Books I Have Read But Missed Reviewing

When I got my first Kindle I bought up bargain books, many of which were wonderful discoveries. I did not review them at that time.  I thought it's time to share books that have stuck with me.

I was looking around Netflix and happened upon the film Harry and Snowman. It rang a bell. It only took a minute before I realized I knew Snowman from The Eighty-Dollar Champion, which I had read quite a few years ago.

This book by Elizabeth Letts is one that has stayed with me. The story of an immigrant who buys a horse on its way to become dog food and how the horse becomes a champion is an inspirational story.

"Harry knew what it felt like to be powerless. Beat up or not, this horse seemed brave." from The Eighty-Dollar Champion

Harry de Leyer grew up on a farm in Holland during WWII, hiding Jews and working in the resistance. He helped to save horses abandoned by the retreating Nazis. After the war he was sponsored to come to America to work on a tobacco farm. Harry was 22 years old. But his passion for training horses was noted. He worked his way up to teaching riding at an elite girl's school.

Harry needed an easy riding horse. He was late to the auction and the only horses left were on the trailer going to the slaughter horse to become dog food. He noted a horse who seemed to have something special. The horse looked him in the eye and nuzzled his hand. He bought the horse for $80. When he got home it was snowing and one of Harry's children thought it made the horse look like a snow man. And he got his name.

Harry ended up selling Snowman but the horse kept jumping fences and returning to Harry. So Harry bought him back and began to work with Snowman. The horse had a love of jumping.

"There was more to horses than columns of numbers, the profits and losses in his farm ledger. There is one thing no horseman can ever put a price on, and that is heart."from The Eighty-Dollar Champion

Snowman was not pretty. He did not have a pedigree. Harry was not a college-educated, East Coast elite like the competition. What Harry and Snowman had was chemistry, heart, and the desire to be winners.

Their achievements brought international fame.

Who can resist a tale of the underdog stealing the win?

I can't. And that is why I remember this story and this book.

In 2014 I read An Unfinished Season by Ward Just. I enjoyed it immensely and later read The Eastern Shore and liked it even more. I have his novel American Romantic on my TBR shelf. An Unfinished Season is the story of a young many who falls for a girl from the upper crust. The young man discovers that all that glitters is not gold. Through the story of one young man, Just considers the American psyche and the choices we make.

I bought the book for 50 cents at Big Lots. It sat on my shelf for at least a year. I picked it up and fell in love. I did not want to read it too fast, yet did not want to put it down. In his blurb, Pat Conroy confesses, "I love this book." Well, Pat, I do too.

Corey, the son of a blue-collar, working-class man, shares his father's high standards of careful workmanship. While helping his father replace a drain, and saving the roots of an aged oak tree, he is noticed by Liam Metery, who has inherited the wealth accumulated by his Gilded Age grandfather. Corey is asked to help around the Metarey estate, and as Liam Metary and his family come to respect Corey, he is invited into their lives. Liam himself is a man who loves workmanship, and the simple pleasure of hands-on industry. He is also a progressive liberal who decides to back the great Liberal senator from New York State, Henry Bonwiller, in his run for the presidency in 1972.

As Corey becomes involved with the behind-the-scenes machinations of politics, his world widens. Corey is especially taken by a journalist, who becomes his role model, leading him to his life's work in journalism. Corey is also affected by Liam's dreams of a better country, the end of the war in Viet Nam, and a government that aligns itself with the common man's good. Liam recognizes the boy's potential and assists him with a scholarship to a private school, and later leaves him money for a Harvard education.

The fairy tale unravels, dragging Liam and Corey into the ambiguous black hole created by Bonwiller, and their loss of innocence reflects the national loss of idealism in the 1970s.

What would you do to protect your most sacred dream? How reliable are the human vessels in whom you place your dreams? Can you live with the knowledge that you have compromised yourself?

One reviewer wrote that the title "America, America" should be heard like a sigh for what might have been, knowledge of what has been lost.

I later read Canin's novels Carry Me Across the Water, which I reviewed here, and  The Doubter's Almanac which I reviewed here.

I remember Song of the Orange Moons by Lori Ann Stephens as a lovely book. I wish I could tell more about the plot but it's been a long time since I read it in 2012. The blurb reads,

A mosaic of stories that follow the intertwined lives of three girls coming of age. Two young girls from Jewish and Christian families and their elderly widow next door try to find happiness in a seemingly cruel world. In spite of their different cultural and economic backgrounds, Rebecka, Helen, and Adelle all share the delicate and self-conscious journey to womanhood. In their search for they find lasting strength in the power of their friendships. 

 My highlights from the book include:

Those church-ordained picnics and prayer lines and ladies groups are the finest excuse for conjuring up rumors I ever heard, and just more evidence that God is a woman. 

For the first time since I moved, I felt the immense emptiness caused by grief. I cried for the loss of my friend, and for my inability to find her again. 

Skin is not like love or morality. Love is just a tradition that people follow. A word that means “you must.” Morality is a death sentence to the imagination, a noose for passion—I’d seen the hand of morality in torn pages of the library books. 

Being cynical is better than walking onto cattle cars on a direct route to the incinerator and still hoping that humans are basically good at heart. 

...feel his sadness like a blanket covering us both. 

They feel a terminal loneliness. They feel like a misplaced foot or a forgotten ear. 

Of course she was lonely. Everyone is swimming alone. But we are swimming alone together, sometimes bumping into each other, sometimes rubbing our fins together awkwardly against the current, and sometimes floating at the top with our bellies exposed to the dry air.

...telling me the facts of life that I knew couldn’t possibly be true, but telling them with such conviction that the truth seemed to bend like a spectrum, into so many beautiful colors.

Well, now I want to read it again!