Last week I read two library books from my local library.
Early Morning Riser by Katherine Heiny had glowing reviews about its humor. The novel is set in the Up North city of Boyne City, Michigan. Our library book club read the author's novel Standard Deviation a few years ago. I thought it would be a welcome bedtime read.
And it was that! I laughed out loud. Heiny knows the Up North culture, and through her character Jane, a young teacher new to the area, provides some very pointed humor. She mentions the iconic Kilwin's ice cream and places Michiganders will know.
It seemed to Jane that people who lived downstate had cabins in Northern Michigan, and people who lived in Northern Michigan had cabins in the Upper Peninsula, but where did people who lived in the Upper Peninsula have cabins? Canada? And where did Canadian people have cabins? At what point did there cease to be an appeal in going north and people gave up and bought time shares in Florida?
I loved the wacky, likable characters that surround Jane. Her love interest Duncan seems to have slept with every woman she meets. Duncan was burned by his first marriage to a beautiful, but controlling, woman. He still mows his exe's yard and fixes things at her house, although she has remarried; her husband is eccentric with endless special needs.
Duncan has taken under his wing Jimmy, a mentally challenged man. A tragic accident changes Jane's life and she assumes care for Jimmy along with Duncan.
This charming novel has great heart and warmth.
Available now
from the publisher
A wise, bighearted, boundlessly joyful novel of love, disaster, and unconventional family
Jane falls in love with Duncan easily. He is charming, good-natured, and handsome but unfortunately, he has also slept with nearly every woman in Boyne City, Michigan. Jane sees Duncan’s old girlfriends everywhere–at restaurants, at the grocery store, even three towns away.
While Jane may be able to come to terms with dating the world’s most prolific seducer of women, she wishes she did not have to share him quite so widely. His ex-wife, Aggie, a woman with shiny hair and pale milkmaid skin, still has Duncan mow her lawn. His coworker, Jimmy, comes and goes from Duncan’s apartment at the most inopportune times. Sometimes Jane wonders if a relationship can even work with three people in it–never mind four. Five if you count Aggie’s eccentric husband, Gary. Not to mention all the other residents of Boyne City, who freely share with Jane their opinions of her choices.
But any notion Jane had of love and marriage changes with one terrible car crash. Soon Jane’s life is permanently intertwined with Duncan’s, Aggie’s, and Jimmy’s, and Jane knows she will never have Duncan to herself. But could it be possible that a deeper kind of happiness is right in front of Jane’s eyes? A novel that is alternately bittersweet and laugh-out-loud funny, Katherine Heiny’s Early Morning Riser is her most astonishingly wonderful work to date.
*****
I read and enjoyed Judithe Little's historical novel Wickwhythe Hall, and a number of years back read Coco Chanel and the Pulse of History by Rhonda K. Garelick. I was interested in Little's new novel The Chanel Sisters, the story of Coco's youngest sister, Antoinette.
The Chanel sisters Julia-Berthe, Adrienne, Gabrielle, and Antoinette lost their mother and were abandoned by their father, growing up at a convent orphanage.
The Chanel sisters seek a path out of poverty through work or romance. Antoinette is essential to Coco's design career but she dreams of marriage. Little imagines a love interest that predates her historical marriage, and which explains her death in Argentina.
Readers will love these characters determined to rise above the circumstances of their birth, not only challenging social norms but changing them with fashions that freed women from constricting, ornamental clothing.
Available now
from the publisher
A novel of survival, love, loss, triumph—and the sisters who changed fashion forever
Antoinette and Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel know they’re destined for something better. Abandoned by their family years before, they’ve grown up under the guidance of pious nuns preparing them for simple lives as the wives of tradesmen or shopkeepers. At night, their secret stash of romantic novels and magazine cutouts beneath the floorboards are all they have to keep their dreams of the future alive.
The walls of the convent can’t shield them forever, and when they’re finally of age, the Chanel sisters set out together with a fierce determination to prove themselves worthy to a society that has never accepted them. Their journey propels them out of poverty and to the stylish cafés of Moulins, the dazzling performance halls of Vichy—and to a small hat shop on the rue Cambon in Paris, where a business takes hold and expands to the glamorous French resort towns. But when World War I breaks out, their lives are irrevocably changed, and the sisters must gather the courage to fashion their own places in the world, even if apart from each other.
*****
News of the World by Paulette Jiles is my library book club choice for May. I had a copy on Kindle, but when my husband tried to read it, he was frustrated by the lack of quotation marks. So, he purchased the audiobook.
We listened to the audiobook over three nights, two hours at a time. We were mesmerized by the characters and gorgeous writing. The narrator, Grover Garland, was terrific.
We both exclaimed at passages of great beauty; one became my #SundaySentence on Twitter.
With the release of the movie based on the book, starring the wonderful Tom Hanks, I expect most people have heard of this story of a Civil War veteran and the girl captured by natives and their fraught travels across Texas. Capt. Kidd is to return to her extended family members, but becomes attached to her, and he has a deep understanding of the challenges she faces in reassimilation.
My fifth great-uncle Michael Rhodes, whose family were some of the first settlers in the Shenandoah Valley, was captured by Native Americans and taken to Ohio for three years before being returned in an exchange. I thought about him and wondered what his life was like. He saw his parents scalped, his siblings murdered. Characters in News talk about how quickly white settlers became acclimated to native life and have trouble reentering their old life.
I previous read Jiles's Simon the Fiddler, and was happy to meet him again in this novel. And early in my Kindle days, I read Jiles's novel The Color of Lightning. I have her Stormy Weather on Kindle waiting to be read.
from the publisher
In the aftermath of the Civil War, an aging itinerant news reader agrees to transport a young captive of the Kiowa back to her people in this exquisitely rendered, morally complex, multilayered novel of historical fiction from the author of Enemy Women that explores the boundaries of family, responsibility, honor, and trust.
In the wake of the Civil War, Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd travels through northern Texas, giving live readings from newspapers to paying audiences hungry for news of the world. An elderly widower who has lived through three wars and fought in two of them, the captain enjoys his rootless, solitary existence.
In Wichita Falls, he is offered a $50 gold piece to deliver a young orphan to her relatives in San Antonio. Four years earlier, a band of Kiowa raiders killed Johanna’s parents and sister; sparing the little girl, they raised her as one of their own. Recently rescued by the U.S. army, the ten-year-old has once again been torn away from the only home she knows.
Their 400-mile journey south through unsettled territory and unforgiving terrain proves difficult and at times dangerous. Johanna has forgotten the English language, tries to escape at every opportunity, throws away her shoes, and refuses to act “civilized.” Yet as the miles pass, the two lonely survivors tentatively begin to trust each other, forming a bond that marks the difference between life and death in this treacherous land.
Arriving in San Antonio, the reunion is neither happy nor welcome. The captain must hand Johanna over to an aunt and uncle she does not remember—strangers who regard her as an unwanted burden. A respectable man, Captain Kidd is faced with a terrible choice: abandon the girl to her fate or become—in the eyes of the law—a kidnapper himself.
