The Lost and Found Bookshop by Susan Wiggs

June 18, 2020

The Lost and Found Bookshop by Susan Wiggs

Natalie Harper is a successful executive at a wine distribution company in northern California, until a horrendous tragedy upends her life.  She returns to San Francisco to care for her aging grandfather and try to figure out where her life is going.  On impulse, Natalie decides to quit her job (which she hates) and take over the family bookshop.  But the bookshop is in deep financial trouble, and she wonders if it is too late to rescue the store.

  

As I'm not a real fan of women's fiction or romance, I found the storyline somewhat predictable, as I pretty well figured out the rest of the story about 1/3 of the way through the book (who the love interest was, that Granddad was going to find buried treasure in the basement and save the bookshop, etc.).  There are too many coincidences that stretched credulity a little too far (a $12,000 military medal, a $19 million Tang dynasty vase, and a priceless set of original hand-colored Audubon bird books, all in the same building?  Which has frequent floods and earthquakes, yet all the artifacts are still in perfect condition?  The most famous children's author in America drops everything to do a reading for her little store?).  Unlike her previous novel (The Oysterville Sewing Circle) where the love interest shows up on the second page of the book, at least there was a little character development first.  This one really wasn't my style.

But if you are an avid romance reader or enjoy women's fiction, or want a happy ending where everything works out perfectly, you will enjoy Wiggs' latest novel, and to be fair, she is a very good writer, much better than many romance authors.  With all the upheaval and social unrest in the world right now, maybe a perfect happy ending isn't a bad thing.

Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for providing an eARC in return for a review.

Cold Storage by David Koepp

June 17, 2020

Cold Storage by David Koepp

In 1987, two Pentagon operatives who specialize in neutralizing bioterrorism threats are sent to Australia with a bio-scientist.  Their mission is to investigate and neutralize a highly mutative organism capable of wiping out all life on the planet.  After one of the team dies freakishly, the sample they retrieve is buried deep in a little-used military base used for long-term storage in Atchison, KS.

Fast forward 32 years – Teacake and Naomi are two twenty-something security guards at the Atchison Storage Facility in Atchison, KS.  Teacake is an ex-con, Naomi is a single mom saving to go to veterinary college.  The storage facility is the same former military base where the government stashed things best forgotten, now converted to individual storage units for public use.  When the fungi escapes its containment unit, Roberto Diaz, one of the original operatives (now retired) is called out of retirement to stop the virus a second time.

Entertaining read with hints of Michael Crichton’s The Andromeda Strain.  It gets a little confusing in the last 60 or so pages with the variety of characters coming together.  There are some pretty gross parts so it’s not a book to read on your lunch hour.

The Book of Lost Friends by Lisa Wingate

June 16, 2020

The Book of Lost Friends by Lisa Wingate

As the Civil War rages, slaves Hannie Gossett, her mother, and siblings are sent by their owner from Louisiana to his property in Texas, as a way to protect his assets.  But the relative sent to safeguard the slaves on their journey begins selling them off at the Texas towns they pass through.  Ten years after the end of the Civil War, Hannie still lives at the Gossetts’ Louisiana plantation, but as part of a group of sharecroppers who have worked to gain ownership of their land.  But the plantation owner has gone missing, and the sharecroppers fear that if he dies, his wife will burn the deeds to the sharecroppers’ property.  Hannie breaks into the main house, determined to find the deed, only to find that Mr. Gossett’s mixed race daughter Juneau Jane is there as well, searching for documents that will protect her and her mother (Mr. Gossett's mulatto "fancy woman").  Determined to track down Mr. Gossett or his business partner, Hannie disguises herself as a boy and travels with Gossett’s two daughters from Louisiana to Texas to try and locate one of the men, or at least find out what happened to Gossett.

Along the way, the girls discover a newspaper column called Lost Friends, which prints letters for people (mostly former slaves) seeking lost family members.  They begin to collect more stories from the people they meet on their quest, and Hannie vows to help as many of them as she can, while searching for her own lost family.

In a parallel story, Benny Silva takes a job as an English teacher in Augustine, Texas, the town founded by the Gossett family.  The school is woefully short of supplies, and she contacts Nathan Gossett, the heir to the Gossett house, about donating books from the Gossett library to the school.  Little do either of them suspect that they are opening up a long-sealed chapter of local history.

Like her previous novel (Before We Were Yours), Wingate shines a spotlight on a hidden or forgotten piece of history.  The newspaper excerpts printed between the chapters really humanize the true horror of slavery even among those who treated their slaves "well":  of men owning other people and selling them off with no more thought than they would their cattle, often being sold repeatedly; of the separation of families; of the lifelong desire and need to find those families again, with the search sometimes lasting over 40 years; and of the injustices that former slaves continued to suffer, even after freedom.

Moving and at times gut-wrenching, I highly recommend this historical novel to anyone who wants to learn more about unknown history and injustices that last to this day.

Dotter of Her Father's Eyes by Mary M. Talbot and Bryan Talbot

June 11, 2020

Dotter of Her Father's Eyes by Mary M. Talbot and Bryan Talbot

By contrasting her own life with the life of Lucia Joyce, daughter of James Joyce, Mary Talbot creates a graphic novel that is part autobiography and part biography.  Mary's father was the respected Joycean scholar James Atherton.  He was considered such an authority on Joyce that Encyclopedia Britannica asked him to write the encyclopedia entry about Joyce.

Mary draws some interesting parallels between her own life and Lucia's life.  Both had very dominant fathers who neglected family life in favor of their own work; both were pressured to live up to their fathers' expectations.  However, Mary was able to escape through college, graduate school, marriage and her own family.  Lucia unfortunately ended up institutionalized and barely escaped being euthanized when Nazi forces overran Paris, and the patients at the sanatorium where she lived were evacuated to the coast.

The book's artwork is by Mary's husband Bryan Talbot, the award-winning graphic novel illustrator.  Although he has illustrated a number of graphic novels, Bryan is known particularly for his work on Neil Gaiman's Sandman series.

I'm not a huge fan of graphic novels, but when I read a novel about Lucia's life (The Joyce Girl), this graphic novel was listed in the appendix as one of the sources that inspired the novel's author.  I was interested enough to seek out a copy of the graphic novel.

The Joyce Girl by Annabel Abbs

June 10, 2020

The Joyce Girl by Annabel Abbs

Lucia Joyce, daughter of writer James Joyce, was a talented dancer in her own right.  Living in Jazz Age Paris, Lucia is exposed to all the latest ideas, a wide variety of artists and writers, and a night life that caters to all tastes.  But the family has some dark secrets that prove to be too much for Lucia's fragile psyche.  As her behavior becomes increasingly erratic, her family has her committed to a sanatorium and arrange for psychoanalyst Carl Jung to treat Lucia with the "talking cure."

Lucia's life began full of promise, but sadly her talent was never realized.  She excelled in gymnastic maneuvers as well as modern dance, and had artistic talent as well, studying drawing with Alexander Calder for a while.  Lucia pursued her interests to the point of obsession, whether it was dancing eight or more hours per day, making plans to open a dance school, or stalking her current love interest.  She was drawn to Irish writer Samuel Beckett and became obsessed with him, believing they were fated to be together even though Beckett was only interested in her father and did not return Lucia's adoration.  After Beckett spurned her, she transferred her hopes to Calder, although her obsession with Beckett stayed with her for the rest of her life.  While her father loved her dancing and considered her his muse, he wanted her to dance only for him and not professionally.  Her mother Nora did not approve of or support her dancing at all, and after a promising stage debut, her parents discouraged her from continuing with dance.  At the age of 22, Lucia decided she was not strong enough to be a dancer and that she would try teaching dance instead, but that soon fell apart as well.  Without the structure of dance, Lucia's life quickly fell apart.  After suffering a breakdown in 1930, Lucia became increasingly unstable mentally, and she was committed to a psychiatric hospital in 1934.  She remained institutionalized for the rest of her life.

Lucia Joyce doing her mermaid dance

Written in the first person in Lucia's own voice, the author provides a look into a damaged soul.  There are hints of incest with both her father and brother which are very disturbing.  Overall, I was interested in Lucia's life but the writing was a little flat.  There are too many descriptions of Lucia lurking in hallways waiting for Beckett, and also for Calder, although it does help to illustrate her obsessive nature.  Although her biography states that Beckett and Lucia were lovers for a short-time, Abbs does not have them consummate their relationship.  I did love the sepia-toned Jazz Age picture on the cover.

Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for providing an eARC in return for a review.

The Motion of the Body Through Space by Lionel Shriver

June 6, 2020

The Motion of the Body Through Space by Lionel Shriver

Serenata Terpsichore and Remington Alabaster have been married for over 30 years.  They have raised two children, weathered the storm of Remington's forced early retirement, and generally had an extremely happy life together.  They enjoy each other's company more than they do anyone else's (including their children).  For her entire adult life, Serenata exercised for 90 minutes daily, running and cycling and doing calisthenics, not out of any fanaticism, it was just part of who she was.  Things changed for Serenata when she turned 60 and discovered that years of daily exercise had damaged her knees to the point of needing knee replacements in both knees unless she wanted to live with constant pain.  Around the time she resigns herself to giving up running, her husband Remington decides that he wants to run a marathon, something even exercise devotee Serenata had never done.  As he trains for his big run with a new group of friends, Serenata wonders how much of her husband's decision was aimed at her, now that she was unable to pursue her favorite hobby, out of resentment for all the time she spent exercising over the years.

The main plot line satirizes the cult of exercise, also highlighting the downside of exercise:  when you pound on your joints continually, they are going to wear out sooner.  Another theme is aging:  no matter how hard you try, your body is going to age, we are all eventually going to die, and years of rigid dieting and strenuous exercise may not buy you any extra time.  There are interesting parallels between Remington and his newfound fanaticism about exercise, and their adult daughter Valeria who has been sucked into a fundamentalist religious group - both groups have cult-type overtones.  The story also gives a look at the big-business aspects of marathons and triathalons.  I have read several other books by Lionel Shriver, and this one lands somewhere in the middle, not nearly as good as We Need to Talk About Kevin but nowhere near as bad as Big Brother.  

It took me about 25% of the book to get into the story; after that point, I was interested enough in the dynamics between the characters to continue and finish the book. During her last illness, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis remarked that she regretted all the time she wasted doing sit-ups, a realization that the main characters in novel arrive at in the final section.  While I was overall satisfied with how the story ended, I found Serenata's happy musings on death in the final section to be rather depressing.

Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for providing an eARC in return for a review.

 

Mrs. Lincoln's Sisters by Jennifer Chiaverini

June 3, 2020

Mrs. Lincoln's Sisters by Jennifer Chiaverini

Before she married Abraham Lincoln, Mary Todd was one of the Todd sisters, the belles of Lexington, KY, society.  Ten years after her husband's assassination, Mary is estranged from her family and displaying increasingly erratic behavior.  Her only surviving son Robert has no choice but to have her committed to a sanatorium for her own safety.

Mary Todd was from the prominent Todd family, active in politics and friendly with most of the major politicians of the day.  Mary had five siblings and nine half-siblings; three sisters and one half sister feature in the book.  Mary's sisters had long been aware of her self-centeredness, manipulative nature, and almost pathological need to be the center of attention.  Today, we would call Mary a drama queen - she loved drama, and if there wasn't any, she would create some by blowing a minor snub out of proportion.  Mary's sisters' families referred to her as "Crazy Aunt Mary."

Most of the photographs of Mary Todd Lincoln that have survived show a rather dumpy over-dressed unhappy looking woman, so it is hard for modern readers to believe that she was once considered to be one of the most beautiful and sought after young women in Kentucky and Illinois.  The tragedies that Mary experienced after her marriage certainly contributed to her mental crises, but in the 19th century, it was unfortunately all too common to lose several children and have one's husband die (although not many were assassinated in front of their wives).

The story line moves back and forth between Mary's youth and her chaotic widowhood.  The story drags a bit in the middle, but anyone interested in MTL will be interested in the women who grew up with Mary and knew her best.

Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for providing an eARC in return for a review.