Author Archives: Andrea Sigetich

Tell Me Everything

Elizabeth Strout

Fiction 2024 / 326 pages

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I saw this cool graphic on the Oprah website, identifying the number of characters in Elizabeth Strout books.  The highest number of characters is in Tell Me Everything.  Twenty-three characters.  Be prepared!  The descriptions about the book tell us it is about "unrecorded lives."  This is an apt description. It is a panoply of stories from people living in Crosby Maine.  And the stories are interesting, even though these are everyday people.  But/and I have an image of a peg board.  The stories are hung on the peg board like a bunch of tools, or more accurately, pieces of fabric.   Sometimes they overlap, sometimes they stand on their own.

Except of course for our main story ... the life of Bob Burgess.  Bob is the 65-year-old defense attorney who is trying to find out how Delores Beach, also known by the unattractive name of "Bitch Ball" came to be found dead.  Bob, who is married to Margaret, also has a burgeoning relationship with Lucy, who is living with her ex-husband William.  Bob and Lucy meet once a week for a talk and a walk, and I frankly grew real tired of how Strout, at the end of each of these meetings, talks about how Bob feels seen and listened to by Lucy.  The author kind of drives this point into the ground.  Clearly Bob is falling in love with Lucy.

And, of all the "unrecorded lives" in this book, Bob's life is the centerpiece.  It is his mind and heart we come to know, not only as he defends Matt, Delores Beach's son, but his he brings Matt back to life, how he copes with his brother’s wife Helen dying, how he helps his brother heal his relationships with his children, his strong intuition, his ability to care for and about other people’s children (though he has none of his own), his support and forgiveness for his alcoholic ex-wife Pam  … and on and on.  His character is somewhat implausible.  Everyone loves him, he is a helper with a big heart.

So, do I recommend this book?  It is fun, pleasant, rewarding.  A little too saccharin for me, but it might keep you warm on a winter’s weekend.

February 2025

 

Shred Sisters

Betsy Lerner

Novel 2024 | 266 pages

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I love the quote that is associated with this book in most reviews and descriptions:  "No one will love you more or hurt you more than a sister."  I do not have a sister, but this quote tugs at my heart every time I read it.

I quite enjoyed this book about two sisters, based primarily in New York.  Amy is four years younger than Olivia, and Olivia (Ollie) is mentally ill.  The time frame is the mid-70s to the mid-90's.  Especially when Ollie is younger, we see how our knowledge of mental illness and how to address it was really just at its infancy.  Once Ollie hits puberty, she becomes quite unmanageable ... often doesn't come home for days on end, steals, become promiscuous, ignores the drug regimen her doctors put her on.

Amy, meantime, is stable, smart, and trying to live a normal life with a "crazy" sister whom she loves.  Their parents ... especially their father ... always forgives Ollie her excesses, but miraculously, Amy doesn't seem to be injured by the imbalance.  It is like a child in a family with most any disability ... that child receives more than his or her share of attention.

I really liked both of these characters, Amy and Ollie.  I like where Amy developed and shepherded her career, and the ways in which Ollie avoided anything that smacks of a "profession."  They both were involved with a number of men, which became just a tad confusing at times, but it is difficult for Amy to develop real friendships ... in this way, she HAS been hurt by the instability of her sister and the challenges associated with emotional intimacy.

This is an easy read, though it just might make you think. I recommend it for a winter weekend.  This is Lerner's first novel.

January 2025

 

Wintering

Katherine May

Memoir 2020 | 241 pages

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We all encounter times of wintering. Our cold, transformative, challenges may be precipitated by a death, or one's illness or the illness of another, or a child who hates the school he is at, or financial worries, or a sense of a spiritual void, or depression, or simply the short cold days of a season we mostly want to end.

May tells us about her journey through her own wintering and shares with us what she has learned, what perspectives she notices and alters, what attitudes and attributes appear during the seemingly dark time of wintering.

She tells us about the bees and how they, and the ants, prepare for winter.  She relates stories of going to the Arctic, even though she is very pregnant.  She travels to Stonehenge one winter solstice to learn how the people who show up there view the shifting currents of winter.  She learns to plunge into icy cold waters to clear her head and regain a sense of presence, aliveness, resilience, and self-sufficiency.

I picked this up because of what I read about her integration of other authors, poets, mystics, philosophers.  I enjoyed this part ... she could have done much more of it!  Wintering is really a spiritual book, to savor and read slowly; to let her wisdom sink in.

Some reviewers did not like this book.  They were offended by her privilege and her financial ability to travel to a spa or to see the northern lights in Iceland (she lives in Britain). While these readers vehemently claimed they were not looking for a self-help book, I believe they were. They wanted "how to winter" advice that they could apply and integrate into their own lives.  Even though I am currently immersed in my own set of "wintering" experiences, I was just as vehemently not looking for any self-help.  I wanted to read this book just as one woman's account of her wintering. And, as such, it was astoundingly beautiful.  Her writing is simply beautiful and soothing.  And still, I know that I couldn't help but learn from her story.

I recommend Wintering.

 

Tall Oaks

Chris Whitaker

Fiction 2016 / 361 pages

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Harry Monroe, three years old, is abducted from his bed by someone wearing a clown mask.  This transgression rattles the small town of Tall Oaks, which is unaccustomed to major crime.

Tall Oaks, the book, takes us into the lives of many of the residents of Tall Oaks, such as Manny, 17, who wants to be a gangster; Jess, Harry's mom, who obsessively puts up posters in town with Harry's picture on them; Jim, the local sheriff who has fallen in love with Jess; Jerry, the 500-pound manager of CopyMax, whose manipulative mother is dying of dementia and who is actually a brilliant photographer; and Jared, who moves from town to town every few months and clearly has something to hide.

The book is allegedly about the discovery of Harry's abductor, but it isn't a crime/detective novel as such.  It is a psychological thriller, much more about the myriad of characters and their intra- and interrelationships. Harry's kidnapping is just the context.

Whitaker, in this debut novel, excels at building idiosyncratic, intriguing, and sometimes funny characters.  The struggle I had with Tall Oaks is the format.  He writes from the perspective of his characters, but typically no more than one or two pages at a time.  It is difficult to keep track of who is who (and there are a multitude of other, lesser, characters in addition to the ones I mention above).  It took me about half the book before I could comfortably move between characters and know whose voice I was reading.  You will find lists of Tall Oaks characters on the Internet because others have had the same challenge.  Use one of these lists to help you!  He also does that thing that debut novelists sometimes do ... almost all of his character names begin with the same letter, this time it is a "J," making it more difficult to differentiate.

So, I enjoyed this book, but it won't be my favorite book of the year, for certain. It is an entertaining read, but not something that needs to go immediately to the top of your book pile.

January 2025

 

In the Lives of Puppets

TJ Klune

Fiction 2023 | 420pages

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You know immediately, when you start reading this book, that it is not really about robots, even though three of our four main characters are robots.  It is about people ... our idiosyncrasies, quirks, feelings, emotions, insecurities, communication styles, strengths, skills ... all the characteristics someone might program into a particular robot.

We have Victor, our one human.  GIO is the robot who raised Vic from infancy. Rambo is the small vacuum robot, and the Nurse robot (Nurse Registered Automaton to Care, Heal, Educate, And Drill ... Nurse Ratched for short).  Rambo loves everything about life, and the Nurse is not only brilliant, but I love it when she turns on and off her empathy protocol ... "Engaging Empathy Protocol" she says!

The four of them live on their own, way out in the forest, having no contact with the outside world.  The relationships among them are loving, with lots of kidding and caring.  They each bring unique proclivities to the family they have formed.  Individually and as a family, Klune has created engaging and interesting distinctive characters with strong personalities.  They have lovely conversations and fun teases with sexual overtones.  They often make me laugh.

One day, Vic and Nurse Ratched and Rambo travel to one of the many Scrap Piles placed in the wilderness to see what they can salvage.  They find the remnants of a robot named HARP, who has been decommissioned and has no memory, nor a working battery pack.  They bring him home and attempt to get him operational again.  After weeks of work, they succeed, and HARP renames himself as HAP.  And now, there are five.

Everything is delightful up to this point.  Then a crisis occurs and GIO is kidnapped by other robots, and the rest go to look for him to bring him home.  Their journey begins as they travel towards the City of Electric Dreams, where they believe GIO is being held.  And the story starts a slow decline, in my opinion.  The journey is okay, but once they reach the City, there are way too many robots, too much chaos, too many robots with odd, sad, and destructive designations.  We lose the tight connection of the family in this electric maze (as I suspect our main characters also feel), and I become bored to tears.  My four-heart rating drops to three and then finally to two, as I force myself through the time in the City.  There are 200 pages in the middle of this book I would pull out and rewrite to maybe 30 pages.  Not surprisingly, the story reengages near the end, as the five characters become a family again (it's not as easy as it sounds!!) out in the wilderness.

I am disappointed in this TJ Klune, whom I enjoy, and am just hard-pressed to recommend it, unless you are way more interested in the machinations of robots than the workings of humans.

(My apologies to the friend who recommended this book to me.  Keep on recommending please!!)

January 2025

Eruption

Michael Crichton & James Patterson

Fiction 2024 | 424 pages

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Mauna Loa on the Big Island was about to erupt.  John MacGregor, the geologist  in charge of the Hawaii Volcano Observatory has a big job ahead of him; to keep the residents of Hilo and other Hawaiian towns safe.  With the current technology (it is April 2025 in our book) Mac knows the eruption will happen in 114 hours.  But he is unwilling to start a panic and, in his press conference, tells people it will erupt "within two weeks."

But soon General Rivers arrives on behalf of the military, and we learn that the eruption of Mauna Loa is not the only problem, nor the biggest one.  The horrendous problem is the extremely toxic waste buried deep in the mountain that will destroy the earth, not just the Big Island, if it is released.  And the glass containers holding the toxic chemicals are so old, they are cracking and covered with fissures.

Eruption is a great thriller!  No one is murdered or gets shot.  It is a thriller based on a potentially huge natural (and unnatural) disaster.  It is gripping, a cliff hanger, an edge-of-your-seat read.

There are many reviewers who did not like this book.  Mostly, they seem disappointed with Sherri, Michael Crichton's wife, who selected James Patterson to finish this thriller that Crichton started before he died.  They feel Patterson does not have the skills to live up to Crichton's scientific knowledge and, therefore, dumbed down what this book might have been.

I decided to stay out of that fray completely, since I know neither Crichton's nor Patterson's writing that well, though I have read both of them.  I decided just to take this book at face value, for what was ultimately published.  And I believe what is published is an engaging, thought-provoking masterpiece of a thriller. I recommend it.

January 2025

The Wedding People

Alison Espach

Fiction 2024 | 363 pages

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Phoebe arrives at a hotel, a mansion in Newport, Rhode, Island, in a long light green dress and without any luggage, leaving behind her home in St. Louis, a messy kitchen,  and her cat Harry, who just died.  She has booked a room in this gorgeous place.  But it turns out she is the only person in the entire hotel who is not a part of the week-long wedding of Lila and Gary.  Soon, she and the bride-to-be find themselves in the elevator together and this conversation takes place (abbreviated here):

Lila:  "So, are you in Gary's family?"

Phoebe: "No."

Lila:  "Are you in my family?"

Phoebe:  "You do not know who's in your own family?"

....

Lila:  "But if you're not here for the wedding, then what are you here for?"

Phoebe: "I am here to kill myself."

Thus begins an important and authentic friendship between Lila and Phoebe and thus begins an excellent writer with a fast-paced novel and some of the best dialogue I have ever read.

The Wedding People is simply delightful!  Interesting, playful, funny characters are trying to get their lives together.  We experience crazy relatives, an anxiety-prone bride, and convoluted feelings in relationships, new and old, that are sometimes deep, occasionally magical, intermittently real, and often quite unclear.

I suggest you read this with a cup of tea by your side and when the snow and cold make it unpleasant to be outside.  Enjoy!  And please post your reactions here.

December 2024

 

Negative Space

Gillian Linden

Fiction 2024 | 160 pages

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For once, I am aligned with Goodreads.  Negative Space earned an unimpressive 3.29 average rating.  It may be the lowest I have ever seen.

While I like the author's style with language and her pace in this debut novel, it is BORING!  It is one week in the life of a part-time schoolteacher in New York, just as the pandemic restrictions were winding down.  The two major themes in the book revolve around the main character possibly seeing an inappropriate interaction between a teacher and a student (she believes they touched heads), and her young daughter Jane's coping with infected gums that require the extraction of some of her baby teeth.

Negative Space is a negative read.  It is not worth your time.  There is nothing there.

December 2024

The Way of the Hermit

Ken Smith

Nonfiction 2023 | 266 pages

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Something was odd about the writing in this book, but it took me until I finished it and did some research to understand.  As you near the end of the book, Ken Smith has included verbatim many of his journal entries, and he, quite literally, cannot write.  Incomplete sentences, sentences without verbs or prepositions, incorrect punctuation.  I was not able to determine if English is his second language, or if he was uneducated or ... ?  And so, he hired a ghostwriter, Will Millard.  In the translation from Ken's diaries to Millard's writing, much was lost.   Millard does not have the passion or heart that Smith has.  I wish he'd hired Millard to write the book as a biography about Smith, and incorporated more of Ken Smith's fascinating, if frustrating, actually diary entries.

Now that I have presented my pretentious opinion on writing, as though I actually know what I'm talking about, let's get to the meat of Smith's life story.

This is actually a very interesting book! Ken Smith becomes a hermit, and lives in Canada and in the Scottish woods by himself for some 40 years.  No surprise, what he learns about flora, fauna, wood, lochs, weather, eating, and survival is astounding!  My favorite part is when he builds a cabin for himself, based upon the principles employed by Dick Proenneke in building his cabin at Twin Lakes in Lake Clark National Park.   I had the privilege of visiting Proenneke's cabin, so this chapter was so real and tangible to me.

You will learn a great deal about the immense challenges of living off the grid.  It takes considerable physical and emotional strength to keep one's cabin warm, to feed and clothe one's self, to be with the much desired peace and solitude, to have no access to services of any kind without a 7-mile walk in one direction, or longer.  And Smith is aware, present, and introspective in his simple life.

The Way of the Hermit is being made into a movie, which I do not to see.  I suspect it will move even further from the truth of Smith's utterly fascinating life.

Yes, read this book, for its content and passion, and do not worry about the writing.  Maybe you will love even that! (And, by the way, if you read the soft-cover, there are two sets of photographs.  The first set includes some spoilers, so I suggest you skip past these photos until you reach the end of the book.)

December 2024

Whalebone Theater

Joanna Quinn

Novel 2022 | 576 pages

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As I prepare to write this blog post, I keep having an image of a stately mature tree ... deciduous, maple I think.  Whalebone Theater Is like that tree to me. The major British characters, who relate as though they are two sisters and a brother, Cristabel, Flossie, and Dingby, play together, come of age together, find a beached whale together, reach to each other for emotional support in a family that abstains from it.  I adored the three of them together and their unyielding love, acceptance, and respect for one another.  They are solid as they weave together, like the trunk of my maple tree.  And that is the first half of the book.

Then the branches separate and differentiate and grow in their own ways, though all three are supporting Britain in the war effort of WWII.  It is here where the book loses its charm a bit for me .... when the trio separates and they become their own unique people in the world.

Though my concern about where Ms. Quinn took the plot is not enough of a problem to reduce my four-heart rating.  The writing in this debut novel is astounding ... beautiful, visual, clear, deep.  Her characters are real, profound, and eminently lovable.  As she carries them forward into the challenges of the War, we also learn something about agents, secrecy, and the Resistance.

This is an astounding debut novel.  How can one person have so much story within herself to tell?  It is broad and deep, spanning decades.

Thank you Josie for this recommendation. I do look forward to discussing in book club in January.

December 2024