Old Heart by Peter Ferry

Posted on June 16, 2015 by pagesofjulia

A sweet, tender story of a decades-old, dreamed-of romance and the less elegant realities of aging.

old heart

Peter Ferry (Travel Writing) crafts a wise and delicate novel of aging, love and autonomy in Old Heart.

Tom Johnson is an old man. He has been widowed, and thereby freed from a troubled marriage, for a number of years. His adult children have begun pressuring him to sell the house in Illinois and move into a home. The motives of his son the gambling addict are suspicious; his daughter’s are likely pure. His eldest child, who had Down syndrome, was Tom’s best friend, but his death has given Tom the opportunity to pursue an old mystery. And so Tom plots to run away, leaving no clues behind save a note for his family: “I am not coming back.” He then travels to the Netherlands to track down a Dutch woman he knew during World War II, with whom he had “invented love.” He knows the chances of finding Sarah alive are poor, but he is driven nonetheless. “This is my life, whatever is left of it,” he writes in the note to his children.

The half-hidden narrator of Old Heart is Tom’s granddaughter Nora, a graduate student who had just begun recording the story of Tom’s return from the war and the beginning of his long-lived but unhappy marriage. When Tom makes his escape, Nora is the only one he takes into his confidence, and she relates parts of his story from her perspective. In other chapters, he chronicles his personal history–the parts where he meets and loves Sarah–in long letters to Nora. Throughout, the question of Tom’s mental competence looms over his narrative.

Of course, upon his arrival in the town where he knew Sarah, Tom does not find what he hoped he would; what he finds instead is far more complicated. In the winding path he travels–from Illinois to Eindhoven, and from dream to reality–Tom instead learns a lot about what he wants, what he has the right to expect from his life and where he’s come from. And despite his age, he continues to grow, and finds a chance to love.

Old Heart is earnest and, yes, occasionally sentimental, but also pensive and eventually enlightened. It is at once a romance, a meditation on the complications of end-of-life independence and the responsibilities of family, and a lovely personal history. In a slim, unassuming read, Ferry opens intriguing questions and introduces his reader to complex and deeply likable characters. The result is delightfully warm and universally appealing.

This review originally ran in the June 4, 2015 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 8 decisions.

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Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel (audio)

Posted on June 15, 2015 by pagesofjulia

station eleven

Wow. The entirety of this book is every bit as good as it seemed when I wrote about it some time ago. I am reeling, very sorry that it is finished, and will want to track down more of Emily St. John Mandel’s work as soon as I can. Thanks again, Liz, for the great recommendation as always.

Station Eleven has two settings, dually in a dystopian or post-apocalyptic future world, and with flashbacks to the world of here and now. The story begins with the beginning of the collapse, when during a stage production of King Lear the lead actor dies of a heart attack onstage. The audience member who tried to save him leaves the theatre, stunned, as a highly virulent and fast-acting flu virus sweeps through his home city of Toronto; warned by a friend who is an ER doctor, he stocks up on supplies and holes up with his brother in the brother’s apartment. His brother lives on the 22nd floor and is in a wheelchair, so they do not evacuate the city.

Flash forward 15 or 20 years, and now we follow a group called the Traveling Symphony, incompletely named because they also specialize in Shakespeare productions. The world has changed: almost the entire human population of every continent died of the flu, with only small bands of people left and little technology. There is no more electricity, no more fossil fuel, no more computers. Small communities have formed but are insular and suspicious, and sometimes violent; life is hard. The Traveling Symphony brings some light to this regretful world – art is still beautiful – but the symphony members are not exempt from the hardships; they carry weapons, deal with uncertainty every day.

The story is told in disjointed chronology, jumping back and forth between the pre-collapse world and the world after. Each of these two timelines runs chronologically, but we alternate between the two. The third world is that of Station Eleven, a fictional creation of one of our characters that also bears on the real world both before and after the flu epidemic.

Perspective shifts as well between several characters, some of whom we follow both before and after the collapse – if they survive. They have aged 15-20 years in that time, which presents some interesting possibilities and points of view. It also ramps up the suspense and tension: what happened to this person or that, did she live, does he ever find his loved ones again, and do they see any consequences for their actions? Mandel is expert at teasing us with these questions, and I heartily second Liz’s feeling that this book ends too soon: I too want more.

Mandel exhibits genius in the details of all three of the worlds in this story. Her characters are outstanding: nuanced and complex people with strengths and flaws that we can mostly learn to love but never worship. The struggles of these characters ask questions of the reader: what kinds of behavior are justified by hard times? What technologies would be hardest to live without, and is there anything to be gained by going “back to basics” or back to a less technological era that we often regard as “simpler”? What is the value of art; what do we want out of it? What is the meaning of friendship? If computers and cars and airplanes and iPhones suddenly went away, should we teach the next generation about them or let that history go silent?

As a novel-reading (listening) experience, I thought Station Eleven was nearly as good as it gets: entertaining, aesthetically pleasing, thought-provoking, stimulating, colorful, well-written, compelling. As a cultural critique, I found it useful as well, although as I contemplate global collapse in its various forms and our strategies related to it, I want to think about forms of collapse that are rather more our fault than this is. That’s a little awkward; what I mean is, the flu in this story is sort of an act of god, a thing that happens to us, but I think it would be useful to think about economic, environmental, societal collapse due to human hubris and poor decision-making. The flu could be a version thereof, less directly. Still, its results are instructive or at least stimulating.

The narration on this audio production by Kirsten Potter is very fine. I told my parents partway through that there were two readers, a man and a woman, but that was wrong; between listenings, I clearly got confused, due to Potter’s fine acting of male and female perspectives throughout.

Mandel is a nuanced writer with a keen imagination. I can’t wait to discover more of her work and recommend this novel highly.

Rating: 9 knife tattoos.

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Girl in the Moonlight by Charles Dubow

Posted on June 11, 2015 by pagesofjulia

A lifetime of love and lust, with a backdrop of fine art, vast wealth and high society.

moonlight

In Girl in the Moonlight by Charles Dubow (Indiscretion), Wylie Rose has known the Bonet siblings since he was 10, when he fell out of a tree and broke his arm at a party on their massive estate. He studies painting with the elder son, who becomes a dear friend; he admires the younger twins and the rest of the family, who are all brilliant, luminous, talented, beautiful and tremendously rich. But it is Cesca, two years older than Wylie, who hypnotizes him, and ruins him for any other woman or any other life than self-destructive devotion to her.

From a distance of decades, adult Wylie reflects on that life–always coming when Cesca called, from their first sexual encounter when he was a teen through her unpredictable comings and goings over the years, and the apparently mature and healthy relationships he throws aside for her in Manhattan, Paris and Barcelona. She seemingly can’t help her flirtations, manipulations and self-destructive behaviors. Wylie feels for her like “an exile misses his homeland or an old man misses his youth.”

Dubow’s writing is a bit uneven, but often inspired in its phrasing, evoking a mystical atmosphere around Cesca’s mesmerizing power and the rarefied world she travels in: extraordinary wealth, titles and estates around the world, artistic success and broken hearts. Wylie and Cesca see tempestuous years pass in struggling to define the magnetism they feel for one another, and readers will be spellbound by the process.

This review originally ran in the May 26, 2015 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun!

Rating: 5 martinis.

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Hyacinth Girls by Lauren Frankel

Posted on June 10, 2015 by pagesofjulia

A tricky, smart riddle in novel form about bullying and family secrets.

hyacinth girls

Lauren Frankel’s debut novel, Hyacinth Girls, opens when Rebecca puts Callie’s face, along with a provocative question, on a billboard near the high school. A lengthy flashback explains why, in a gradual uncovering of the past. Callie is not Rebecca’s daughter but the daughter of her late best friend, Joyce. The happenings and drama of Callie’s middle and high school years are more troubling than the average teen experience, and have led to some terrible events that call for a billboard. But what exactly happened, and who is the perpetrator and who the victim, and why? These are questions that take the whole book to unravel, with roles reversing throughout. Rebecca’s voice alternates with Callie’s, but not until late in the book, when the reader’s impressions are already formed. The mixing up of clues and the struggle to sort out loyalties results in an unreliable narrator or two.

The story of Callie and her social circle eventually becomes entangled with that of Joyce and Rebecca, when they were childhood best friends. New and old traumas slowly, coyly come out: bullying, suicide, simple mistakes and basic meanness. Betrayals and lies populate the experiences of both generations. In revealing a complex web of family and community secrets, schoolyard bullies and the nature of trust, Frankel nudges her reader to ask questions like the one Rebecca puts on the billboard: Do you know your children?

Hyacinth Girls is a compelling and powerfully evocative novel of friendship and love, deceit and duplicity, and the rough terrain of being a teenage girl.

This review originally ran in the May 26, 2015 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun!

Rating: 6 tattoos.

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Teaser Tuesdays: Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

Posted on June 9, 2015 by pagesofjulia

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading.

station eleven

You’ll recall that I’m loving this audiobook. Here are the lines that made me snort the other day:

“I’m afraid I’ve no idea,” the tuba had said when Kirsten had asked him for confirmation a few years back. No one had any idea, it turned out. None of the older symphony members knew much about science, which was frankly maddening, given how much time these people had had to look things up on the internet before the world had ended.

Take note, people, we should all be spending more time looking things up on the internet in case of the world ending! (KIDDING – go ride your bike.)

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Still Life With Insects by Brian Kiteley

Posted on June 8, 2015 by pagesofjulia

The subtle, sublime life of an amateur entomologist, in tiny glimpses.

insects

Leah Hager Cohen (No Book but the World) selected Brian Kiteley’s first novel, Still Life with Insects (originally published in 1989), for reprinting by Pharos Editions. In her introduction, Cohen gracefully outlines the strengths of this slim, quietly powerful book.

Elwyn Farmer is an amateur entomologist, forever wandering off to peer under dry leaves or dig in riverbanks. Still Life with Insects consists of his journal entries, spanning 40 years: from 1945, when his 43rd birthday has just been celebrated, to 1985, when his vision begins to fade. The entries record his quiet rejoicing in the ephemeral glory of the natural world, the beetles he collects and, through and around them, the details of his fragile life. Following several nervous breakdowns, he tells stories in which grandchildren and tragic death figure at an equal level with the Burying Beetle (Nicrophorus marginatus), or the Asian Stink Bug his family encounters in a Hungarian resort.

Although a bug collector’s field notes may not sound like an imaginative or exhilarating backdrop, Brian Kiteley’s distinctive style plays well to such a challenge. His greatest accomplishment is understatement. In a mere 103 pages, a sensitive, complex man becomes a brittle old man, fully experiencing the passing of time and life. The stories that fill these journal entries, sparse and widely spaced over decades, are necessarily mere vignettes, bare sketches. Still Life with Insects is a deceptively simple story, characterized by restraint, but with many layers of allegory available to the close reader.

This review originally ran as a *starred review* in the May 19, 2015 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun!

Rating: 8 boxes.

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The Mountain Can Wait by Sarah Leipciger

Posted on June 5, 2015 by pagesofjulia

A hit-and-run fatality overshadows the life of a family and a community in the bush of British Columbia.

mountain

Sarah Leipciger’s debut novel, The Mountain Can Wait, centers on a family’s shared and separate struggles in the wilds of British Columbia. Tom’s wife left him when the kids were small. He hopes he can put in one last good year at work, sell his forest restoration company and provide for his children in his retirement. His son, Curtis, lives a few towns over, a young man on his own. Daughter Erin has begun to pull into herself, in typical teenage fashion. Around this nucleus are colorful characters like Tom’s mother-in-law, angry and estranged, living off the land in a tiny island village; Tom’s new girlfriend, a poet with an independent streak; and the tree planters and other employees of his company. Between hunting and foraging, idle drug use and countless cigarettes, this motley crew sharply evokes their environment in Leipciger’s spare but feeling prose.

The biggest crisis of all is out of sight for much of the story, but bookends everything else that transpires: a hit-and-run that kills a teenaged girl and haunts the driver, who is slow to seek redemption. “She was an instant, the sulfuric flare of a match…. And there was a dull slap.” This overarching tragedy shadows the rest of the action, as characters go on making their plans, unaware of how it will affect their lives.

In language that highlights natural beauty and the challenges of living in the bush, Leipciger explores what a sense of responsibility really entails, the finer points of family dynamics and the strong hold a place can have on a person, from Whistler to the tiny isles around Vancouver Island. Curtis struggles with the family tradition of hunting for their meat; he has trouble killing, even collecting tadpoles. But he will wreak havoc in just trying to survive, let alone impress his father. Tom is still troubled by the sordid details of his wife’s demise, some years after she left. He loves his children, but despairs at knowing them at all.

The Mountain Can Wait concentrates on the difficulties of properly caring for loved ones, and the meaning of community. Set within British Columbia’s stunning and intimidating back country, a mountain goat killed in one shot and a bear only wounded come to the forefront, too. As the title reflects, even the calamities Tom and his clan experience fade against such a backdrop.

This review originally ran in the May 14, 2015 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 cherries.

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Mislaid by Nell Zink

Posted on May 29, 2015 by pagesofjulia

A Southern comedy of errors starring a broken family stretched across social classes.

mislaid

At the start of Nell Zink’s delightfully odd first novel, Mislaid, Peggy is a lesbian teenager in 1960s Virginia heading off to Stillwater College, a remote women’s school, where she plans to sow her oats with all those other young ladies and become a famous playwright. Instead, she begins a strangely lusty affair with one of the few male faculty members, Lee Fleming, a famous poet hidden away at Stillwater by his wealthy and proper Virginia family because he is gay. Their misguided, mismatched affair quickly results in a pregnancy and marriage. After 10 years, Peggy finds herself miserable, acting as servant to Lee’s obnoxiously pretentious literary house guests while he engages in infidelities and general disrespect. She runs away, taking their three-year-old daughter and leaving their nine-year-old son, Byrdie.

Because Lee has also threatened to have her committed, Peggy goes into hiding. She conveniently acquires a birth certificate from a recently deceased African American child to rechristen her white-blonde daughter as Karen Brown, herself as Meg. They squat in a condemned house in abject poverty, making a new life, but the oddest part is that “Karen and Meg Brown” on their paperwork are black. “Maybe you have to be from the South to get your head around blond black people,” writes Zink, but Meg and Karen, white as they are, do pass.

A decade later, when Karen enters the University of Virginia on a minority scholarship as a freshman, Byrdie is a senior there and the two finally meet. The ensuing drama of confused identities drips of both tragedy and hilarity, as family dynamics and literary ambitions propel a broad cast of quirky, complex, lovable characters into odd scenarios. Meg has mixed herself up in some illegal dealings in her years as a single mom and met some interesting folks. Karen’s boyfriend and his family are equally zany and winning. Zink pulls no punches in portraying Virginia’s mores and peculiarities. Mislaid‘s pathos is charmingly funny, and a sentimental streak softens the sarcasm.

With its distinctively Southern setting and bizarre range of sincere men and women making their way in a weird world, Zink’s novel captivates from the very first page. Readers may be tempted to blaze through this slim book in a single sitting. Comic, sympathetic, heartbreaking and outrageous, Mislaid is a wonderful, raucous book with everything of life in it.

This review originally ran in the May 12, 2015 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 9 BLT’s.

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book beginnings on Friday: The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty by Vendela Vida

Posted on May 15, 2015 by pagesofjulia

Thanks to Rose City Reader for hosting this meme. To participate, share the first line or two of the book you are currently reading and, if you feel so moved, let us know what your first impressions were based on that first line.

diver's clothes

I have you for today a most interesting new novel, which begins thusly:

When you find your seat you glance at the businessman sitting next to you and decide he’s almost handsome. This is the second leg of your trip from Miami to Casablanca, and the distance traveled already has muted the horror of the last two months.

I love that a lot is given away in these lines, and many mysteries are presented and left unsolved as well. Note also the unusual second-person voice: you are the star of this story, m’dear. Stay tuned.

This quotation comes from an uncorrected advance proof and is subject to change.

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God Help the Child by Toni Morrison

Posted on May 14, 2015 by pagesofjulia

Toni Morrison brings a keen perception and lyrical voice to the veiled but lasting effects of childhood trauma.

god help

Toni Morrison (Home), winner of a Pulitzer and a Nobel Prize in Literature, satisfies her fans with a searing, lyrical story about the power of childhood trauma.

God Help the Child centers on a woman who has left behind the “dumb countryfied name” Lula Ann to become Bride, “with nothing anybody needs to say before or after that one memorable syllable,” a successful California career woman with her own cosmetics line but who wears no makeup. Her mother was a light-skinned, “high yellow” woman dismayed by and unable to love her blue-black daughter, but Bride grows up to repossess her skin tone and every other aspect of her beauty.

From a childhood marked by rejection and terrible crimes, Bride remakes herself as an object of attraction and a financial success, but as the novel opens, she faces dual blows: her mysterious live-in boyfriend, Booker, leaves, and a prisoner is paroled with whom she shares an old bond. God Help the Child reveals these complicated paths in alternating perspectives, most frequently Bride’s first-person voice but also that of her friend Brooklyn; her mother (who taught Lula Ann to call her Sweetness, rather than Mama or anything else that would tie them too closely together); the new parolee; and a child Bride meets along the way. Eventually, after several oblique glances, Booker himself comes fully into sight, but his perspective is told only in the third person, as Bride goes looking for answers and Lula Ann threatens to reemerge.

Even Morrison’s minor characters are complex, intriguing people deserving of closer inspection, and as Bride’s journey acquires a momentum of its own, the magnetism of her troubles pulls the reader along. She suffers the coldness of both her parents, a harrowing court case, an assault, a car accident and a fire; but it is the traumas of her childhood that most torment Bride, and, as becomes apparent, the same is true for Booker. In the end, healing comes in a surprising form.

Beautifully composed in a variety of distinct voices and covering a range of family concerns, God Help the Child employs a hint of magical realism and explores issues of race and women’s lives familiar to fans of Morrison’s fiction. The story of Bride’s life and trials is sensual, both delicate and strong, poetic and heavy with sex, love and pain, exemplifying a revered author’s unfailing talent.

This review originally ran as a *starred review* in the April 20, 2015 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 earrings.

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