Shelley Blanton-Stroud

Fiction 2023 | 256 pages

Speaking of falling in love with an author (seeing my last blog post!) I have also fallen in love with Shelley Blanton-Stroud, author of Copy Boy, Tomboy, and Poster Girl. 

Our hero, Jane Benjamin, has worked her way up to be gossip columnist for The Prospect, a San Francisco-based newspaper, in 1942.  But, as in her first two novels, Benjamin finds herself in the middle of real stories, not the stuff gossip is made of.  Covering seven days in November 1942, the novel opens with Jane attending a celebration for the first women welders hired and trained by Lowe Shipyards, a west coast shipbuilder, who is a leader among the shipbuilders in the competitive shipbuilding market as the United States enters WWII.  But one of the four new welders is missing from the celebration, and we soon find her dead, apparently from a faulty welding cable.  Jane is thrown into the mystery of her death, which is handled and investigated totally by internal Rowe employees, as well as the political and cultural struggle to bring women into patriotic, economic, and physical support of the war.

As with her first two novels in the Jane Benjamin series, Blanton-Stroud has created smart, scrappy, satisfying women’s history. Poster Girl is an absorbing mystery and a fascinating historical fiction story.  As with her previous novels, we learn that Jane Benjamin is flawed, over-zealous, ambitious, has no filter on her mouth, and among the most lovable characters you will find.  I just love this new author.  I can find nowhere on her site that she has another novel in the works.  I sure hope so!

I whole-heartedly recommend Poster Girl.  I suggest you read her three novels in the Jane Benjamin series in order.  While Blanton-Stroud does fill in all the information you need to know, I find it quite intriguing to watch Jane Benjamin grow and change, and to understand from whence she came.

March 2024

Claire Keegan

Fiction 2023 | 128 pages

Sharp. Crisp. Wounded. Insightful.  These are words that come to mind when I think of how Claire Keegan develops her characters.  How can she make you comprehend an important essence of a character in 20, 30, 40 small pages?   I don't quite understand it, but I love it.  Her writing is astounding!  I am not a fan of short stories, and yet the three short stories that comprise So Late in the Day are profoundly related to each other.  They grab you, and do not let go.   She tells the stories of what goes wrong between men and women, from a place of deep insight, not surface behavior (especially, she portrays the men and their psychological weaknesses).

Take an hour or two and read this short book.  Keegan has nine books, most of them about 100 pages long, and you will see more blog posts from me on this author in the next few months.  It is wonderful to fall in love with an author!

March 2024

Andrew Doughty

Nonfiction

I just read three books on Hawaii, as we plan for our trip to the Big Island.  Hawaii The Big Island Revealed by Andrew Doughty is a real gem.  Doughty, who lives in Hawaii, won't recommend someplace in his book until he has been then, often a few times.  It feels up-to-date and clear, and it is as though you are in conversation with hm.  We expect this to be our go-to book.

Hawaii, The Best Beaches on the Big Island by Robert Frutos, is a sweet and short book.  But it fulfills for us just what we wanted fulfilled.  It markets itself with this description ... "including the very best snorkeling locations." A good reference if snorkeling is your thing.

Wind, Wings and Waves by Rick Soehren is a nature guide to Hawaii.  It covers nature, geography, volcanoes, culture, plants, animals and coral reefs across all of Hawaii. Because he includes the islands of Kaua'i, O'ahu, Maui, Moloka'i, Lana'i, and the Big Island, it is more of a reference guide than a tourist guide.  This book will probably stay home when we travel.

Just in case someone else out there needs these books!!

March 2024

Lynda Rutledge

Historical Fiction 2021 | 355 pages

The story is narrated by Woodrow Wilson Nickel, a fictional character. When the story opens, he is 105, and being the age he is, he wishes to write of the experience of a lifetime, one he had when he was only seventeen.

Inspired by true events, the tale weaves real-life figures with fictional ones, including the world's first female zoo director, at the San Diego Zoo.  Two giraffes, named Boy and Girl, travel from Europe on a ship in 1938, and as they enter New York harbor, so does a hurricane.  West with Giraffes is the story of Woody Nickel who, having lost both his parents and his baby sister in the Dust Bowl in the Texas Panhandle, has traveled east to find Cuz, the boss of his third cousin.  He sees at the harbor these two giraffes, barely alive, and manages to finagle his way to sign on with Old Man to help drive Boy and Girl to San Diego.  And the adventures begin.

The story line is awesome; the connection to truth is intriguing.  There were moments I couldn't wait to turn the page, and many other moments I was simply bored. The writing was very inconsistent to me.  I read a lot of magazines while reading West with Giraffes, because I was often drawn to distractions, so I could put the book down.

One problem I had is I could not picture the rig, which made virtually every scene rather foggy. Rutledge was much better at telling the story than showing the story ... a writer's curse of death.  I finally looked this up on google and found about a half-dozen photos of rigs, all decidedly different, all carrying two giraffes each.  These photos gave me a better feel for what they may have been traveling in and wiped away a bit of the fog.

One reviewer wrote that the sentences were passive.  Even once I read this, I couldn't pick out passive sentences, but I had the feeling there was a dampening of the story, like the reader had on headphones or was under water.

Another reviewer writes:

"Woody drives for a while.
They stop so the giraffes can eat.
They run into road trouble.
Red is following them and takes pictures.
They solve their trouble.
They stop for the night.
Repeat the same sequence tomorrow, and the next day."

I think she hit the nail on the head.

I do not know quite how to explain this ... it is something we talk about in coaching ... putting a lid on it. I felt the whole time that there was a lid on this story, holding the energy down and trapping it inside.  If she had had fewer crises (instead of one every day) but let them explode ... be deeper, bigger, more interesting, more filled with action and emotion (I SO wanted to know more about the seven Black brothers and the big family's granddaughter) ... the story would have been more compelling.  If she had explored Old Man or Red in greater depth, instead of being obsessed with their secrets, we might have discovered more about who they are, what they felt, even their histories, about which we knew nothing, the story would have been more compelling.  We only came to know one coming-of-age character, Woodrow Wilson Nickel, and that was not enough.

Two members of my book club recommended West with Giraffes for our March read.  I will be fascinated to hear what they have to say.  In the meantime, I don’t recommend this book.  Guess I will return to my magazines now.

February 2024

Michael Finkel

Nonfiction 2023/ 225 pages

Stéphane Breitwieser, along with his girlfriend Anne-Catherine, is believed to be the most prolific art thief of all time, conducting 239 heists, typically in broad daylight, from 172 museums, and amassing $2 billion in art works. Different from most (all?) other art thieves, during his heyday, he never sold or attempted to sell a single piece of work.  He stole them for their artistic beauty and displayed them all in the attic bedroom and salon he shared with Anne-Catherine.  Check out this book if for no other reason than to see the drawing of these two rooms.  He was obsessed with the beauty of exquisitely completed art, much of it from the Renaissance period, and all from a wife wide range of media ... painting, sculpture, ivory, metal chalices, wood, weapons ... a large and diverse range.  His thieving eventually transforms from love to compulsion to obsession to maniacal.

And his story is absolutely true.  This is a "true crime" book.  For that reason, it deserves a read.

However (I know, it has been weeks since I did not give a book four hearts) I found it poorly written.  It reads like a spreadsheet to me. He stole this piece, from this museum or show or gallery, by removing 4 or 8 or 30 screws or two locks and stashed it under his jacket or his backpack or Anne-Catherine's large purse, and walked out of the building in the middle of the day, often chatting with a guard or patron.  This pattern repeats itself through the book, without much interlude.

Do I recommend The Art Thief?  Mildly.  The story is interesting, but I will be curious to hear/remember why my book club selected this short read.  It just didn't quite woo me.

February 2024

Abraham Verghese

Fiction 2023 | 725 pages

I picked it up at the library, and then took it back unread.  Then I did it again.  And then a third time.  I was intimidated by the length (900 pages large print; 725 regular print).  But this last time, I committed and read it through.  What a profound, delightful, meaningful, engaging, powerful, interesting book. (it took me 19 days to read).

We begin in 1900 and follow a family for three generations and across two continents, until Ammachi's granddaughter makes some astounding discoveries at the end of the book, in 1977.  We learn early on about "The Condition," so named by Ammachi, the 12-year-old Indian girl who is forced into an arranged marriage and who eventually becomes the beloved matriarch of this family.  She notices, as does the generation before her, that in every generation, someone dies from drowning.  The drowners also hate the water, and refuse to go near it all of their lives, from fussing under the baptismal font until their final accidental encounter with water.

But soon the book becomes not only about the family, but about land, and the caste system in India, and land growth and development, and leprosy, and advances in the medical field as well as in cultural and social norms.  There is a section near the end about the Indian caste revolution and the democratic election of a Communist government.

The family is complex, with their "secrets" like any family and generations-old relationships both within the family itself and the lower caste that serves them and their land.

Verghese is a doctor who decided mid-career to train at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and has gone on to achieve distinction in both fields.  You will enjoy his considerable medical knowledge as well as his very engaging characters and story development.

I must recommend this tome ... it is destined to be a classic.  AND, know that snow days or beach days will help you navigate the length, complexity, and depth of The Covenant of Water.  Please post your thoughts and reactions here.  I will be eager to read what you think about this delightful book.

February 2024

Heather Morris

Historical Fiction 2018 | 288 pages

This short book is another gem ... only this is one everyone SHOULD read, not only might enjoy reading!

The Tattooist of Auschwitz is a story of a young Slovakian Jew named Lale Sokolov who was taken from his home to save his family in 1942, and transported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, a German Nazi concentration and extermination camp, in Poland.  While there, he worked as the camp tattooist (Tätowierer) and fell in love with a Slovakian Jewish girl named Gita Furman. She saw no reason to get to know him, initially. To her, "they were never going to leave that place, other than through the chimney."  But they did and after the war, the lovers found each again, and were married for 58 years.

As such, the book depicts not only the nightmarish wartime reality, violence, humiliation, degradation, starvation, murder, and completely inhumane day-to-day life at a concentration camp but also describes a love story that survives despite the enormous difficulties.

For many years, this history was known only to the closest family of Lale and Gita. Lale was simply afraid to discuss his past so as not to be accused of collaborating with the Germans. Only after the death of his beloved Gita in 2003, when he first met the writer Heather Morris, did Lale decide to tell Heather about everything that had happened during the war.

Claims of factual inaccuracies have been made by the Auschwitz Memorial Research Center.  For example, they say that a tattooist never had this role as his job.  The assignment at tattooists was more random and short-term than represented in the book.  Somehow, I don't find it necessary to ferret out truth from fiction in "historical fiction."  If there is a core element of truth, with attempted research behind it, and the book raises my awareness about a time period or an event, I consider myself well-served.

I heartily recommend this book.  It is insightful, yet hopeful.

February 2024

Shelley Blanton-Stroud

Fiction 2020 | 309 pages

Tomboy is an excellent sequel to Shelley Blanton-Stroud's first novel, Copy Boy.  In Tomboy, Jane Benjamin reverts to her rightful gender, female.  She has been accepted at her SanFrancisco- based newspaper, the Prospect, in a low-level cub reporter role, but, still, as a young woman during the Depression Era.

Through a series of flukes, Jane gets herself on a trip to report on a female tennis star at Wimbledon, which proves to be more than Jane bargained for when the tennis star’s coach drops dead at the game. On the trip back across the Atlantic, more questions arise, and Jane soon finds herself researching another mystery.  She wants to be a gossip columnist but keeps running into real news to write about!

I loved the way the author handles Jane's trip across the sea to England, and back again, on the RMS Queen Mary.  Each chapter opens with the deck of the Queen Mary that is the setting for the chapter, and it is fascinating to watch the workings of the ship, as well as Jane and the hardships she encounters.  I swear, I could feel the rocking of the great ship.  Jane is befriended by the tennis star, Tommie, and their relationship is complex.  They serve as mirrors to each other, right down to what shoes they wear.

Jane is not an easy-to-love character.  She lies, steals, and uses people.  She is irresponsible and selfish; naive and moody.  And yet, because she sees clearly who she is and begins to admit it to herself, she is endearing and you root for her. She is also feisty, ambitious, resourceful, and determined.  In the end, she does her best to not hurt people.

I urge you to climb aboard the lively Blanton-Stroud train.  A friend of a friend, the author recently retired from teaching writing at Sacramento State.  She is a mature writer, even in this, her second novel.  I am at the edge of my seat, awaiting the third novel, The Poster Girl. RECOMMENDED!

January 2024

Keegan Claire Keegan

Fiction 2010 | 95 pages

Now I understand why everyone says, “I didn’t want this book to end….”

An unnamed girl is given to her aunt and uncle for a few weeks of fostering on the Irish countryside, while her mother delivers yet another baby.  While this girl has few words or experiences to describe her emotions, she soon learns what love is.

This novella will take you two hours to read, and it is worth every minute.

February 2024