Imagine That by Mark Fins

When I was in 8th Grade my English/Social Studies teacher lamented that people lose their imaginations when they grow up. This struck a cold fear into my heart, for make-believe was my favorite world and imagining stories my passion. I was determined it would not happen to me--I would keep my imagination. I would NOT grow up!

Of course, I did grow up, but I hope I kept a healthy amount of imagination mixed in with the necessary evils of practicality and pragmatism.

Later, I was the mother of a boy whose imaginary world was so palpable I could almost see it as he walked through life telling his stories out loud, enacting the scenes running in his head. 

Used correctly, one's imagination can enrich life. Without understanding and self-control, it can create problems.

Mark Fins' character Mark in Imagine That is an eight-year-old boy who lives in a world of his imagination, acting out the scenarios in his head. Mark narrates his story, telling us how he is drawn to act out what is in his head, leading to near catastrophes and punishments from his beloved father. Especially when he imagines a lit match as a kamikaze pilot plummeting to earth.

Mark's father is stressed over his business and it makes him short-tempered and impatient, resorting to the belt, so that Mark has learned to fear him. 

After a move, a lonely Mark meets an elderly man who values Mark's imagination and befriends Mark and his family, subtly aiding them to personal growth and harmony. Mr. Hawkins struggles with regret and sadness over choices that severed his family.

The novel began to feel didactic at this point, more like an extended example of how to parent a difficult child. (Nothing wrong with that! Many of us are flummoxed over child raising.) But Fins has incorporated themes that elevate the story to something more as he tackles issues of love and redemption, punishment and forgiveness.

"This is the face of war," I heard myself say. The screaming and suffering and dying and the faces of the solders in a fight to the death made me realize that even though it was glorious to pretend, war was a terrible thing, just like Mr. Hawkins had once said.

I didn't want to do war anymore, maybe even for a long time. There was too much sadness in war.  

Mark in Imagine That

I loved the section where Mr. Hawkins helps Mark and the neighborhood children reenact WWI as a way of teaching them that the glorification of war hides its cruel realities.

My favorite scene, near the end of the book, finds Mark discovering a nascent belief in God, finding meaning to his Jewish heritage. I was choked up reading this section.

Fins' novel is deeply autobiographical and his delving into his early memories creates a rich character. 

The ebook includes a Reading Group Guide.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through a Goodreads win.

The papberback ($4.99) and ebook ($2.99) are available at

http://www.markfins.com/buy

Marlena by Julie Buntin

As a girl, I'd had a friend who died. We were close. I didn't talk about it. When you grow up, who you were as a teenager either takes on a mythical importance or its completely laughable. I wanted to be the kind of person who wipes those years way; instead, I feared, they defined me. from Marlena by Julie Buntin

After reading Ohio by Stephen Markley and Once Upon a River by Bonnie Jo Campbell, books about Midwest small towns, drugs, abuse, and growing up, I decided it was the right time to read Julie Buntin's Marlena. The novel focuses on Marlena, a teenage girl in Northern Michigan caught in a web of poverty and drugs, and the lasting impact Marlena had on the narrator, Cat.

Buntin's novel caught so many things for me. The painful nostalgia for a moment in time, the haunting loss of a loved one, how in youth our naivety blinds us to darker realities.

I want to go home--a phrase that's stuck on a loop, that I hear before falling asleep, waiting in line for my coffee, tapping at the elevator button and rising through the sky to my apartment, worrying the words like a lucky stone, and yet my desire is not attached to a particular places--not to Silver Lake, not to Marlena, not to Mom or Dad or Jimmy. I want to go home, I want to go home, but what I mean, what I'm grasping for, is not a place, it's a feeling. I want to go back. But back where? from Marlena by Julie Buntin

The narrator, Cat, is living in New York City with a good job and a loving husband. She is an alcoholic. Cat tells the story of being the new girl in a small Up North town, looking for a new best friend. She develops a girl crush on a charismatic and beautiful older teen who lives next door. Cat, fifteen, wants to be like Marlena--cool, daring, exciting, experienced.

After her dad left them, Cat's mom moved the family from Pontiac to her childhood vacation spot, Silver Lake. Silver Lake is a half hour away from the school and Walmart and the nearest mall is ninety miles downstate. It is also down the road from the mansions along Lake Michigan where the 1% come to play, and a historic, elite Methodist enclave. Cat's mom has a drinking problem and with no job skills is lucky to get a job cleaning a summer estate.

Catherine had been on scholarship at a private school, a good student, college-bound, a bookish loner. Her older brother walked away from a college scholarship to help take care of his mom. Moving is a chance to reinvent herself as Cat, an edgier and more risk-taking girl.

Marlena's mom disappeared years back and her addict dad has a meth lab in the woods. Marlena cares for her younger brother as best she can, but he is often alone with no food in the house. Already at seventeen Marlena is an alcoholic, she trades sexual favors to obtain drugs, and although smart she skips school.

For eight brief months, Cat became a part of Marlena and her world-- the 'best days ever'-- with a group of friends who accepted her, her life with filled danger and excitement.

****

By July we, like twenty percent of Michigan's population--Mom loved that statistic--were on food stamps. from Marlena by Julie Buntin

Michigan ranks 4th in the country for drug problems, with heroin and cocaine in Detroit and opioids everywhere else. An estimated 20% of Michigan adults drink to excess and 24% of young men are binge drinkers. Beer is everywhere; the state ranks number 10 in the number of IPA breweries in the country.

The Pere Marquette River in Baldwin, Lakes County, the poorest county in Michigan

Michigan has its urban centers mired in job loss and poverty, the racist legacy of redlining and 'urban renewal' with its wholesale destruction of African American neighborhoods. Pontiac, Cat's hometown before they move to Silver Lake, has a poverty rate of 34%.

But the rural Up North communities also are impoverished. I just returned from a trip to Lake, Roscommon, and Ogemaw Counties with poverty rates over 28%, higher than the state average of 24%. Michigan ranks as one of the worst six states in the nation for the number of children living in poverty--one in five.

There are also pockets of great wealth located in Oakland County where I live, including Bloomfield Hills, one of the top 20 richest cities in the country.

Meadowbrook Hall, the second largest private home in America, built in Oakland Co, MI by the heir to the Dodge fortune

The city where my grandparents lived in the 1960s is now one of the ten wealthiest cities in the state, where I grew up is number 15, and my current city is number 30. These suburbs were built to house workers in the auto industry, from the top brass to the union workers like my dad. Their playground became the small 'Up North' towns--modest cabins for the middle class, posh resort homes and yachts in a marina for the 1%.

My dad's cabin

These remote villages and towns became dependant on tourism, the hunters and fishers and snowmobilers and skiers and family vacationers. So that side by side, for a few weeks each year, the very wealthy live amongst the local poor. And then the economy plummeted, and the working and middle classes could not afford the cabins and vacations Up North.

Summertime transformed northern Michigan. Kewaunee swelled to twice its normal size. from Marlena by Julie Buntin

Pentwater Lake

We spent two years in a resort community on Lake Michigan. Between July 1 and the end of August the town was filled with campers at the state park and the Methodist campground, cottagers, bed and breakfast tourists, and people living on their sailboats in the marina. At summer's end, everything closed. Anyone who had enough money left town for their winter homes in Texas or Arizona or Florida or even Metro Detroit. Several bars were open, and the bank and post office. The one grocery store that catered to the marina kept half the store open for basics. In winter 193 inches of snow fell.

Years before we lived there, we used to go to the Methodist family camp. We were impressed by the beauty of the lake and marina, the channel feeding into Lake Michigan with its gorgeous sand beaches.

The beach at Pentwater

One day when I was in town checking out the tourist shops and ice cream parlors I remarked to a teenager that it must be a beautiful place to live. He scowled in answer. It wasn't until we lived there that I realized how isolated and boring a place it had to be to grow up in. Graduation class sizes were in the teens, the entire K-12 school system had about 260 students.

Lake Michigan at Pentwater

When we left Philadelphia when our son was two I thought a small town would be a wonderful place to raise our son. It turns out that Mayberry doesn't exist. Maybe it never did exist.

*****

As I read Marlena I wondered how much I had missed, all the different places we had moved and stayed a few years, never really understanding the community that deeply. I worked with teens but what did I know about their lives? One boy in the inner city of Philadelphia told me I did not understand real life. Pacifism did not work on the streets where one didn't get mad, one got even. In a small rural town, our son would ask why classmates could not read, had no telephones or books at home, or why their dads were in jail.

I remembered 'my' Marlena, a gregarious and confident girl from a well-to-do family who took the 14-year-old me under her wing--I was the new girl in school--and encouraged me to be outgoing, lose weight, have fun. She dropped me, age 15, and a year later I saw her going through the school hallway, her books held close against her chest, eyes straight ahead, slightly leaning forward in a fast walk. She put purple chalk on her eyelids in the restroom before school. She had changed. Years later I stopped by her home. Her brother told me she had married three times and lived in an Up North small town; her mother didn't remember which one, but it started with an M.

Cat is filled with nostalgia for that moment in time when she first felt alive and a part of something. And she is filled with survivor's guilt and regret. She struggles with alcoholism which might destroy the life she has built. What she experienced was horrendous; she saw the destruction of a smart and beautiful and courageous girl, a girl she wanted to be.

Just one girl, one fictional girl.

How many thousands across Michigan are we losing today? To human trafficking. To opioid addiction, meth, heroin, alcohol. To poverty, sexual abuse... How many across the country, the world?

What impressed me about Marlena was the story and the voice and the Michigan places and the heartbreaking REALNESS of it all. I am glad I finally read it.

Farewell, Summer by Ray Bradbury

"Farewell, Summer. Here it is. October 1st. Temperature's 82. Season just won't let go. The leaves won't turn." from Farewell, Summer by Ray Bradbury

I read Farewell Summer on the last day of summer. 

My electric company had sent me a warning email that my bill would be twice as high as last month's. We had been running the air conditioner for weeks because of the high humidity and 90-degree weather, accompanied by thunderstorms. The bees were visiting the Sedum Autumn Joy since most of the other flowers had gone, except the roses which are still blooming their hearts out.

But a few days later as I write this post the change has come. We expect our first frost. The apple tree has some yellowing leaves. I left my window open last night but pulled my quilt up to my chin. The house was chilled this morning. Farewell, Summer.

If only life were only about the changing of the seasons, but with the change comes the recognition that life is moving on, the months are ticking off another year. I am growing old. I tried to hang onto youth, like Doug and Tom in Bradbury's fictional Illinois town, resentful and obstinate, sure I would never grow old. I would die first. Instead, I turned sixteen and suddenly I was married and then I was old.

A sequel to Dandelion Wine, written 55 years later, Bradbury returns to childhood's grappling with the awareness that comes after age nine, the knowledge that we grow old and die. Doug and Tom go to war with the old men. They think they know how the old men control the boys' destiny so they become men. Steal the chess pieces! Break the clock! 

Couched in the language of war, the last chapter is Appomatix. Mr. Quartermain, the old man who resented the boys, and Doug who waged war on the old men sit down together. 

"What is it you want to know?" Quartermain asks Doug.

"Everything," said Douglas. 
"Everything?" Quartermain laughed gently. "That'll take at least ten minutes."
"How about something?" asked Douglas finally.
"Something? One special thing? Why, Doug, that will take a lifetime. I've been at it a while. Everything rolls off my tongue, easy as pie. But something! Something! I get lockjaw just trying to define it. So let's talk about everything instead, for now."

I was so blown away by the writing, the word choice, the insights, I could have highlighted pages of favorites sentences. For #SundaySentence hosted on Twitter by author and 'book evangelist' David Abrams, I shared this lovely quote:

Grandpa's library was a fine dark place bricked with books, so anything could happen there and always did. All you had to do was pull a book from the shelf and open it and suddenly the darkness was not so dark anymore.

Last year I read Dandelion Wine with book club, my first reading since I was a teenager. Then I reread Something Wicked This Way Comes, which I also last read as a teenager.

Frankly, I could easily make it a habit every year of reading Dandelion Wine and Farewell, Summer both on the Autumn Equinox. The older I get, the more I have to learn from children.

The Rules of Magic by Alice Hoffman

I will admit, I have not read Alice Hoffman's Practical Magic, and I am not a fan of books or television series about witches. Except for Bewitched, which I loved, but I was eleven years old then.

Consequently, I did not know what to expect when the publisher offered me The Rules of Magic based on my having read the author's previous books Vinegar Girl, the Hogarth Shakespeare series version of The Taming of the Shrew, and her historical novel The Marriage of Opposites imagining the marriage of the artist Camille Pissarro's parents. Based on the last mentioned book alone, I have collected quite a few Hoffman books now languishing on my TBR shelves!

What happened was unexpected, for I was instantly in love with Hoffman's language and The Rules of Magic characters. Although the novel is about three teenagers struggling with the powers and limitations of having magical abilities, it is really about universal themes: the power of love, and how we must love regardless of the costs, and that we must embrace who we are.

Franny, Jet, and Vincent are complex characters burdened with the knowledge that they are cursed to bring destruction to the men they love. As they grew up, their parents tried to protect them from self-knowledge, but they recognized they were not like other children. "It's for your own good," her mother told Franny. "What makes you think that's what I want?" Franny counters.

"What is meant to be is bound to happen," and in 1960 the children's lives change when they visit their Aunt Isabella, a contact that "inflame[s] characteristics" which were "currently dormant." And over the summer each child learns their genealogy, their abilities, and about the curse and joy of love.

The book was a joy to read, lovely and moving. I felt a deep connection to the characters.

The Rules of Magic is a prequel to Practical Magic, telling the backstory of Frances and Jet who accept their brother's granddaughter into their home. I found I did not need to know the previous book to understand and enjoy this one; it stands on its own, and without any tedious linkage to the other book.

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

The Rules of Magic
by Alice Hoffman
Simon & Schuster
Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2017
Hardcover $27.99
ISBN: 9781501137471

Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

Shaker Heights, Ohio, is a subdivision built on order where well off families live the American dream: good jobs, home ownership, well-ordered lives, and gifted kids earmarked for prestigious universities. It seems the community channels the original Shaker settlers, being a "patch of heaven on earth, a refuge from the world," a utopia based on harmony and order.

The Richardson family, a defense attorney father and journalist mother with two sons and two daughters, appear to be the ideal family. Mrs. Richardson inherited a house which she lets for low rent, a "form of charity" for the deserving poor.

Itinerant artist Mia Warren and her teenaged daughter Pearl move into the rented home. Pearl has been promised their frequent moves are over. For the first time she has to care what her peers think of her; she's in for the long haul.

"They dazzled her, these Richardsons..."

Moody Richardson befriends Pearl, who is like no one he's ever met before. Pearl is enchanted with the Richardson family and spends her free time with them. She has a crush on the eldest boy Trip and learns fashion from Lexie. Izzy is the family misfit, born to 'push buttons,' an original thinker who won't fit in, but who finds a kindred spirit in the free thinking Mia.

Things get complicated when sexual liaisons arise. One results in an unplanned pregnancy.

Meanwhile, Mr. Richardson is defending a Shaker Heights couple in a legal battle over the Chinese American child they are adopting when the birth mother tries to get her baby back.

"I mean, we're lucky. No one sees race here.""Everyone sees race, Lex," said Moody. "The only difference is who pretends not to."

The local art gallery has an exhibit of photography. Mia is clearly in one of the portraits. Mrs. Richardson puts her reporter skills to work to find out who this Mia really is and what she has been running from.

There is so much going on in this novel: Racism; the question of who 'real' mothers are (Biological? Adopted? Spiritual?); the discrepancy between what a child needs and what it is believed they need; choices of conformity and self-realization.

It is a joy to read, the characters so unique and vivid, their story lines so delightfully intertwined. There are enough ideas and insights into American life to keep a book club going for several sessions. But the book reads like butter, quick and easy and sweet.

Celeste Ng's first book Everything I Never Told You was a huge critical and popular hit. In Little Fires Everywhere she will secure her place in reader's hearts, as well as her place as one of our best young writers.

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

Celeste Ng grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Shaker Heights, Ohio, in a family of scientists. She attended Harvard University and earned an MFA from the University of Michigan (now the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan), where she won the Hopwood Award. Her fiction and essays have appeared in One Story, TriQuarterly, Bellevue Literary Review, the Kenyon Review Online, and elsewhere, and she is the recipient of the Pushcart Prize. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her husband and son.

Little Fires Everywhere
by Celeste Ng
Penguin Press
On Sale Date: September 12, 2017
ISBN 9780735224292, 0735224293
Hardcover |  352 pages
$27.00 USD, $36.00 CAD
Fiction / Literary

Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury

I first read Dandelion Wine in my teens, back in the late 1960s. I had read through all of Bradbury's books, and a few years later when my younger brother needed a boost in his interest in reading I gave him my collection. It revitalized his interest. And my son has also read this novel, and most of Bradbury as well.

Because it had been so many years since I had read this book, when a local book club chose it for their monthly read I knew I had to fit it into my heavy reading schedule.

Reading Dandelion Wine in my mid-sixties was very different from reading it as a teenager. I read it in small bites, drawing it out over several weeks. I would pick it up and read a few paragraphs, or pages, or a scene, and my heart would hurt and my mind would thrill and I had to let the feeling just be for a while.

The nostalgia overwhelmed me. I was not alive in 1928, the year in which the book is set, and I never lived in this small Indiana town with the trolley and front porches with swinging chairs on creaking chains. Two Black Crow records and stereoscoptic viewers are antiques to me. But I felt the perfect beauty and preciousness of the time and place, of which the protaganist, Doug, finds himself suddenly aware.

Doug is a boy who is on the cusp of growing up, and has just discovered he "is alive." The other side of that knowledge also comes to him over the summer, for all that he wants to deny such knowledge: all that is alive will die, and all that is changes and passes.

"...does everyone in the world..know he's alive?...I hope they do," whispered Douglas. "Oh, I sure hope they know." 

Douglas takes a notebook and makes lists about life: Rites and Ceremonies, the cycle of known things, and Discoveries and Revelations/Illuminations/Intuitions, what he is just learning about life.

The passage that most hurt with bittersweet truth was when Douglas's friend John notices the colored glass in the attic window of a house. "I never saw them before today," John marvels. "Doug, what was I doing all these years I didn't see them?" "You had other things to do," Douglas responds. John is upset, "It's just, if I didn't see these windows until today, what else did I miss?" And since John is moving, it upsets him all the more, and he makes Douglas promise to never forget him.

I set my tablet down and looked around me. It is the end of August and the days are growing shorter. I felt the urge to go out, do something, see something new. Life is passing by, and here I am caught in the web of 'something else' and missing the colored glass in a window I pass every day. There are so few years left me, so few years of health and ability, and what am I missing? What have I not noticed?

In the forward, Bradbury writes, "I came on the old and best ways of writing through ignorance and experiement and was statles when truths leaped out of bushes like quail before gunshot. I blustered into creativity as blindly as any child learning to walk and see. I learned to let my senses and my Past tell me all that was somehow true."

He uses the wine metaphor as a way of fathering "images of all my life, storing them away, and forgetting them." He plunged his memories and they bloomed into flowers that were captured in this rare vintage of Bradbury wine. I am so glad to have sipped it again.

"Here is my celebration then, of death as well as life, dark as well as light, old as well as young, smart and dumb combined, sheer joy as well as complete terror, written by a boy who once hung upside down in trees, dressed in his cat costume with candy fangs in his mouth, who finally fell out of the trees when he was twelve and went and found a toy-dial typewriter and wrote his first "novel."

Mini-Reviews: Another Brooklyn, Eight Hundred Grapes, and The Rosie Project

The Rosie Project by Grame Simsion was my book club's January pick. My hubby read it before e, and frankly, his constant guffaws and laughter reverberated throughout the house, and he frequently interrupted my reading to share a scene with me. He was having a great time. So, I knew it was a funny book before I opened it up.

And it is a very funny book. It is a romantic comedy with a happy, tied-up-with-a-bow ending. It is a nice anodyne to the worries of the world.

Still...I have to say the ending seems too idealized and improbable, and I had great concern about laughing at a man with Asperger's syndrome. I felt it was in bad taste to laugh at Don.

If the author hoped to make Asperger's a relatable and charming personality trait to promote understanding I might feel differently, but I don't know his motivation for creating Don Tillman. I wondered how the book would be received by those who treat Asperger's or have a family member with Asperger's. At book group a friend shared the story of her daughter who has Asperger's. She loved the book. Frankly, she admitted a lot of things her daughter did were funny.

The group gave the book high ratings and discussion was lively.

I had heard so much about Another Brooklyn by Jaqueline Woodson that when I saw it at the library I brought it home. The librarian's eyes shot up--did I have time to read it? she asked. Its a small book; I'll fit it in, I replied. 

I read it in an evening. 

What a beautiful book. I loved it. Woodson wanted to write about growing up a girl in this country, drawing from memories of her teenage years. She created four girls whose friendship creates a safe haven.

August came north to Brooklyn with her father and little brother. She watches and envies the girls who play on the street below their apartment. When she finally meets them, they claim her, saying, "You belong to us now."

 "And for so many years, it was true," Woodson writes. 

"What did you see in me? I'd ask years later.

You looked lost, Gigi whispered. Lost and beautiful. 

And hungry, Angela added. You looked so hungry. 

And as we stood half circle in the bright school yard, we saw the lost and beautiful and hungry in each of us. We saw home."

And with that scene I was caught in Woodson's story-web, wishing I had been one of those girls who had so early found a home in a threatening and changing world.

Adult August returns to Brooklyn for her father's dying and death, the memories return of growing up, of changing bodies attracting men, the discover of hidden talents and gifts. It is a story of 'white flight', addict war vets lurking in hallways and accosting young girls, and of parents who want the best for their daughter or who are incapable of caring for their children. The girls grow up, imagining 'another Brooklyn,' another reality to be claimed.

Woodson writes. "Creating a novel means moving into the past, the hoped for, the imagined. It is an emotional journey fraught at times with characters who don't always do or say what a writer wishes...in many ways, the characters a writer creates have always existed somewhere." 


These girls will live in my heart for a long time.

When Off the Shelf offered a giveaway for a book they promised would make me feel good, I entered. I really, really needed an escape for a bit. They understood, and I won Laura Dave's Eight Hundred Grapes.

So many on Goodreads call this novel a "beach read,"  which usually sounds an alarm for me, being (in my head) short for a plot driven romance with little staying power, the literary equivalent of hooking up. 

Instead I discovered a solid Literary Romance with good writing, nice characterization, an interesting family, and a heroine who at the tender age of twenty-five discovers what her "has to have" is in life. The importance of family is the enduring message. 

Rollicking and Unconventional: The Clancys of Queens

Sometimes I just want to have fun. Curious about Tara Clancy's new memoir I read one of her stories published in the New York Times. I was amused and took a chance on The Clancys of Queens.

I gulped it down in two sittings, laughing out loud. Tara's family--no pseudonyms used--are unique and quirky, strong and sure.

Tara's childhood was unique. Her mismatched parents split when Tara was two. She grew up bouncing between their two worlds:in Queens with her mother's big Italian family, and staying with her Irish cop father in a one bed boathouse, their social life centered at the local bar. When her mother met a wealthy self-made man, limo pickups to his place in Bridgehampton was thrown into the mix. There she lived the high life and participated in long, intellectual talks while watching the sun set. Tara's superpower was being "able to jump social strata in a single bound!"

Tara's tom-boy, super active, no holds barred antics recalled to mind the cartoon intro to the Dennis the Menace tv show of my childhood: remember the tornado that represented Dennis? Tara was like that. What I loved about her family was their acceptance of Tara. When she climbed a tree in her new satin dress, staining it with tree sap, she explained to her dad that he hadn't mentioned "no tree climbing."  And I love that her dad, the warrant cop, laughed.

Tara's mother decided to nudge her daughter to discover her sexual identity. They went to visit her mom's college lesbian friend. What her mom didn't know was the nature of her friend's business--a S&M sex toy store! It's hard to believe this isn't fiction! When Tara falls in love in college, her mom's attitude was "I told you so."

Tara's drop-out teen years made a 180 turn in her junior year of high school. She opened King Lear, the first book she'd ever read on her own, and cut classes to finish reading it. Suddenly Tara knew her future. Her senior year she took AP Shakespeare and graduated on the honor roll. She went on to college and a career in writing and story telling appearances on The Moth.

Yes, I had stumbled on another book where Shakespeare is the hero, changing lives for the better!

Clancy has written a delightful memoir and I had great fun reading it.

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

The Clancys of Queens

Tara Clancy

Publication October 11, 2016

Crown Publishing

$27 hard cover

ISBN: 9781101903117