Crow

 by Amy Spurway

This is NOT a book to read during a pandemic.  It was a downer.

This is the story about a Cape Breton girl who has escaped her life and nutty family in Cape Breton and got a job with a multilevel marketing company in Toronto.  She gets engaged and thinks her life is great until she discovers her fiance cheating on her. She breaks of the engagement and shortly after learns that she has terminal brain tumours.

She sells her condo in Toronto and all her big city clothes and returns to CB to live with her mother in a trailer.  She is understandably feeling very sorry for herself.  Her mother who is working hard as a cleaner at a hotel gives her some tough love.  We meet many of her zany relatives and friends including one friends who ill mother (who she had been caregiving for) has died, she later tries to commit suicide. Another girlfriend with mental issues has just has a baby.  Crow hooks up with a local guy she liked in high school and shares some weed with him and they have sex.

Her crazy girlfriend convinces her to cut off all her hair.  She regrets this immediately.  The girl, Crow, is getting medical tests but the prognosis is not good and her symptoms and pain are increasing.  She sees crazy lights around people amongst her symptoms.

Then crow finds out she is pregnant, she stops drinking and doing weed but has to think about if she wants to abort the pregnancy.  She decides not to abort, tells the father of the baby who is delighted.  Crow never really new her father, he disappeared before she was born. It is assumed he drowned on his fishing boat. Her father's family have let her mother live on a trailer on the family land but not the evil sister of Crow's father plans to sell the land and boot Crow and her mother out.

As if thinks aren't bad enough, Crows mother is killed in a car accident.  It is then she learns that her family members aren't necessarily crazy, they have gifts, for example her mother was a bit of a healer, perhaps Crow's colours are a gift too, seeing people's emotions.

Crow convinces her boyfriend to marry her.  The wedding celebration will put a temporary halt to planned development work on the property.  They do get married and she has a baby girl.  We think.... maybe... her mother might have healed her...  The man she thought was her father shows up for her mother's memorial service and she finds out that her real father is her father's father and her father actually fathered a child with her aunt (parents of the crazy friend).

But the last chapter is her obituary!  Not what I wanted or needed.

This book did a great job of portraying the quirkiness of people in a small village in the Maritimes, their gossiping, but also their coming together when times are tough.  However, it was a bit of a downer at times like these.  Their was lots of maritime dark humour.

Summer

 by Ali Smith     

This woman is a genius!! This is her fourth and final book of the Seasons.  She is amazing.  I love the power with which she writes, exquisite language, angry language.  Her books are all meant to reflect the tenor of the times, the first book takes place at the time of Brexit.  The final book, don't know how she wrote it so quickly is partly about post Brexit vote, immigrant internment and a pandemic.

Autumn

Some of the characters in the books carry through the four stories.  A main character is Mr Gluck, who in the last book is 104 years of age.  As a young boy he and his father were interned on the Isle of Man during the second world war because his father was German.  His sister for some reason stayed in Germany and he often saw her in the summer.  Mr Gluck was apparently a successful song writer. Later we learn that his sister got to France and was part of the resistance.  She got pregnant by another resistance fighter but eventually left her daughter with a farm family who had been helping her get people to safety in Switzerland.

In the first book we also meet Elisabeth, a young girl who is often ignored by her mother.  Mr. Gluck serves as an informal babysitter and mentor for her.  In the last book we find Mr Gluck is living with Elisabeth and her mother and Elisabeth is looking after him.  Mr. Gluck seems for the most part to be mostly sleeping and recalling the past.

Winter

Winter is the story of Sophie, her son Art and her Sister Iris.   Sophie was a successful entrepreneur.  Art is a blogger of Art in Nature.  He had intended to take his girlfriend Charlotte with him to spend Christmas with his mother but he and Charlotte have a breakup because Charlotte learned he was making things up on his blog.  Instead Art invites a total stranger to come with him.  They discover his mother is in dire shape, hardly eating, imagining a floating head.  Charlotte and Art contact Art's aunt who was a very active protestor in her youth to come and help with the mother.   The sisters had been estranged for years but seem to reconcile.  It turns out Art's mother owns a house that Art's aunt lived in as part of a commune years before.

Spring

The story starts with a young school girl who somehow gets past all security into an immigrant detention centre and convinces the boss to get all the bathrooms cleaned.  The next character we meet is Art a film director.  He is depressed because 1)his mentor Paddy has died from cancer and 2) he has been offered a film but he doesn't agree with the direction it is going in.  He hops on a train to get as far away from London as he can.  He gets off at a train station and jumps down on the tracks.  He is rescued by the young student who has somehow convinced a detention centre officer to accompany her to some special place in Scotland.  Art ends up joining up with them on their pilgrimage.  They end up meeting with some people who are working to help the illegal immigrants.  However, things go badly because the immigration centre guard calls her bosses to tell them what is going on and there is a raid.  Art drops the film he has been offered and starts making a film about the people working to help the immigrants.

Summer

In this book we meet a family, Mother Grace, children Robert and Sacha.  Grace and her husband have separated in part because they had opposing views on Brexit.  The husband now lives next door with a younger woman who can no longer speak.  Robert is very intelligent, interested in Einstein, but is getting into a lot of trouble because of being bullied at school.  His sister Sacha wants to change the world.  Robert crazy glues an egg timer to Sacha's hand to give her the gift of time.  A young couple, Art and his former girlfriend Charlotte find Sacha with a bleeding hand, from tearing the egg timer off her skin.  They had taken her to A and E for treatment and then taken her home.

Arthur and Charlotte have inherited Arthur's mother's estate and are living in her house with the Aunt Iris.  They tell the family that at the dead mother's request they are taking something to a man in northern England.  It turns out that Mr Gluck had a statue, mother and child, made up of two pieces of Marble.  At some point in time Mr. Gluck and Art's mother had had sex and she stole the round marble piece that was the child part of the sculpture.  She now whats it returned to Mr. Gluck. Robert is passionately in love with Charlotte even though he is much younger than she is.

Art and Charlotte invite the family to join them on the trip.  Art and Charlotte tell Sacha about a man they met in immigration detention called Hero. Sacha starts writing to him telling him about things on the outside world.  They get to see Gluck, who is being cared for by Elisabeth.  Gluck is now 104 and seems to spend most of his time in the "dreamtime" remembering his past.  He is delighted to have this precious sculpture back complete.  As the story concludes we find that Art and Elisabeth have fallen in love, Art stays with Elisabeth.  Charlotte goes back to live with Art's aunt who is preparing the house for an influx of immigrants who will be released from detention centres because of the pandemic.

At first Charlotte's reaction to Art's abandonment of her and everything else is to shut down and hide in her room but eventually she does overcome her ennui.

At the end of the book Robert says to Charlotte, I don't want to live in a (primal) world like that.

Charlotte responds "we're certainly living in one where the primal and the public have been getting more and more fused together.... but if you don't attend to the primal stuff inside us all.... where will it go.

I think that Ali is making us see that for as much as time moves on things don't change, people are imprisoned unjustly in the past and today also.  There is so much anger, lack of communication, irrational, cruel bureaucracy.

However, the book does show that there is the possibility for love, for caring for others, creating families of non related people. I think she is encouraging us to be aware, to act, even in a small way.

Phenomenal works!  Incredible insight!

 

The Night Portrait

 by Laura Morelli

This story takes place in world war II.  It involves two different time periods and three different primary characters.  One part of the story takes place during the time of Leonardo Da Vinci.  It is about a young woman who becomes the mistress of the Duke of Milan who commissions Leonardo to paint her picture.

The other part of the story takes place in WWII and involves a German art restorer who is recruited to identify valuable art objects from all the art the Germans are stealing from the Jews in Poland.  She finds many valuable pieces but one of special appeal to her is the Da Vinci painting of the girl with an ermine.  The girl is told that the art will be "saved" for the world but she is shocked and appalled when she finds high ranking gestapo officers taking some of the art to decorate their homes.  She is particularly upset when the Da Vinci is claimed by a vicious German who is responsible for the death of many Poles.  The girl doesn't like what is going on.  Her only recourse as she sees it is to make her own personal inventory of what is taken, from whom and where it is taken.

The other part of the story is about a young American soldier who becomes an MP aiding the Monuments men.  He is sad to leave his wife and child behind but is glad to be working to retrieve the art as he likes to draw,

The German Art Restorer's list eventually gets to the Allies an many art objects are retrieved.

It was an interesting read.

The Midnight Library

 by Matt Haig

Another book about libraries....

This is a about a young woman who is depressed and down in the dumps.  She has just been let go from her low paying job and her piano student has also dropped his lessons.  She decides to end it all.

But instead of dying she finds she is in a library with thousands of books.  There she meets a Librarian who had befriended her at school in her youth.  The Librarian tells her she has the chance to explore various lives and pick one she would like to have.  She tries lives where she is a successful musician, a mother, a scientist in the arctic, the co-owner of a California winery, in some she is single, in some divorced, in some she gets along with her brother, in others she doesn't. None of them seem to fulfill her.

She finally sees lives where her Librarian friend has died, her next door neighbour whom she often helped, is alone in a care home, and the young piano student is a juvenile criminal.  She decides to live and go back to her old life committed to do what she can to achieve a better life for her and her friends.

It was an okay story, motivational, but you knew all along she would have to have some kind of ephiphany.