Matt Haig

Fiction 2024 / 324 pages

A small, long-ago act of kindness towards her colleague Christina leads to 72-year-old Grace being bequeathed a house in Iziba, Spain.  Puzzled as to why a virtual stranger would do such a thing, Grace decides to go visit the house.

Grace is filled with grief, being recently widowed and also losing her son Daniel in a bicycle accident.

This book is the story Grace writes in a very long e-mail to one of her former students who is struggling in life. Grace proceeds to tell this student how she, too, has been struggling through her life, and how this house changes her life. Once on Ibiza, she is drawn towards La Presencia, where she discovers and claims her psychic fantasy powers.

This book is 100 pages of unmitigated grief, followed by 225 pages of a story.  Now, I like fantasy and magical realism in a novel, but this was about 70% fantasy and 30% real story.  The story is like a skeleton on which Haig hangs the fantasy.  Someone on Goodreads said it read like a first draft and I can agree with that.  Just too much gravy and not enough meat.

I read the entire book and enjoyed it somewhat, but I hesitate to suggest you put this book on your nightstand.

November 2024

Lynne Cox

Biography/Memoir 2006 | 148 pages

Early one California morning, 17-year-old long distance competitive swimmer Lynne Cox was swimming off the coast, nearing the end of her three-hour workout, when she felt something shift in the water.  Swimming near her was a baby whale ... with no mother to be seen anywhere.  This is the remarkable tale of that morning, swimming with the gray whale, whom she names Grayson, and searching together for his mother.  At his young age, he will die without her.  She is his only food source for the first eight months of his life.

The true story is heart-warming and touching, speaking to the connection that can happen between humans and animals.  Cox's sense of the power of our minds to communicate and connect really resonates with me.  I also like how much she shared about the other sea animals they encountered, from dolphins to sunfish.

I cried near the end.

You only need part of a Saturday afternoon with a cup of tea by your side to read this book.  It is short and a fast read.  I recommend it surely!

November 2024

Betty Webb  |  Fiction

2023, 352 pages

Maybe it is Betty Webb.  Maybe it is me.  Maybe it is the distraction of the @#^%$ election.  But 110 pages in, I am disengaged and bored.  Check out my next blog post if you want something juicier.

November 2024

William Kent Krueger

Fiction 2019/ 450 pages

William Kent Krueger is nothing if not a phenomenal writer.  I know the major characters in this book so well ... Odie, Albert, Mose, and Emmy.  I feel as though I could predict how each would act, if they showed up at my home today.  I know their mannerisms, their personalities, their gifts, their values, their fears, their failings.  Krueger truly shines at developing characters.

In This Tender Land, three young White kids and one Native leave an Indian school where they, as well as the many Indian children, were abused.  The year is 1932 and there is no love between the White man and the Native population.  Emmy is six, our narrator Odie is 12, his big brother Albert is 16, and I don't think we know exactly how old Mose is, though we do know someone cut out his tongue when he was four and he is mute.  Odie and Albert end up at the Indian school when their parents die because there is no room at the white orphanage.  Emmy becomes an orphan during the telling of this tale.

The four children, who are fast friends, run away from the school in a canoe, traveling the Gilead River and then the Minnesota and finally the Mississippi.  This Tender Land is all about their travels and who they meet along their way to St. Louis, where Albert and Odie have an aunt, Aunt Julia.

The story is grim at times, heart-warming most often, and full of good people and bad people the four vagabonds encounter in their travels down the rivers.  While it is a novel, clearly the foundation is rich in research and learning about what our Midwest was like during the Great Depression and a time when we had not come to peace with the Natives who occupied this land for centuries.  You will meet many interesting and entertaining characters in this novel in addition to our four main characters.

I give it three hearts instead of four, because I felt it dragged and was slow at times.  Many of you, as well as many reviewers, will disagree with this assessment.  As always, take my assessment with a grain of salt and enjoy This Tender Land for what it gives you.

November 2024

Kristin Hannah

Historical Fiction 2024 | 480 pages

The longest wait at the library finally came to an end!  After months of moving up the wait list, I finally received a library copy of the immensely popular The Women.

It was worth the wait.

I thought it was a non-fiction book until I brought it home and discovered it was a novel.  A novel about Frankie McGrath, who, with two weeks experience after nursing school, volunteers to be a nurse in Vietnam, coincidentally on the morning of the same day she and her parents receive notice that her beloved brother Finley was shot down and killed in Vietnam.

Frankie's story is a conglomerate of the women nurses who served in Vietnam, invisible to most people both in-country and back home, except for those soldiers who were injured and medivac-ed into the nurse's care.  This is a page-turning book, but often not an easy read.  It is by no means light and flowery.

The first section is about her experience in Vietnam.  I would not personally call it gruesome, but the realism is heart-breaking.  You will read about the men who are put in body bags and placed on sawhorses for the morgue; about the "expectants" who are not treated because they are expected to die momentarily; about shrapnel and chest wounds and bomb carnage and buddies carrying in their friend, holding his leg in one of their hands.  You will read about napalm, about bombings done by the US of Vietnamese villages, and about helicopters arriving at 2 am and rousing the nurses out of their beds.

And then Frankie comes home, to parents who were so ashamed of her for going to war that they told their friends she was studying in Florence.  You will read about the myriads of people, including Vietnam veterans, who deny her experience because "there were no women in Vietnam."  You will read about her being spit upon. Most important, you will read a lie that she chose to not question for years ... that her job is to "forget."  This was a time before PTSD was recognized by the AMA, and Frankie had no help, recognition, nor validation of nightmares that threw her off her bed, of her screaming, of anger and fear of noises, of her eventual drug addiction and suicide attempt.

Some reviewers did not like that Hannah included Frankie’s love affairs.  I did!  This is normal for an early-20-something woman.  However, Kristin Hannah says in an interview on her website:  "You’ll probably be surprised to hear that the most difficult aspects of this story for me, as the writer, centered on the love story."  I am not surprised at all. She seemed uncomfortable writing about Frankie's love life.  I didn't feel as though she truly saw and could relate to this part of Frankie.  The one aspect that made this clear is Hannah never saw anything good in these liaisons.  They all end in trauma or tragedy, and never just the way relationships typically end ... a growing apart, or development of different awareness.

Yes, for sure, I recommend The Women. If you were alive during the Vietnam war, you will find this book brings up memories for you.  Perhaps, like me, it may remind you of some action you took personally that you are no longer proud of.  It is worth the introspection.  Thank you, Nina, for your recommendation.

October 2024

Emilia Hart

Fiction 2023 | 356 pages

Many reviewers wrote that this book is about misogyny, rape, abuse.  Many wrote that it was about the resilience, strength, independence, and determination of women,  I agree with the latter interpretation.  To pay too much attention to the abusive men makes them more important and, in this novel, diminishes the women.

The women, who lived in 1619 (Altha), in 1942 (Violet), and in 2019 (Kate) are women who took charge of their lives.  These women loved nature and had a special gift for healing that, in Altha's case at least, would label her as a witch.

I loved the interplay of the three women ... each of the 53 chapters was written from the perspective of one the women, and each moved the story forward.  Combining elements of women’s fiction and magical realism, author Emilia Hart expertly weaves the three different threads of this story into a compelling narrative.  It is a creative and engaging debut novel.

Weyward women belong to the wild. And they cannot be tamed…

I recommend this strong novel.  I am looking forward to our discussion in book club tomorrow night.  Thank you, Jan!

October 2024

Nevada Barr

Fiction 2012 | 368 pages

I am probably not the only one amongst us who has read a number of Anna Pigeon books by Nevada Barr.  Ms. Barr's first Pigeon book of 19 was written in 1993.  Anna is a sleuth who solves mysteries in National Parks.  She is a strong and delightful character in beautiful and inspiring settings.

The Rope is the 17th book in the series and is essentially a prequel.  Nevada Barr fans have been asking her to write a book about how Anna Pigeon gets started as a solver of mysteries, and this is her answer.  Anna finds herself working as a seasonal worker in Glen Canyon National Recreational area after the death of her husband, and her desire to stop being a stage manager for off-Broadway plays.  When she arrives, she is pasty, skinny, weak, and uneducated about the wilderness.

When we first meet Anna, she is at the bottom of a deep sandstone hole in the desert in Glen Canyon.  She is completely naked, drugged, molested, and dying of dehydration. The first third of the book is a macabre story about her time trapped in this hole.  I began to wonder if the entire book was going to be set here, in which case it may just have been too gruesome for me to complete reading.  But Anna finds her way out, and, for the rest of the book, searches for the perpetrators who nearly killed her, and did in fact kill a woman named Kay whom Anna finds buried in her hole (which she calls a "jar."). We get to learn about Anna's motivations, proclivities, personality, decision-making, courage, resourcefulness, wisdom, and grief.

This is a marvelous Nevada Barr, with her crisp, tight writing and creative murders.  If you have not read a Nevada Barr, this would be a fine place to start!  If you have read this author, you can pick up The Rope anytime.  Except it is so popular there are wait lists at the libraries!  Yes, I recommend The Rope for your reading pleasure and to feed your imagination.

October 2024

Anna Quindlen  |  Fiction

2024, 304 pages

Too saccharin and shallow for me.

October 2024

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Kevin Fedarko

Nonfiction 2024 | 488 pages

The depth, the intricacies, the anguish, soul-arresting views, moments of great fear, but constantly prodding on, most of the time on foot, though sometimes rappelled by rope.

Kevin and his friend Pete walk the entire Grand Canyon, 750 miles, in a year which includes untold thousands of feet of elevation gain and loss through canyons, crumbling ledges, slot canyon rappels, endless searches for potholes and springs to provide water, blisters, bites, temperatures in the 90’s and 100’s and occasionally way below freezing, and probably thousands of cactus needles embedded in their skin.

He also integrates the culture of the Canyon, specifically educating us about the atrocious relationship between white people and Native American tribes.  Horrific treatment leading to abject poverty (in the spiritual as well as the financial sense of the word ...)

Another wilderness adventure, which many of you know is a passion of mine.  But sometimes women and men who achieve great feats in the wilderness cannot write worth a darn.  Bu Fedarko?  His writing was so beautiful, so exquisite, so engaging, that I consciously slowed my reading to enjoy his words as well as his sentiment.  It takes quite a while to slowly read a 488-page hardcover book.

At times it was challenging to understand his descriptions because words do not adequately describe the magnificence he was witnessing.  And sometimes his maps were a bit hard to follow. But the story ... what a truly amazing journey!  Of course, I could not experience the heavy packs Kevin and Pete carried, the animals they observed, nor the slippery rocks they navigated.

On balance, I heartily recommend this book if you are a lover of the great outdoors and/or our country's most magnificent scenery.  But do not expect to read it in a weekend.  It may take a bit of time; it took me nearly two weeks.  And it was worth every moment.

October 2024