Lost Among the Living

Lost Among the Living
by Simone St. James
Rating: ★★★★
isbn: 9780451476197
Publication Date: April 5, 2016
Pages: 318
Genre: Fiction, Paranormal
Publisher: NAL / New American Library

England, 1921. Three years after her husband, Alex, disappeared, shot down over Germany, Jo Manders still mourns his loss. Working as a paid companion to Alex's wealthy, condescending aunt, Dottie Forsyth, Jo travels to the family's estate in the Sussex countryside. But there is much she never knew about her husband's origins...and the revelation of a mysterious death in the Forsyths' past is just the beginning...

All is not well at Wych Elm House. Dottie's husband is distant, and her son was grievously injured in the war. Footsteps follow Jo down empty halls, and items in her bedroom are eerily rearranged. The locals say the family is cursed, and that a ghost in the woods has never rested. And when Jo discovers her husband's darkest secrets, she wonders if she ever really knew him. Isolated in a place of deception and grief, she must find the truth or lose herself forever.

And then a familiar stranger arrives at Wych Elm House...

Not only a re-read, but a re-re-read – and still I couldn’t remember most of the book’s happenings. Most of the time, I like when this happens, because, though I may not remember plot points, I remember a sense of place. Not so much with this book, and I can’t really say why.

I stand by most of what I said in my original review. Except it’s not my least favourite of St. James’ first 5, it’s my second least favourite. I remember The Other Side of Midnight being less enjoyable. Although now I’m questioning my memory; a re-read of it might be in order.

The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend

The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend
by Alice Menzies (translator), Katarina Bivald
Rating: ★★★★
isbn: 9780701189068
Publication Date: June 18, 2015
Pages: 376
Genre: Fiction
Publisher: Chatto & Windus

Sara is 28 and has never been outside Sweden - except in the (many) books she reads. When her elderly penfriend Amy invites her to come and visit her in Broken Wheel, Iowa, Sara decides it's time. But when she arrives, there's a twist waiting for her - Amy has died. Finding herself utterly alone in a dead woman's house in the middle of nowhere was not the holiday Sara had in mind.

But Sara discovers she is not exactly alone. For here in this town so broken it's almost beyond repair are all the people she's come to know through Amy's letters: poor George, fierce Grace, buttoned-up Caroline and Amy's guarded nephew Tom.

Sara quickly realises that Broken Wheel is in desperate need of some adventure, a dose of self-help and perhaps a little romance, too. In short, this is a town in need of a bookshop.

Another re-read – I seem to be on a general-fiction-involving-books spree at this very moment.

This time though, my take on the book is very different. I first read this in 2016, before the End Of Life As We Knew It. Now, living mid-shitstorm as we are, this story struck me as melancholy. So very melancholy. This is a town gasping its last breath, and an MC that has lived her whole life in a shade of grey, whose massive adventure in life is to visit her elderly pen pal in a tiny town in Iowa. Every single one the people in this story has given up. Until Sara arrives and the novelty of a tourist gives them all something to focus on.

The plot itself is highly improbable, but the outlook is so dismal it doesn’t matter – anything to give these people some hope – and the improbability gives the story and the characters a chance to be their quirky selves. It’s a story with a happy ending for everybody – maybe even the town.

My previous review (inside the spoiler tags to save space):

View Spoiler »

I Was Told it Would Get Easier

I Was Told it Would Get Easier
by Abbi Waxman
Rating: ★★★½
isbn: 9781472277152
Publication Date: August 5, 2020
Pages: 329
Genre: Fiction
Publisher: Headline Review

Jessica and her daughter Emily are touring colleges. For Jessica, this is going to be the chance to reconnect with the daughter she seems to have lost. But for Emily, it's a preview of freedom, and the chance to explore a new and exciting future.

Yet before any of this can happen, their perfectly planned trip is derailed into a series of off-roading misadventures: mother-daughter skiving, skipped mandatory meetings, and a scuffle with the FBI...
With seatbelts fastened, physical and emotional baggage safely stowed away, this mother-daughter duo might be ready to hit the road, but are they ready to reconnect to the person sitting next to them?

I am on both an Abbi Waxman and a general fiction jag, so I ordered this the other day, even though I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to be the target audience for it.

I was correct. It was still a good read, but while I can empathise with the mother and daughter in this book because I have a bff with a teenage daughter, I myself am not a mother to a teenage human (just a teenage cat, which is enough thankyouverymuch) so I failed to emotionally connect to the narrative. That’s ok, because it still entertained me and took my mind off my own real life. It also made me thankful I grew up when I did, those glory days when you could just graduate from high school and with good grades and better SAT/ACT test scores, just apply to your universities of choice. Sure, Ivies still made you work for it, but it wasn’t the trial of fire and ice it is today. Also: corporate college tour companies; my mind boggles.

The Bookish Life of Nina Hill

The Bookish Life of Nina Hill
by Abbi Waxman
Rating: ★★★★½
isbn: 9781472266217
Publication Date: July 9, 2019
Pages: 335
Genre: Fiction
Publisher: Headline Review

Meet Nina Hill: A young woman supremely confident in her own... shell.
Nina has her life just as she wants it: a job in a bookstore, an excellent trivia team and a cat named Phil. If she sometimes suspects there might be more to life than reading, she just shrugs and picks up a new book.

So when the father she never knew existed dies, leaving behind innumerable sisters, brothers, nieces, and nephews, Nina is horrified. They all live close by! She'll have to Speak. To. Strangers.
And if that wasn't enough, Tom, her trivia nemesis, has turned out to be cute, funny and interested in getting to know her...
It's time for Nina to turn her own fresh page, and find out if real life can ever live up to fiction...

Back when I read The Garden of Small Beginnings, I realised I’d read Abbi Waxman before, but I could find no record of my reading The Bookish Life of Nina Hill. This drove me more than a little cray-cray at the time because I remembered reading the book; I distinctly remembered many, many plot points. But nowhere on my too-many book sites was there any record of it. I did finally find the book on my bookshelves (the Read bookshelves), and accepted the fact that I must have read it during the Great Reading Slump of 2020, and it fell through the cracks of my book-life despondency, never to be acknowledged until now.

I’ve recently ordered Adult Assembly Required, and as it involves a few of the characters from Nina Hill, I thought now would be a good time to re-read tBLoNH.

I love this book. Waxman writes incredibly likeable characters, laugh-out-loud dialog that’s witty as hell, and buried at exactly the right depth in all this sunshine-y fun is the acknowledgment of Very Real Life in the form of crippling anxiety. Nothing is downplayed or made light of, but it’s not turned into a massive melodrama either. I don’t have crippling anxiety, but Nina Hill and I share a lot of other character traits (actually, I probably fall closer to Lydia, her niece, but never mind), and I’d like to think that if I did have crippling anxiety, I’d handle it with the same optimism and humor Nina Hill does, even if she sometimes visits self-denial-land more often that she should.

My loquaciousness is still sleeping off the 3 day weekend, so that’s really all I’ve got. It was a great book, even the second time around, and a lot of fun to read. I can’t wait for Adult Assembly Required to arrive, and in the meantime, I’ll likely re-read The Garden of Small Beginnings too.

The J.M. Barrie Ladies’ Swimming Society

The J.M. Barrie Ladies' Swimming Society
by Barbara J. Zitwer
Rating: ★★★½
Publication Date: April 5, 2012
Pages: 271
Genre: Fiction
Publisher: Short Books

When Joey Rubin stumbles upon a group of elderly women swimming in a lake one freezing January morning, she thinks they must be mad. But then they dare her to come in...

Joey, an overworked New York architect, is in the Cotswolds to oversee the restoration of Stanway House - the stately home that inspired J.M. Barrie to write Peter Pan. It hasn't been easy. The local residents aren't exactly welcoming, and then there's the problem of the brooding caretaker, a man who seems to take every opportunity
to undermine her plans. She soon begins to feel that she can't do anything right.

Until, that is, she discovers the J.M. Barrie Ladies' Swimming Society and begins to take a daily dip with them in their own private Neverland. For Joey, meeting Aggie, Gala, Lilia and co. is a life-changing experience, the beginning of a friendship that will transform her in the most remarkable of ways...

What my daddy would have called a “fair to middlin'” story. It was good, evenly paced, well-written. Interesting without being exciting. A page turner without being suspenseful. It was extraordinarily realistic in its portrayal of adult friendships – pretty much all interpersonal relationships – without being dramatic.

A very ordinary story, well done.

Bitch in a Bonnet: Reclaiming Jane Austen from the Stiffs, the Snobs, the Simps and the Saps (Volume 2)

Bitch in a Bonnet
by Robert Rodi
Rating: ★★★★½
isbn: 9781499133769
Publication Date: August 10, 2014
Pages: 514
Genre: Books and Reading
Publisher: Createspace

Novelist Rodi continues his broadside against the depiction of Jane Austen as a “a woman’s writer … quaint and darling, doe-eyed and demure, parochial if not pastoral, and dizzily, swooningly romantic — the inventor and mother goddess of ‘chick lit.’” Instead he sees her as “a sly subversive, a clear-eyed social Darwinist, and the most unsparing satirist of her century.”

In this volume, which collects and amplifies three years’ worth of blog entries, he combs through the final three novels in Austen’s canon — Emma, Northanger Abbey, and Persuasion — with the aim of charting her growth as both a novelist and a humorist, and of shattering the notion that she’s a romantic of any kind.

I’m probably ruined for any further literary criticism at this point. This book was so much fun, and Rodi’s analysis laced with so many quips and jokes and sass, I doubt I’ll ever have any patience for staid, thoughtful, academically minded critiques.

I say “Rodi’s analysis” but that’s probably building the lily a bit. Rodi is an author (whose work I’ve never read), and a man who loves Jane Austen’s work. Not because it’s romantic, but because it is absolutely everything but romantic. He’s a true fan of her writing, her satire, her wit, her ability to create characters that are deeply flawed and darkly funny. He maintains that the prevailing viewpoint that Austen is a writer of romances is the fault of Hollywood and the BBC, who don’t know who to treat her books as the dark comedies they are, and fall back, instead, on the relationships.

Volume 2 covers Emma, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, and he goes through each book in detail, using a lot of quotes and discussing, in detail, what’s going on in the stories, as if he’s sitting with friends in a version of a bitch and stitch gathering. Only without the swooning over Colin Firth’s wet t-shirt contest of one. There’s no academic speak here and quite a few moments where I laughed out loud.

The thing is, Rodi’s correct: when you really, deeply read Austen, she’s not even a little bit romantic. She has no patience for sentiment, or affection, or weddings. I knew there was a reason I adored her books. For Austen, the more romantic a character, the bigger fool she made of them, and even her heroines aren’t allowed to be great. Good, but not great; not flawless in the least, just the least flawed in a cast of fools, villains and cads.

I fully recognise that I enjoy Rodi’s take on things because it’s a form of confirmation bias, but I don’t care. I’ve ordered the first volume, covering S&S, P&P and Mansfield Park, and I look forward to delving into those with him.

Northanger Abbey

Northanger Abbey
by Jane Austen
Rating: ★★★
Publication Date: January 1, 1975
Pages: 222
Genre: Fiction, Literature
Publisher: Folio Society

During an eventful season at Bath, young, naove Catherine Morland experiences fashionable society for the first time. She is delighted with her new acquaintances: flirtatious Isabella, who introduces Catherine to the joys of Gothic romances, and sophisticated Henry and Eleanor Tilney, who invite her to their father's house, Northanger Abbey. There, influenced by novels of horror and intrigue, Catherine comes to imagine terrible crimes committed by General Tilney, risking the loss of Henry's affection, and must learn the difference between fiction and reality, false friends and true. With its broad comedy and irrepressible heroine, Northanger Abbey is the most youthful and optimistic of Jane Austen's work.

My thoughts about this book are about as uneven as the book’s narrative, but I’m … 90% sure I like this one even less than I like Emma.

This re-reading was done in parallel to Robert Rodi’s analysis of the same in his book Bitch in a Bonnet, in the hopes that he could show me this book from a more appealing direction. He didn’t, but that’s because he doesn’t think much of this book as a whole either.

As a story, there’s no there there in Northanger Abbey, and our ‘heroine’ Catherine is naive to the point of imbecility. The hero is an ass, charming and witty though he may be, and even Austen knew it:

…I must confess that his affection originated in nothing better than gratitude, or, in other words, that a persuasion of her partiality for him had been the only cause of giving her a serious thought. It is a new circumstance in romance, I acknowledge, and dreadfully derogatory of an heroine’s dignity; but if it be as new in common life, the credit of a wild imagination will at least be all my own.

The narrative structure is meandering, at best.

But the satire is delicious and I lived for the moments, like in the above quote, that Austen breaks the fourth wall and talks to the reader as herself. Because this book was originally written and completed before all her other books (but published posthumously), her humor is much more in-line with her juvenile works. In other words, her wit is rawly scathing, and lacks the subtleties she developed in her adult works. When she has a go at someone, you know it. It’s a lot of fun.

I’m definitely not sorry I re-read it; Austen’s worst is still miles better than almost everybody else’s best. But I can now confidently put Northanger Abbey and Emma at the end of the shelf, and save my indulgent re-reads for the other 4 novels.

The Library Book

The Library Book
by Susan Orlean
Rating: ★★★★½
isbn: 9781782392262
Publication Date: November 1, 2018
Pages: 319
Genre: Non-fiction
Publisher: Atlantic Books

After moving to Los Angeles, Susan Orlean became fascinated by a mysterious local crime that has gone unsolved since it was carried out on the morning of 29 April 1986: who set fire to the Los Angeles Public Library, ultimately destroying more than 400,000 books, and perhaps even more perplexing, why?

With her characteristic humour, insight and compassion, Orlean uses this terrible event as a lens through which to tell the story of all libraries - their history, their meaning and their uncertain future as they adapt and redefine themselves in a digital world.

Filled with heart, passion and extraordinary characters, The Library Book discusses the larger, crucial role that libraries play in our lives.

When I reviewed The Man Who Loved Books Too Much, I said I dislike true crime, yet here I am again, talking about a true crime book. Sort of.

The publisher’s classification for this book is ‘true crime’ – and it does cover in detail the devastating fire at Central Library in Los Angeles in 1986, but the case remains unsolved, the suspect deceased, and some questions remain about whether or not it was actually arson – so was a crime even committed?

In the same way The Orchid Thief by the same author was nominally about the theft of protected orchid species from parkland, but was really more about the obsessive allure of orchids that drives some people to extremes, so The Library Book is nominally about the Central Library fire, but really a history of the LA Library system and an ode to the importance and joy of libraries in general.

For those that enjoy True Crime, this book is going to be frustrating; for those of us that aren’t fans of true crime, this book will fall somewhere in the range of ‘more palatable’ and ‘perfect’. For me, it was close to perfect. I was fascinated by the narrative of the fire itself, how bad it was, how challenging it was to put out, the whole walk-through of the day itself. The logistics of the aftermath and conserving as many of the books as they could. I was interested in the investigation; the manpower, the few slim leads, interviews with those involved. Mystery catnip! The few chapters devoted to the suspect, Harry Peak, were good, if disturbing. LA really has more than its share of people who live in their own reality.

Orlean interspersed all of this with a history of the Library system, from its modest start as a fee-based lending library at the edge of the wild west, to the massive city-wide system it is today, including concise bios of the many men and women who headed up, ran, and directed the library. A few of these chapters crawled a bit, but there were enough characters involved to keep things mostly lively.

I genuinely enjoy Orlean’s writing; she’s a journalist who knows how to do her research and engage the reader without trying to solicit a reaction in one direction or another. A most excellent read.

DNF: The Cursing Mommy’s Book of Days

The Cursing Mommy's Book of Days
by Ian Frazier
Rating: ★★
isbn: 9780374133184
Publication Date: January 1, 2012
Pages: 244
Genre: Fiction
Publisher: Farrar Straus and Giroux

Based on his widely read columns for The New Yorker, Ian Frazier's uproarious first novel, The Cursing Mommy's Book of Days, centers on a profoundly memorable character, sprung from an impressively fertile imagination. Structured as a daybook of sorts, the book follows the Cursing Mommy―beleaguered wife of Larry and mother of two boys, twelve and eight―as she tries (more or less) valiantly to offer tips on how to do various tasks around the home, only to end up on the ground, cursing, surrounded by broken glass. Her voice is somewhere between Phyllis Diller's and Sylvia Plath's: a hilariously desperate housewife with a taste for swearing and large glasses of red wine, who speaks to the frustrations of everyday life.

This book has been on my TBR for years; the title appealed to me in the moment – I’m not a mommy but I can curse with the best of them. A few months ago, I had it in hand to purge, but I read the flap and the author is a New Yorker columnist so I held it back. After reading Are We Having Fun Yet by Lucy Mangan, I thought it would be the right time to read this one as a comparison of sorts: how would the American version of the concept compare to the UK version? How would a male author’s portrayal of a columnist-working-from-home mother of two stack up against the same dynamic in the UK?

It didn’t, obviously. I wasn’t able to make it through February. But I’m not sure this is a condemnation; it’s just a very different delivery and one that ultimately didn’t suit me at all because – hilariously – of the swearing.

Do you remember the comedian Sam Kennison? For those that don’t, he was an American stand-up comedian and actor. A former Pentecostal preacher, he performed stand-up routines that were characterized by intense sudden tirades, punctuated with his distinctive scream, similar to charismatic preachers. The Screaming Mommy is the Sam Kennison of mommy diarists, and I think you have to have a certain sense of humor to appreciate it. Entire paragraphs of all-caps profanity, using f*ck as every part of speech, usually in the same sentence.

Apart from that, it’s not bad, but still didn’t work as a book; if I skipped those tirades, the narrative still failed to connect with me and frankly, I found some of it disturbingly hypocritical – like when she’s wondering why her 12-year-old son needs to be medicated to control his angry, emotional outbursts in school, as she’s smashing an entire sink full of dishes with a hammer because she tried to rinse her hands off, and the splash back from a dirty cereal bowl stained her silk blouse.

In the author’s defence, this book was based on a series of columns written for The New Yorker, and as columns, I think they’d have worked much better; outbursts like this are probably easier to chuckle over when they’re fed to the audience once a month. All together like this in book form, it’s just way too much. Lucy Mangan manages to convey the same frustration and angst in a way the reader can laugh with, rather than feeling as though they’re laughing at the crazy person who escaped the asylum, and she manages to do it with a semblance of continuing plot, or at least character, development.

Horseshoe Crabs and Velvet Worms

Horseshoe Crabs and Velvet Worms
by Richard Fortey
Rating: ★★★★
isbn: 9780307275530
Publication Date: December 11, 2012
Pages: 332
Genre: Natural Science, Non-fiction, Science
Publisher: Vintage Books

Evolution, it seems, has not completely obliterated its tracks as more advanced organisms have evolved; the history of life on earth is far older—and odder—than many of us realize.

Scattered across the globe, these remarkable plants and animals continue to mark seminal events in geological time. From a moonlit beach in Delaware, where the hardy horseshoe crab shuffles its way to a frenzy of mass mating just as it did 450 million years ago, to the dense rainforests of New Zealand, where the elusive, unprepossessing velvet worm has burrowed deep into rotting timber since before the breakup of the ancient supercontinent, to a stretch of Australian coastline with stromatolite formations that bear witness to the Precambrian dawn, the existence of these survivors offers us a tantalizing glimpse of pivotal points in evolutionary history. These are not “living fossils” but rather a handful of tenacious creatures of days long gone.

Written in buoyant, sparkling prose, Horseshoe Crabs and Velvet Worms is a marvelously captivating exploration of the world’s old-timers combining the very best of science writing with an explorer’s sense of adventure and wonder.

This ended up with 4 stars because I struggle with timelines that stretch over billions of years. I find the science riveting, but when the text starts throwing around Ages and Periods like Cretaceous and Mesozoic and Mesoproterozoic like we’d talk about events that happened to us last week, my eyes glaze over and my comprehension rate plummets through the floor.

Still Fortey deserves better; he’s an excellent writer, one who mixes personal anecdotes with hard science very well. He only slipped up once and made evolution sound like a sentient decision making process on the part of the specimen in question, but perhaps he was only making a point.

In this book he visits a list of life (flora, fauna, and microscopic) whose branch on the tree of life has survived the ages, evolving through catastrophic events only to wind up in the here and now, where humans will likely figure out a way to kill them off. Except, sadly, for the cockroaches, and, happily, the sea monkeys. He ties these fascinating species of today to their ancestors of the past and discusses where current thinking places them on the tree of life: are they closer to the trunk (truly amongst the first) or are they closer to the tips of the branches (the newcomers, or – in our case – the party crashers).

This is one of those books that, because of their built-in uniqueness in flora and fauna, the antipodean part of the world becomes the star. There are a lot of critters featured here that are found in New Zealand and Australia. Not taking anything away from my home country, these were my favourites. I need to be on the lookout for the velvet worm, and I have a new appreciation for the extreme mothering practices of the Echidna. I think seeing a lungfish might be kinda cool.

Fortey does get one thing wrong: he says no mammal is venomous. I don’t know if this is because the book was written before the slow loris was found to have venom glands, or if that discovery just stayed under his radar. It’s a small thing in the overall body of knowledge in the book and has no consequence in the context of the subject matter under discussion.

Not an easy reading book, but one that’s worth the time and effort.

NB: Some quick research into the venomous mammal bit, and the slow loris is the only venomous primate; of course there are a handful of other venomous mammals, including my beloved (male) platypus. I tried to find the reference in the text again, but I can’t remember which chapter it was in, and the index yields nothing for venom, so now I’m thinking he might have been referring to primates, not mammals, and the slow loris discovery was post-publication.