Girl, Woman, Other

by Bernardine Avaristo

This book won the Mann Booker Award this year along with Margaret Atwood and her book The Testament.

It was an interesting book, I like the way the author writes, at times the words seem more like poetry.

The book is about 11 black women, most of them immigrants, and their lives in England and beyond.
As the book goes on we see that the women are all connected in one way or another.  The first story is disturbing, it is about a lesbian who gets lured to the U.S. by another woman.  They live in an all female commune.  The American woman ends up dominating and abusing the British women until she is finally helped to escape by other women in the commune.

Some of the other characters include a playwright who rejects the status quo, a young woman who is raped at 14 and starts to fail in her studies.   She finally decides she will have to fight to succeed.  One of her teachers encourages her an helps her.  She goes on to a successful career in banking.  Her teacher started out as a very idealistic well loved teacher but all the bureaucracy that developed in education wore her down and she is now considered something of a joke by the students. One woman has a daughter from IVF and has several people serve as the girls godparents.  One girl feels she is not a girl and via the Internet hooks up with an Indian boy who has had a sex change to a girl.  The first girl does not want to go through operations to become a man but she does shave her head and have her breasts removed.  The girl and the trans boy become lovers. Another girl is shocked when her parents tell her that she is adopted, having been left on a church doorstep.  Another woman had a child out of wedlock at 16.  Her parents made her give up the child.  She grieves the loss of this child and wonders what has become of her.  At the end of the book they get connected thanks to a DNA test.

The author does a great job of portraying the experiences, the hopes, fears and disappointments of the women.  Sadly many of them are not happy in how their lives have turned out. Several of them are pregnant after one night stands. Understandably there is a lot of discussion about what black people experience in the UK.  I guess I feel there was too much of an emphasis on lesbianism, etc.  Do that many women really struggle with their sexuality? 

I guess I have to say that after reading the book I have to ask, so what?  I guess it is partly about the desire to find love and acceptance and that nonstandard relationships are an option.  A lot of them were trying to find out their background/roots or felt incomplete because they didn't know their origin.  One of the women, the one who had the DNA test is shocked to learn that a small percentage of her DNA is from Africa.

Reproduction

by Ian Williams

This book one the Giller Prize this year.  It is written by a poet/writing prof.

The book starts out with a young teenager (Felicia) and an older man (Edgar)meeting in the hospital as their mothers appear on the verge of death.  They converse a little to pass the time.  The girl's mother dies, the man's mother doesn't. 
The girl is an orphan now.  She is trying to finish her high school work.  The man invites her to live at his place and look after his invalid mother.  The man is the head of a company and travels a lot on business.  He doesn't seem to have much care for his mother and seems to spend his time drinking an smoking in various hotel rooms.  He and the young woman start having sex, he has told her he had a vasectomy.  However, in a few months the girl is pregnant.  When she tells him she is pregnant he offers to pay for an abortion.  He schedules one but she doesn't go through with it.  When the man finds this out he unceremoniously fires her and kicks her out of his house.

The book then jumps to the future when the woman and her son Armistice (known as Army) are struggling to survive financially.  They end up living in part of the house of a divorced man (Oliver) who is bitter about he was treated by his ex-wife.  Army, always aware of being poor cooks up all sorts of schemes for making money, e.g. setting up a barber shop in the garage of the house.

Oliver's kids live in the U.S. with his ex-wife.  They come to visit him for the summer.  Army really likes the daughter (Heather) but she ignores him.  She gets attracted to a guy who works at Walmart(?).  In a very disturbing scene in the book she is drugged and gang raped by the Walmart guy and some of his friends.  She ends up getting pregnant.  Her mother is furious with her ex for letting this happen and send the girl back to Ontario to have the baby to avoid scandal.

At one point Edgar contacts Felicia and offers her money, initially $10 and $20,000, Felicia always refuses.  Eventually he sends her a cheque for more than $100,000 again she refuses.  It turns out Edgar is being accused of sexual harassment and it appears he wants Felicia to be a character witness on his behalf.  She doesn't agree.

After Heather has her baby Oliver and Felicia take on the baby as their child  Heather has named the child Chariot but he is known as Riot, and he is quite a trouble maker.  He wants to be a film maker but keeps getting kicked out of school for bad behaviour.  Oliver and Felicia don't have a sexual relationship but they do act like a blended family. They never tell Riot who his mother is, but he suspects.

All along Army has asked who his father is but Felicia doesn't tell him.  Felicia finds out Edgar is sick with cancer.  Army then discovers who his father is and invites him to come live with them as he prepares to die. Felicia and especially Oliver are furious about this. Army's behaviour is not really altruistic.  He hopes to get money from Edgar's estate.

When Edgar dies he leaves most of his estate to charity, his house to Felicia and a mixed tape of music for Army.

I found the names Armistice (Peace)/Army and Chariot/Riot interesting.  The original names are quite powerful, in a good way but the nicknames are vary aggressive.

This was an interesting story about an unconventional family. I enjoyed it.

Telling Tales

by Ann Cleeves

This is the second book in the author's series featuring the Detective Inspector Vera.  Coincidentally they played this story on TV recently.  The TV version varied a little at the beginning and also in whodunnit.  However for the most part the stories were similar.

The book is about Vera and her assistant being brought in to re-open a murder investigation.  A teenager was killed.  The girl's father's lover was convicted of the crime but always maintains her innocence. She commits suicide in prison.  At about the same time it comes out that new evidence has come forward that exonerates her.

Vera finds that the local police perhaps jumped too quickly to their conclusion.  The murder victim had one girl who was her closest friend.  It was this girl who found her body.  The girl's brother, who had been estranged from the family returns to town and is killed soon after.

Eventually it comes out that it was the young girl's mother who killed both the teenager and her own son.  She killed the teenager because she was going to blackmail the woman's husband and she kills her son because he is going to accuse his father  of the murder.

It was an interesting read.  You don't really get much insight into how Vera thinks or feels about things but she is considered gruff in the book, as she is portrayed in the TV series. 

The Giver of Stars

by Jojo Moyes

This book is supposedly based on real events.

It takes place in Kentucky in the depression area. The story starts with a young English woman who longs to escape her family.  She marries a handsome young American who has come to England.  Everyone thinks it will be an ideal marriage.

The young man is travelling with his father.  On the voyage back to America the newlyweds share a cabin with the man's father.  Why??  The young man is shy about doing anything amourous with his father nearby.

The young woman had imagined she would be going to a city in America but she is actually going into the Kentucky mountains.  The father-in-law runs a coal mine.  He treats his employees as slaves and safety measures are lacking.

When they arrive in Kentucky the couple live with the husband's father.  As the father sleeps in the next room the young man again declines intimacy.  The young woman is puzzled.

One day some woman announce that the President's wife has started a mobile library program to help promote literacy in America.  They are looking for women to ride into the mountains to take books to people.  The young bride feels she has nothing to do and despite the objection of her father-in-law she volunteers to be one of the Librarians.

She then gets involved with a group of women who will become her close friends:Margery, the daughter of a moonshiner, member of one family in a decades long feud with another local family.
She is a very independent woman and teaches the other women the routes through the mountains.  Other members of the group include Izzy a young crippled girl and a black girl who trained in a black library and is the administrator of the collection.

The women ride through all weather to deliver their books and their service is much appreciated.  Alice, the main character, initially feels an outsider but through her work is welcomed by the people she visits.  She sees how tough life is for the mountain people and befriends them, for e.g. reading to a dying man. Alice starts working longer and longer hours as she cannot bear to go home.  One day she gives some dolls that belonged to her deceased mother-in-law to some poor local girls.  When the father-in-law discovers what she has done he beats her up.  Bruised and battered she leave the family home and goes to live with Margery.

Margery is carrying on an anonymous campaign warning locals that Alice's father wants to buy they out of their property to expand his mining operations.  When there is a flood one of the mine's holding ponds burst and it is Margery who tells people about this.  This activity and the fact that she is housing his daughter-in-law infuriates the father-in-law and he is doing everything he can to discredit Margery and shut down the library service.  Most of the books and magazines they deliver are classics, comic books, cookbooks etc.  There is one "facutal" book about sex information .  It turns out to be a popular read in the community.  Alice's father-in-law accuses the librarians of corrupting the community by distributing this book.  Alice is so naive she doesn't even know what it means to have sex and that it is unusual that her marriage has never been consummated.

Then, one day a man, from the family Margery's family had the feud with, is found dead with a library book on his chest.  She is arrested for murder even though she is pregnant (out of wedlock).
The trial starts and it appears she will be found guilty.
However, Alice's husband suggests to her that the dead man's daughters, who are reclusive, should be interviewed.  One of the girls, who is heavily pregnant, comes to the trial and tells the judge that her father had a library book and was anxious to return it to town.  She speculates he must have slipped on the ice and died from injuries from the fall.

When asked why she didn't report her father missing it is obvious she did not like him (is it he who got her pregnant)?  Ironically the book the father was found with was Little Women. Based on this testimony Margery is released and reunited with her baby and her lover.

The book starts with Margery encountering the girls father.  He tries to attack Margery.  In defence she hits him with a book and rides off as fast as she can.  She doesn't check to see if he got up....

The book has a happily ever after ending.... Alice's marriage is annulled.  Her husband marries another woman, Alice marries a local man she has fallen in love with and Margery marries her lover.  The black Librarian moves back to the city where she worked as a librarian with her brother who was injured in the mine (and abandoned by the  mine owner).

The puzzling part of the book is why Alice's first husband, who seemed to marry her willingly, then seemed to have no interest in her sexually.  I thought he might be gay but he married another woman.  Perhaps his second wife would initially not have been acceptable to his father, but after all that happened the old man was happy to have a compliant daughter-in-law.

The story was action packed.  The author did a great job of describing the hardships of travelling through the mountains in all seasons and the lives of the locals.  A very interesting read.

The Giver of Stars by Amy Lowell
Hold your soul open for my welcoming.
Let the quiet of your spirit bathe me
With is clean and rippled coolness.,
That, loose-limbed and weary, I find rest,
Outstretched upon your peace, as on a bed of ivory.

The Testaments

by Margaret Atwood

This is the sequel to The Handmaid's Tale, it was just announced as a joint winner of the Mann Booker Prize this year.

I recently re-read The Handmaid's Tale.  I found it interesting, and disturbing yet again.   The ideas Atwood presents in this book in terms of the rituals, sex scenes with the commanders, the handmaids and the wives are absolutely chilling.

I was wondering how she would follow up the first book and I have to say The Testaments was different, perhaps even better in some ways.  It is the story of three women, whose lives are intertwined.  It is a story and a bit of a mystery novel.  We find that a child was secreted away from Gilead and taken to Canada.  The baby's picture is plastered around Gilead and the baby is being vigourously sought as it would be a coup if Gilead could recapture her.  There are women called angels who go into Canada, supposedly to preach about Gilead but they are actually spies seeking information about the baby and about people who help women and children escape from Gilead.

One of the characters is a young woman who is shocked at the death of the people she thought were her parents.  She is shocked to learn that she is that baby.  We also meet a young girl who is basically ignored by her father and his new wife, especially when they have a child by a handmaid.  She is being groomed to be married but convinces the officials, including Aunt Lydia that she is committed to life as an Aunt.  She does not want to get married.  Another friend of hers also becomes an aunt (she was traumatized by being sexually abused by her father, a highly regarded dentist).  We meet Aunt Lydia who is probably the most powerful of the aunts and learn that Gilead has records of all women, children born, etc.  Aunt Lydia is secretly writing a journal about what has happened in Gilead. If she was found out she would be hung.

As the book progresses we learn that the main character in Handmaid's Tale (Offred), was able to escape to Canada.  The daughter she had with her husband also survived. At the end of the novel Offred and her two children are re-united.  Eventually the notes written by Aunt Lydia are found but no one knows that she is the one who wrote them.

I enjoyed the way Atwood developed the story and how the various people's lives intertwined.  I am not sure why Aunt Lydia did what she did.

The books starts with the person who is Aunt Lydia and other professional women being rounded up.  In life she was a respected judge. Rather than fighting she decides to commit to becoming part of the Gilead administration.  This was the most disturbing and intriguing part of the story to me, that someone who was a defender of the law and should be committed to human rights would abandon all that to survive and in fact become an architect and perpetrator of the vile Gilead empire.  And, in the end why did she write these notes?  To apologize for what she was part of?  As a lesson for the future?

The Reckless Oath We Made

by Bryn Greenwood

I saw some good review of this book and thought it sounded interesting and it was.  It is a strange story but well told

The story is about a young woman Zee, who is struggling physically and financially.  She was injured in a motorcycle crash and is still in pain and paying for her medical bills.  At the time of her accident she had just told her boyfriend she was pregnant.  He is unhappy about it and dumps her.  She storms off on a motorcycle and ends up getting in an accident.  She is on pain killers and THC for her pain.

Zee is burdened with trying to support her 600 pound hoarder mother who likes her other sister better and doesn't appreciate anything she does for her.  She is living with and trying to support her sister and the sister's  young son.  To make some extra money she transports and sells drugs.  She feels her life is a total ongoing disaster and she isn't far from wrong.

Zee's father was a criminal who went to prison for some bank robberies and died while in prison.  Her mother never recovered from the loss of her husband.  This started her on the hoarding behaviour.  Zee's sister volunteers at a local prison.

One day the sister doesn't come home, Zee looks after the nephew, whom she loves dearly, as best she can.  Then the news comes that there has been a riot at the prison, two very dangerous prisoners escaped and have taken two volunteers hostage, one of who is Zee's sister.

The police arrive at Zee's mother's place with a search warrant.  They suspect the sister may not be a hostage but a willing participant.  They search the house dumping a lot of stuff outside and leaving it there.  I cannot imagine that police would actually do that.  Zee tried to calm her mother who ends up going to the hospital.

While these things are happening we find out that there is a young man who has been stalking Zee.  Gentry is a young autistic man who is fascinated with knights and chivalry and sees himself as Zee's protector and guardian.  Zee evenutally meets him and gets his help with some things.  She also meets is natural and adopted family.  The natural family use and abuse him, the adopted family seem to love him but perhaps overprotect him.  Gentry takes her into the country where he is actually working on building a castle and where he and some other friends gather to joust.

Zee with the help of an uncle who was a partner in crime with her father, manage to locate where the escaped prisoners and her sister are hiding out.  She, Gentry, some of Gentry's friends and her cousin work on a plan to go and rescue the sister.  They get to the remote location but things go badly.  The sister, as was suspected, actually loves one of the escapees and won't leave him even after he is killed.
Gentry is injured and one of his friends is killed.  Gentry ends up going to jail for being part of the melee.  Zee denies being at the fracus.  Gentry's family are furious with her for getting Gentry and her friend involved with the disaster.

Zee feels bad but she feels she has to look after her mother and fight to have some access to her nephew (his paternal grandparents get custody as both their son and now daughter-in-law are now in jail).

It seems very sad that poor innocent Gentry and his friend have to pay the price for this misadventure but it seems he is prepared to accept this punishment as part of his knightly loyalty to Zee.
Zee's uncle has given her some money he had from the bank robberies he did with her father.  Zee uses this money to help her mother, set up a trust fund for her nephew, and pay the mortgage on the land Gentry was buying and building his castle on.

It was a strange story but interesting and well written.
 

A Better Man

by Louise Penny

I was eagerly awaiting this new book by Louise Penny.  However, I have to say I was quite disappointed by the story.

As the story starts Armand Gamache has been investigated for a police investigation and gun battle in the last book.  He is being pilloried by his superiors and the Premiere.   They are trying to get him to resign by removing him from his position and offering him the demotion job of Head of Homicide (which he held years before).  This is is a big comedown from his position of Head of the Surete.  To their surprise and frustration he accepts.  He will take over from his son-in-law who is leaving for France for a non-police position.

A major rainfall and potential flooding event is about to fall on Quebec.  Gamache makes some suggestions about how to mitigate the flood by cutting channels in fields.  His superiors and government officials do not appreciate his input.

So this is the main reason why I did not enjoy this story, the whole pick on Gamache theme.  In addition do his dealings with his superiors and the provincial officials someone is posting on Facebook/Instagram that he is a failure and botched the previous job.  There is a lot of chatter against him as a result of this.

One of the police officers that Gamache had previously wooed to homicide announces that her goddaughter is missing and asks for her disappearance to be investigated.  Even though it is not homicide's role and she has only been gone for a short time Gamache and the officer start investigating.  The woman was married to a pottery and was the victim of domestic abuse.  They meet a policeman who had responded to calls to the property.  He seems more than casually interested in the woman.  The woman's husband is suspected as he is an abuser and an alcoholic with a quick temper but so far they cannot pin anything on him.  The young officer tries to get some information by posing as an art gallery interested in his work.  Her sleuthing turns up the fact that the husband and the woman who is doing his social media might be more than just work colleagues.

While they are investigating Quebec is flooding, including at 3 Pines.

While all this is going on there is a side story about the 3 Pines artist Clare.  She had received some substantial acclaim previously but recently produced some miniatures which have received a lot of criticism.  She is having trouble dealing with the criticism.  Then a young internet 'influencer" about art comes to 3 pines, meets her and sees her work. This person also pans her miniatures.  People who have bought her art now wish to get their money back.  She is devastated.
That is all there is to this story.  I don't know what point it had in the book other than to parallel Gamache's being trashed on the Internet.

While they are investigating the damage caused by the flooding the missing woman's body is discovered in the river near 3 pines.  Her car is found on a bridge nearby.

Things get worse for Gamache as footage of other firefights he was in are shown and the parts that are shown online are not complimentary to him (but they do not show the entire story).

It seems that the poet Ruth might have put up this footage to try to salvage his reputation but she denies doing it.  It eventually turns out it was one of Gamache's superiors who did it.  I am not clear as to why she did it, Gamache had helped her get her job.

In the end they find out that the police officer who originally brought up the missing woman actually was the one who killed her accidentally.  The officer was angry at the woman for taking advantage of her father, asking for money.  The officer is in love with the woman's father but he seems to have rebuffed her for his daughter.

I usually really enjoy the characters, the quirkiness, the not quite up to police procedure behaviour of Gamache but this time I found all the conspiracy stuff against him hard to take and hard to understand.  This was probably my least or second least favourite of all her books.

I will be interested in seeing how Gamache fares without his side-kick son-in-law.  As all of Gamache's children and their families are now in France it makes you wonder why he and his wife bother to stay in Quebec.  It seem he cannot let go of his passion to right wrongs.

Lampedusa

by Steven Price

This story is set in Sicily.  It is set in approximately 1950.   It is about Guiseppe Lampedusa, the last Prince of Lampedusa.

I didn't realize that Sicily had a nobility class.

Guiseppe is nearing death, he has emphysema.  He has some respect in society by virtue of this hereditary title but most of the family lands have been sold or were destroyed in the war.  He and his wife are struggling financially. He and his wife have no children and he feels the family story and his legacy will die with him. He and his wife adopted the adult son of another family to pass on the family title but there will be little estate to pass on to him Guiseppe decides to write a novel loosely based on family history.

As part of the family estate the family own the island of Lampedusa but it appears to be abandoned and in the past was rumoured to house monsters.  Guiseppe has some young men around him who come to visit him so he can lecture them about world literature.  He enjoys doing this. 

One day he and some of the young men head off to one of the family's properties, an estate that became a monastery when two of his relatives became devout and became a priest and nun.  One or both of these people were sainted.  When they visit the monastery they find it is all in ruins.  Guiseppe had hoped it might be in decent shape so he could sell it to someone to run as a B and B.

When Guiseppe discovers how serious his illness is he is hesitant to tell his wife because he doesn't want to worry her.  When he does tell her several months later she is furious at him for not telling her sooner.  She stops talking to him.  They really seemed to love each other so I found this reaction of hers puzzling.

Once Guiseppe's book is written he elicits the help of a cousin who is a poet to help convince a publisher to publish it.  His book is rejected.  It is not clear but I suspect the cousin did nothing to champion his cause, perhaps being jealous of him having success.

After he dies Guiseppe's adopted son gets the book published and it becomes a best-seller.  Guiseppe will not know it but he has indeed secured his place in history, at least literary history, with the book.

From my description this may not have seemed to interesting but I really enjoyed the book.  I loved the authors language and the characters.

In a House of Lies

by Ian Rankin

This is one of my favourite mystery writers and he did not disappoint with this one.

A body is discovered, with handcuffs around its ankles, in an area that has long been searched.

It turns out the dead person disappeared several years ago.  As soon as John Rebus hears the news he is quite sure he knows who the person is.  It was a case he worked on years ago.  He is retired but keeps trying to insert himself into the investigation along with Siobhan Clarke and Malcom Fox (who is working on the edge of the case, reviewing what was done in the original investigation).  Fox is finding out that the police were not necessarily doing everything by the book, they were covering for officers with drinking problems and others having affairs on work time.  Some dirt could come out about Rebus.

Siobhan is having her own problems, she recently came under review and is still stinging from that.
And Siobhan is getting harassing phone calls.

As the story develops it turns out that two crooked cops who are trying to tarnish Rebus, Shioban and Fox, had some involvement with the circumstances leading up to this murder.  Rebus makes it his mission to reveal their deeds and success

While he is trying to keep involved with this case Rebus is also trying to investigate the case of a young man who is in prison for murdering his girlfriend.  The boy does not wish to admit the truth to protect his sister.

These books always have interesting characters, lots of tension and great plots.
Very interesting read.

Big Sky

by Kate Atkinson

This book is part of her mystery series with Jackson Brodie, a former cop.  I read another book of hers, Started Early, Took my Dog.  I enjoyed it. 

This is the fourth book in the series and I enjoyed it.  She has a great knack for writing interesting characters and very creative plots.  In this book Jackson Brodie has left the police force, under unsettling circumstances??  He is now working as a private investigator.  In his current case he is tailing an adulterer.  He is bored with the assignment but the wife of the man wants him to keep tracking her husband.

While Brodie is doing this job another story develops about four golf buddies, three of whom are human traffickers and one who is despondent because he has lost his job and his wife is divorcing him taking everything.

There is another minor part of the story in which Brodie witnesses what he thinks is a child luring.

There are numerous quirky characters in the book, a "trophy" wife who was herself a victim of trafficking.  She does not know til the end that her husband is doing this.  She has a stepson and a daughter who has a wardrobe of Disney heroine costumes.  There is a drag queen, a washed up comedian and much more.

There are also two junior detectives who are trying to track information on an old case to do with a pair of criminals that were involved in a number of criminal activities. 

One of the wives of the golfers is murdered.  The two cops arrive on the scene when they are seeking the woman's husband.  They are excited to be involved with a murder but are soon shuttled off to routine paperwork and questioning regarding the old case.  They arrive at the home of the woman's husband (the one who is getting divorced) to question him as part of their investigation and are there when officers arrive to tell him his wife is dead... the detectives did not know he was the victims husband.

Brodie gets "involved" when he is walking his dog and stops the dead woman's husband from jumping off a cliff.

In the end the trafficking ring starts to fall apart because one girl commits suicide and one runs away and is found by the detectives as they are seeking another of the golfers.... they don't find the boy and girl (children of the trophy wife) who are also being held captive in the trailers they visit.

In the end one of the trafficked women shots one of the traffickers but Brodie convinces the women detectives... who have again bumbled into the action, to say that one of the traffickers shot one of his partners.

Brodie is willing to bend the truth in the interests of common sense justice.  He also finds that the girl that he thought he was lured has indeed been held captive and her kidnapper is arrested.

A complicated but very interesting story.  It seems strange to say it was funny but parts of it were quite comic or tragi-comic.

The Sun is Also a Star

by Nicola Yoon

This YA book is about two teenagers in New York City and a day in their life.  A young Korean man who is being pushed to be a doctor by his parents and who is bullied by his older brother who got kicked out of Harvard, meets a Jamaican girl who is scheduled to be deported that day because her father got caught for DUI and the police discovered he and his family are illegal aliens.

Like the father in Paris by the Book, this father had dreams which have been thwarted.  He wants to be a successful actor but feels perhaps that having a family has hampered his success.  The young woman, his daughter, wants to stay in the U.S. and go to University so while her family is packing she makes more attempt to get their removal order overturned.

The boy notices the girl as she is walking down the street.  He is supposed to be taking a cash deposit to his father at the family's store, getting a haircut and preparing for an interview for admission to Yale.  Instead he starts following the girl and falling head over heels in love with her.  When he saves her from stepping off the curb and getting hit by a car they meet.  He tries to convince her to love him by asking her various questions from a website.  She says she only believes in science.

As the day goes on they become friendly and affectionate.  The girl sees a lawyer who tells her that he thinks he can get a judge to overturn her removal order.  Coincidentally it appears this lawyer was hit by the driver who almost hit the young girl.  The shock the lawyer received has made him realize he is in love with his secretary.  So instead of going to the judge he has sex with his secretary.  He later lies and tells the girl that the judge would not agree to the change.

He had planned to fire the secretary.  However when the Korean boy shows up at his office for his Yale interview and tells him how much he loves the girl and wants her to stay, the lawyer decides he must leave his wife for the secretary.

This means the two teens who have now fallen in love will not be able to stay together.  The boy accompanies her to the airport.  They keep in touch for a while but gradually drop contact.  The author had done a great job of building up the passion between the two kids from a one sided infatuation to mutual affection.  The girl kept trying to keep him away but he gradually won her over.  The innocence of the boy was well presented and the hard-nosed realism of the girl too.

The author does have an alternate ending where a decade later the two of them are on an airplane (together??).

The book makes one think about all the people we encounter as we go about our day.  We don't really notice them, pay attention to them and their stories.

The story was interesting. Each chapter was only two or three pages long, each written from the perspective of the boy or girl or other characters in the story.  It was an interesting way to develop the story.  Of course all the many coincidence in the book were contrived and one expected that things would work out so they could stay together.... but it didn't happen... that is life, nothing that easy ever really works out.  It was a cute story.  It is being made into a movie.  It will be interesting to see how they translate the approach taken in the book into a movie script.

Paris by the Book

by Liam Callanan

This book is by the author of the popular book The Cloud Atlas.

Some of the reviews of this book describe it as a romance set in the romantic, evocative city of Paris.  This is too simplistic a reading of the book. Some praise it as about a woman finding herself.  Rather, I think it is a tribute to a woman trying to cope and a childish man who doesn't want to grow up.

The book is about a family, two parents and their daughters, but it is largely about the parents.
The parents meet when the mother steals a book from a bookstore.  She is a film studies student fascinated by the film the Red Balloon by Albert Lamorisse, which is set in Paris.  The father is a fan of the Madeline books of Ludwig Bemelmans, also set in Paris.  Both would like to get to Paris but finances don't permit.

The couple marry and the man continues to pursue his career as an author. The woman gives up her film aspirations and becomes a speechwriter for a local college.  The husband is not as successful as he would like to be and is very moody.  He often leaves to go off to do writing.  His wife does her best to keep the family together.  One day the husband disappears and does not return.  His wife while searching the house finds a clue in a box of cereal.  She discovers that her husband bought tickets to Paris.  She thinks that must be where he has gone.  She rents out their house and sets off to Paris.
While in Paris she gets a cheque, royalties for a story/book her husband wrote.  She decides to stay in Paris, enrolls her girls in school and makes arrangement to purchase an English language bookstore in Paris with the money they received.

A family friend tells her that police believe her husband died when he took a boat out onto a lake and encourages her to take steps to get him declared legally dead.  The woman and her daughter refuse to believe his is dead.  Particularly since strange things happen, for e.g. she finds one of his books in the bookstore with the words "I'm sorry" written in it, and her daughters think they have seen him at times in Paris.

Near the end of the book the husband does show up.  He tells her he didn't really intend to disappear, he was just in a bad state and didn't want to be hospitalized and drugged.  He tells her he has been watching them in Paris and didn't reconnect because they all seemed happy.  Little did he know how sad all of them were, missing him, not knowing what had happened to him. 

I have to say I found the husband's behaviour frustrating and hard to understand.  I can understand that he got depressed and needed to leave for a while. It seems he just wanted his wife to be as playful,  adoring and unquestioning as she was when they first married.  However, while he seems stuck in his fantasy to be an acclaimed author, she has been worn down by the burden and the reality of running the family and dealing with him and his moods.  In an interview the man said he doesn't believe in writers block, but this is what appears to have happened to him.

While he claims to love his kids how could he just walk away and leave them in limbo?  He says he watched them and they seemed happy without him... I think that is just and excuse for his self-absorption and irresponsibility.  Just as many people fantasize about Paris and its romantic appeal, I think the man and his wife both have childish obsessions with the city, at least when they first meet.

When the husband shows up in Paris he admits he did go back to see his family after his disappearance but by then his wife had found the clue about the airplane tickets to Paris and set off to Paris to find him.  He found the family home had been rented. He was shocked at this, but also not surprised.  It appears he did follow them to Paris but decided to spy on them rather than make contact.  What would have happened if his family had still been in Milwaukee? Would anything be different?  Would he have stayed with his family or left again?  I suspect he would have left again and the fact that his family was gone justified his continuing abandonment of them.

The husband has written a successful novel, a bit like the story of their life except in his book the wife is the author.  He submits the book to a publisher in the wife's name and she gets all the royalties.

The woman does not tell her children that their father is still alive.  It is probably easier for them that way than to try to understand why he has left them.

As the book ends the old woman who was the wife's partner in the bookstore tells the woman she has to leave the store.  The woman goes back to school to study film making.


I found the book hard to take, all the intrigue and coincidences are a bit cheesy.  I found the husband completely unsympathetic and frustrating.  He should have gone to the family and explained his position without making them suffer so long not knowing what had happened to him.  Beyond the story line itself I found the book not all that easy or interesting to read.  Other reviews I have read also commented that it was disappointing, hard to get engaged with.

I think the characters disappointment that life didn't turn out to be entirely the way they wanted it to be was lame.... this happens to most people as they have children and their lives have to adjust to family life.  Not everyone has to give up on their dreams but they do have to make accommodations for the changes that occur in their lives. Just as life doesn't always work out the way we thought it would, Paris probably doesn't live up to people's romantic notions about the city.

The way the book ends, with the wife saying she doesn't really read anymore, might be a hint that the author himself is suffering some of the angst, and writer's block of the woman's husband.  I guess time will tell....

Library of Lost and Found

 by Phaedra Patrick

This is the story of an older woman, Martha, who is a volunteer at her local library.  Martha is very stressed and sad.  Her house is cluttered with things she needs to sort through and work she has volunteered to do for others.  She feels frustrated because she keeps applying for a permanent job at the library but is never successful despite how hard she works as a volunteer.

She feels she has wasted her life.  She gave up a man she loved to come and look after her aged parents.  Her sister did little to help out because she has a husband and children.  Martha did not get along with her parents.  She felt her father was too strict and wouldn't let them have any fun.  He did not like her associating with her grandmother, he felt the grandmother was a bad influence on her.  She resents her mother because she felt her mother never stood up to her husband.

One day a parcel  arrives on her doorstep.  When she opens it she finds it is a published book of stories she and her grandmother had made up when she was a child.  She is even more shocked when she sees the book is dedicated to her by her grandmother, three years after her grandmother supposedly died.

With the help of a bookseller she is able to track down another copy of the book and also, eventually is reunited with her grandmother who is ill but still alive.

As the book goes on Martha finally blows up at all the demands on her.  She eventually learns why her grandmother disappeared so many years ago... her father had told her to disappear as she had revealed some embarrassing info at an anniversary celebration.  Martha was sick and never learned that the man she thought of as her father was not her biological father, but a fisherman who died in a storm.  She can now understand why her father may not have been as close to her.

Eventually Martha reunites with her grandmother and the remaining family is reunited.  She may even develop a romantic relationship with the bookstore owner.

The book shows that we cannot change our past but we can change how it impacts us and we can overcome our feelings of inadequacy.

I thought it was a very interesting story.  It kept my interest from beginning to end.  The author did a great job of presenting the sad little librarian/perfectionist.

Spring

by Ali Smith

This is the third book, in a series, that I have read by this author.  I just read my comments on the previous book, Winter.  I commented that I hoped "Spring" would not be as depressing as "Winter".
Well, it wasn't really.....

The book has a few references to new life and growth in spring but... it doesn't really seem to be regenerative or hopeful.  One of the book reviews I read calls this the darkest book.

The story makes references to climate change, Brexit and Trump

The first chapter is like a stream of consciousness rant.  The second chapter "I'm the child who's been buried in leaves, the leaves rot down, here I am".  No idea who this is, she doesn't seem to appear else where in the book.

Then we meet Richard Lease, TV and Film Director, who is struggling with a script he doesn't want to work on.  He is distraught after the death of a female friend and Mentor. He leaves his home, throws away his phone and heads out of London on a train going he knows not where.

Then we meet Brit who is working as a guard at an Immigrant detention centre. It sounds like a horrid place and a horrid job.  Rumours start circulating that a young girl entered the facility, no one knows how she got in our got through security.  She apparently met with the Head of the Centre and after that cleaning crews cleaned all the bathrooms in the place.

One day Brit is on her way to work and at a train station she is approached by a young girl in a school uniform.  The girl says she wants to get a a location on a post card she has and heads to the train.  Surprisingly no one asks her for a ticket .  She gets on a train and Brit follows her. 

They head north and eventually get to a train station where Richard has decided to commit suicide by lying down on the train tracks.  The little girl spots him and he is rescued.

Then the three of them head off to the girls desired destination driven by a woman in a coffee wagon that doesn't really sell coffee or anything else.  It turns out that the driver is one of a group of volunteers who try to help immigrants.  It seems that the young girl hopes to find her mother.

When they arrive at the destination, a battlefield, Brit calls in to her agency and there is a raid.  The driver is arrested and Richard and the young girl are taken away.

We never learn what has happened to the girl or the driver but at the end of the book Richard is doing a documentary about the volunteers who work to help the immigrants.

This was a powerful book but disturbing too.  I am afraid the last book Summer won't have much Sunshine when it comes out.  She is an amazing author.

Mr. Flood's Last Resort

by Jess Kidd

This is an interesting, but a bit bizarre book.

It is the story of a care giver who is assigned to give care to a cantankerous old man. He is a hoarder and hard to get along with. He has been warned this is his last chance to behave or he will be put in a care home.  The care worker learns that the previous caregiver had a breakdown from working with the man.

The caregiver, Maud, has a ghost in her past, her older sister disappeared one day and no one knows what happened to her.  Maud's mother blames her for her sister's disappearance.

When Maud arrives at Mr. Flood's house it is a mess, cluttered, dirty, with lots of cats.  She dives in trying to get some order in the kitchen. Mr Flood is annoyed that she is there.  She keeps calm and puts up with his outbursts, eventually he stops being so grumpy.  Mr. Flood has piles of National Geographic magazine blocking the way to most of the house including the upstairs but Maud squeezes through the magazines and prowls around the house.  She sees a lot of bizarre specimens and a picture of Mr. Flood's wife. 

One day a picture is stuck to the window in the kitchen.  As Maud is cleaning the kitchen she finds a glass bottle with a paper rolled up in it.  Maud looks at it she sees it is a picture of two children, a boy and a girl.  The girl's face is burned out of the photo.  Maud is curious about this.  When she asks Mr. Flood he says he only has a son, whom he despises and doesn't trust.  Maud also learns that Mr. Flood's wife died after falling down the stairs at the house.  Was she killed or was it an accident?

Maud was raised Catholic and one of her favourite books was about Saints.  In the story she now has various saints including St. Valentine who hover around her at times reacting to what is going on and sometimes even talking to her.  No one else can see them.

Maud's landlord is an agrophobic transvestite named Renata.  Renata is a mystery fanatic and when Maud tells her about her job with Mr. Flood Renata gets excited about solving the mysteries.

As the story progresses Maud meets a person who claims to be the man's son, Gabriel. Mr. Flood denies he is is son.  She also meets another man who claims to be the former care worker.

As Maud and Renata seek to learn the truth Maud finds a number of newspaper clippings about a missing girl.  She eventually finds out that the floods had a daughter Marguerite who attempted to kill Gabriel.  She was put in an institution but kept escaping.

At one point Renata's house is ransacked and she is roughed up too.  They get worried as to who would be trying to warn them off.

Eventually Maud discovers that Marguerite and the missing girl are the same person, Marguerite had started to use a different name.  She also learns, with the help of a psychic that there is a body at the bottom of the well on the Flood property.

In the end we learn that Gabriel, and his cousin Stephen had killed Marguerite when she returned to the house and it is she who is at the bottom of the well.   While it appeared that Mr Flood was grief stricken at the loss of his wife we learn that his wife was initially married to Mr. Flood's brother and when the brother died Mr. Flood married her.  It probably was not a happy marriage.

 His wife was the one who had all the money and Flood tried to take control of it but gradually she was able to get back her fortune and in her will she was supposed to have directed that after flood's death all money from the assets should go to the institution her daughter was in.  We learn that the Mother knew what her son and the cousin had done but she loved the son so much she never reported this to the police.  We also learn that for some reason (never explained) the son was pretending to be the care giver and the cousin was pretending to be the son.

At the end of the book Maud, Renata and a retired policeman go back to Renata's childhood village to face the past.  The saints are no longer around.

It was a very interesting, somewhat bizarre story.  It is not often that you have a story where so many characters are bad, or all have done bad things.  It seems like all the Flood family were bad.



Stephen

Cooking for Picasso

by Camille Aubray

The title of this book captured my attention.  It is about a young girl who is sent to prepare lunch for Picasso (who is in hiding as Mr. Ruiz) in Antibes in the mid 1930's.  She is a precocious girl who goes from quietly preparing and serving his lunches to being a model for some paintings and eventually having an affair with him and getting pregnant.

The story switches from the past with Odine to the present when her granddaughter learns from her mother that the Grandmother claims to have been given a painting by Picasso.

The granddaughter, Celine is going through a rough time, her mother (Odine's daughter) married an abusive man who had twins from a previous marriage.  The stepfather is hard on Celine and her mother.  He is a very angry controlling man.  When he dies the twins take control of his estate and move their stepmother from New York to Nevada to be near one of them.  They keep Celine entirely out of the picture.  One time Celine's mother gives her a book which turns out to be a notebook where Odine wrote down recipes and notes for what she prepared for Picasso.  Celine's mother has a stroke and her siblings try to keep her away from her mother.

Celine discovers that her mother had plans to travel to France to take a cooking class with Celine's stepfather's sister.  She is much nicer than he is.  Celine and the aunt decide to change the mother's ticket and have Celine go instead so that she can search out her grandmother's history and search for the painting.

As the story goes on we learn that Odine was promised to a local man but married the love of her life and they moved to the U.S. where they set up a successful restaurant on the east coast.  However the mafia are demanding payments and there is an altercation and Celine's adopted father is killed.  Her mother is frightened and takes them back to France where they learn that Odine's parents have both died.  They struggle but eventually Odine is able to convince the owner of her parents former restaurant to take her on as a cook.  She helps him build up the business to include a small hotel/b and b??

The story goes on to describe how Odine is able to get the painting by Picasso by stealing it from him
Eventually Celine, with the help of the current owner of her Grandmother's hotel,  finds the painting and though she would like to keep it she decides to sell it to become partners with the chef who owns her  grandmother's hotel and also fund a legal case to free her mother from her siblings control. Sadly her mother dies before she can achieve this.

I picked this book up on a whim and wasn't expecting too much but it actually was an engaging read with lots of details and mystery.

The Island of Sea Women

by Lisa See

This is the story of the lives of two south Korean female divers, called haenyo.  The two girls, Young- sook and Mi-ja.  Young-sook's mother is head of the women's diving collective.  Mi-ja is living with an aunt and uncle who are very mean to her.  She is an orphan (with a cloud hanging over her because her parents were considered Japanese collaborators).  The girls are very close friends and share all the time they can together.  They are illiterate but do rubbings to document their various adventures and memories.

The book describes how the women divers are the breadwinners of the family and the cooks and gardeners.  It seems all the men do is look after the children.  There is an early tragedy when Young-sook is being taught to be a diver, the other baby diver she is diving with gets caught underwater.  She lives but is brain damaged. 

The lives of the people are tough especially as they are under Japanese occupation.  Many people are killed or arrested as rebels.  Mi-ja gets engaged to a man that Young-sook likes.  She is sad about this but soon comes to suspect that they man she likes is abusing Mi-ja.  Young-sook marries a young school teacher and they are very much in love.  Young-sook's affection for Mi-ja wanes as she suspects Mi-ja's husband is siding with the Japanese against the local people.  He is eventually captured during the war (by whom I am not sure).  But when he returns being the chameleon he is he gets himself employed by the new occupiers, the Americans, and the new government that has been installed

The people are unhappy with this government and one day their dissatisfaction boils over into a riot.
Young-sook is devastated when her husband and son are killed and the young brain damaged woman who is now her sister-in-law is raped and murdered in front to the crowd.  She begs Mi-ja who is also there to take her other children to save them but Mi-ja refuses.

The years go by, Mi-ja eventually returns to the town but Young-sook avoids her.  She is outraged to learn that her daughter is seeing Mi-ja's son.  When the young people announce they are getting married Young-sook refuses to attend.  Eventually Mi-ja and the young people move to the U.S.  They send Young-sook letters but she only reads the first one.

Eventually Mi-ja's granddaughters (also Young-sook's granddaughters) come to town and want to speak to Young-sook, she ignores them repeatedly until she finally agrees to listen to a tape recording of Mi-ja.  Young-sook realized that she did not know the truth of what was going on and harbouring her hatred for so long (when many other people had suffered as much or more than she) was a  mistake.

This book was very hard to read and times but it was fascinating to get a better understanding of the history of south Korea.  It was a very powerful story and it was worth sticking through it to the end.

Transcription

by Kate Atkinson

This is the third book that I have read by this author.  I enjoyed the first two, I found them quirky and unique but interesting.

This books is about a young British woman, Julie Armstrong, who is recruited to work for MI5.  Initially she is only a transcriber.   She listens in to conversations in the next room where a British agent, who is pretending to be a Nazi sympathizer, is meeting with Brits who are nazi sympathizers.  They want to find out what the sympathizers know or are planning to do, at times they feed them false information.

There is a bit of intrigue within the various bosses at MI5, one of the superiors asks Julie if she has noticed anything suspicious about her immediate boss but she doesn't tell him anything.  Her boss tells her that she shouldn't trust anyone.

Eventually she is recruited to be a spy, meeting with one of the key female nazi sympathizers.  Her actions eventually result in that women and others being arrested.

At one point one of the sympathizers comes to her office/apartment and discovers what is going on.  She and two other agents kill the woman and dispose of her body.

The book jumps around in time.  It starts in 1981 with Julie being hit by car when she is crossing the street, then it goes to 1940 and at times to 1950.  After the war Julie gets a job with the BBC.  Other former agents are also working there.  She is frightened when she gets an anonymous note saying she will pay for what she did.  She also finds that once you have been a spy you cannot leave that behind.
She is asked to provide a safehouse for a Czech defector who seems to have some knowledge about the Russian nuclear weapons program.  She and a fellow agent lose this man to unknown people.  Her boss loses his job because it is found out that he is homosexual.  He had proposed to her, probably to try to cover up his homosexuality.

One of the people who is after her is a foreign woman who was acting as a British Agent.  The woman's dog was entrusted to Julie and her boss but while they both loved the dog and took care of it, it ran away from them them.  Julie thought the woman had died in Germany but the woman reappears and several times attacks Julie for killing her dog.  She is a bit deranged.

However, it does seem that other people are after her.  When she tries to leave England there are people trying to stop her at the train station.  Her former boss comes to her aid, getting her way paid on a freighter which takes her to Europe.  She apparently settled in Italy and had a son from an liaison there.  However, one day two men arrive at her door and take her back to England.  She is never charged with anything so you have to wonder why they bothered to bring her back.

It was an interesting story but not as engaging as the other two I read.

Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine

by Gail Honeyman

This is the first novel by a Scottish writer. It has been getting alot of positive press so I thought I would read it.

It is about a young woman who is very lonely and isolated.  She is the survivor of a traumatic event in her childhood that saw her moved from foster home to foster home and group home to group home.  She was not maltreated there but she was not loved.  Once a week Eleanor receives a phone call from her mother who keeps berating and threatening her.  She dreads these calls.

She is working in a a job as an accounts clerk, she has no life, she works then comes home to the same meal every night and drinks herself into oblivion on weekends with vodka.

She doesn't think life can get any better, she lives in a suite provided to her by the state, furnished with other people's cast offs but she doesn't seem to care.  She is stockpiling pain killers.

Eleanor is disfigured by burns on her face from a fire.  She sticks to herself and her workmates find her strange and aloof.  However, a tech guy in the company befriends her and invites her for coffee, to meet his mother etc.  One day they are out walking and they find a man collapsed on the street.  Eleanor talks to the unconscious man while they are awaiting help.   The man survives and Eleanor and Raymond go to visit him in the hospital.  The patient is grateful to them and welcomes them warmly.  They are introduced to his family.  As Eleanor has these interactions she starts to see what a family is like.  This is an eye-opener to her.  She doesn't have a frame of reference for a healthy family.

Eleanor is at a club and sees the lead singer of a band, she falls head over heels for him and starts to imagine that they will get into a relationship.  She buys a computer so she can track him on the web, she buys new clothes, gets a new hairdo and even gets her face done and buys makeup so she can be presentable to to the man she hopes will be her beau.  She even visits where he lives.

Sadly, the man that Eleanor and Raymond saved dies a few weeks later.  They are both very sad at his death.

Eleanor buys tickets for a concert by the man she has been stalking.  She dresses up in her new clothes.  As the concert progresses she realizes that the musician will never really see her or be attracted to her.   She chastises herself for being a thirty something women with a teenage crush. She goes home and drinks herself into oblivion.  She would probably have died but Raymond arrives at her home, cleans up the mess she has made and brings her food and flowers.  He insists she see a doctor who diagnoses her with clinical depression.  He offers her drugs but she declines.  He insists she see a counsellor and she agrees to do this.  She is off work for a few weeks to recuperate.

As she goes to therapist she gradually opens up about the trauma she has suffered.  As a child she and her sister had a nutcase of a mother.  The Mother keeps telling them they are better than other people and insists they speak well and dress well.  But while she lectures them at times she beats them and starves them.  When teacher's notice the bruises on the children the mother pulls them out of school.
One day the mother sets fire to their home, planning to kill the two children.  Eleanor's young sister dies in the fire.  Eleanor finally remembers her sister and admits that she feels guilty that she was not able to protect and save her sister.  The therapist assures her this is not her fault.  A surprise crops up however, we learn that Eleanor's sister AND mother died in the fire.  So all these years Eleanor had been imagining the weekly phone calls from her mother.

As the book ends Eleanor has a friend, a cat and the people at work welcome her back warmly when she returns to work.  It looks like Eleanor will be fine.

This was a very sad book at times.  The author did an excellent job of portraying a very disfunctional, lonely and isolated human.  She did a great job of showing the transformation of Eleanor from a person totally isolated from society to a person who is gradually growing and learning how to behave in society.

Bridge of Clay

by Markus Zusak

WOW!!!
I read a previous book by this author called The Book Thief.  I thought it was good.  But, this book was brilliant!! One of the best books I have read in a long time, if not ever.

The book iss  told in a disjointed way, jumping back and forth in time.  It is a long book, over 500 pages and I must admit that about 150 pages in I was going to give up on it.  However, I am glad I hung in.

The book is about a family of five boys, the two women their father loved, and especially about one of the brothers, Clay and the girl he loved.

The book tells of the father and his first love.  He is deeply in love with his wife and has painted numerous paintings of her.  His wife, while she may love him, decides the marriage isn't working for her and divorces him.  He is devastated and collapses in grief in the garage where he did the paintings of her.

Then the story tells of the boys' mother.  She was raised in Eastern Europe by her father who taught her to play piano.  Her father eventually arranges for her to go perform outside of the country.  He buys her a round trip ticket but tells her not to come back.  She misses her father but takes his advice.  She works at housecleaning jobs and somehow makes her way to Australia where she continues to work as a cleaner.  She saves all her money to buy a piano but the delivery people take it to the wrong address.  This is how she meets her future husband (with whom she will have the five boys).

The boys are portrayed as very rambunctious, even vicious with each other.  The portrayal of family life is incredible.

We learn that the boys' mother gets cancer and dies after suffering tremendously.  The boys of course are devastated by her death but it is the father who falls apart.  He leaves one day abandoning the boys.  They survive in a very rough and tumble way.  The family includes a cat, a dog, a donkey, a pigeon and a goldfish.  They beat up each other.  They get Clay who likes to run and seems to like to get beat up to race with people stationed around the track to beat him up to slow him down.  They take bets on how fast he will make it around the track.

Eventually the father does come back the boys don't want to have anything to do with him.  The refer to him as "the murderer".  They say he murdered them.  The father tells them he is building a bridge.

The brother Clay falls in love with a young woman who lives across the street.  She is an aspiring jockey despite her parents.  She really applies herself to the task of becoming a good jockey.

One interesting thing about the book is that the boys don't talk a lot to each other but they seem to understand each other.  The boys "know" that Clay will leave them to go to the father without him telling them so,

Clay is sorry to leave his girlfriend but feels he needs to go help his father.  They plan to replace an old bridge that collapsed years before.  They are going to build it from bricks and with arches.  Michaelangelo is a hero of the father/son... his work with quarries.  Clay works like a dog to dig a trench for the bridge supports, working himself to exhaustion.  He does go back to see his brother and girlfriend occasionally.  Eventually he decides he must leave his girlfriend for good so she can concentrate on being a jockey.  Her returns to help his father.

His girlfriend dies on the track the day after he leaves her.  Clay is devastated and feels that he is responsible for her death.  He eventually helps his father complete the bridge... working with superhuman effort.

In the jumping back and forth in time of the book we find out that the mother confided some background family history, e.g. about the first wife, to Clay.  It is also Clay who is actually  murderer.  His mother wanted the father to kill her with carbon monoxide in the family car but it is Clay who actually does it because his father can't.

We also find out that Clay's girlfriend helps him find their father's first wife.  She is single, divorced once or twice.  She tells them leaving Clay's father was a big mistake... but if she hadn't Clay wouldn't exist.

After the bridge is complete Clay leaves, before he goes he tells one of the brothers where to find a buried typewriter that belonged to their grandmother and to write the family story.  No one knows where Clay is but when the writer of the story is about to get married he tells his father to go find Clay.  The father goes to Florence as he believes Clay will be found near the David statue and after 29 days Clay does show up in the museum.   He does come home for his father's wedding.

The book was very hard to read with all the pain and suffering of the characters, including the mother.  However, it was so powerful, the way the author portrayed the relationships and the crazy interaction of the brothers.  It seems to me that he presented memories and understanding perhaps the way one's memories might come and go and understanding of events, lives and what motivates people might grow over time as we think about our lives and experiences.

This author is amazing, so unique, creative, sensitive and insightful.  I loved this book!!

Lear's Shadow

by Claire Holden Rothman

I picked this book up while browsing at Chapters, I thought the story was potentially interesting.
It is the story of a middle-aged woman whose life is falling apart, her lover with whom she co-owned a yoga studio has left her and she is basically bankrupt.  She sells the yoga studio,
In desperation she takes a job as an Assistant at a Montreal summer theatre company as a jack of all trades.  The cast includes an ornery drunk, who is cast as Lear.

While she is trying to keep up with the workload of this demanding but low paying job her sisters marriage is falling apart and her father is displaying symptoms of dementia.  Her sister insists that she move in with her father as a caregiver.  She hardly gets any sleep as her father has a tendency to sleepwalk.  Eventually the sister moves into the father's home with her children.

I am not familiar with the Lear story but assume the daughter's struggle with the father is meant to reflect the Lear story.  One thing I don't understand entirely, the women's father seemed to be quite wealthy.  I don't understand why the main character didn't ask her father to help her out.  He was cantankerous and might have refused but I think she could have asked.

I have read some online reviews of the book, some people really liked it but many were lukewarm or even disappointed.  So I don't feel bad to say that taking on the Lear story and trying to pair it with the modern world could have been interesting and powerful.  I think this was a weak effort, grabbing onto a powerful story of Shakespeare for appeal but weak by comparison.

Animal Heart

by Dania Tomlinson

This book is by a local author and set in the Okanagan.

It takes place around the time when the Okanagan was being settled by British immigrants.  The story is primarily about a girl(Iris) and her mother.  The mother is Welsh, the father is British.  The man brings his family, his wife, a daughter and a son to the Okanagan and they settle in a town, Winteridge,  along the lake that was apparently a native village.  It is rumoured that the settlers are claiming the land for their farms and orchards on land where the natives lived and are buried.

The father leaves at times to take care of mining concerns that belong to the family in Europe and other places.  The mother appears to have epilepsy.  She tries to hide this condition.  The mother regales her children with Welsh folk tales.  The mother and daughter are befriended by a native man who is the volunteer keeper of the local library.  He also seems to be very knowledgeable about native lore and history.

Both the mother and daughter seem to be able to see ghost people and ghost animals wandering around the vicinity.  Both mother and daughter also see a huge water serpent but they are told it is just a large fish.  The girl discovers and unusual fish and keeps it in a jar of water, she keeps it over the years.  Her mother is aware of the fish and sometimes wants it with her.  How the fish could stay alive in a small jar is a mystery to me... magical fish??

The girl becomes close friends with a Japanese girl whose family has come to work the orchards.  The Japanese girl's father works on Iris's family orchard.  Iris's father also buys some land which he leases (with the intent to sell it to) the Japanese girl's father.  Iris and the Japanese girl hang out in a tree house where the Japanese girl sets up a Shinto altar because her parents don't want her to practice the old faith in the new country.

Then a Ukrainian family arrives a man, his wife and two sons.  The man becomes the foreman on the family farm, his wife is hired to look after the family farm and look after the girl's mother. 

When Iris discovers that the Japanese girl is having sex with one of the Ukrainian boys, whom she also likes, she destroys the shrine.  The other Ukrainian boy likes Iris but she ignores/rebuffs him.

When WWI is declared most of the men sign up including Iris's father and brother and the two Ukrainian boys.  The brother who likes Iris asks her to marry him and she impulsively agrees.  As the war goes on the other Ukrainian brother sends letters to Iris  to give to his Japanese lover.  Iris doesn't give them to give them to the girl and actually encourages the girl to marry a Japanese boy her parents want her to marry.

At one point many of the local men go out to capture the monster.  They come back with  a large fish and say all danger has past.  The girl, her mother, and probably the native man know this is not true.
The character late says that the locals have now come to call this mythic creature Ogopogo.

While the war is on Iris has recruited local women to work in the orchard.  Police come looking for the Ukrainian foreman as they suspect with his background he might be a threat.  Initially the family denies they know of him but after the man continually beats his wife, Mary, Iris turn him in.  She thinks this will save Mary but she is arrested and sent to an internment camp with her husband even though she isn't Ukrainian.

The local Japanese people are collected and interned also

The girl's brother and then the father are killed in the war.  The family is devastated.  Her mother becomes essentially bedridden.

The older of the two Ukrainian brothers returns home wounded.  He has lost part of one of his legs and walks on crutches.  He is devastated that his Japanese lover has married.  Initially he and Iris are just friends but eventually they become physical.  Just as Iris discovers she is pregnant the other brother comes home.  Iris has let slip something the older brother had confided in a letter to his Japanese lover and he realizes that Iris has read his letters -- betrayed him.  He tells her to marry his brother and he disappears.  Her mother commits suicide shortly after that.

She does marry the other brother but on their honeymoon cruise she has a miscarriage and her husband realizes she has not been faithful to him.  He claimed he had saved himself for her but she realizes from his love making that this is not true.  When she returns to their cabin on the ship she finds him attacking one of the ship staff. 

When they return to BC their ship is quarantined for a while as several other people are ill.  However, they soon learn that the Spanish flu has decimated the population on land and that most of the people of the town had died.  The town is burned down to avoid spreading the plague.  The woman and her husband move to the coast and set up a home but they never have a happy marriage.

This woman has hurt/betrayed so many people in her life.  When she is old she returns to the village, convincing the ferry captain to drop her off at the deserted town.  She tells him she has arranged someone to come get her later.  But in fact she walks into the water, taking the strange fish with her.

This was an interesting, well written story.  The local interest made it appealing.

The Outsider

The Outsider/L'Etranger

by Albert Camus

I finally got around to reading this very famous book.  It is a very short but very powerful book.  In reading analysis re: the book and Camus it is said that as an existentialist Camus felt that what happened in life was random and this randomness was absurd... there was no great plan for anyone... so what was the point of living??

Yet I saw a quote by Camus "man cannot do without beauty".  This seems to contradict the suggestion that he felt there was no point in living.

The Outsider
It seems many  reviewers get excited even by the opening sentence of this book, "My mother died today. Or yesterday.  I don't know".  This is taken to be evidence of the heartlessness of the protaganist.  Later on his lack of emotion, lack of tears upon the death of his mother are part of the actions used to declare him guilty at his murder trial.  Mersault had put his mother in a home so that she would be cared for, this decision is also used against him at the trial... of evidence of not wanting to care for her.

Mersault doesn't just lack emotions vis a vis his mother, he has a girlfriend with whom he enjoys swimming and having sex but when she asks him if he loves her he says no, he doesn't react when she says she loves him.  He seems to be incapable of showing emotion of any kind.

One of his neighbours has a dog which he beats constantly and swears at... but when the dog disappears he is unconsolable.

Mersault is offered a promotion to a position in Paris but declines it.... his employer chastises him for having no ambition.

Mersault has a friend Raymond who apparently is a pimp.  When Raymond asks Mersault to pen a letter to get his girlfriend (who he believes was cheating on him) back, so that he can "punish" her, Mersault writes it.  When the girl returns Raymond beats her and gets Mersault to vouche for his character so he is not charged.  One day Raymond is attacked by some Arab men (friends/family of his girlfriend).  They fend off the attackers but later Mersault encounters one of the Arabs, he has a gun in his pocket that Raymond had given him).  When the Arab lifts a knife toward him Mersault shoots him once, and then four more times.  He blames the sun for doing what he did.

At his trial he watches the proceedings as an observer, rather than the person who is on trial and facing dire consequences.  He listens sometimes with interest, sometimes with total disinterest to the proceedings.

Several of his friends including his girlfriend come and speak in his support saying he is a good person.  He does nothing to speak up for himself or to defend himself.

You don't know what you've lost til its gone
It is only when he is found guilty that he realizes that he will no longer have the little pleasures in life, his girlfriend, the sound of the city at night, swimming in the ocean...  the beauty in everyday things.  He regrets that his life will be cut short while others will be able to live theirs out to their natural conclusion.
When a priest comes to ask him to confide in god he gets furious and shouts at the priest.  This is the only time he shows any real emotion,

The book closes with him saying that he hopes that he will have a large audience of haters when he is guillotined.  At the end he wants his life to be somehow acknowledged.


French Exit

The mother and son in French Exit, which I recently read, seem somewhat similar to Mersault, they just move through life without thinking at all about others or the consequences of their actions.  However, unlike Mersault, the mother does concentrate on getting things her way so there is some deliberate selfish intent there.

Samuel Beckett

On Sunday Morning on CBC today they had an entire hour devoted to Samuel Beckett the author/playright.  It was an excellent program.  I really enjoyed Beckett when I read him when I was in university.  Like Camus I think he writes about the absurdity of life.  However, unlike Camus I feel that Beckett has a wry sense on humour as he explores this absurdity.  And, as the people interviewed on CBC commented today Beckett seemed to maintain a willingness to keep trying/fighting. "“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” - Worstword Ho by Beckett.

Beckett, like Camus, is trying to jolt us out of our complacency.  I was amazed to hear actors discuss how his editorial notes in his plays and other direction were so powerful and subtle.... they discuss the difference between a comma and a semicolon.  One Irish actress, who has performed numerous Beckett pieces said that performing his plays has changed/challenged her as a person. 

She discussed one play where all is dark in the theatre, even the exit signs, and all people see is a mouth eight feet above the stage.  As the actor she was in a harness and even had her head constrained and wore a blindfold.  She talked about how disconcerting this is for the audience but also how it impacted her physically and mentally.  I had never heard thoughts like this before.

Beckett's characters, may be waiting for something or someone, or feel all alone, but somehow we still come away with a sense of hope or possibility.  I guess it is like listening to Leonard Cohen, he is sad, he is hurting, but sharing his pain helps us feel not so alone.

French Exit

by Patrick De Witt

This book was nominated for the Booker Prize this year and also for a Canadian Prize.  I wish I had read my review of his other book Sister Brothers, then I probably wouldn't have been interested in reading this one.

I don't know why his books get such acclaim.  This story was silly and the main characters were a waste of human space in my opinion.  Is that what people like today, people who are more useless and more self-centred than they are?

It is the story of a mother and son who when the book opens are living in New York.  The back story is that the man's father died years before, his wife discovered him dead and left him there to go off skiing or something for a weekend.  When she came back she reported the death.  This story was scandalous and she was villified in the media.

At the time of his father's death the boy was at a private school, his mother arrives one day to pull him out of school and announces his father has died.  The father was wealthy and they are living off the wealth in an extravagant fashion in New York until they are told that they are basically insolvent and will have to sell all their property. The son and his mother have become very close.  The son does not work nor do much of anything.

The wife has a cat whom she is convinced has taken in the spirit of her dead husband.  It appears this might be correct.

They decide to leave for Paris and live in an apartment offered to them.  The Mother is fine with leaving but the son is devastated as he is engaged to a girl.  They do leave on a ship and the cat is drugged so they don't have to deal with all the paperwork of bringing an animal on the ship and into France.

On the ship the young man meets a tarot card reader and they have sex.  The young woman had successfully predicted the death of one of the guests on the ship.  She is fired when the woman dies.

When the mother and son arrive in Paris they live extravagently, the mother literaly gives money away and flushes it down the toilet.  The cat runs away and even though they try to woe him back using the services of the card reader and the bank employee/cum private investigator, the cat decides to continue to live a hard lonely life on the streets of Paris.
The Mother and son inherit a rag tag collection of guests who come to live with them in the apartment including another American, the tarot card reader, a bank employee and eventually the son's fiancee who is now engaged to a former fiancee, and her fiancee.

The mother, after she has given or spent all her money, commits suicide in a bathtub.

That is the end....

Don't really care for the story or any of the characters.