Shelter in Place by David Leavitt

In 1986 I read David Leavitt's novel The Lost Language of Cranes and it blew me away. Although I have his novel The Indian Clerk on by TBR shelf, I haven't read more by him and it was time to correct that. Especially, it was time for this novel.

Reading in the age of Coronavirus is not easy. I pick up my Kindle, read for a bit, then find myself on Twitter or checking my email or placing an order for delivered groceries. It isn't the books--they are great books. I just have trouble concentrating.

But, I had no problem with Shelter in Place--it's a comedy of manners under the Trump presidency that kept me entertained. These characters are rich and liberal and, well, flaky.

Eva won't even say the president's name, (think Voldemort) and yet she wouldn't stand in the long lines to vote. After Eva and her friend Min visit Venice, she decides to buy an apartment there, a place to escape to when America is no longer safe. Her obliging husband Bruce plays his role in their marriage: he earns--she spends. A successful wealth manager, he is rich enough to indulge his wife's whims.

And Eva does spend.

Eva is determined the Venice home would be redecorated by her favorite decorator Jake. But hearing he would have to go to Venice, he has been stalling. Likeable, secretive, Jake is the straight man in the novel--well, a gay straight man, a foil to the people who hire him.

When Eva's dogs start peeing on the sofa, she has the maid wrap it in aluminum foil! "Some things matter more than decor," Eva proclaims, and yet she has not considered what will happen to the dogs when she--or she and Bruce--goes to Venice.

Bruce's secretary is battling cancer, her husband abandoning her. He becomes overly involved with her life, his version of charity.

Bruce also has been consorting with the enemy---the Trump supporting neighbor Alec whose kids won't talk to him since the election. Alec can't even say Hillary's name. The election results came as a miracle to him. "One man's miracle is another's nightmare," Bruce says. Walking their dogs at night, they confide to each other.

Shelter in Place targets our idiosyncrasies when our world suddenly changes, on the national and personal level. Sometimes we grow, other times we dig in and hold on tighter.

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

Shelter in Place
by David Leavitt
Bloomsbury USA
Pub Date October 13,  2020 
ISBN: 9781620404874
hardcover $27.00 (USD)

from the publisher

It is the Saturday after the 2016 presidential election, and in a plush weekend house in Connecticut, an intimate group of friends, New Yorkers all, has gathered to recover from what they consider the greatest political catastrophe of their lives. They have just sat down to tea when their hostess, Eva Lindquist, proposes a dare. Who among them would be willing to ask Siri how to assassinate Donald Trump? Liberal and like-minded—editors, writers, a decorator, a theater producer, and one financial guy, Eva’s husband, Bruce—the friends have come to the countryside in the hope of restoring the bubble in which they have grown used to living. Yet with the exception of one brash and obnoxious book editor, none is willing to accept Eva’s challenge.

Shelter in Place is a novel about house and home, furniture and rooms, safety and freedom and the invidious ways in which political upheaval can undermine even the most seemingly impregnable foundations. Eva is the novel’s polestar, a woman who moves through her days accompanied by a roving, carefully curated salon. She’s a generous hostess and more than a bit of a control freak, whose obsession with decorating allows Leavitt to treat us to a slyly comic look at the habitués and fetishes of the so-called shelter industry. Yet when, in her avidity to secure shelter for herself, she persuades Bruce to buy a grand if dilapidated apartment in Venice, she unwittingly sets off the chain of events that will propel him, for the first time, to venture outside the bubble and embark on a wholly unexpected love affair.

A comic portrait of the months immediately following the 2016 election, Shelter in Place is also a meditation on the unreliable appetites—for love, for power, for freedom—by which both our public and private lives are shaped.

Covid-19 Life: Quilts, Books, and News

It was a windy day when the quilters met in the park. I showed my latest quilt top completion, the wind blowing it like a sail! The central block is from Esther Aliu's Little Hazel pattern. I used reproduction fabrics from my stash to complete the top.

When I saw this panel I had to buy it. I did thread work and machine quilting to enhance it. The golden thread really makes the acorns pop!

I got book mail from LibraryThing early reviewer giveaway, Angry Weather by Friederike Otto, looking at the human sources of climate change.

New to my NetGalley shelf

• Beethoven by Laura Tunbridge, a biography through nine of his works
• Girl Explorers by Jayne Zanglein 
• The Dangers of Smoking in Bed by Mariana Enriquez whose Things We Lost in the Fire I reviewed
• The Mission House by Carys Davies whose West I reviewed

Halloween displays have cropped up all over town.

Including at our son's house!

We bought a new kitchen table! It is a retro style chrome and laminate table with a pedestal base. We were able to special order the WilsonArt Betty laminate that is on our countertops!

I bought a new laptop computer for Zooming. I have Zoomed with my library book club and several times with a neighboring library book club. I also am starting to go to virtual author events.

This week we are having a warm wave, with temperatures close to seventy. But soon enough it will be cold. The quilters won't be able to meet in the city park, and we will again Zoom together.

The maple trees turned red and orange early, but the silver maples and oaks are just not yellowing. There are roses in the garden, and the bees still come to the geranium.

We in Michigan have had such a shock learning of the militia plan for a terrorist attack on our elected officials and to kidnap Governor Whitmer. The Republicans have removed the governor's power to mandate protections during the pandemic and local communities are scrambling to create their own requirements. Our county instantly took action, and masks and other protections remain in place. We took our ballets to city hall this week. Now, we pray that anarchist groups don't interfere with at the polls.

Right now, I can hear the national anthem being played at the stadium down the street. Someone practicing on an electric guitar for the high school football game tonight. Flags fly at the field and the DPW and in front yards.

Yet we can not agree what patriotism is in this country. 

I am reading What Unites Us: Reflections on Patriotism by Dan Rather. Last night I read,

“No one has a monopoly on the truth, but the whole premise of our democracy is that truth and justice must win out. And the role of a trained journalist is to get as close to the truth as is humanly possible. Make no mistake: We are being tested. Without a vibrant, fearless free press, our great American experiment may fail.”― Dan Rather, What Unites Us: Reflections on Patriotism

So much is at stake. 

My Literary Quilts: Portraits of the Poets

In 2016 I woke and a quilt flashed into my head. I went to the local quilt shop, bought fabric, and by day's end had the quilt designed and started. I finished it the next day.

My William Shakespeare portrait quilt started me on a new quilt series. 

I sketched the image on a large sheet of paper and cut it out for templates for the head, hair, and body. 

The portrait was made with snipped fabrics fused to a black background. I then cut the portrait out, leaving some of the black which I folded over and hemmed. Then I placed the portrait on the background. I printed Sonnet 116  on fabric to include. The flowers in the foreground were also lined are folded for a three-D effect.

It was so much fun that I next made an Edgar Allen Poe portrait quilt. I made the image the same way, hand snipping prefused fabrics to build the face. I made a pieced background and added a 'silken purple curtain' of gently folded fabric. I attached the portrait onto the background, adding Poe's poem Annabel Lee and a real feather in the inkwell.

For T. S. Eliot I searched for cat fabrics. I printed his portrait to the size I wanted and traced it onto my fabric. I used permanent marker pens to create the portrait. I found an image of a cat and then reversed. And printed out The Names of Cats on fabric.

I typed the names of the cats in the poem and printed it on fabric which is used in the pieced background.

I have been reading quite a few books on the Brontes and a few years back read all their novels and poetry. 

I used the image of the sisters painted by their brother Branwell as my model for the Bronte Sisters quilt. 

This time I directly fused the fabrics onto the Jane Sassaman fabric background, then fussy cut flowers from Sassaman and Kaffee Fassett fabrics. I wanted to show the women's romantic and wild sides.

I have been working on an Emily Dickinson quilt but need more fabrics and I haven't found what I want. Since the pandemic I have only shopped online.

My idea was to show the many images we have of the poet: the recluse in white, the lover of flowers and gardens, her darker side that wrote about death and pain, and the romantic lover and writer of Valentine poems.

My techniques include fusible applique and permanent marker and colored pencil. I have a lace overlay to represent a curtain at her window.

This has been a fun series to make. 

Literary Quilts 3: Embroidered Fairy Tales and Stories

The third kind of literary quilt I make are embroidered fairy tales and children's stories.

Some of the quilts I made I neglected to photograph! I made the Ruby McKim Peter Pan quilt.

Most recently I completed the Alice in Wonderland redwork quilt. The patterns were from Mirkwood Studios and are base on the original book illustrations.

Alice in Wonderland by Nancy A. Bekofske
Mirkwood Studios pattern

The Little Red Riding Hood redwork quilt patterns were reproduced from 1918 patterns. I hand embroidered and hand quilted it and used Riley Blake's Little Red fabric line.

Little Red Riding Hood by Nancy A. Bekofske

I drew my own images for the Wizard of Oz embroidered quilt. It was a fun process of drawing and revising the drawings.

Wizard of Oz designed by Nancy A. Bekofske

The finished  quilt.

Pale Morning Light with Violet Swan by Deborah Reed

If she told her family the truth, death would get on everything.~from Pale Morning Light with Violet Swan by Deborah Reed

Secrets. Children who don't really know their parents. Parents who don't really know their children. Trauma, consciously forgotten or unspoken, eating their souls.

Ninety-one-year-old Violet Swan's secret was not just the cancer killing her; guilt had dogged her life since a girl. A fire had killed her beloved father and sister. Evil men took advantage of the unprotected child. She escaped, a teenage vagabond crossing the country to the West Coast, pursuing a fragile dream of finding her place in the world.

Violet became famous for her abstract paintings. She lived in her art studio tower, her loving husband Richard protecting her solitude and running her business.

Their son Frank (Francisco, named for Francisco Goya) grew up imprisoned in himself, his silence smothering his marriage, his dutiful wife growing increasingly resentful. Their son Daniel had loved his Grand, Violet, but also felt his father's distance and had stayed away from home for years, living in LA as a filmmaker.

An earthquake begins the story, a premonition of the changes that will shake their relationships nearly to the breaking point. Daniel returns home bearing a secret. Violet finally agrees to allow her grandson to make a film interview; she will spill her secrets at last.

Deborah Reed saturates Pale Morning Light with Violet Swan with visual details, seen through an artist's eye. Music and literature enrich Violet's life.

Violet's story is unravelled throughout the novel, lending an urgency to keep reading, like a mystery novel; we want to understand the intricacies of life experiences that have brought this family to crisis.

I will warn that Violet's life includes trigger events. Violet is a survivor, a resilient woman. She finds salvation in the beauty of this world and in her art that endeavors to capture it.

Frank is mired in anger, addicted to television news. "How on earth was a person supposed to live a normal life?" he wonders, in despair.

Into their lives comes a small child and she changes everything and everyone.

An ordinary happiness runs through me...This is everything beautiful, this is love. Are you listening? Do you hear?~from Pale Morning Light with Violet Swan by Deborah Reed

I was very taken by this novel that glows under Reed's capable hands and beautiful writing.

I was given access to a free ebook by the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.

from the publisher: 

The story of a famous abstract painter at the end of her life—her family, her art, and the long-buried secrets that won’t stay hidden for much longer.

 Ninety-three-year-old Violet Swan has spent a lifetime translating tragedy and hardship into art, becoming famous for her abstract paintings, which evoke tranquility, innocence, and joy. For nearly a century Violet has lived a peaceful, private life of painting on the coast of Oregon. The “business of Violet” is run by her only child, Francisco, and his wife, Penny. But shortly before Violet's death, an earthquake sets a series of events in motion, and her deeply hidden past begins to resurface. When her beloved grandson returns home with a family secret in tow, Violet is forced to come to terms with the life she left behind so long ago—a life her family knows nothing about.

 A generational saga set against the backdrop of twentieth-century America and into the present day, Pale Morning Light with Violet Swan is the story of a girl who escaped rural Georgia at fourteen during World War II, crossing the country alone and broke. It is the story of how that girl met the man who would become her devoted husband, how she became a celebrated artist, and above all, how her life, inspired by nothing more than the way she imagined it to be, would turn out to be her greatest masterpiece.

 Pale Morning Light with Violet Swan: A Novel of a Life in Art
By Deborah Reed
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Publication October 6,  2020
ISBN: 9780544817364
paperback and audiobook  $15.99 (USD); $9.99 ebook

Magic Lessons by Alice Hoffman

I came to the Owens family story through Rules of Magic, published years after the first Owens family novel, the immensely popular Practical Magic. I had liked the characters in Rules and realized their story was rooted in the very real struggles of young adulthood. Afterward, I finally read Practical. 

The prequel to Practical Magic, Magic Lessons, begins in 1664 in Essex, England. It is the story of the first Owens witch who cursed all the Owens women's loves.

The teenage witch Maria tragically loses her mentor and adopted mother. Her biological parents send her to the New World as an indentured servant. On St. Kitts, she honed her craft as a healer. Maria falls in love with the New England merchant John Hathorne, who abandons her without knowing she is pregnant. Maria travels to New England to find John.

She finds passage in exchange for nursing and healing the pirate Samuel Dias, whose Jewish family had fled Portugal. He falls in love with Maria.

Her troubles increase when she does find John. Her very life is threatened by the witch hunters of Salem, her daughter stolen from her.

John Hathorne in the novel is based on the actual magistrate who condemned women accused of being witches to death. (Nathaniel Hawthorne, our great early novelist, added that 'w' to his name to disassociate himself with his ancestor.)

Oh! the ways women have been controlled and punished for overstepping the narrow lives men ordained for them. If a woman reads, she must be a witch. If a woman stands up for herself, she must be punished. If a man is attracted to a woman, she has bewitched him and is evil. Bind them in iron and drown them! Nail their feet to the ground and burn them!

And women are still fighting this battle.

Maria understood that a woman with her own beliefs who refuses to bow to those she believes to be wrong can be considered dangerous.~from Magic Lessons by Alice Hoffman

The heart of the novel is, of course, love. How women love the wrong men and suffer for it. "Love someone who will love you back," Hannah advises. But how do we know love when we find it? Young people confuse lust with love, always have. We ignore the signs that later seem obvious. Maria rejects her true love, first because of her passion for John, and later because she vows never to love again.

Love was risky, for marriage required women to abdicate all self-determination and choice. Maria's magic helps women from men who abuse them.

I had a neighbor who said, "What goes around, comes around." Hoffman's rule of magic is similar: you get back threefold whatever you do. Best to do good! What magic you bring into the world becomes your responsibility.

Hoffman weaves her stories with flawed characters whose struggles we recognize, for even if they have magic at their command, they are very human. It is no wonder these books are so popular with readers. They offer romance, challenges, strong female characters, life lessons, and in this book a heavy dose of history.

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

Read my review for  Rules of Magic
Read my review for Hoffman's novel Faithful here.
See my review for Hoffman's novel The Marriage of Opposites here.

Magic Lessons: The Prequel to Practical Magic
by Alice Hoffman
Simon & Schuster
Publication Date October 6, 2020
ISBN: 9781982108847
hardcover $27.99 (USD)

from the publisher

In an unforgettable novel that traces a centuries-old curse to its source, beloved author Alice Hoffman unveils the story of Maria Owens, accused of witchcraft in Salem, and matriarch of a line of the amazing Owens women and men featured in Practical Magic and The Rules of Magic.

Where does the story of the Owens bloodline begin? With Maria Owens, in the 1600s, when she’s abandoned in a snowy field in rural England as a baby. Under the care of Hannah Owens, Maria learns about the “Unnamed Arts.” Hannah recognizes that Maria has a gift and she teaches the girl all she knows. It is here that she learns her first important lesson: Always love someone who will love you back.

When Maria is abandoned by the man who has declared his love for her, she follows him to Salem, Massachusetts. Here she invokes the curse that will haunt her family. And it’s here that she learns the rules of magic and the lesson that she will carry with her for the rest of her life. Love is the only thing that matters.

Magic Lessons is a celebration of life and love and a showcase of Alice Hoffman’s masterful storytelling.

Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter

It was time for a new book.

The first book I picked up was full of horrors and war. 

The second book was full of fears of horror and war. And the war was shortly coming.

I could feel my blood pressure shoot up. I am trying to control my blood pressure. I scanned through my hundreds of unread ebooks, downloading anything that might be uplifting, fun, or happy. Beautiful Ruins came up. Why not this one? It had that lovely photo, exotic and unfamiliar. I heard heard great things about it. 

I downloaded it and two days later swiped to the last page, completely content with my choice.

From the opening sentence to the end, Walter weaves a beautiful story about love and doing the right thing and fame and finding true happiness. 

Oh, and my blood pressure has been remarkable.

Jess Walter, I thank you. 

from the publisher:

The story begins in 1962. On a rocky patch of the sun-drenched Italian coastline, a young innkeeper, chest-deep in daydreams, looks out over the incandescent waters of the Ligurian Sea and spies an apparition: a tall, thin woman, a vision in white, approaching him on a boat. She is an actress, he soon learns, an American starlet, and she is dying.

And the story begins again today, half a world away, when an elderly Italian man shows up on a movie studio's back lot—searching for the mysterious woman he last saw at his hotel decades earlier.

What unfolds is a dazzling, yet deeply human, roller coaster of a novel, spanning fifty years and nearly as many lives. From the lavish set of Cleopatra to the shabby revelry of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Walter introduces us to the tangled lives of a dozen unforgettable characters: the starstruck Italian innkeeper and his long-lost love; the heroically preserved producer who once brought them together and his idealistic young assistant; the army veteran turned fledgling novelist and the rakish Richard Burton himself, whose appetites set the whole story in motion—along with the husbands and wives, lovers and dreamers, superstars and losers, who populate their world in the decades that follow.

Gloriously inventive, constantly surprising, Beautiful Ruins is a story of flawed yet fascinating people, navigating the rocky shores of their lives while clinging to their improbable dreams.