Matthew Dicks |  Fiction

I LOVE this book!  It is sweet and delightful and a pleasure to read.  (Thank you, Janey!)

Max is an unusual 8 year old boy.  He likes to be by himself.  He has poor social skills.  He needs a schedule, and commitment to it.  He doesn't like change.  And sometimes he gets “stuck.”  But he does have an imaginary friend, Budo.  This delightful story is all about Max's imaginary friend.  And the fun part is, it is written by Budo himself!

Budo is invisible to everyone but Max and he can go wherever he wants, which makes him a great storyteller!   We learn what it is like to be imaginary.  Budo can be seen by other imaginary friends, like Graham and Puppy and Teeny and Oswald.  But all imaginary friends are just what their makers imagine.  Budo can walk through closed doors, because that’s how Max imagined him.  But he can’t sleep, because Max didn’t think of that.  Some imaginary friends can fly.  Some, like Puppy, are not very smart.  Budo, of course, is very smart!

Imaginary friends live until their makers forget about them.  Many of them “disappear” the first few days of kindergarten, as their makers begin to interact with, well, real kids.   But some live on much longer.

Did you have an imaginary friend when you were a child?  Someone you could talk with, play with, or seek wisdom from?  Please tell us about him/her!  I didn't.  However, I do have an imaginary friend now.  His name is Beryl.

Kristin Hannah |  Fiction

I don’t know Kristin Hannah’s work well, but it seems she has a real gift for breathing life into her characters.  The Great Alone is haunting and complex.  

This novel takes place mostly in 1974 and 1978, with a resolution and completion in 1986.  Ernt Allbright has returned a changed man from serving in Vietnam, and he suffers nightmares, anger, and violence.  He can’t find his way back to the man he was before, even with the unfailing love of his wife Cora and daughter Leni.  After losing jobs and relocating his family many times, he finally decides to move them to a wild and remote corner of Alaska.  This is the Alaska that is fiercely independent, where people are isolated and all their energy goes to survival in a wild, beautiful, unrelenting, frozen land.

Leni is the protagonist in The Great Alone.  She is 13 when the novel begins, and this is her story about learning to love and survive in Alaska.  She struggles to reach womanhood, when her primary task is to attempt to protect her mother from her father, which she fails at over and over again.  There are other wonderful characters in the community in which the Allbrights carve a home.  The local wealthy guy, Tom; Large Marge; and Mad Earl ... whose names give you clues to their personalities!  And then there is Matthew.  But I'll leave you to discover these people on your own.

Before I began this book, and every single time I picked it up to read it, I had to take a deep breath (which is easier said than done since my bout with pneumonia) and steel myself, because there was a chance that Ernt was going to beat his wife Cora.  There's a lot of domestic violence in the middle third of this book.  Be prepared.

Hannah's depiction of the three main characters is what makes this novel, despite it's sad premise, compelling and difficult to put down.  Their intense and difficult love for each another, and how they fall in love with the challenges of surviving in stunning Alaska, will keep you glued to the page, and staying up later than you intend to.  Take a breath and be transported to a wild place of incomparable beauty and pain.

Ruth Ware|  Fiction

Like the best seller, The Woman in Cabin 10, Ruth Ware has written another intriguing mystery novel.  I am struck by the complexity and intricacy of the stories she tells ... she’s just not like many mystery writers where the plot is:  “Someone is killed.  Who did it?”

Four dear friends, Kate, our narrator Isa, Fatima, and Thea, who attended a boarding school together when they were 15, reunite 17 years later, when a body is found in a tidal estuary near London, just a short distance from Kate's home.  Three of them receive the text from Kate they hoped they never would receive.  It says simply, “I need you.”  And thus begins the disentangling of what really happened 17 years ago among these four inseparable friends.

Absolutely, read it.  It's for fun, for intrigue, for wondering what the real story is and trying to figure it out, and for resolution.

Deborah Harkness |  Fiction

This is the second book in a trilogy by Harkness.  The first one is called A Discovery of Witches.  (See my blog posting on 01/23/2018).  I liked this second book a lot; was never bored, and it entertained me through all 592 pages.  It was the perfect read while recovering from unexpected surgery.

This second book is also a fantasy, featuring witches, vampires, daemons, and humans.  It is set in 1590, as Matthew (a vampire) and Diana (a witch) have time-traveled back in time to find a witch to help Diana learn her skills as a witch, and to search for the all-important book, Ashmole 782.

I rated it three hearts instead of four because it is all about relationships – and there isn’t much action.  The relationships are fascinating, interesting, and teach us a lot about Elizabethan London.  However, I think it may a bit slow for Outlander fans, with its pattern of relationship – crisis – relationship – crisis.

Matthew and Diana grow together and it is fun to meet their extended families.  (Well, mostly Matthew’s, since we are in the 16^th century!)   I think if you like book 1, you will like book 2.  I intend to read Book 3, The Book of Life, when it is warm and sunny on my back deck this summer.

Rakesh Satyal |  Fiction

This is the Deschutes County Library 2018 community read.  And so I really WANT to give it four hearts, but it doesn't quite slide into that category for me.  No One Can Pronounce My Name is the story of Indian-Americans living in Cleveland.  Some lived in India earlier in their lives; some were born here, all identified as Indian.  This was their story about how they maintain their culture (my mouth often watered as many social events were held around homemade pakoras and samosas); how they integrate; how they assimilate; how they befriend one another; how they deal with traditions and values and norms both American and Indian; what they gain and lose when they do assimilate.

It is not a heavy read … you will laugh and cry sometimes.  The main characters are in their 20s, 30s and 40s. They are gay, straight and questioning.  They desperately want friendships and intimacy, and don’t always find the vehicles to create meaningful relationships.  Their jobs and passions differ, and the overlap of the circumstances of their lives happen by coincidence, a chance, sharing a workplace or a moment in a bar with an unlikely other.

I learned something about the challenges of building a new social structure.  I chose three stars because I found the writing confusing at times and that made it a little less engaging than I had hoped.

If you live in Deschutes County, read this and go the workshops that are sponsored by the library and hit Bend High to hear the author speak.  If you are not local, yes, I still recommend it, just not with my full heart and enthusiasm.  It’s worth a peruse as you make your own decision.

Katie Kitamura  |  Fiction

I made it half through this novel before I tossed it on the return pile. I think it is absurdly written.  Written in first person, our main character travels to a small town in Greece to find her estranged husband, who seems to have disappeared.  I could not wrap myself around her decisions and action.  In a very remote village, in this hotel, there are two desk clerks, one driver, one manager and only rarely, a guest.  I cannot come to terms with why she didn't tell these people she was concerned and looking for him.  His belongings were still in a room, which the hotel staff cleaned out for another guest.  So they also knew he was missing but she never asked anyone ... when did you see him last?  Did he say where he was going?  Had he gone to this place or that place?

Her actions were perhaps consistent in one way, even though they didn't make sense to me.    The main character has no name; an apt match for a woman with no emotions, no emotional depth at all.  I really didn't like her.

Then, a bit before I hung the book up, she spends something like 8 pages explaining to us a conversation between two of the staff members.  It was spoken in Greek, of which, she doesn't speak a word.  So she speculated from gestures, tones and facial expressions.  I found this egotistical, ungrounded and boring.

Something meaningful happens at the beginning of chapter 7, but I read that chapter and still quit.

Forget this one!

Joshua Hammer  |  Fiction

Love the title; can’t abide the book.  I only read enough to feel I could legitimately put it down.

Helen Macdonald |  Nonfiction

What a surprise!  I thought H is for Hawk was a novel.  I don’t know what my brain was thinking … that it was a posthumous replacement of H is for Homicide by Sue Grafton?  It was a shock to discover this is nonfiction, and it really IS about training a hawk, a goshawk.  I would never have picked this book off the library shelf if I knew these salient points.  What I DID know is numerous people recommended it to me.  And so I read it.

And I loved it.  Helen Macdonald is a superb writer, I believe, to write about a hawk – a topic I had NO interest in – with such sensitivity, insight, suspense, humor, vulnerability, awareness, and knowledge!  At one point she spends an entire page explaining different hawk hoods.  Seriously?  Whatever she didn’t know already, she researched very well.

This tale of her training her goshawk parallels T.H. White’s 1951 nonfiction book, The Goshawk.  A constant theme is to compare and contrast what White is doing with his goshawk, with Helen’s decisions in modern-day England about her own.  Yes, that is the same T.H. White who wrote The Once and Future King and The Sword in the Stone. 

Helen’s father dies early in the book, and I realize that my friends recommended H is for Hawk because of how Macdonald interweaves her grief into the tale of her goshawk.  Every 20 or 30 pages she talks about what is occurring with her grief, the memorial service, being with her mom, etc., and observes what she is learning and what parallels there are.  It is a very non-sappy approach to grief, and I think one readers can understand readily.  I am most profoundly impacted by a quote she shares from poet Marianne Moore:  “The cure for loneliness is solitude.”  Makes me think.

Yes, read it.  Perhaps it will surprise you as it did me.  Perhaps you will learn something about yourself, as I did.  Perhaps you will decide to train a goshawk

Phil Knight |  Memoir

Shoe Dog is fun!  It certainly doesn’t read like an autobiography of a mucky-muck corporate exec, Founder, CEO. And yet, it is!  I love the way Knight laughs at himself, shares his faux pas and mistakes, his weirdness, his worries.  As a professional coach of entrepreneurs I was intrigued by his lack of articulated vision.  He talks about a “crazy Idea” but isn’t very clear. We eventually learn that it is buying shoes from Japan and selling them here.  But how fun to watch his crazy ideas evolve over the years.

Knight faces untold challenges.  He begins with $50 from his father in 1963 by selling shoes out of his Plymouth Valiant, and grossing $8000.  His memoir is humbling, seemingly unfiltered, refreshingly naïve.  He doesn’t do much of anything by the books.  I don’t know HOW he remembers most of these events from 1964, 65, and beyond, but he seems able to pull threads from his past and watch them reawaken.

Three hearts vs four was a tough decision for this book.  While I really enjoyed the tale Knight weaves for us and his engaging style, I became a little bored with his financial difficulties.  And not so much even bored with those, but I actually wanted to know more.  Every time he spoke about design challenges, or marketing challenges, or his social ineptness, I found myself leaning forward.  I wanted more on the breadth of his business – more about his retail philosophy, more about the athletes he signed, more about his organization structure and how he grew and inspired his employee base.  Knight gives us one sentence –  one lousy sentence – when he changes the name of his business from Blue Ribbon to Nike, after seven years.  I bet there was a bit of angst over that momentous decision!  Shoe Dog may also be a bit more interesting to us Oregonians than to mere mortals(!)  It is an Oregon story, down to its roots.

Of the reviews I read, I like Bill Gate’s best:

“A refreshingly honest reminder of what the path to business success really looks like. It’s a messy, perilous, and chaotic journey riddled with mistakes, endless struggles, and sacrifice. Here Knight opens up in a way few CEOs are willing to do. I don’t think Knight sets out to teach the reader anything. Instead, he accomplishes something better. He tells his story as honestly as he can. It’s an amazing tale.”—Bill Gates, one of his favorite books of 2016

Amanda Coplin |  Fiction

In many of my recent blog posts, I complain about shallow characters.  Not in The Orchardist!  You will know these characters so well, you will be able to predict their actions.  I don’t know for certain if that is good or bad, but these characters are rich and interesting!

At the turn of the twentieth century, William Talmadge tends apples and apricots in his orchard in rural Washington State.  One day, two young, scared, pregnant women appear on his land and, without speaking, Talmadge, Jane, and Della build a relationship. Of course, their lives are changed forever. And the story progresses from there, through the next 20 years.

This is 1900 in the Pacific Northwest.  Before roads, before a lot of civilization as we know it.  People live hardscrabble lives off the land.  I am again amazed that this is a first novel.  Coplin’s writing renders depth into a small and (often) picturesque slice of life.  Much as the characters in this novel are fiercely independent, so is Coplin, in her style.  I found myself particularly intrigued by her use of chapters.  When they need to be a paragraph long, they are.  When they need to be pages and pages, they are.  I also smiled at the names she uses.  Talmadge is always Talmadge, to everyone.  I had to check the inside flap of the book to see if Talmadge was his first name.  And his friend Caroline Middey is always Caroline Middey.  Every single reference, every time she appears, she is Caroline Middey.

I don’t want to give the story away, but it is not a roses and lavender story.  These folks, though incredibly successful at growing fruit, have hard social and interpersonal challenges.  There is birth and death and violence and love and loyalty and betrayal.  And always, apricots and apples and yummy food!

The Orchardist is a long book; it slows in places and speeds up in places.  But it is the type of book you will read in front of the fireplace (or your modern-day version) evening after evening, for a few days.  And you will think about these characters in-between your reading.  Yes, I am still elevating and warming my ankle, so this was a PERFECT book for my current adventure!

Thank you to my friend Melinda for suggesting this book to me (and us!)