The Lives of Edie Pritchard by Larry Watson

I had twin uncles. They were identical in appearance. One joined the navy. The other worked in an auto factory and built a cabin. When one died, his twin divorced his wife and married his brother's widow.

It was more complicated than that, of course. But the gist of their story was that, in the end, they both loved the same woman.

In The Lives of Edie Pritchard by Larry Watson, Edie is loved by twin brothers. Her story is revealed through three road trips across Montana.

She leaves home to become her own person; then returns home to confront her past and escape her present; and last of all, she goes on a quest to save her granddaughter.

Dean Linderman was unsure that Edie had meant to marry him and not his twin brother Roy. Roy was the hunk, the chick magnet. Dean was quiet, introspective. Why would the most beautiful girl in town choose to marry him when she could have had his brother?

Dean was jealous but passive, even knowing that Roy still carried a torch for his wife. Edie pleaded to move away, hoping to separate the brothers to save her marriage. They needed a fresh start.

Dean assumes that Edie wants to move so she won't fall into bed with Roy. No, Edie replies, "What I'm afraid of is that you'll end up with him."

Edie Pritchard did not ask for the attention of men. She resented their unwanted attentions. Her first marriage ends because Dean's repressed jealousy came between their love. Her second marriage ended because Gary didn't truly love her; he only wanted to possess her.

She's done with complications. She's done with men, including the nice guy who stalks her at work, and especially the younger men who come on to her. It seems that no sees or care about who she is, just their projections they create based on her beauty. No one ever asked Edie what she wanted.

Edie knows she failed as a mom to her and Gary's daughter, Jennifer. Jennifer's teenage daughter Lauren shows up with her boyfriend Billy and his best friend Troy, escaping her unhappy home. Troy is deeply insinuated into Lauren's relationship with Billy. No one understands better than Edie that when a couple is a threesome, there is trouble ahead. And Troy is trouble. One more complication has entered Edie's life.

Lauren moves on with the men, later sending a cry for help. Roy shows up to help Edie rescue Lauren, still insisting it was always and only her that he loved.

In a climatic scene, Edie makes a dramatic stand, hoping to save her granddaughter from the men who would use her.

Watson's book explores the boxes men put women into, the compromises women make, and what it takes for a woman to live authentically. Easy to read, with detailed descriptions of the past and the landscape and great characterizations, I loved this story of Edie Pritchard and her individuation quest for self-realization.

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

from the publisher:

Everyone in Gladstone, Montana recognizes Edie as the smart, self‑assured, beautiful wife to her high school sweetheart Dean. But they only see what they want to see. They don’t see the relentless pursuit of Edie by Dean’s twin brother, Roy. Or Dean’s crippling insecurity in the face of Roy’s calm, easy charm. Edie’s relationship with the Linderman brothers reverberates through the years: from her conventional start as a young bride; to her second marriage to an explosively jealous man with a daughter caught in the middle; to her attempts to protect a granddaughter who is pursued by two lecherous boys. But despite it all, Edie remains strong and independent, no matter how many times her past attempts to claw its way back into her life.

“A few years ago, my wife and I were at a banquet where the guests began to trade stories,” says Larry Watson, whose writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, the Chicago Sun-Times, and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, among others. “An older gentlemen told of being a high school exchange student in Japan, where he fell in love with a young woman. She was a twin however, and he could never be sure which sister was the one he was in love with. I didn't quite believe his story—surely love would enable one to discern the difference—but the situation was so intriguing, I kept playing with its possibilities. 

I began to work on a novel whose working title was Edie and the Linderman Twins, which featured twin brothers who were in love with the same woman. But something happened in the writing that I hadn’t expected. 

It was not the twins, but Edie who came to dominate the story, a woman who often found that others, men usually but not exclusively, projected on her an identity that suited their needs rather than hers. Perhaps it was this that drew me to Edie’s character most of all: through her many lives, despite others’ attempts to define her, she was sure of who she was. I hope you recognize her.” 

The first film adaptation of Watson’s work, based on his novel Let Him Go, will be released by Focus Films in 2020, starring Kevin Costner and Diane Lane.

Read an excerpt at
https://www.workman.com/products/the-lives-of-edie-pritchard
Read an essay by Watson about the book at
https://d17lzgq6gc2tox.cloudfront.net/downloadable/asset/original/9781616209025_ae.pdf?1588876608

The Lives of Edie Pritchard
by Larry Watson
Algonquin Books
Publication Date July 21, 2020
ISBN: 9781616209025
hardcover $27.95 (USD)

The Pull of the Stars by Emma Donoghue

Having read the galley for Emma Donoghue's last novel The Wonder, I put in a request for The Pull of the Stars before even reading the synopsis. I was not disappointed.

Donoghue revisits some of the same themes in this novel--an unmarried female nurse embracing scientific methods, women's lives in a repressive society, what we will do for family and love.

Set in 1918 in the middle of the Spanish Flu epidemic, in a Dublin maternity ward where an endless round of pregnant women ill with the flu come and go, the novel is a spine-tingling reminder of our vulnerability.

Donoghue began writing The Pull of the Stars in 2018. How chillingly providential that it would be published the year of the novel cornoavirus covid-19 epidemic.

Today as I write this review, violence and protests have been breaking out across America, demanding a just society.  Donoghue's novel depicts a world crushed by WWI, men broken in body and spirit like ghosts of the people they had once been. Unwed mothers are taken in by organizations that demand repayment through a kind of slave labor, their babies becoming trapped in servitude and subject to abuse.

The myth of progress is challenged by reminders of how little has changed in 100 years. War still crushes, the human body still is attacked by enemies large and small, society remains inequitable, ingrained social prejudices destroy lives.

Nurse Julia Powers is dedicated and hard-working, although underpaid and lacking authority. Readers spend several days with Julia at work, the action taking place in a small hospital room of three hospital cots.

This is not a novel for the squeamish. So many things go wrong. In graphic detail, readers endure the female patient’s suffering, the heroic endeavor to save the lives of mother and babies. We learn about their lives, their illness, their deaths.

Every loss is marked by Julia on her silver cased watch, a memorial and reminder to never forget.

This is not a novel to escape, the world too closely reflects what we are dealing with with today's pandemic. Warnings, fake cures, the uncertainty, government endeavoring to play down the threat--nothing has changed.

I finished the novel in two days.

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

Read an interview with Donoghue discussing the novel published in the Atlantic
https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2020/05/emma-donoghue-interview-the-pull-of-the-stars-the-blood-tax/610828/

The Pull of the Stars
by Emma Donoghue
Little, Brown and Company
Pub Date: July 21,2020
Hardcover $28 (USD)
ISBN: 9780316499019
PRICE $28.00 (USD)

from the publisher

Dublin, 1918: three days in a maternity ward at the height of the Great Flu. A small world of work, risk, death, and unlooked-for love, by the bestselling author of The Wonder and ROOM

In an Ireland doubly ravaged by war and disease, Nurse Julia Power works at an understaffed hospital in the city center, where expectant mothers who have come down with the terrible new Flu are quarantined together. Into Julia's regimented world step two outsiders -- Doctor Kathleen Lynn, a rumoured Rebel on the run from the police , and a young volunteer helper, Bridie Sweeney. 

In the darkness and intensity of this tiny ward, over three days, these women change each other's lives in unexpected ways. They lose patients to this baffling pandemic, but they also shepherd new life into a fearful world. With tireless tenderness and humanity, carers and mothers alike somehow do their impossible work.

In The Pull of the Stars, Emma Donoghue once again finds the light in the darkness in this new classic of hope and survival against all odds.

Once Upon a Time I Lived on Mars: Space, Exploration, and Life on Earth by Kate Greene

Kate Greene was one of six people who spent four months living in a geodesic dome in Mauna Loa, Hawaii, simulating a Martian environment. The 'almost' astronauts were human guinea pigs in the Hi-SEAS project focused on the domestic challenges of privacy, food, and shared resources in space.

This book is the result of Greene's struggle to find a way to talk about those months and how they changed her.

Greene travels across a broad range of philosophical questions that arose from her experience, discussing food, finding a balance between solitude and sociability, boredom, and isolation, applying her insights to daily life.

I appreciated her thoughts on the privatization of space technology and the lack of oversight in the data collection and use of social media by tech companies, influencing users without their knowledge or consent.

The Space Race arose from a quest for military and political dominance. Greene asks, is it possible for space exploration to transcend "nationalist pride, capitalist power, and ordinary ego?"

"I've come up with more questions than answers," Greene writes.

Entertaining and informing.

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

Once Upon a Time I Lived on Mars: Space, Exploration, and Life on Earth
by Kate Greene
St. Martin's Press
Pub Date July 14, 2020
ISBN:9781250159472
hardcover $27.99 (USD)

from the publisher

When it comes to Mars, the focus is often on how to get there: the rockets, the engines, the fuel. But upon arrival, what will it actually be like?

In 2013, Kate Greene moved to Mars. That is, along with five fellow crew members, she embarked on NASA’s first HI-SEAS mission, a simulated Martian environment located on the slopes of Mauna Loa in Hawai'i. For four months she lived, worked, and slept in an isolated geodesic dome, conducting a sleep study on her crew mates and gaining incredible insight into human behavior in tight quarters, as well as the nature of boredom, dreams, and isolation that arise amidst the promise of scientific progress and glory.

In Once Upon a Time I Lived on Mars, Greene draws on her experience to contemplate humanity’s broader impulse to explore. The result is a twined story of space and life, of the standard, able-bodied astronaut and Greene’s brother’s disability, of the lag time of interplanetary correspondences and the challenges of a long-distance marriage, of freeze-dried egg powder and fresh pineapple, of departure and return.

By asking what kind of wisdom humanity might take to Mars and elsewhere in the Universe, Greene has written a remarkable, wide-ranging examination of our time in space right now, as a pre-Mars species, poised on the edge, readying for launch.

The All-Night Sun by Diane Zinna

I loved The All-Night Sun by Diane Zinna, mesmerized by the writing and propelled by the story line. It was the perfect read for my scattered and distracted brain, transporting me into another's story.

A family of three is like a bet.~ from The All-Night Sun by Diane Zinna

Only child Lauren lost her parents in a tragic accident when she was eighteen, leaving her alone in a baffling world. Her parents couldn't afford to send her to college but after their deaths she guiltily sold everything to raise the funds for her education. She learned how to survive in isolation, accustomed to lying about being orphaned.

At twenty-eight, she has her dream job teaching a writing class to international students at a small Catholic college, a popular teacher who loves her work. She understands her foreign student's experiences as outsiders, their homesickness, and admired their courage.

Art student Siri comes into her classroom and insinuates herself into Lauren's life, and for the first time Lauren felt understood, that she had a true friend. Siri was outgoing and sincere, but also a risk taker who charms her teacher out of her safety zone. Lauren is used to secrets, and knows she must keep their relationship under wraps from the other teachers and administration.

Siri asks Lauren to come to her home in Sweden for Midsommer and she impulsively accepts.

I gasp at early memories of our trip now, and they are otherworldly, other-sensory. ~from The All-Night Sun by Diane Zinna

The gorgeous descriptive writing weaves visions of an enchanted land and time, maidens frolicing in meadows and woods, flowers woven in their hair, bathing in the cold water. Lauren allows Siri to transform her, and she feels what it is to be young--that fleeting time that passed her by with her parent's demise.

Siri has a complicated relationship with her siblings. The early deaths of their parents spurred older sister Birgit to take on the role of mother. Siri hates her artist brother Magnus, both blaming each other for their mother's death, and she warns Lauren to stay away from him. For Siri's sake, Lauren wants to resist the attraction between them.

The headiness of the all-night sun, being a part of a circle of teenage girls, comes to a crisis at a Midsommer party. Lauren retreats home determined to put Sweden and Siri and her family behind her. But there is no escape.

As her life spirals out of control, Lauren loses herself and her life, but in the end she discovers forgiveness and acceptance.

The All-Night Sun reads like a psychological thriller written by accomplished literary hands that spin a denouement of  uplifting satisfaction.

I was given a free ebook by the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Read an excerpt at
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/602443/the-all-night-sun-by-diane-zinna/

The All-Night Sun
by Diane Zinna
Random House Publishing Group - Random House
Pub Date  July 14, 2020
ISBN: 9781984854162
hard cover $27.00 (USD)

from the publisher

Lauren Cress teaches writing at a small college outside of Washington, DC. In the classroom, she is poised, smart, and kind, well liked by her students and colleagues. But in her personal life, Lauren is troubled and isolated, still grappling with the sudden death of her parents ten years earlier. She seems to exist at a remove from everyone around her until a new student joins her class: charming, magnetic Siri, who appears to be everything Lauren wishes she could be. They fall headlong into an all-consuming friendship that makes Lauren feel as though she is reclaiming her lost adolescence.

When Siri invites her on a trip home to Sweden for the summer, Lauren impulsively accepts, intrigued by how Siri describes it: green, fresh, and new, everything just thawing out. But once there, Lauren finds herself drawn to Siri’s enigmatic, brooding brother, Magnus. Siri is resentful, and Lauren starts to see a new side of her friend: selfish, reckless, self-destructive, even cruel. On their last night together, Lauren accompanies Siri and her friends on a seaside camping trip to celebrate Midsommar’s Eve, a night when no one sleeps, boundaries blur, and under the light of the unsetting sun, things take a dark turn. 

Ultimately, Lauren must acknowledge the truth of what happened with Siri and come to terms with her own tragic past in this gorgeously written, deeply felt debut about the transformative relationships that often come to us when things feel darkest.

Other People's Pets by R. L. Mazies

La La has crime in her blood as surely as the Flying Wallendas have acrobatics, and the Kennedys, politics. ~from Other People's Pets by R. L. Maizes

I adore Other People's Pets! It is fresh and heartfelt, a perfect read during stressful times. La La and her father Zev will win your heart.

Even if they are burglars.

LaLa's mother ran off when she was nine. She wasn't a very good mother. When they were ice skating, LaLa fell through the ice and her mother didn't notice. LaLa was rescued by a large black dog. The near-death-event left her an animal empath.

Zev was a locksmith by day and a burglar by night. He homeschooled LaLa and took her on his heists, isolating her to protect himself. He couldn't risk his daughter giving away his secret life. LaLa has a special relationship with a veterinarian who notices her insight into animals and takes her under his wing.

LaLa is in vet school, living with her fiance, when her father lands in prison, unable to make bail. He was caught after calling 911 to help the man he was robbing. LaLa makes the hard decision to put her dad first.

As LaLa's life stray further from her dreams, she takes comfort that she only robs houses with ailing pets she can help.

LaLa and Zev have never recovered from their abandonment. Zev still carries a torch for his wife and LaLa dreams of gaining her mother's approval, which brings them to a fatal meeting.

LaLa faces a series of heartbreaking losses, including her beloved dog, Black. In the end, LaLa realizes the true meaning of family and finds her place in the world.

I love Mazies humor. Descriptions like, "The pores on his nose are big enough to house a fly" and "ears grown large from listening," and Zev's business name of "Honesty Locksmith," kept me laughing out loud.

I loved R. L. Mazies book of short stories We Love Anderson Cooper, filled with memorable, flawed, yet loveable characters.

Read an excerpt from Other People's Pets here.

I was given a free egalley by the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Other People's Pets
by R.L. Maizes
Celadon Books
Pub Date July 14, 2020 
ISBN: 9781250304131
hardcover $26.99 (USD)

R.L. Mazies

about the author

R.L. Maizes was born and raised in Queens, New York. She now lives in Boulder County, Colorado. Maizes's short stories have aired on National Public Radio and have appeared in the literary magazines Electric Literature, Witness, Bellevue Literary Review, Slice, and Blackbird, among others. Her essays have been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Lilith, and elsewhere. Maizes is an alumna of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Tin House Summer Writer’s Workshop. Her work has received Honorable Mention in Glimmer Train’s Fiction Open contest, has been a finalist in numerous other national contests, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is the author of the short story collection We Love Anderson Cooper.

from the publisher

R.L. Maizes's Other People’s Pets examines the gap between the families we’re born into and those we create, and the danger that holding on to a troubled past may rob us of the future.

La La Fine relates to animals better than she does to other people. Abandoned by a mother who never wanted a family, raised by a locksmith-turned-thief father, La La looks to pets when it feels like the rest of the world conspires against her.

La La’s world stops being whole when her mother, who never wanted a child, abandons her twice. First, when La La falls through thin ice on a skating trip, and again when the accusations of “unfit mother” feel too close to true. Left alone with her father—a locksmith by trade, and a thief in reality—La La is denied a regular life. She becomes her father’s accomplice, calming the watchdog while he strips families of their most precious belongings.

When her father’s luck runs out and he is arrested for burglary, everything La La has painstakingly built unravels. In her fourth year of veterinary school, she is forced to drop out, leaving school to pay for her father’s legal fees the only way she knows how—robbing homes once again.

As an animal empath, she rationalizes her theft by focusing on houses with pets whose maladies only she can sense and caring for them before leaving with the family’s valuables. The news reports a puzzled police force—searching for a thief who left behind medicine for the dog, water for the parrot, or food for the hamster.

Desperate to compensate for new and old losses, La La continues to rob homes, but it’s a strategy that ultimately will fail her.

Clawson Quilting Sisters Losses

The Clawson Quilting Sisters have been meeting in the local park this last month. Before that we had Zoom meetings and before that no meetings since the lockdown in early March.

Over these months we have not lost anyone to COVID-19, but there have been losses.

Shirley Williams, a founding member of the group 20 years ago, died June 16 after a stroke. She was 94 years old.

And Lucy Lesperance had a stroke on April 1, which was discovered to be related to brain cancer. She passed away on July 9 at age 85.

Here are some photos of these women and their quilts.

Lucy's quilt Lucy in the Sky with Sapphires appeared in a number of local quilt shows and was juried into the American Quilt Society show at Paducah.

Lucy with her quilt
Lucy in the Sky with Sapphires

Every year Lucy made a quilt to be raffled off at her family Christmas gathering. They were always stunning.

Lucy organized the making of the teapot quilt for the Downtown Abbey Tea Party, which you can read about here.

Lucy at the Downton Abbey tea party with the raffle
quilt she organized

 

Lucy's Cardinal quilt won the CAMEO Guild challenge contest

Lucy in center front with a pie potholder

Shirley Williams was unable to continue her crafting at the level she once did but she found new ways to express her creativity by scanning photos on fabric and making mug rugs.

Shirley Williams and a mug rug, complete with tea bag pocket

In the photo below Shirley holds her quilt of miniature quilts which shows off her high skill level.

The photo above was taken at Shirley's 91st birthday party held by the quilters.

Shirley with blue icing!

Shirley in a vest she made

Shirley with one of her quilts

Shirley often told me the story of falling for a young WWII pilot. She took one look at him, removed her engagement ring, and announced that was the man she was going to marry!

A young Shirley with her husband

He taught her how to fly.

Shirley as a young woman

We don't know when the community center will reopen or when groups will be safe to meet indoors again. But when we do, things will not be the same.

Miracle Country by Kendra Atleework

The Eastern Sierra is a land of wild winds and wildfires. In 1892, Mary Austin arrived at the Eastern Sierra and wrote, "You will find it forsaken of most things but beauty and madness and death and God."

Once Paiute harvested fields of wild rye and love grass, before ranchers arrived to summer their stock. The cattle devoured the crops and the First People starved. Bill Mulholland stole lake water to grow Los Angeles. Drought depletes the wells while the streams are diverted to LA.

A woman from the Great Lakes and a man from the California coast were drawn to the sublimity of the high desert. They met in a band and went on a hike. They birthed two girls and adopted a brown-skinned son.

It's hard to know how to fix a smashed world at sixteen, at fourteen, at eleven.~ from Miracle Country by Kendra Atleework

Their idyllic life was smashed with their matriarch's early death, spiraling the children into their private hells from which their father could not save them.

Atleework left for LA and then the MidWest. The hills burned. The dust blew arsenic. Her father's well dried up. But the beauty of Atleework's homeland brought her back from her wanderings.

Whiskey's for drinking. Water's for fighting over.~from Miracle Country by Kendra Attleework

The environmental cost for the growth of cities is central to the story and raises ethical questions about water rights. "We live in a landscape damaged beyond repair," Atleework writes, "and we see our loss magnified the world over."

The story of water in Owens Valley...was a sad story of wrong done, a near tall tale with a suit-coated villian and cowboy herons. ~from Miracle Country by Kendra Atleework

The valley's discovery by American soldiers and the settlers eager to displace (or annihilate) the native people is the story of European attitudes that 'built' the country while also destroying it.

Atleework's Miracle Country was a pleasure to read, gorgeous in prose, intimate as a memoir, and wide-ranging in its portrait of a land and its people. Highly recommended.

I was given a free ebook by the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Miracle Country: A Memoir
by Kendra Atleework
Algonquin Books
Pub Date: July 14, 2020 
ISBN: 9781616209988
hardcover $27.95 (USD)

from the publisher:

Kendra Atleework grew up in Swall Meadows, in the Owens Valley of the Eastern Sierra Nevada, where annual rainfall averages five inches and in drought years measures closer to zero.

Kendra’s parents taught their children to thrive in this beautiful, if harsh, landscape, prone to wildfires, blizzards, and gale-force winds. Above all, they were raised on unconditional love and delight in the natural world. After Kendra’s mother died of a rare autoimmune disease when Kendra was just sixteen, however, her once beloved desert world came to feel empty and hostile, as climate change, drought, and wildfires intensified. The Atleework family fell apart, even as her father tried to keep them together. Kendra escaped to Los Angeles, and then Minneapolis, land of tall trees, full lakes, water everywhere you look. 

But after years of avoiding her troubled hometown, she realized that she needed to come to terms with its past and present and had to go back. Miracle Country is a moving and unforgettable memoir of flight and return, emptiness and bounty, the realities of a harsh and changing climate, and the true meaning of home.

 For readers of Cheryl Strayed, Terry Tempest Williams, and Rebecca Solnit, this is a breathtaking debut by a remarkable writer.