and all the other minor characters remain nameless throughout.

Many reader/reviewers have found the novel difficult to read, despite its glowing critical reviews and many literary prizes. Although the language is fragmented, using only full stop periods as punctuation -- I found the narration flowed -- sometimes lyrically, more often savagely sordid. It was the girl's journey through the novel that I found difficult

"Skating on the beach. I dreamed it. Empty sort on a yellow sky day cliff. In the evening of it. All alone though gulls are there. Cormorants I know. Chicks and hens. Buttery throt calls squawks. Dipping fish out. Wheeling in it turn and dive. Flutter like a panic wings that they would all fall down above me. I hate those bird feet hanging. rubbery storm air as though blowing over the water. Coursing I think. That clouds and wind skiteing sand spray floats of it up. Catching at the back of me."

"I met a man. I met a man. I let him throw me round the bed. And smoked me, me, spliffs and choked my neck until I said I was dead. I met a man who took me for walks. Long ones in the country. I offer up. I offer up in the show more hedge. I met a man I met with her. She and me and his friend to bars at night and drink champagne and bought me chips at every teatime.... I met a man who gave me a smack. I met a man who cracked my arm. I met man who said what are you doing out so late at night. I met a man. I met a man. And wash my mouth out with soap. I wish I could. That I did then. I met a man. A stupid thing. I met a man. Should have turned on my heel."

In some ways the plot itself is cliched -- a dysfuntional family -- after the elder brother suffers from a brain tumor and the Girl is born, the father deserts the family. The deeply religious (Roman Catholic) mother is left to fend for herself and her children -- at times compassionately, at times self-pitying and violent. The brother and sister are close, the sister sometimes protective. At 13, the girl is molested by her uncle and spends the rest of her adolescence tryng to fill the void in her being with sexual encounters. The conclusion of the novel is ambiguous.

When I was about half way through the novel, I read this interview with McBride that I found illuminating:
http://www.thewhitereview.org/feature/interview-with-eimear-mcbride/

I'd only recommend this novel to readers who are fascinated by the lengths to which the English language can be stretched and don't mind graphic sexuality. show less

Snow, snow and more snow. William Wisting, the protagonist/police officer of this mystery, must shovel out his driveway at least fifteen times during the short course of the book; a roof laden with heavy snow collapses on hime and traps him beneath it for at least an hour; tire tracks and footprints in the snow are clues to solve the mystery. It made me cold in 76 degree FL weather -- the reason why this western NY, snow belter is happily ensconsed in FL.

That said, I have mixed reactions to this prequel of a popular mystery series featuring Detective Wisting. I found the writing in the first third of the book really plodding and slow-going. I wasn't sure anything of interest was developing, but I was cozy in bed, so I kept reading. The plot about a 60 year old COLD-case caught the attention of then young Officer Wisting, and he began to investigate the clues of a murder and robbery of a large amount of cash being transferred from one bank to another by a private hauling service.

Suffice it to say, this is the case that offered Wisting an opportunity to become an investigative Detective. I've not read any other books by Horst, but since I have one still on my TBR, I shall get to it soon

Joy Williams is probably an acquired taste -- acquired by those who savor gallows humor and tenuous connections between life and death. Generally speaking her characters are not the kind of souls one would want to spend much time with, but they do tease the mind for a couple of afternoon or evening reads. The Quick and the Dead takes place during one summer in an unidentified Southwestern desert town. The main characters are three motherless sixteen year-old girls.

Alice, the central character, has been raised by her Granny and Poppa as her mother decamped shortly after she was born. Her school friend, Corvus, has recently lost both her parents in a freak flash flood. Annabel, a newcomer to the town, has arrived from New England with her father Carter, who is literally haunted during the night by his late wife, Ginger. Alice wants to live a singular life, and although she sees earth-threatening calamities around every corner, she is the most daring. Corvus is buried in grieving and unsure how to proceed. While trying to remember and memorialize her mother, Annabel hates the desert and longs for the "normal" life she has been dragged from.

Peripheral characters include the founder the a Wildlife Museum populated by the stuffed animals he has hunted all over the world, a piano player who wears a tuxedo all the time, an eight-year old girl who despises the man her mother is seeing, a seductive gardener who enchants Annabel's father, and a drifter -- a young stroke victim -- show more who believes a monkey lives in his brain.

The book was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and is brilliantly written, as are all Williams' novels (I haven't read her short story collections). Williams's landscapes contribute to or counterpoint the bizarre and bleak vision she has of the modern society. show less

I read this book because this week I'm having lunch with my cousin who wrote it. It's the true story of a very old horse she adopted from Whippoorwill Horse Rescue. When Janis adopted Sable, she was underweight with rain rot spots. Over the course of a summer with much veterinary care and careful, personalized feeding, the 26 year old mare recovered into a stable old age. In Kiss, Sable!, Sable tells her own story making this a charming tale for horse-loving pre- and early teens. The climax is perhaps when she is reunited with Margaret, now a young mother, but Sable's "girl" who , from the age of five until she left home, owned and trained and rode Sable through the hills of Western Tennessee. If you know a horse-loving youngster, she or he would enjoy this heartwarming tale. All proceeds from the sale of the book go to the care and feeding of adopted horses.

Keiko Furukara narrates this short novel about her life as a clerk in the Hiiromachi Station Smile Mart. She has worked there for 18 years since she first got the position as the store opened -- it was a brand new convenience market in a business district, and she had just finished school. In the culture of the store, she finds her perfect niche. The employees' behavior is outlined in the company manual, and all the stock is displayed in a manner most employed to catch the customers' attention and highlight the store's current sales and promotions. She eats, sleeps and lives for the position she has found despite mounting pressure from her family to find a "real" job or better yet, to get married.

In elementary school, Keiko had learned to cope with her peers by simply keeping silent. The few times she had reacted to situations, her reactions, perfectly logical to her at the time, were deemed totally unacceptable -- for instance, when two boys got into a fight, and everyone was yelling at them to stop, she simply picked up a shovel and hit one over the head. This and a few similar occurences led her loving parents to try to find an elusive "cure" for her.

While it is difficult for someone not intimately knowlegeable about Japanese culture and the kind of exploration/satire Murata is employing, for me, as a Western reader, the novel seems to be exploring the reality and coping mechanisms employed by someone on the autism/Aspergers syndrom scale. The book is wry and has some show more definite humorous moments as well as a fairly strong message about "living and let live." show less

Hanna's Daughters is a novel of 3 generations of Swedish women.

Hanna, the daughter of peasant family, although raped as a young servant, married an ambitious miller and moved into the country gentry. But as the country moved into the 20th century, the agricultural economy languished, and when Hanna's husband died, the family was forced to move to Goteborg and learn to make their way in the city. Johanna, Hanna's daughter, after a disastrous stint in domestic service with a doctor's family, worked in a delicatessen and joined the Social Democrats as a young woman. She married a dashing young carpenter who took her sailing and bought her a house with a garden. However, it was not until after WWII, when she returned to work, earning her own money, that she felt secure and respected. She had mixed feelings when her daughter Anna went off to university and moved within the bourgeosie, the class she had despised since her youth. Anna supported herself as a writer even after her divorce from her adored, but womanizing, husband. It is Anna who delves into the stories of her mothers and grandmothers, revealing generations of secrets.

The summary sounds a bit like a soap opera, and Fredriksson sometimes resorts to stereotypes -- but the novel weaves in a century of Swedish history with a compelling family history. She skillfully navigates different narrative voices as she moves back and forth within the generations.

As a fourth-generation Swedish immigrant from families of strong show more women, I identified with the familial patterns and expectations. It's probably not a book for everyone, but the women in my family loved it. show less

An entertaining Gothic novel about a line of mothers and daughters who are descended from the spirit of Lake Superior. Kate is haunted in her dreams by a mysterious woman who was murdered in the early 20th c. When a perfectly preserved body of a young woman and her newborn wash up on the shore of the great lake, the mystery of who she is and how she was killed needs to be solved.