The Fortunate Ones by Ed Tarkington

"Charismatic Southern Republican Senator commits suicide." 

Charlie Boykin thought he had escaped the past when Arch Creigh was the center of his world, when he had carried a torch for Arch's girlfriend, the beautiful Vanessa.

The news of Arch's death sends Charlie reeling back in time to when he was the fortunate recipient of a scholarship to an elite private school where met Arch and was invited into the homes of the wealthy and privileged. It was a world built on tradition, the personal quashed for the sake of appearance, a world of secret pain and forbidden love.

Charlie had left to forge his own way as an artist. But when his mother was dying, he returned. It was time to forgive, to accept human vulnerability and frailty. It was time to face his past.

...I knew what was gripping me was just nostalgia, but I needed to feel it and see it through to the end so I could go back without regrets.~from The Fortunate Ones by Ed Tarkington

Arch was forging a political career. He embraced conservative values--but his private life would scandalize his supporters. 

Charlie wonders how the exceptional, wealthy, beautiful, Arch with his billionaire wife Vanessa became the champion of the 'people.' "There is nothing in this world to which people connect more willingly in uncertain times than the appearance of genuine certainty," and Arch projected that surety. People were clamoring to "get behind a charismatic businessman with a smart, beautiful wife and a fortune in the bank."

Vanessa accepts the life she is expected to have, sharing her secret guilt and doubts only with Charlie.

This is the story of a young man growing up, a nostalgic remembrance of lost innocence and the revelation that our heroes have feet of clay. It is about ambition and masks, how privilege corrupts, and choosing to turning away from corruption. It is about the fickleness of the public and misguided devotion.

Who are the 'fortunate ones'? The heirs of wealth? Or, those accepted into their charmed circle? Or, is it those who, drawn by the golden siren lure, glimpse behind the facade, and escape?

The novel reminded me of Brideshead Revisited and The Great Gatsby, while also reflecting today's political climate. 

I read this novel in two days, barely able to set it down.

I was given an ARC by the publisher in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

The Fortunate Ones

by Ed Tarkington

Algonquin Books

Pub Date January 5, 2021   

ISBN: 9781616206802

hardcover $26.95 (USD)

from the publisher

When Charlie Boykin was young, he thought his life with his single mother on the working-class side of Nashville was perfectly fine. But when his mother arranges for him to be admitted as a scholarship student to an elite private school, he is suddenly introduced to what the world can feel like to someone cushioned by money. That world, he discovers, is an almost irresistible place where one can bend—and break—rules and still end up untarnished. As he gets drawn into a friendship with a charismatic upperclassman, Archer Creigh, and an affluent family that treats him like an adopted son, Charlie quickly adapts to life in the upper echelons of Nashville society. Under their charming and alcohol-soaked spell, how can he not relax and enjoy it all—the lack of anxiety over money, the easy summers spent poolside at perfectly appointed mansions, the lavish parties, the freedom to make mistakes knowing that everything can be glossed over or fixed?

 

But over time, Charlie is increasingly pulled into covering for Archer’s constant deceits and his casual bigotry. At what point will the attraction of wealth and prestige wear off enough for Charlie to take a stand—and will he?

 

The Fortunate Ones is an immersive, elegantly written story that conveys both the seductiveness of this world and the corruption of the people who see their ascent to the top as their birthright. 

Covid-19 Life: Books, Quilts, Insurrection, Health

Nine days into the new year. There is nothing 'normal' about this January.

Insurrection and violence. Highest number of Covid deaths in one day. Bitter cold but no snow here. 

We were watching Congress on television and had got to Arizona and were about to turn it off when the camera switched to the scene outside the Capitol. We watched for hours. We did not eat dinner that night, our appetite gone. The only reason I got to sleep was because I spent an hour in the quilt room and had a happy book to read before bedtime.

We were thrilled to receive a letter from our health provider about signing up to be called for a Covid vaccination. It will take some weeks, but still! By spring perhaps we will return to a store and feel more comfortable visiting family, with masks, but actually visiting.

We have had our car for two years now, and have reached 6,000 miles! We took it out for a spin yesterday, going nowhere, hoping the battery won't die this winter. As did our son's truck battery. (He works from home.) It's been so cold, I have not gone for a walk. Perhaps today, as the sun is shining and that will trick me into thinking it is warmer than the 30 degrees the thermometer reads.

The quilters Zoom and try to show off our work, holding it up to the computer camera. I am hand quilting still, but have finished my machine quilted project which is ready for binding. And I started--finally--the Michigan Lighthouse quilt. I bought the first Aunt Mary's pattern almost twenty years ago!!!

I have twelve blocks fused. Next, I need to ink in details and then machine applique the raw edges.

Books in the mail include At the Edge of the Haight by Katherine Seligman from Algonquin Books. 

And The Great Indoors by Emily Anthes, a Goodreads win.

New to my NetGalley shelf is 

• The 12 Lives of Alfred Hitchcock by Edward White.

Along with my books for review, I am reading Barack Obama's book A Promised Land, a Christmas present. And just before bed, Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle. I had heard people talking about as a favorite book and picked up a 1948 edition at a library book sale. 

Reading a fun, happy, book before sleep really helps! I have been reading Wonderworks: The 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature by Angus Fletcher which talks about the impact of literature on the chemical stimulus in the brain. And in The Great Indoors, I just read the chapter about the importance of hospital patients seeing nature as part of their healing.

Literature, creativity, nature. It's all so important during these stressful times.

My brother lives on a canal to a lake and the deer have been bedding in his yard outside his family room window. The also eat his plants and the bird feed scattered by the birds, squirrels, raccoons and other critters who feed there.

Recently, my brother was at the Elk Park in Gaylord, MI. 

And, walking at Kensington Metro Park, he and his girlfriend encountered Sandhill Crane and a hungry Titmouse.

My brother built a covered bridge over his cabin's tiny stream. A very scenic sight in winter! Here, the grass is just beginning to lose it's green and we have not had enough snow to actually shovel. Yet.

Stay safe.

Better Luck Next Time by Julia Claiborne Johnson

I had heard good reviews of Julia Claiborne Johnson's debut novel Be Frank With Me. I was intrigued by the cover of Better Luck Next Time, the vintage photo of women at play. I am so, so happy that I put in my name in to win an ARC. This was a bright, warm, and happy light in the midst of Michigan's dismal winter and COVID-19 self isolation.

I laughed out loud, starting with the first page with the narrator's epigram, "Some men are born gigolos; others have it thrust upon them." 

In 1988, Dr. Howard Stovall Bennett III (Ward) tells his story to an unnamed interviewer, recalling six weeks in 1938 that changed his life. 

He took any job he could find during the Depression after his family lost their wealth and home. A Cary Grant look-a-like, he leaves his manual labor work to become a fake cowboy on a Reno dude ranch that offers wannabe divorcees a six-week residency to qualify for a quick divorce.

Ward was hired to perform ranch chores, provide eye-candy, and to "squire rich, brokenhearted ladies around Reno," which he proclaims was good experience for his future career as a doctor.

But that career was far in the future in 1938 when Nina and Emily arrive at The Flying Leap ranch. Nina is a 'repeat customer' with all the vibe and audacity of a Flapper, and she determines to help Emily loosen up and live a little.

OK, actually live it up a LOT. Like teenage schoolgirls, they go on larks and involve Ward as their chauffeur and partner in crime. Over-the-top scenes involve skinny dipping and Bottom's head and fairy wings from the theater department.

I loved all the women at the ranch, and the other cowboy Sam, and the ranch owners, and even the husbands and insolent daughter; it's an ensemble that lends itself to insight and humor.

The writing is so clever, the setting so unique and bizarre, the characters flawed and zany but human and lovable. 

Warm and generous, with a heartwarming twisted ending, this was a real delight. 

I received an ARC from the publisher through LibraryThing. My review is fair and unbiased.

Better Luck Next Time

By Julia Claiborne Johnson

ISBN: 9780062916365

ISBN 10: 006291636X

Custom House

On Sale: January 5, 2021

hardcover $28.99

from the pubisher

It’s 1938 and women seeking a quick, no-questions split from their husbands head to the “divorce capital of the world,” Reno, Nevada. There’s one catch: they have to wait six-weeks to become “residents.” Many of these wealthy, soon-to-be divorcees flock to the Flying Leap, a dude ranch that caters to their every need. 

Twenty-four-year-old Ward spent one year at Yale before his family lost everything in the Great Depression; now he’s earning an honest living as a ranch hand at the Flying Leap. Admired for his dashing good looks—“Cary Grant in cowboy boots”—Ward thinks he’s got the Flying Leap’s clients all figured out. But two new guests are about to upend everything he thinks he knows: Nina, a St Louis heiress and amateur pilot back for her third divorce, and Emily, whose bravest moment in life was leaving her cheating husband back in San Francisco and driving herself to Reno.

A novel about divorce, marriage, and everything that comes in between (money, class, ambition, and opportunity), Better Luck Next Time is a hilarious yet poignant examination of the ways friendship can save us, love can destroy us, and the family we create can be stronger than the family we come from.

Machine Embroidered Art: Painting the Natural World with Needle & Thread by Alison Holt

Alison Holt's machine embroidered art will amaze you! She renders nature scenes in photographic detail, the foam of breakers on a rocky shore, a verdant meadow, or dappled forest floor depicted only with paint, needle, and thread.

Holt guides artists through her process in over 200 pages, lushly illustrated. 

Using photographs, she composes her scene, then paints it on silk. With straight and zig-zag stitches on her Bernina sewing machine, she creates layers of thread to detail the natural elements. 

Her book explains every step, from composition and color, how to blend and shade with thread, and how she combines the two basic thread stitches to create flowers, leaves, trees, water, and other elements. 

Holt guides you through her process in creating individual pieces, every step photographed and explained.

I was impressed by the detailed instructions. With study and practice, and easily obtained basic tools, readers should be able to create their own nature art. She is clearly a gifted teacher.

As a book of art, this is a pure delight. As a source of inspiration it is invaluable. 

I received a free book from the publisher through Amazon Vine in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Look inside the book at

 https://www.searchpress.com/book/9781782217916/machine-embroidered-art

Learn more about Holt at her website https://www.alisonholt.com/

Visit her blog at https://www.alisonholt.co.uk/ali_wp/

About Alison Holt

Alison Holt, a UK contemporary textile artist with a Fine Art Embroidery BA Hons degree from Goldsmiths College, London, specialising in freehand machine embroidery.

Using a basic Bernina sewing machine and just 2 stitches, straight stitch and zig-zag I make embroidered pictures of landscapes, seascapes, flowers and garden scenes, influenced by the Shropshire Wales border near Oswestry where I live and by my travels.

Alongside the 5 books on my style of threadpainting and an educational DVD, Creative Machine Embroidery, I offer a range of textile courses, workshops, demonstrations and lectures in the UK and abroad.

I work to commission and have experience of exhibiting regularly at the Chelsea Flower Show and other venues in the UK, France and Australia.

Machine Embroidered Art: Painting the Natural World with Needle & Thread
By Alison Holt
Paperback $31.95
Published by Search Press
ISBN 9781782217916

from the publisher

Table of Contents

• Introduction 
• Materials & equipment 
• Planning an embroidery 
• Light 
• Colour 
• Creating backgrounds 
• Starting to stitch 
• Flowers and foliage 
• Seascapes 
• Trees and woodlands 
• Index 

A showcase for textile artist Alison Holt’s exquisite machine embroideries, this book will teach you to ‘paint’ your surroundings with thread.

Use thread to paint the world around you with free-motion embroidery. Alongside new examples of Alison Holt’s exquisite and distinctive machine embroideries, this book collects together her teachings and techniques for machine-embroidering flowers, woodlands, landscapes and seascapes.

A huge range of techniques and ideas are clearly explained using step-by-step photographs, and demonstrated through a selection of inspiring projects.

Learn how to create landscapes and seascapes of your own, and find inspiration through numerous examples of Alison’s original work.

Sergeant Salinger by Jerome Charyn

The inimitable Jerome Charyn has turned his pen to probe the transformative war experiences of one of America's most famous writers, J.D. Salinger. Like so many of his generation, WWII left its indelible footprints on Salinger, as manifested in his stories and his troubled life. 

Charyn begins with Sonny Salinger as a love-struck Park Avenue boy with a few stories under his belt. Sonny was smitten with teenage vamp Oona O’Neill (daughter of playwright Eugene O’Neill), but Oona had big plans; he was merely a pleasant diversion. 

The army decided to overlook Sonny's heart murmur and called him to duty. Sonny went overseas, a secret counterintelligence agent whose job was to seek out and interrogate Nazi collaborators. 

Oona went to Hollywood where her life plans were altered by Charlie Chaplin. In England, the heartbroken Sonny frequented a local pub, scribbling a story about Holden Caulfield at war.

Sonny experienced the most atrocious killing fields of WWII.

There was Devon's Slapton Sands where 1700 GIs rehearsing for Utah Beach were killed by friendly fire. He was at Utah Beach on D-Day, and at the Battle of the Bulge, and he saw the first liberation of a concentration camp.

Sonny was tasked with sniffing out Nazis and Nazi collaborators in every hamlet. He knew that the people he interrogated were as broken by the war as he was.

The depravity and waste of war was overwhelming. Sonny became a ghost. Frayed, he secretly checked into a German civilian hospital.

Back at work as 'the grand inquisitor,' one of the doctors who had nursed Sonny was brought before him for interrogation. He married her, and with fake papers, brought his German Nazi bride home to America to meet his Jewish family.

The marriage failed.

Charyn includes images from Salinger's fiction, especially the Nine Stories--an Eisenhower coat, Sonny at the beach making sand castles with children and remembering Bananafish, hanging in British pubs to write. Salinger's Glass family are referenced, and the carousel in Central Park. Guest appearances are made by Hemingway and Teddy's son General Roosevelt.

In 2018 I reviewed Eberhard Alsen's book J.D.Salinger and the Nazis. When I last read The Catcher in the Rye for book club in 2016, I considered how PTSD influenced the novel. 

Charyn  draws readers on a journey into the darkness of monstrous carnage. As I read, joy was sucked from my world, colors faded, I felt cheerless. Sonny's disillusion and trauma leaves him a tin man, and we understand, because we feel it, too.

A glimmer of hope comes at the end."Whatever music he had lost in the carnage at Slapton Sands, at Hurtgen, and among the smoldering corpses at Kaufering IV had come back."

We know the books that Salinger would write and their impact. Instead of Holden Caulfield's war death, he wrote a novel about a teenage Holden who dreams of protecting children from the adult world. He had seen the devaluation of human lives sacrificed to false gods. And we know how damaged he was, how he became an unsettling, mysterious hermit. Charyn's novel leads us to understand the forces that shaped Salinger and inform his writing.

I was given an ARC by the publisher in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Read Charyn's article J. D. Salinger The Lost Bar Mitzvah Boy here.

Sergeant Salinger
by Jerome Charyn
Bellevue Literary Press
Publication January 5, 2021
Trade Paper US $16.99 ISBN: 9781942658740
Trade Cloth US $28.99 ISBN: 9781942658825
Ebook ISBN: 9781942658757

from the publisher

J.D. Salinger, mysterious author of The Catcher in the Rye, is remembered today as a reclusive misanthrope. Jerome Charyn’s Salinger is a young American WWII draftee assigned to the Counter Intelligence Corps, a band of secret soldiers who trained with the British. A rifleman and an interrogator, he witnessed all the horrors of the war—from the landing on D-Day to the relentless hand-to-hand combat in the hedgerows of Normandy, to the Battle of the Bulge, and finally to the first Allied entry into a Bavarian death camp, where corpses were piled like cordwood.

After the war, interned in a Nuremberg psychiatric clinic, Salinger became enchanted with a suspected Nazi informant. They married, but not long after he brought her home to New York, the marriage collapsed. Maladjusted to civilian life, he lived like a “spook,” with invisible stripes on his shoulder, the ghosts of the murdered inside his head, and stories to tell.

Grounded in biographical fact and reimagined as only Charyn could, Sergeant Salinger is an astonishing portrait of a devastated young man on his way to becoming the mythical figure behind a novel that has marked generations.

Nora: A Love Story of Nora and James Joyce by Nuala O'Connor

"To Jim I am Ireland."~ from Nora by Nuala O'Connor

In her novel Nora, Nuala O'Connor channels Nora Barnacle as she tells the story of her life with James Joyce. Warned against him as a wild and savage madman, Nora affirms that part of him, for she also has a wildness inside.

I was drawn in by Nora's distinct voice and her unorthodox, independent character.

The novel covers Nora's entire life, from the workhouse to meeting Joyce, agreeing to go abroad with him without marriage, their rise from poverty to Jim's financial success, and their marital and family troubles. 

Warning: The novel begins with a sexual encounter and there will be more later in the novel.

The novel begins on Juneteenth 1904 when a young Jim Joyce walked out with twenty-year-old Nora Barnacle. She understands what he wants and they have their first sexual encounter. Jim had found someone adventurous and sensual; no one of 'his class' could be so open and willing. They stayed together until Jim's death. 

Jim worked uninspiring jobs to support them as he wrote his stories and worked on his novel. He drank too much and spent too much. 

Nora was left alone too much and had to scramble to put food on the table and raise their children. Like the wives of so many writers, Nora's fidelity and support required her to take on the greater part of providing for their basic needs. She found allies and friends, including Jim's brother.

The early part of the novel is wonderful. It has a nice continuity and I felt immersed in the story. The later part of their life jumps across time, hitting on important events. The story of their daughter's mental illness could merit a novel all its own.

This is the story of an independent, strong woman who defies social convention for a relationship that evolves and endures over a lifetime. The novel will appeal to readers interested in Joyce but also to the broader readership of women's fiction and even romance.

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

Find a Reading Guide here.

Nora: A Love Story of Nora and James Joyce
by Nuala O'Connor
Harper Perennial and Paperbacks
Pub Date: January 5, 2021   
ISBN: 9780062991720
paperback $16.99 (USD)

from the publisher

Acclaimed Irish novelist Nuala O’Connor’s bold reimagining of the life of James Joyce’s wife, muse, and the model for Molly Bloom in Ulysses is a “lively and loving paean to the indomitable Nora Barnacle” (Edna O’Brien).

Dublin, 1904. Nora Joseph Barnacle is a twenty-year-old from Galway working as a maid at Finn’s Hotel. She enjoys the liveliness of her adopted city and on June 16—Bloomsday—her life is changed when she meets Dubliner James Joyce, a fateful encounter that turns into a lifelong love. Despite his hesitation to marry, Nora follows Joyce in pursuit of a life beyond Ireland, and they surround themselves with a buoyant group of friends that grows to include Samuel Beckett, Peggy Guggenheim, and Sylvia Beach.

But as their life unfolds, Nora finds herself in conflict between their intense desire for each other and the constant anxiety of living in poverty throughout Europe. She desperately wants literary success for Jim, believing in his singular gift and knowing that he thrives on being the toast of the town, and it eventually provides her with a security long lacking in her life and his work. So even when Jim writes, drinks, and gambles his way to literary acclaim, Nora provides unflinching support and inspiration, but at a cost to her own happiness and that of their children.

With gorgeous and emotionally resonant prose, Nora is a heartfelt portrayal of love, ambition, and the quiet power of an ordinary woman who was, in fact, extraordinary.

Quilt Projects Completed in 2020

Covid lockdown and social distancing gave me the motivation to get working on those UFOs piling up. I accomplished quite a bit this year, mostly because I learned to machine quilt on my new Bernina QE.

These wool birds were on the quilter's 'free table' last year. I made a patchwork background and appliqued some tree branches for them.

I am currently machine quilting the Gingiber Thicket animals bed sized quilt.

But I did finish a wall hanging version.

I had these original Wizard of Oz embroidered blocks languishing for years until I saw the Dorothy's Journey fabric line from Riley Blake! I spent weeks drawing and perfecting the designs.

My hand appliqued Yellow Rose Sampler came back from my long arm quilter in the spring.

I am now hand quilting the Hospital Sketches applique quilt, patterns from Barbara Brackman.

I started my Emily Dickinson portraits but need more fabrics and have not been to a quilt shop since I picked up my sewing machine, outside and masked, in April. 

I hand embroidered and machine quilted these adorable cat patterns.

I made the Baby Cactus pattern for my son's girlfriend's birthday. Hand appliqued and machine quilted.

I finished these 2014 Michigan Row by Row blocks into a wall hanging.

This Alice in Wonderland embroidered blocks were finally set and machine quilted.

Thread work and machine quilting a fabric panel turned out great and was gifted to my son and his girlfriend.

I made the central block and the four other wheel blocks some time ago, and finally turned them into a quilt.

I bought the Mountain Mist Water Lily pattern almost 30 years ago. It was time to make the quilt. Hand appliqued, and waiting to be hand quilted.

I needed to play one day, and hauled out my vintage embellishments and quilt tops. 

These 1901 Pan American Redwork blocks had also been languishing for years, and I finally set them together.

I made this lap quilt from 2014 Row by Row Michigan patterns. But machine quilting it on my old machine made a mess. I tore out stitches and finally, with my new machine, finished it and gave it to my brother.

I started designing The Great Gatsby Story Book quilt several years ago. I had some Great Gatsby fabric printed when the last movie version came out. And I finally finished it this year! My original design, hand appliqued and hand quilted.

I just started another long planned project--Michigan lighthouses!