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