A Theater for Dreamers by Polly Samson

There are no bigger secrets than our parent's lives, unless it is the secrets kept between lovers.

When Erica's mother dies she discovers she didn't know her mother at all. She had only seen the woman who stayed with an abusive husband and father. How did she secretly stash money away for her daughter's future, and where did that secret car come from, and how was it used?

Erica is nineteen and in love with the older, beautiful, wannabe writer Jimmy. When Erica's previous neighbor, her mother's friend Charmain, sends her newest book and invitation to visit her on the Greek island of Hydra, Erica uses her inheritance to take her and Jimmy to Greece.

Hydra is paradise on earth, nestled between the cliffs and the sea, with marble streets and exotic foods and floral odors competing with the smell of sponges piled on the fishing boats.

Charmain and her husband Gordon are the center of a group of ex-pat young people, artists and writers and poets and their muses. Erica finds a surrogate mother in her, and Charmain tries to guide the teenager to prepare for a fuller life, warning her of the pitfalls of love and men and being bound to a supporting role.

In the early 1960s, these Bohemians are seeking meaning in a world threatened by Atomic destruction, rejecting the conformity of the 1950s. And yet, the men still hold to old fashioned ideas about women and love and sex, and the women comply to keep their men. Charmain imagines another way of living, not merely being a man's muse and caretaker to protect his creative process. 

A natural observer, Erica tries to puzzle out the twisted relationships around her, noting the tension in the marriages of Axle and Marianne Jensen and Charmain and Gordon. When Leonard Cohen arrives on the island, already published at age 25, he is ready to claim Marianne when her husband abandons her and their son for another woman. She is the perfect muse and compliant help-meet for a creative man.

As relationships topple, and alcohol and drugs fuel craziness, Erica is forced to alter her idea of her future.

Hydra is central to the novel, with lush descriptions vividly rendering its beauty and challenges. The Greek traditions are observed, the seasonal changes described. I dreamed of it at night, especially after viewing photographs online of the historical denizens of Hydra during this time. Samson's descriptions of these people, their clothing, is so detailed, arising from these photographs.

I also dreamed of Cohen's music, So Long, Marianne, That's No Way to Say Goodbye, and especially The Stranger Song, from Cohen's 1967 record album that I purchased at age 16. I was surprised to learn that the songs Cohen sang at the group gatherings were folk songs like I Ride an Old Paint. I always loved that folk song, and had a 45 record of it when I was a girl. 

I read this book during a cold spell in spring, immersed in the bright light and sea air of a place I will never see, but feel as if I had. I loved this book for taking me to another place, and for the interesting and deeply flawed characters, and for its insight into women's role in men's lives.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.

A Theater for Dreamers
by Polly Samson
Algonquin Books
Pub Date May 11, 2021
ISBN: 9781643751498
hardcover $26.95 (USD)

from the publisher

"Sublime and immersive . . . If you wish you could disappear to a Greek island right now, I highly recommend."

—Jojo Moyes, #1 bestselling author of Me Before You

"This gorgeous, glimmering summer read is itself perfect summer: irresistible and deep, Samson's lyric sentences pulling you into unforgettable sunlight and shadow."

—Amy Bloom, New York Times bestselling author of White Houses

It’s 1960, and the world teeters on the edge of cultural, political, sexual, and artistic revolution. On the Greek island of Hydra, a proto-commune of poets, painters, and musicians revel in dreams at the feet of their unofficial leaders, the writers Charmian Clift and George Johnston, troubled queen and king of bohemia. At the center of this circle of misfit artists are the captivating and inscrutable Axel Jensen, his magnetic wife Marianne Ihlen, and a young Canadian ingenue poet named Leonard Cohen.

When eighteen-year-old Erica stumbles into their world, she’s fresh off the boat from London with nothing but a bundle of blank notebooks and a burning desire to leave home in the wake of her mother’s death. Among these artists, she will find an unraveling utopia where everything is tested—the nature of art, relationships, and her own innocence.

Intoxicating and immersive, A Theater for Dreamers is a spellbinding tour-de-force about the beauty between naïveté and cruelty, chaos and utopia, artist and muse—and about the wars waged between men and women on the battlegrounds of genius. Roiling with the heat of a Grecian summer, A Theater for Dreamers is, according to the Guardian, “a blissful piece of escapism” and “a surefire summer hit.”

The Brother Years by Shannon Burke

...it was at that great moment in adolescence where you throw off what you think you ought to be and start imposing your true personality on the world, a moment of grace and strength and beauty and danger. ~ from The Brother Years by Shannon Burke

My 50th high school class reunion was to take place next month but was cancelled because of COVID-19. One of my friends suggested the class post their photos from senior year on the class Facebook page.

I was the first to share, a panorama photo of the senior class trip to Washington D.C. Classmates shared pics from the trip, Senior prom, and the school musical.

Something happened along the way. One classmate talked about her memories of the Vietnam war and civil rights movement, the Detroit riots, the protest sit-ins.

People talked about how they were not in the popular group, were outsiders looking in. They talked about their life after high school. And then, a girl talked about the anxiety that crippled her most of her life, how she hid it in school. We had thought she was popular, pretty, a golden girl.

Suddenly the barriers were falling down. Social class, academic standing, beauty, achievement, popularity were revealed to be false delinations that separated us.

So, here I am in life looking backward to adolescence, those horrible, difficult, eventful years, and I pick up The Brother Years by Shannon Burke as if the stars had aligned to ensure I read this book at this time.

Burke writes about "the weird, poor family in the rich neighborhood' and how their childhood was a crucible that molds and toughens them. Central are brothers Coyle and Willie Shannon and the competition that makes Willie's life hell.

The boys' father strives for success, working multiple jobs and studying for a teaching degree. He works the sons as hard as he works himself, employing The Methods to toughen them for the world. The stress gives him a short temper and violent outbursts. Their mother is a housewife with a college degree who ineffectually tries to keep the peace.

Coyle's academic and sports achievements were a testament to his father's Methods. But there was always the awareness of being the poorest family in the rich 'hood.

...there was that familiar feeling of knowing there was something wrong with us--with our clothes or haircuts of the way we talked. ~from The Brother Years by Shannon Burke

Coyle's antithesis is the wealthy Robert. Willie aligns with Robert in his bid to get on the tennis team. Coyle accuses his brother of being a suck-up. Robert and Willie use each other for their own purposes. If that pisses Coyle off, so much the better.

Memories of a friendship with a rich friend came back. Dad was a blue collar worker and mom a housewife. We had what we needed, but my clothes were from KMart and our special eating out treat was buying 15 cent burgers from a local chain. At fourteen, I wore mom's hand-me-down swing coat and dated bathing suit with boy pants and a bra.

When I was a freshman, a girl took me up as a project, much like Emma took up Harriet in Jane Austen's novel. My friend was wealthy, had been to Europe, and lived in a posh house  that her father had designed. Her parents had college degrees. She encouraged me to lose weight, flirt with boys, and become 'cool.' At least, cooler. In the summer I went to her house to swim in her built-in pool. Mom bought me a new swimsuit to wear.

One day this friend told me her mother thought I was not the right sort for her because of our economic status. I don't know if her mom really said that or if it was the start of my friend pushing me away because she soon took up another 'project.'

The energy it takes to rise above one's born class! It takes the Brennan dad years to get that degree. The boys had to be the best in everything to get into a top-notch college and to get the needed scholarships to afford it. Their childhood was brutal, the competition violent.

I was immersed in the story and the characters. The Brennan family is unforgettable.

Burke has given us a powerful coming-of-age novel, a story of class divide and what it takes to achieve the proverbial pulling oneself up by one's bootstraps.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Read an excerpt here.

from the publisher

"In our family, there was none of this crap about everyone being a winner," says Willie, the narrator, who looks back on his teen years--and his nearly mortal combat with his domineering older brother, Coyle. In the Brennan house four kids sleep in a single room, and are indoctrinated into "The Methods," a system of achievement and relentless striving, laced with a potent, sometimes violent version of sibling rivalry. The family is overseen by a raging bull of a father, a South Side tough guy who knocks them sideways when they don't perform well or follow his dictates. Rivals, enemies, and allies, the siblings contend with one another and their wealthy self-satisfied peers at New Trier, the famous upscale high school where the family has struggled to send them. Evoking their crucible of class struggle and peer pressures, Burke balances comedy, tragedy, and a fascinating cast of characters, delivering a book that reads like an instant classic--an unforgettable story of the intertwining of love and family violence, and of triumphant teen survival that echoes down through the years.

The Brother Years
by Shannon Burke
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group/Pantheon
Pub Date August 4, 2020
ISBN: 9781524748647
hardcover $25.95 (USD)

The Mothers by Brit Bennett

This is a story of mothers.

There was the mother who would not protect her daughter and the mother who abandoned her daughter.

The daughters become mothers, one by mistake and the other through great endeavor.

And there are the other Mothers, the Greek Chorus women of Upper Room Church, the women who pray and get things done--and spread the rumors.

There is the First Lady, the pastor's wife, mother of Luke, the handsome and thoughtless boy who grows to be a handsome and unreliable man.

It is the story of two girls and one boy, the tangled web of their silence and secrets.

It is the story of gender and power, the double-edged sword of ending an unwanted pregnancy, the way we categorize people as good or bad when good people do bad things, too.

These deeply flawed characters are each in their way heartbreaking as they break each other's hearts.

The audiobook is excellent. I only wish I could have marked special sentences and passages!

I received a free audiobook from the publisher. My review is fair and unbiased.

The Mothers
by Brit Bennett (Goodreads Author), Adenrele Ojo (Narrator)
ISBN0735288267 (ISBN 13: 9780735288263)

Such A Fun Age by Kiley Reid

Kiley Reid's debut novel Such a Fun Age offers an original and unique perspective on race and class through a page-turning story that is deceptively entertaining.

The setting was familiar--Philadelphia's Rittenhouse Square and Kensington. My husband once worked at the corner of Rittenhouse Square and we spent 1980 living in Kensington. The two neighborhoods could not have been more different. The historic Rittenhouse Square and the upscale shops around it, ethereal sounds of music wafting from the Curtis Institute of Music; and Kensington with its empty factories and yardless rowhouses built to house textile factory workers. Money and privilege and the working poor. After we left, Kensington declined even more.

Reid's character Emira has graduated from my Alma Mater, Temple University, with a B.A. in English--as I did. I often proudly said that I held a degree that prepared me to read intelligently while impoverished. Emira has other complications: she has no idea what she wants to do in life and she is African American.

My first job out of Temple was working Christmas Rush at Strawbridge & Clothier's downtown; my second job was customer service at a Bala Cynwyd insurance company. Emira is a part-time typist for the Green Party and takes a part-time job as a babysitter. She shares an apartment in Kensington and hangs with her friends, wishing she had more disposable money like they do. Emira will soon be 26 and the impending loss of her parent's health insurance looms over her head. She needs a 'real job'.

The woman who hires Emira to babysit is Alix Chamberlain who has built a career as an influencer, married an older, well-off television newsperson, and has two children. She carries the heartache of her first love with Kelly, who dumped her just before prom over a misunderstanding and her ill-formed decision that proved disastrous for Kelly's African American buddy.

Emira has great affection for Alix's child. And, she badly needs the babysitting money. So when she gets a call for an emergency late-night sitting job she leaves her friend's birthday party at a bar. Dressed inappropriately, with a few drinks under the belt, hanging with a white child, Emira strikes the security guard as suspicious and she is nearly arrested. A white man records the incident and encourages Emira to prosecute. She isn't interested. But when they met up again later, they become involved personally. That man is Kelley.

Meantime, the incident causes Alix to take a closer look at her babysitter. She becomes emotionally attached to Emira, losing the boundary between the professional and the personal. This escalates to the point that Alix interferes with Emira's personal life with disastrous results for everyone. Except for Emira; she comes out the better, finally finding herself.

The interactions between races depicted in the novel were startling to me, first because I had not encountered them before in fiction, and secondly because they felt very true.

Do we white people really understand the implications of our behavior when we try to help, endeavor to show we are not prejudiced, are color blind or woke? Do people with comfortable lives really know what those who are struggling want from us? I mean, Alix sends leftovers and wine home with Emira! Is that helpful when what she really needs is health insurance?

Such a Fun Age reads like popular women's fiction but hits on important and relevant issues. It would be a great book club read.

I won a free book on Goodreads. My review is fair and unbiased.

A REESE'S BOOK CLUB x HELLO SUNSHINE BOOK PICK

Such a Fun Age
by Kiley Reid
G. P. Putnam & Sons
ISBN-10: 052554190X
ISBN-13: 978-0525541905

Last Books of the Year

My last books of the year were not review books, but personal choices from my TBR shelf.

When I bought my first Kindle I went wild with 99 cent book sales. It was unbelievable that I could own a book for under a dollar! I discovered some of my favorite books this way, like John William's Stoner. Another was Ward Just's An Unfinished Season, a coming-of-age story about politics and journalism. Later I reviewed Just's last novel, The Eastern Shore, a retired journalist reviews the uses and abuses of journalists and the news.

Learning of Just's passing I pulled his Rodin's Debutante off my physical TBR shelf.

"Tell me this, she said. Has your life worked out the way you thought it would?"~from Rodin's Debutante by Ward Just

A small town is shocked by the violent attack of a teenage girl in the local school and the leaders of society convince the local newspaper editor to bury the story.

Teenage Lee's mother convinces his father to leave the town of his ancestors for a safer neighborhood.

Odgen Hall School of Boys is Lee's chosen school, housed in the private home of Tommy Odgen whose wealth allowed him the luxury of pursuing his love of shooting--and his love of the local cathouse. One of the most chilling scenes I have ever read occurs when a young Tommy, hunting on his father's grounds, sees an interloper hunting. He gets the man in his sights, justifying his intended action. Tommy establishes the school to spite his wife. His lawyer Bert Marks handles the business for him.

Lee helps the school team to have a winning season and is noticed by Tommy, who upon meeting the boy warns that "you don't learn a damned thing by defeat." Tommy then goes on a rage about newspapermen, "They'll take everything if you let them," he growls.

In the house remained a sculpture by Rodin of a Chicago debutante. Lee was enchanted by the sculpture and it impels him to pursue the art of working in stone.

Lee goes to university, renting a South Chicago room for his studio. Resisting a knife attack leaves him with a scar. Lee meets a girl, he becomes successful.

The victim of the attack that drove Lee's family from their home returns, seeking answers. She has no memory of what happened and hopes Lee will prompt her memory.

You mean a thing's better not known than known. 
It depends on what you fear most, the known or the unknown. 
She offered a ghost of a smile. Do you have to choose? I imagine it's chosen for you, Lee said.~from Rodin's Debutante

I love Ward's writing.

When I read the beginning pages of The Secrets We Kept on the First Look Book Club I was enchanted by the narrative voice. I put in a hold on Overdrive and waited patiently. The audiobook was the first available copy.

I wanted to read the book for several reasons: First, because I had read Cold Warriors by Duncan White this year in which I learned how books and ideas were weapons in the Cold War. Second, because I had read Doctor Zhivago in 1968 and was interested in how the novel was secreted out of the Soviet Union.

my 1968 copy of Doctor Zhivago

Preston divides the novel into two fronts--East and West. In the West, female secretaries working for the government face sexism even when some become spies; one helps to clandestinely disseminate Pasternack's novel to Russian readers at the World's Fair in Belgium. In the East sections, we learn the story of Boris Pasternack and his lover Olga who was sent to Siberia for not informing on Pasternack when the government feared what Pasternack's novel contained.

The secrets kept are multiple on both fronts.

I enjoyed the audiobook and the story, but I still prefer to read a book. I could have read the novel in half the time it took to listen to it!

The Falconer by Dana Czapnik

Sometimes a book finds me that I would not have found by myself. That is how The Falconer by Dana Czapnik came into my life--as an unexpected package from the publisher.

Reading it was about a seventeen-year-old girl in 1993 New York City whose passion was basketball and who has a crush on her best friend Percy, I wondered if I would care for the book. Sure, there was advance praise from Column McCann, Salmon Rushdie, Chloe Benjamin--but could I relate to the story?

I opened the book and started reading. The opening scene finds the protagonist, "pizza bagel" Lucy, playing basketball with Percy. I've seen basketball games. Only when the tickets were free. But the writing was so good, I found myself drawn into the scene, turning pages. There was something about this book, about Lucy's voice.

On the surface, I had nothing in common with Lucy. And yet Lucy felt familiar, her concerns and fears universal.

In telling the story of one particular girl from a particular place and time, the author probes the eternal challenges of growing up female: conformity and acceptance by one's peer group while staying true to oneself; crushes on boys who don't see you; concerns about our attractiveness; what we give up for love; is the world is chaotic and without order, or can we find joy and hope?

There was a multitude of lines and paragraphs that I noted for their wisdom, beauty, and insight. I reread sections, scenes that elicited emotion or thoughtfulness.

I felt Lucy was channeling Holden Caulfield, who I met as a fourteen-year-old in Freshman English class in 1967. The Catcher in the Rye was life-changing for me, a voice unlike any I had encountered in a novel. The New York City setting, the wandering across the city, the characters met, the rejection of the parental values and lifestyle, Lucy's misunderstanding of a song line--Lucy is a female Holden, updated to the 1990s.

Lucy tells us that in Central Park is a statue of a boy releasing a falcon. She loves this statue but resents that only boys are portrayed in the way of the statue, that girls are shown nude or as children like the Alice in Wonderland statue. She sees in the joy and hope in The Falconer.

The Falconer, Central Park

Lucy experiences many things in the novel, including some pretty bad stuff. But she is resilient, holding to the joy and beauty she finds around her, the "the perfect jump shot" moments. She will inspire young readers and offer those of us whose choices were made long ago a journey of recollection and the affirmation of mutually shared experience.

I received a free ARC from the publisher in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

The Falconer
by Dana Czapnik
Atria Books
Publication: January 29, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-9322
$25 hardbound

Novels with a Sense of Place

I have recently two books that offer a wonderful sense of place. Vacationland by Sarah Stonich is set in the far north of Minnesota, along Lake Superior. Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens is set in the North Carolina marshes. 

Vacationland with quilt Michigan Autumn by Nancy A. Bekofske

Reading Laurentian Divide through Bookish I fell in love with Hatchet Inlet and the people of Naledi lodge. I learned that the novel is based on Sarah Stonich's set of interconnected short stories Vacationland and found a copy through my local library.

If anything, I would say that Vacationland is even better than the novel. And that's saying a lot, folks. I feel like I know so much more about these characters and their experience. Hatchet Inlet becomes more "real" and vivid in these stories. The depth of human experience in all its varieties that Stonich elicits from a small group of people is profound. The stories left me heart sore and some will stay vivid in my mind for a very long time.

The sense of place comes alive through the character's love of this far north land where Chicagoans come to summer but few have the stamina to stay year round. And in descriptions that leave a visual image.

Much of the resort is pocked with neglect: a sack of mortar left leaning near a wall has hardened to its own shape, with tatters of sack flapping; a tipped wheelbarrow has a maple sapling sprung through its rusted hole. Flat stones form a run of stairs have eroded to a jumble below, and high on the plateau old cabins lean like a trio of gossips, their eaves and sills lushly bumpered with moss...Bunchberry has berried and the sumac has gone bright. A fork in the path leads to a bog, where each footprint fills with water and spindly tamarack drop yellow needles. At her feet are colorful pitcher plants looking tropical and misplaced amid the hair-cap and hornwort...Water hyacinths, leatherleaf, bog rosemary--soft and woody plants in various stages of growth and bloom and rot make for a heady decay. from short story Hesitation in Vacationland by Sarah Stonich 

Bunchberries in bloom, Upper Peninsula of Michigan near Lake Superior. Photo by Gary L. Bekofske

stones near the Lake Superior shore in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Photo by Gary L. Bekofske

I heard so much about Delia Owen's first novel Where the Crawdads Sing. I had high expectations, based on reviews by Goodreads friends. 

I found it to be a good page-turner read, with a vivid sense of place. The author's love of the North Carolina marshland shines in lovely descriptive passages. I enjoyed this aspect of the novel.

The further I read into the book, the less satisfied I was with the plot which stretched my credulity. And the supporting characters were standard stereotypes: good boy, bad boy, drunk father, a mother who has run off, the victim of societal prejudice.

It is the story of an abandoned child who shuns society and manages to survive with the help of a kindly African American family who offers her covert charity. There is a boy who loves her too much (and teaches Kya to read) but leaves her, and a boy who loves himself more and leaves her. The girl grows up to become an expert on marsh flora and fauna, illustrating and writing scientific books about the marsh. There is a suspicious death, a trial, and an unexpected reveal.

I am in the minority in rating this as an average read. Entertaining enough. The marsh is memorable and the best-drawn 'character' in the novel. But it is hard to believe that a small child would be left alone to raise herself, ignored by society, survive without incident, and grow up to become a self-educated scholar and science writer. There was foreshadowing but no real lead up for the twisted ending.

I recalled the quote from Alice in Wonderland:

“There's no use trying,” she said: “one can't believe impossible things.” “I daresay you haven't had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

If you are willing to believe the impossible, Kya's story will tug your heartstrings.

The novel is filled with wonderful observations of the flora and fauna of the marsh. Kya is so connected to the land, her boyfriend knows she could not survive penned up into "civilization" and the teeming human life of the city. It is this wild world that feeds her soul.

Sandhill Crane in the Seney National Wildlife Preserve marsh, Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Photo by Gary L. Bekofske
This is the setting for The March King's Daughter by Karen Dionne

Other novels I have read this year with a sense of place include:

The March King's Daughter by Karen Dionne, set in Michigan's Upper Peninsula near Seney Wildlife Preserve

Virgil Wander by Leif Enger, set in Minnesota along Lake Superior

Marlena by Julie Buntin set in Northern Michigan near Lake Superior

Once Upon a River by Bonnie Jo Campbell set on and near the Kalamazoo River in Michigan

Hard Cider  by Barbara Stark-Nemon set in the Leelanau Peninsula in Michigan

A Collar for Cerberus by Matt Stanley set in Greece

Historical fiction

Burial Rites by Hannah Kent

Our Homesick Songs by Emma Hooper set in Newfoundland

The River by Starlight by Ellen Notbohm set in Montana

The Winter Station by Jody Shields set in Manchuria

The Winter Soldier by Daniel Mason set on the Eastern Front of WWI

Once Upon a River by Bonnie Jo Campbell

Seven years I lived in a small Michigan town in a county described as being a downstate 'Up North,' an area of wide open spaces and farmland punctuated by woods and wild. We knew a self-sufficient family who supplied all their food by hunting, fishing, and gardening. I heard stories about family feuds and wild lives.

The local library book club was led by a retired professor from Kalamazoo. The group wanted to read Bonnie Jo Campbell's book Once Upon a River because of the setting--the rural area around the Stark and Kalamazoo Rivers just a half hour away. The book was so popular that the library couldn't get enough copies of the book for the group and we read another book.

the view from my house

As I finally read Once Upon a River, sexual assault and abuse have been in the national conversation. Women everywhere are sharing their stories.

Meanwhile, reports warn against eating fish from Michigan's rivers tainted with PFAS, including the Kalamazoo River. The rivers in the book, which is set around 1980, are polluted by factories.

I had picked up another timely book. Or perhaps a timeless book.

Once Upon a River is about Margo whose hero is Annie Oakley. She is a deadly shot, can prepare game, fish and travel the river, avoiding the water contaminated by factories. Margo is a beautiful young girl who does not understand life or herself, and who is preyed upon by men. She confuses sex with safety and protection.

At fifteen Margo does not yet understand that she has been raped. The rape is witnessed, leading to a series of catastrophic events. With no mother or father, and unable to trust her remaining family, Margo takes her grandfather's boat to live alone on the river. She finds temporary shelter with a series of men. With each relationship, she grows in her understanding of what is right and wrong, who she is, and what she wants for herself.

Campbell's writing is exquisite, vividly descriptive. Margo is an unforgettable character, strong yet vulnerable, negligent of her outer beauty that lures men, capable of skinning a muskrat or shooting a man. With its beautiful writing, unique character and setting, and timeless themes, I would heartily recommend it for book clubs.

Read an excerpt from NPR here:
https://www.npr.org/2011/07/14/137638326/wild-water-river-runs-deep-with-ferocity-heart
Read an interview with Campbell here:
http://www.raintaxi.com/trawling-the-river-of-words-an-interview-with-bonnie-jo-campbell/

***

Warlight by Michael Ondaatje

"In 1945 our parents went away and left us in the care of two men who may have been criminals." Warlight

From the opening line, I fell into under the spell of Nathaniel's story about how he and his sister Rachel were abandoned at ages fourteen and sixteen to the care of relative strangers, their third-floor lodger, whom they called The Moth, and the Pimlico Dancer.

After their father departed, going to Asia for his work, never to be seen again, their mother stayed with them for two more weeks, sharing bits of her history, enough to lure them into understanding there was much more to her than they knew. Then suddenly she left them, too.

The Moth welcomes shady company into their home. The Darter brings a string of women, none of whom last long. The teens are left alone, sometimes for days.

Nathaniel discovers their mother's trunk is in the house. She had not left to join her husband. And The Moth wasn't talking. "He was brilliant," The Moth says of their father, "but he was not stable." Both parents are strangers to the teens.

Over the next years, Nathaniel lives in a complicated and uncertain world, accompanying The Darter on nighttime trips that are perhaps criminal activities, and working odd jobs during the day. He has a secret liaison with a girl in empty houses.

Years later, Nathaniel is approached to work in a government position that allows him access to files which he plumbs for information about his mother's war-related work. He visits people from his past. He pieces together who his mother truly was, the life she kept secret, the fear she lived with, and the lover who brought her into a world of danger.

Warlight is about a man's search for his mother, the story of the deeply etched marks left by a lost childhood, and an exploration of the stories we weave together just to survive.

I received a free ebook from First to Read.

Warlight
by Michael Ondaatje
Hardcover $26.95
Published by Knopf
May 08, 2018
ISBN 9780525521198

West by Carys Davies

John Cyrus Bellman left his Lewiston, PA farm and his only child to embark on a quest into the west. He knew he would be gone at least two years. Was he a fool, like his sister judged, or romantic and adventurous, as he appeared to his daughter Bess? 

Bellman's desire to see undiscovered country was rooted in a longing to find the living creatures whose huge bones had been discovered in Kentucky. He had already crossed an ocean, from England to America, built a farm, had a child, and lost a wife. But the West beckoned with its mysteries and he could no longer stay put.

Bellman studied the Lewis and Clark Expedition maps at the subscription library. His plan was to follow their trail...but to diverge into the vast spaces they had left unstudied. He was certain he would find the mammoth creatures alive. He packed up trading items and set off on his journey, leaving his daughter and farm to his sister's care.

Carys Davies novel West takes readers across hostile landscapes both wild and settled. As Bellman faces cruel winters and lean seasons, accompanied only by a Native American boy, back in Lewistown his daughter Bess survives in an isolated land without parental love or friends. Bess dreams of her father's travels, longing to see the library maps herself. And, unprotected in the world, as Bess nears puberty, men watch her and wait and scheme.

Bellman's decision to go on his journey seemed to me at once a quest and an escape, resulting in a "night sea journey" recognition of what he had given up in leaving his known world. He struggles with the choices he made, realizing that sometimes we set our mind on what seems important only to realize we have been mistaken in our values.

The novel is beautifully written. 

I received a free ebook from the publisher through Edelweiss in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

West

by Cays Davies

April 24, 2018

Scribner
ISBN 9781501179341, 1501179349
Hardcover $22.00 USD 

We all have one story...the only story

"Don't expect too much of me."from The Only Story

My mother warned me. She was thirty-eight and I was nineteen when she warned that it happens to all lovers. My aunt once pondered, "What happened to us?" while reflecting on her first love and failed marriage.

We see it all the time, famous couples in the news, the couple next door. We expect everything, throw ourselves into young love trusting that the connection shared is timeless and everlasting.

It is our 'only story' of love, that first love when we are young and hopeful. We think we are different from the others.

"Somehow eternity seems possible as you embrace." *

I was excited to finally read Julian Barnes after hearing so much about his books. I was not disappointed. I do love a quiet, introspective novel with beautiful writing and a deep understanding of the human condition. The main character, Paul, tells us his 'only story' from the vantage of fifty years, recalling his first love in all its happiness, and later pain.

Paul is nineteen when he meets Susan, almost thirty years his senior. They play tennis at the local club during his first summer home from university. In a fluid, organic way, without pathos or introspection, their relationship becomes intimate.
Paul becomes a fixture in Susan's life, even coming into the home she shares with her alienated husband. When Paul turned twenty-one he took her away.

After recalling his early innocent and idealized love, we learn that Susan was a victim of spousal abuse. Paul recalls Susan's slipping from him into alcoholism, and lastly considers all the implications of cause and effect, culpability, and his inability to move past Susan.

The novel left me heartsore. For days.

I have a cousin who in her fifties slipped into early dementia from alcohol abuse. Her husband, her first love when they were teenagers, installed her in her own home, unwilling to watch her destroy herself. Of course, I thought of her.

Our only story, the one great love of our life, may end when one beloved partner dies first, or it may end in disaster, heartbreak, a crippling of the emotions. We may be left to relive happy memories or to wonder how it all went wrong. Paul agonizes: did he let go of Susan, let her fall, or did she pull him down with him?

Regardless, Paul is left damaged by his only story. And as a reader, I mourned with him.

I received a free ebook from First to Read in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

*from Second Elegy, Duino Elegies by Ranier Maria Rilke, trans. David Young

The Only Story
by Julian Barnes
Knopf
Publication: April 17, 2018
ISBN-10: 0525521216
ISBN-13: 978-0525521211

The Italian Teacher by Tom Rachman

The Italian Teacher is destined to be one of my favorite reads of the year.

Tom Rachman's character Pinch is the son of a philandering, larger-than-life artist, Bear Bavinsky. Bear is charming and unreliable.

Pinch spends his entire life trying to get his dad's attention and approval. He imitates his dad, smoking a pipe early. In a one day lesson Bear teachers Pinch the fundamentals of painting and Pinch dreams of following in his father's footsteps.

Bear abandons Pinch and his mother, once his model, for the next model to pose for him; he leaves a string of women behind him and seventeen neglected children.

Bear routinely destroys any canvas he deems subpar. And he decides to stop selling or showing his art, a plan to drive up the values of his canvases. He becomes a legend, a tantalizing mystery in the art world.

Pinch feels a failure, unable to get what he needs from Bear. He flounders through his life, searching for an achievement that would finally elicit real love and approval from his father. His dissertation is on Caravaggio because his father once praised him; his dad doesn't remember doing so. Pinch ends up teaching Italian and foreign languages in London.

Not only is he unable to settle on a career, he loses his college girlfriend when she agrees to pose nude for Bear, which drives Pinch crazy: he knows his dad too well. He later marries a woman and again is too possessive and loses her. He finally moves in with a coworker, sharing a house.

His college friend Marsden comes in and out of his life, but is always reliable and can be counted on.

Too late, Bear corrects Pinch: he never said Pinch was a bad artist, just that he didn't have the personality and selfishness to BE an artist.

Pinch's life is sad, miserable, and heartbreaking. So, you ask me, why would you ever want to read this book about a loser? The story has an unexpected turn and a truly comedic ending

Of all his children, Bear chooses Pinch to be his confidence man, even leaving his estate and paintings to him. He believes Pinch understands and supports his intention.

 Pinch hatches a scheme that is the greatest scam of all time, a joke on the whole world of art, a way to keep his seventeen half-siblings happy, and still keep his promise to his dad.

And then...another reversal gives Pinch a place in the art world he so desperately desired. The novel left me laughing. It is a brilliant reversal.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

The Italian Teacher
by Tom Rachman
Viking
Publication Date: March 20. 2018
ISBN: 9780735222694
Hardcover $27.00

Dust by Mark Thompson: A Loving Portrait of Boyhood Friendship

"Early in life, my grandfather told me that only three things were certain: birth, death and time. And time only ticked one way: it went forward and never back. It came to be a recurring wish with me, the desire to turn back the clock, to undo what I had done." from Dust by Mark Thompson

For as long as I can remember, part of me has faced backward, tied to the past by nostalgia and longing. When I read Maria Rainer Rilke's advice in his Letters to a Young Poet that one's childhood "treasure house of memories"* offers the creative artist a wealth of inspiration I knew it was true.

I share this to explain why I so enjoy writing that is turned backwards, considering a childhood's treasure house. The newness, the first contact, the adventure of life--and its sorrows and disappointments and questions--always has a poignancy for me.

Mark Thompson's slim debut novel Dust  is about the friendship and adventures of two eleven-year-old boys growing up in New Jersey in the late 1960s. It is full of lyrical nostalgia as J. J. Walsh recounts his last summer with his best friend Tony 'El Greco' Papadakis.

The boys still imagine sticks are swords, but they also sneak Kent cigarettes and drink coffee black. They imagine the larger world, planning a trip to see the Pacific Ocean. In a freedom rarely allowed today, the boys get into trouble and have misadventures, and they come to terms with death and pursue knowledge of sex. Details of American life offer a deep sense of time and place.

Near the end of summer, Mr. Walsh takes the boys to see his hometown of Savannah, GA, whose exotic beauty enchants JJ. During their travels, the boys experience the Jim Crow South with its poverty and division.

Dust is a love song to the endurance of love, love of a boyhood friend, a wife, a son.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through Net Galley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Dust
Mark Thompson
RedDoor Publishing
ISBN: 9781910453223




*"For the creative artist there is no poverty—nothing is insignificant or unimportant. Even if you were in a prison whose walls would shut out from your senses the sounds of the outer world, would you not then still have your childhood, this precious wealth, this treasure house of memories? Direct your attention to that. Attempt to resurrect these sunken sensations of a distant past." 

We Shall Not All Sleep by Estep Nagy

In 1965 two families, the Quicks and the Hillsingers, gather on an idyllic Maine island. They are preparing for Migration Day when the sheep are gathered and transported to the rich clover fields of a neighboring island, a time of feasting and celebration.

Seven Island and its archipelago of islands have belonged to the families for seven generations; their ancestors had made their fortunes as privateers. The Blackwell sisters Lila and Hannah married into the families: Lila marrying Jim Hilsinger, a CIA operative, and Hannah marrying successful financier Billy Quick.

This year, Jim Hillsinger has invited a man from their past, John Wilkie, to join them.

Activist teacher Hannah's idealism led her to the Communist Party until she saw its irrelevance to the problems of her Harlem students. She couldn't escape the notice of the government agencies looking sniffing out Red spies, leading her to commit a desperate act.

Lila's husband has been falsely accused of treason and ousted from the CIA after an illustrious career; in Warsaw he had been feared by the KGB as The Black Prince.

As the adults struggle with their crisis of family and country, Jim Hilsinger is determined to harden his twelve-year-old son Catta in preparation for his survival in the vicious Cold War world as he knows it--by stranding the boy alone on an island overnight.

"Majestic cliffs rose up behind him. Birds called. A flock of sheep tumbled down the hill, and the smell of cut grass and smoke ran alongside the ethereal salt. The sun was hot and the wind cool. He had never, in all his life, been anywhere so beautiful. Someday, he thought, you will have to leave this place." 

John Wilkie's first sight of the Maine island made me nostalgic. We had camped in Maine for seven or more trips, in love with those woods rising from the ocean, the islands rimmed with granite shores, the lobster boats bobbing from trap to trap in the sunshine. We climbed the mountains and gazed upon the green islands that arose abruptly from the intense blue sea. We sought out the rock-bound tidal pools, the sweep of sand beach in its bowl of cliff, and the inland tarn with its beaver and Siberian Iris.

"Among the rock and penury of Northern Maine, it was a geological freak that there existed here a mile-long white-sand beach in a crescent shape, in a protected harbor facing the open sea."

The families make thick pancakes spread with local orange butter, gather around fireplaces in the evening; to Wilkie they are "moments of perfection" that "often come toward the end of something rather than its beginning, that the light of every supernova comes from an explosion."

The children's world parallels their parent's. Fairy houses are made and baby lambs are born, there are days wandering the island with homemade biscuits secreted in pockets for lunch. Then there is James who covertly bullies new arrivals and leads the boys in brutal games.

Catta is victim of both worlds, abused by his older, jealous brother James, and abandoned, unprepared, by his father on Baffin Island, expected to prove he is 'a man.' It is the end of innocence, a realization that the adult world is corrupt and that children are reared to be warriors "for the slaughter."

We Shall Not All Sleep is an intriguing Cold War family drama with elements of a spy thriller and mystery. The complicated and convoluted thread that snares the Quicks, Hilsingers, and Wilkies is slowly unraveled. I was riveted.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

We Shall Not All Sleep
Estep Nagy
Bloomsbury
Publication July 4, 2017
$26 hardcover
ISBN: 9781632868411

Faithful by Alice Hoffman

Alice Hoffman's new novel Faithful is the story of a teenager's descent into guilt and self-loathing after surviving a car accident which leaves her best friend in a coma. Shelby's mental anguish and depression is self-destructive. The novel follows Shelby's journey from the bottom through her slow, tortuous climb back into life.

Shelby is unable to accept the love of a good man, but he does leave her with the goal of becoming a veterinarian. She leaves him for a bad love affair, but finally realizes she can save herself. And her own past mistakes give her the wisdom needed to help her best friend's children find their way past their bad choices.

Shelby's empathy and ability to understand other's pain, and her natural desire to rescue the unfortunate, including abused dogs, become her greatest strengths.

The message of letting go of the past and that even 'monsters' can be 'angels', is inspirational.

I am glad to inform you, that traveling to Hell with Shelby is worth the trip. We rejoice when Shelby finally finds friendship, acceptance, and even love.

I loved The Marriage of Opposites by Alice Hoffman which I reviewed here.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Faithful
Alice Hoffman
Simon & Schuster
Publication Date Nov. 1, 2016
$26 hard cover
ISBN:9781476799209

The Unseen World by Liz Moore

As I read the last paragraphs my breath caught in a sob, something between tears and amazement, surprise and the regret of ending. A visceral and wholly unexpected reaction. I had come to inhabit this world and know the Sibelius family, experienced Ada's journey, and now it was over and wrapped up in an ending I had not expected, told by a narrator who knows the Sibelius family as ancestors to be remembered and respected.

The Unseen World is a deeply layered and satisfying novel, a coming-of-age story involving the search for the father, a quest for identity, and a revelation of American society's penchant to fearfully target those who are perceived as different.

Dr. David Sibelius and his daughter Ada have an unusual relationship. David is Ada's entire world: mother, father, and teacher; the employees of his lab at Boston Institute of Technology is their extended family.

David's work is in artificial intelligence and his passion is cryptology. Ada participates in his work by talking to ELIXIR, a 'chatbot' program designed to learn human language through conversation. She pours out her daily life to ELIXIR.

One day David gives her a floppy disk with a cryptographic puzzle to solve in her spare time.

Ada adores her father but at age 12 is curious about the lives of  'normal' families and school children. She spys on the family of David's coworker Diana Liston and her beautiful older son William, while younger son Greg in turn watches Ada.

When Ada turns 13 she learns that her father has Alzheimer's syndrome. She endeavors to manage their life and hide his lapses but within a year his condition becomes obvious. Ada is required to attend public school, and when David is placed in a home she moves in with Liston.

As Liston deals with legal issues pertaining to David's care, his estate, and guardenship of Ada, it is discovered that David Sibelius is not who he said he was. Ada becomes obsessed with finding out her father's true identity and solving the cryptographic puzzle which may hold answers.

But discovering David's real identity still leaves the mystery of 'why'. Years pass until Gregory Liston returns with an insight that may solve the puzzle.

Moore captures adolescent society pitch-perfect, Ada's inner world and her apprisal of teenage machinations are spot on, moving and evocative. Ada is a sympathetic and beautifully drawn character.

The writing is wonderful. With subtle inference the reader is allowed to make connections that are later revealed in full. The backstory is told through jumps in time between the 1980s and 2009 with a few chapters dating to David's early life.

The book is rich with multiple themes: identity, the development of artificial intelligence, societal alienation, the father-daughter relationship, and societal prejudices and pograms against people who are different.

I loved reading this novel.

I received an ARC through Shelf Awareness in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

The Unseen World
W. W. Norton
$26.95 hard cover
ISBN: 978-0-393-24168-6

"What's important is the past": Absalom's Daughters by Suzanne Feldman

In the Jim Crow South of the 1950s two girls find their reflection in each other's faces. Although one is black and one white they share the same father-- 'skirt-chasing, adulteratin' white trash'--who has abandoned both families. A rumor comes to town that their father is to inherit a legacy, and being 'progeny' the girls are encouraged to find their father and demand their inheritance.

Sixteen-year-old Judith is white, uneducated, and devastatingly poor. What she possesses is a beautiful talent for singing. Hearing the Negro music aired from New York City--only at night due to its scandalous sexuality--Judith longs to go to New York and become a famous singer.

Cassie, fifteen and cinnamon in color, lives with her grandmother and mother, a hardworking laundress. Grandmother determined that her daughter--and plans for her granddaughter--to take white lovers with the expectation of diluting their African blood until they can pass as white. Cassie's mother hopes to spare her daughter this indignation, encouraging her to follow Judith's quest for the father and leave town.

The story of the girls' road trip across the south is delightful reading, episodic with wonderful characters and twists and memorable characters.

Early in the story Cassie meets Ovid Beale who tells her that mules 'useter be colored folk'; it is easier for colored folk to turn into a mule because they are 'already half one thing and half another.' And it is this theme of passing between two worlds, the legacy of slavery making colored folks black but not black, appearing white while being deemed legally black, that informs the story.

On their travels each sister acts out different roles according to the expectations of the audience and what they need to do to survive. Cassie acts the black servant to Judith, then tries passing as white, learning about herself and deciding on her future. Cassie learns that what is important is the past, to never forget her roots.

It took time for me to get hooked to the story, then it picked up considerably. The characters are interesting and Feldman has an original take on the timeless theme of race and identity in America.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Absalom's Daughters
by Suzanne Feldman
Henry Holt & Co,
Publication July 5, 2016
$26 hard cover
ISBN: 9781627794534

Leaving Blythe River by Catharine Ryan Hyde

Ethan has been estranged from his father ever since he and his mother caught him 'entertaining' his secretary at home. But when his mother needs to help her ailing parents her only choice is to send Ethan to live with his father who has moved into the wilderness.

Ethan has never received his dad's approval. City boy Ethan is small and timid and book smart. His dad is athletic, a risk taker, a womanizer. Their reunion is not going well.

One day Ethan's dad doesn't return from his typical twenty mile run. The local police can't find him and are not convinced he didn't just skip town. Ethan could have walked away but he can't leave until he has gone on his own search for the man he hates and loves.

With the help of three local misfits Ethan takes a journey into the Blythe River National Wilderness on an adventure that brings him self-knowledge, revelation, and personal growth.

Catherine Ryan Hyde 's latest book Leaving Blythe River will appeal especially to YA readers who will identify with Ethan's struggle for parental approval. His personal growth is the focus of the story. The supporting characters are well drawn and memorable. The wilderness journey will propel readers to keep reading. The ending is realistic.

There were some unanswered questions, such as how was Ethan's dad supporting himself while living in the wilderness and going on runs. As a mom, I was not convinced why mom was so accepting of her son's going on the dangerous quest into the wilderness.

I have been a fan of  the author for several years. The author's last book was Worthy which you can read about at http://theliteratequilter.blogspot.com/2015/06/worthy-by-catherine-ryan-hyde.html

I received a free ebook through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Leaving Blythe River
by Catherine Ryan Hyde
Lake Union Publishing
Publication Date May 24, 2016
$14.95 paperback
ISBN:9781503934467

Love For Lydia by H. E. Bates

Lydia arrived an awkward girl, bloomed into an attractive woman, discovered men liked her, and gaily left a wake of bodies in her path. When she saw what she had accomplished she tried to burn herself out in a two year binge of dancing and drink and ended up desperately lonely and guilty in a sanitarium.

Some might believe Lydia was a tease and vixen, partying her way into destruction. Others may feel she was a girl-child who, when released from the 'cotton-wool'  prison of her girlhood, mishandles her sudden sexual power over men. Or is she the genetic product of her profligate parents, an alcoholic mother paid off to keep away and the distant, womanizing father who proscribed her sheltered girlhood?

Love for Lydia by H.E. Bates is an autobiographical homage to his home town, with the narrator Richardson sharing Bates' early jobs and family.
It is the story of young people growing up, the thrill and torment of first love, the end of a way of life, and class stricture. It is the story of what happens when four young men fall for Lydia and how she handles their adulation. It is the story of learning what love really means. It is a love story to England's pastoral beauty.

A cuckoo flew with bubbling throaty calls across the wheat-field, disappearing beyond the copses. In the still air I caught again a great breath of grass and hawthorn and bluebell and earth beating through new pulses of spring loveliness to the very edge of summer.

The novel begins in 1929 when Richardson is nineteen and a reporter for the town paper. Richardson is sent to the Aspen manor to learn about the eldest Aspen brother's demise. The deceased's elderly spinster sisters introduce Richardson to his heir and daughter, Lydia. The aunts suggest he take her skating, show her some fun, for they don't want her growing up in isolation. Ill dressed and stick thin with candlestick curls, Lydia is having fun with peers for the first time. It is a magical time.

Above the trees a mass of winter stars, glittering with crystal flashes of vivid green, then white, then ice-clear blue, flashed down through a wide and wonderful silence that seemed to splinter every now and then with a crack of frost-taut boughs in the copses, down where the drive went, above the frozen stream.

Richardson discovers that Lydia is game for anything, pushing him past his comfort zone. And into regular clandestine meetings where she enjoys his physical attention. As Lydia fills out her aunt's hand-me-down dresses Richardson falls in love, and Lydia claims to love him too.

'Oh! Darling--don't stop loving me'--she said. 'Don't ever stop loving me-'...'Even if I'm bad to you--would you?--will you always?''Yes,' I said.

The aunts press the young people to attend dances and Lydia's social network expands. Richardson's best friend, Alex, local yeoman's son Tom, and chauffeur Blackie all fall under Lydia's charm and vie for her love. Lydia is 'excitable and impulsive," following her instincts thoughtlessly.  In the battle for Lydia's attention hearts are broken and even a death occurs.

The descriptions of the landscape are beautifully written. Richardson seeks out nature as a respite and for its restorative effects. The town is a center of shoe manufacturing, an unattractive and crowded place. Richardson is very aware that the loveliness of the land has been infringed upon by mankind.

In 1977 I watched and enjoyed the Masterpiece Theater's series Love for Lydia but had not read the book until now. I am so glad I did. I will look to read more by Mr. Bates in the future.

Anyone interested in the English Language must read Mr. Bates, one of its outstanding masters. Times Literary Supplement.

Learn more about H. E. Bates at
http://www.bloomsbury.com/author/he-bates/
http://hebatescompanion.com
http://www.thevanishedworld.co.uk/index.html
See a clip of the series Love for Lydia at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7EV2MkbRI4I

I received a free ebook through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Love for Lydia
by H. E. Bates
Bloombury Books
Publication Date May 12, 2016
ISBN: 9781448216444
ebook

Family Secrets, Ghosts, and Greed: Sudden Light by Garth Stein

The Riddell family has a problem. The patriarch Samuel thinks he has a moral duty to fulfill the intentions of his ancestors and let the family estate return to forest as an expiation of the sins of the fathers. The 'fathers' having been a money grubbing, soulless timber baron who decimated the forests of Puget Sound for family wealth. 

Samuel's daughter Serena wants to sell the land to developers and take a cruise around the world. Brother Jones is in a trial separation and thinks that money will solve his martial problems. He has returned home to assist his sister in making the old man sell and has brought his fourteen year old son Trevor along. 

Trevor has never seen his father's childhood home or met his estranged family. The bright, bored teenager perceives there is something more going on and sets out to solve the family mystery. He is assisted by the ghosts of his ancestors. What he learns is not nice. 

When I requested Garth Stein's A Sudden Light  from Simon and Schuster through NetGalley I had not realized it was a ghost story. It is also Gothic, derivative, and discomforting. It is a family drama, a coming of age story, and a mystery as well. Have I left out any genres? Romance? Yep. Got it and it's a gay relationship. And incestuous lust. Philosophy, religion, morality, and environmental issues all show up as well. In the words of Tim Gunn, it is a "hot mess."

The creepy psycho aunt and the ghosts were bad enough, but it was the overuse of easy information dumping and plot problem solving that made me put the book aside for a few days as I considered finishing it or forgetting it. I can handle ghosts, if I know it's a ghost story. Finding one secret room with a hundred year old diary that reveals his ancestor's secrets is iffy. Finding another 100 year journal that sheds light on his great-uncle's death is stretching credulity. Finding hidden letters that reveal information that brings about the denouncement is overboard. And all those back stories told by ghosts...

Perhaps had I realized I was reading Genre fiction I would have come at it with a more open mind. (Amazon has it listed under Genre Fiction, Horror, Ghosts. Other places it is categorized under Young Adult, Coming of Age!)

Stein said his original idea of writing about a house turned into a play which turned into Sudden Light*. He also references that it is about father-son relationships. It is a good look at How Not To Father. Both Trevor's mother and his father's mother are referenced but are absent. Which leaves us with Serena, that crazy girl.

There are a lot of reviews online by readers who enjoyed this book. Some mention it's failures or weaknesses. Others related to Trevor's struggle with "manhood" as he dips his toes into the complexities of the adult world.

Stein's previous book The Art of Running in the Rain was a best seller when I  read it with a book club a few years back. The story is told from the family dog's point of view. Everyone loved it. Except me. My problem was... it was improbable that the dog could know and understand all the things were were asked to believe he knew.

*http://www.garthstein.com/garth-introduces-his-new-novel-a-sudden-light/

Sudden Light by Garth Stein
Simon and Schuster
Publication September 30, 2014
 $26.95

• ISBN-10: 1439187037
• ISBN-13: 978-1439187036