Hello 2021! A whole new year of reading and reviewing is upon us, fellow book lovers. I'm looking forward to so many things this year, the COVID 19 vaccine being chief among them, as well as a return to sanity in our nation's capital, Washington DC. I'm also looking forward to more great books and not-so-great books, read for pleasure or for the Tuesday Night Book Group that I head up at the local library (currently via Zoom online). But first, here are some tidbits and an obit from Shelf Awareness.
RIP to yet another author whose work in the natural world was wonderful.
Obituary Note: Barry Lopez
Barry Lopez http://www.shelf-awareness.com/ct/uz3642037Biz46947924, "a lyrical writer who steeped himself in Arctic wildernesses, the habitats of wolves and exotic landscapes around the world for award-winning books that explored the kinship of nature and human culture," died December 25, the New York Times reported. He was 75. Lopez, who won the 1987 National Book Award (nonfiction) for Arctic Dreams (1986), "embraced landscapes and literature with humanitarian, environmental and spiritual sensibilities that some critics likened to those of Thoreau and John Muir."
Last September, Oregon's wildfires destroyed http://www.shelf-awareness.com/ct/uz3642037Biz46947925 much of his property. Lopez's wife, Debra Gwartney, told NPR that he lost an archive storing most of his books, awards, notes and correspondence from the past 50 years, as well as much of the forest around the home. "He talked a lot about climate change and how it's so easy to think that it's going to happen to other people and not to you," she said. "But it happened to us, it happened to him personally. The fire was a blow he never could recover from."
In his Guardian piece, McFarlane had noted: "Perhaps the best way to think of Lopez is as a postmodern devout. His prose--priestly, intense, grace-noted--carries the hushed urgency of the sermon. Irony and ambiguity are not in his repertoire. His is an unshadowed style, 'transparent as a polished windowpane.' "
I've been a fan of Lebowitz since the 70s, when I found her wonderful essays and sense of humor riveting reading, especially about a city I've long dreamed of visiting, New York.
Movies: Pretend It's a City
Netflix released a trailer for Pretend It's a City http://www.shelf-awareness.com/ct/uz3642037Biz46949643, the Martin Scorsese-directed limited documentary series that will premiere January 8. Indiewire reported that the project marks the second major collaboration between Scorsese and critic/essayist Fran Lebowitz (after the 2010 HBO documentary film Public Speaking), a "longtime friend of Scorsese and American social critic who published bestselling books such as Metropolitan Life and Social Studies."
Netflix noted that Lebowitz "knows what she likes--and what she doesn't like. And she won't wait for an invitation to tell you.... Shaping Lebowitz's thoughts into the furiously funny guidebook every New Yorker has at one point wished for, Pretend It's a City checks in with a classic urban voice on subjects ranging from tourists, money, subways, and the arts to the not-so-simple act of walking in Times Square. (There is a right way to do it.) Along the way, Lebowitz's own past comes into focus: a life marked by constant curiosity and invigorating independence."
This is yet another book on my list of books that I want to read this year, and since I've read a number of Marie Benedict's other books, I know that this one is going to have quality prose and a slick plot that will keep me turning pages into the wee hours.
Pennie Picks: The Mystery of Mrs. Christie
Pennie Clark Ianniciello, Costco's book buyer, has selected The Mystery
of Mrs. Christie by Marie Benedict (Sourcebooks Landmark, $26.99,
9781492682721) as her pick for January. In Costco Connection, which goes
to many of the warehouse club's members, she writes:
"On Friday, December 3, 1926, a young up-and-coming writer by the name of Agatha Christie vanished. Eleven days later, Christie reappeared with no memory of what had happened. While there were theories and rumors about the disappearance, the truth never emerged, not even in her autobiography. In this month's book buyer's pick, The Mystery of Mrs. Christie, Marie Benedict has concocted a riveting scenario that could easily have been an early Hitchcock film. The book will leave you spellbound."
Vanessa Yu's Magical Paris Tea Shop by Roselle Lim is yet another book whose title is something of a misnomer. This book isn't about a magical tea shop at all, it's about a young woman who believes she is cursed with powers of divination and clarvoyance that she cannot control and doesn't want, because the prophecies she spews are largely negative and seem to ruin not only the life of the person she's talking to, but fill her with shame and guilt for knowing something so private about strangers. That Vanessa is sent to her maiden aunties fledgling tea shop to learn to control her powers from said auntie, who has similar powers that she can control, is only part of the plot. Much of the book also revolves around Vanessa's family and the bossy aunties who control everyone's life and apparently have the ability to force marriage on the younger generation, who don't protest this, but dully accept it, like the spineless creatures that they are. Here's the blurb: Vanessa Yu never wanted to see people's fortunes—or misfortunes—in tea leaves.
Ever
since she can remember, Vanessa has been able to see people's fortunes
at the bottom of their teacups. To avoid blurting out their fortunes,
she converts to coffee, but somehow fortunes escape and find a way to
complicate her life and the ones of those around her. To add to this
plight, her romance life is so nonexistent that her parents enlist the
services of a matchmaking expert from Shanghai.
After her
matchmaking appointment, Vanessa sees death for the first time. She
decides that she can't truly live until she can find a way to get rid of
her uncanny abilities. When her eccentric Aunt Evelyn shows up with a
tempting offer to whisk her away, Vanessa says au revoir to California and bonjour to
Paris. There, Vanessa learns more about herself and the root of her
gifts and realizes one thing to be true: knowing one's destiny isn't a
curse, but being unable to change it is.
Lim's prose was stilted and conformed to a number of tropes and cliches, while her plot stalled several times due to redundancy and a amateur writing style. I found the female characters lack of spine to stand up for herself and what she wanted, disturbing at best and misogynistic at worst. I could tell that the author put this down to cultural norms, but since the protagonist is 4th generation American, I didn't buy that excuse. So I'd give this lackluster YA novel a C, and only recommend it to those who like romances that are obvious and plots that are laid out right from the first chapter and hold no surprises for the reader.
The Lost Love Song by Minnie Darke is another YA novel that really isn't a YA novel, but rather a thinly disguised morbid romance. The book is about a concert pianist who dies in a horrible airplane accident and leaves her fiance (and her mother) to grieve at the loss of her beauty and brilliance, as if there are no other talented and accomplished women in the music world. This paragon of musical virtue, Diana, (who sounded, in the first chapters before her death like a spoiled and snobbish narcissist) was writing a song for her man before she died, but she left the notebook with the music score in the hotel she was staying in and didn't bring it on the airplane, so it didn't die with her. Fortunately, a man finds the notebook and brings it home, only to have the music played by several people who find the notebook, steal it or hear the music played, and it changes their lives in significant ways. Meanwhile, between these miraculous stories, Diana's erstwhile fiance Arie spends years grieving her loss and dealing with her fragile mother, who was destroyed by the loss of her daughter. So every other chapter is about Arie's horrible grief (he knew nothing about the song, BTW), followed by a chapter about people whose lives are touched by the song, including a young woman who miraculously rents the Air B&B right next door to Arie and who falls in love with him while playing the song that his dead fiance wrote (what are the chances?!?). Readers will know that Arie and Evie are meant to be together after their first meeting, and the only thing keeping them apart is his guilt and grief over Diana. Here's the blurb:
Concert pianist Diana is finally ready to marry her longtime fiance,
Arie; she’s even composing a beautiful love song for him, and finishes
it while on tour. Before she can play it for him, though, tragedy
strikes—and Diana is lost to Arie forever.
But her song might not be.
In
Australia, the world has gone quiet for Arie and he lives his life
accordingly, struggling to cope with his loss. In Scotland, a woman
named Evie is taking stock of her life after the end of another
lackluster almost-relationship. Years of wandering the globe and failing
to publish her poetry have taken their toll, and she might finally be
ready to find what her travels have never been able to give her: a real
home. And through a quirk of fate or circumstance, Diana’s song is
passed from musician to musician. By winding its way around the world,
it just might bring these two lost souls together.
With heart-wrenching emotion, The Last Love Song explores what it means to be lost, what it means to be found, and the power of music to bring people together.
Though the prose in this novel was clean and sturdy, the plot had several wobbles and I felt that way too much time was spent on Arie wallowing in grief, which is pretty boring to read about. Especially since it seemed obvious to me that Diana wasn't really worth all that whining. Still, I'd give this novel a B- and recommend it to those who believe in the power of music to bring people together.
Miss Benson's Beetle by Rachel Joyce is the 4th book of hers that I've read. While I liked The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, the other two novels of Joyces that I've read, The Music Shop and the Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy were not as good as her debut novel, not as engrossing or filled with characters that I wanted to read about. Unfortunately, Miss Benson's Beetle continued this trend into infamy, and I nearly stopped reading the book altogether after reaching page 151 and realizing that I loathed both main characters and wasn't interested in their journey at all. But, after reading several other books, I finally girded my reading loins and picked the book back up and read it through to the bitter and unfinished end. Here's the blurb: From the bestselling author of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry comes
an uplifting, irresistible novel about two women on a life-changing
adventure, where they must risk everything, break all the rules, and
discover their best selves—together.
She’s going too far to go it alone.
It
is 1950. London is still reeling from World War II, and Margery Benson,
a schoolteacher and spinster, is trying to get through life, surviving
on scraps. One day, she reaches her breaking point, abandoning her job
and small existence to set out on an expedition to the other side of the
world in search of her childhood obsession: an insect that may or may
not exist—the golden beetle of New Caledonia. When she advertises for an
assistant to accompany her, the woman she ends up with is the last
person she had in mind. Fun-loving Enid Pretty in her tight-fitting pink
suit and pom-pom sandals seems to attract trouble wherever she goes.
But together these two British women find themselves drawn into a
cross-ocean adventure that exceeds all expectations and delivers
something neither of them expected to find: the transformative power of
friendship.
Neither Marge nor Enid are good people, Margery is a fragile frump who loses her mind after a student draws an unflattering picture of her in class, and she realizes, out of the blue, that she's an object of ridicule among her snotty teenage students. Having been bullied by teenagers myself for at least 5 years, I know how it feels to be made fun of, but even as a teenager, I had more gumption and spine than the middle aged Marge Benson, who somehow can't live with being laughed at by a bunch of snotty spotty idiot children. How ridiculous of her, and how immature! So she decides to take this ill fated trip to the tropics when she knows nothing of travel by sea and doesn't know any languages other than English. Instead of hiring someone capable, she almost hires a POW who was so abused he's become a psychopath with PTSD, (he ends up stalking and almost killing her) and does hire a wanted criminal who is not only a former prostitute but a suspected murderer, and she's crazy and pregnant and stupid as well. Enid also knows nothing of actual travel or of harvesting insects, and SPOILER, dies anyway after giving birth, leaving Marge with a child she has no idea how to care for. We never learn the fate of the child, we only learn that Marge sends insects to the National Museum without her name, and that she doesn't tell anyone for 30 years that she actually found the golden beetle, but decided, after all the death and mayhem it caused, to not collect and send it into the museum! Stupid! I really regret wasting the hours of my life that I did reading this vastly unsatisfying book. I'd give it a D, and not recommend it to anyone.
The Irish Cottage: Finding Elizabeth by Juliet Gauvin was a free ebook that I downloaded through an Amazon prime program that allows me a few free ebooks a month. While it was billed as a romance, I found the beauty of Ireland and its people to be nearly as compelling as the romance between the protagonist and her Irish prince. Here's the blurb: Elizabeth Lara built a perfect life as San Francisco’s top divorce
attorney, but when she loses her great-aunt Mags, the woman who raised
her, she boards a plane and leaves it all behind.
The Irish
shores welcome her as she learns a shocking truth, kept secret for
thirty-five years. Devastated and now alone in the world, Beth tries to
find peace in a beautiful cottage by Lough Rhiannon, but peace isn’t
what fate had in mind. Almost as soon as she arrives, Beth’s solitary
retreat into the magic wilds of Ireland is interrupted by Connor Bannon.
A man with light brown hair, ice blue eyes and a secret of his own.
He’s gorgeous, grieving, and completely unexpected.
With the
help of Mags’ letters, the colorful townspeople of Dingle, and Connor,
Elizabeth might just find a way back to the girl she lost long ago and
become the woman she always wanted to be.
Be forewarned you might not want to start this book late at night—several readers have reported “gobbling it up” and going on to the next book immediately. This book is literary women’s fiction, it is not a traditional romance, per se.
I totally agree with the note from the author, above. I did gobble it up in short order, and it wasn't really a traditional romance where the surroundings of the couple don't matter, but the sex scenes are all important and described in excruciating detail. The author was judicious in her use of sex scenes, and I loved her descriptions of Dingle and surrounding areas of Ireland, because I visited Ireland back in 2000, and though I never made it to Dingle or the Cliffs of Moher, I loved the people that I met, the music and dancing and the great food that I ate. This is one of those sweet books that is a reprieve from the daily grind, and provides a fun and breezy escape. The prose is lush and green and the plot sweeping and swift. I'd give it a B+, and recommend it to anyone who likes UK romances and stories of life changes and renewals.
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