Sea Wife by Amity Gaige

A super-exciting story about a couple with two young children who go away to sea on a sailboat. You know from page 1 that things come to a bad end. The story is mainly told back-and-forth between Juliet’s hindsight perspective and Michael’s daily log entries. The bold print and indentation for Michael’s entries makes it clear who’s speaking; but even so, the switching could be very rapid, and it sometimes took a slight effort to reposition one’s mind into the right character at the right time.

I don’t know anything about boats and I do terrible at following action sequences under the best of circumstances; so in a lot of the most gripping moments, I could only skim helplessly in a “jib mainsail yada yada halyard keep yada yada” kind of way; and yet the book still delivered a 4-star experience for me.

The plot: with lots and lots of foreboding, we follow the family’s story from the different perspectives, wondering exactly how things will go south. Not only do we know there’s going to be a death: we soon have the possibility of foul play mixed in.

The conclusion: very satisfying.

The characters: While Juliet had many annoying traits – tendencies toward martyrdom, self-pity, self-absorption, and wanting to be a poet for Pete’s sake – it was OK, because I didn’t feel I was necessarily supposed to like her, not all the time. Michael in his personal log betrays an idealistic libertarian streak, but never goes off the nutso deep end – then again, he did take his whole young family away to Central America to live on a sailboat for a year, so what am I saying? Sybil, the 7-year-old is really charming – I don’t think I’ve ever come across a more likeable child in a modern novel before, not one who gets this much screen time. She never seems to get bratty. In fact, towards the end, I started to wonder – why does this kid never get bratty; is that realistic? George, the 2-year-old – also well played.

Rhetorical question: why do female protagonists in modern novels always have to be gorgeous? Can’t we have someone who’s a little dumpy-looking after having two children? (  )

Addendum: I own this book in hardcover and am happy to lend.

The Tea girl of Hummingbird Lane by Lisa See

It was grating, then kind of funny, the way things were always spelled out. For example, it’s really handy when a part of a culture’s traditions includes reciting exactly what that culture’s traditions are, as they perform the traditions, don’t you think? I also appreciated letters and therapy transcripts stating exactly what characters were feeling.

So, it’s OK that it’s not meant to be great literature – I accept that. What really kept the book from elevating, for me, was the number of wacky tangents. All of the following are spoilers.

She’s into education, she’s going to pursue higher schooling, that will be her way out – no, wait, she got distracted becoming a tea expert; the education thing is not happening anymore.

She’s in love, her lover goes away to earn money then returns for her – they can start their life together, though it will be hard – no, wait, that’s not happening, he’s a drug addict.

She’ll leave him and deal with the consequences of being a woman who left her husband – oh way, he just got killed by a tiger!

She goes out into the world and becomes a successful, independent businesswoman – oh wait, now she’s the pampered wife a gazillionaire.

And to tie it all up, the adopted child – birth mother reunion thread. Their paths finally manage to meet up in China. And everything is beautiful and magical and right, because that’s exactly how adopted child – birth mother search & reunion stories always turn out in life, aren’t they? ( )

Sunny Days by David Kamp

I bought this book without even doing my usual sampling preview, once I discovered it was not only about all of my favorite childhood TV shows, but was also written by the same author of THE UNITED STATED OF ARUGULA, one of my favorite metafood books.

It’s about the wild creative atmosphere around educational children’s programming in the late 60s and early 70s. Sesame Street, of course… Roosevelt Franklin… some Mr. Rogers… but I really liked all the coverage of the lesser-known local favorite, Magic Garden. And the shout-out to Joya’s Fun School! I really liked Joya.

This book really pushed a lot of my memory buttons, but I think the weirdest trigger memory of all was when they covered “Berna-dette’s” Zoom intro. Honestly whenever I hear the name “Bernadette” I tend to flash back to that intro; all I remembered was she did something with her arms while they played a kind of celeste-sounding musical bit. I didn’t remember her being Chinese, or that the arm thing was supposed to give the illusion that she had no elbow joints or something. But they really spent a lot of time on it in the book, and now I know ALL about it. And it sent me back to watch some of the original Zoom show intro numbers, and OMG were they bad.

Speaking of bad, then there was the New Zoo Revue. I was very, very little when I used to watch and enjoy this show; and while probably none of the kiddie shows that I watched were true favorites with the parents and older brother in the house, I remember everyone PARTICULARLY hating on the New Zoo Revue. “They can’t even sing,” my mother protested, and I was little enough that this puzzled me. “They CAN sing,” I argued. They were right there on the TV singing. But even in my memory I remember some really awful singing, something along the lines of “With Doug, and Emmy Jo, every day’s a different shooooooow!” half-shouted and half-sung in a monotone.

Good times! Oh wait, I guess GOOD TIMES will be a different book altogether. ( )

Doxology by Nell Zink

Pam is born the same year as me and spends her young adulthood in gritty downtown NYC, working in the financial district as a programmer and living in Chinatown. So forgive me if I liked this book right off the bat.

She does live a much more hardscrabble life than me, running away from home and arriving in NYC young and anonymous. She does much more interesting programming than I ever did, too.

Joe has a fictional neurological syndrome that manifests something like a mild Down’s Syndrome in some ways, with Joe always happy and optimistic and trusting; yet fully functioning, if quirky, and tremendously creative and talented as a songwriter.

Daniel lives in an illegal apartment over a video store in the heart of Chinatown; its only entrance and egress being through the store, Daniel must be home every night by 1 AM when the metal gate comes down, else he has to stay out till 6 AM when it comes back up. He falls for Pam, and she’s into him enough to move in with him into this crazy place.

Flora is their unexpected offspring. She grows up fast. She’s precocious and smart. She’s a child when 9/11 happens, and her parents relocate her to her grandparents’ place in the DC suburbs, where she spends the remains of her childhood. She wants to save the world from climate change. She does a semester abroad in Chad and becomes a soil expert, but never can figure out quite how to channel her energy and enthusiasm to go about actually saving the world.

And that’s it. It’s the life story of these four people from the late 80s to the present moment. I was riveted. ( )

Sharks in the Time of Saviors by Kawai Strong Washburn

“The kingdom of Hawai’i had long been broken – the breathing rain forests and singing green reefs crushed under the haole fists of beach resorts and skyscrapers…”

A tremendously good book with an unfortunately awful title. Synopses will tell you it is about a boy who is magically rescued by sharks and goes on to have supernatural powers, and you might wonder why you should read a silly fantasy tale like that (with an awful title to boot). But this is really the story of a Hawaiian family with deep, magically realistic ties to the earth; as well as the story of a modern family going to shambles.

I went to the Big Island of Hawaii once and it had a life-altering effect on my spiritual attitude, i.e. it gave me one. I think it was at the point that a guide told us that the lava flows were “Pele’s hair.” We all hear about nature-worshipping religions and the Gaia theory, but only in Hawaii did I feel it literally. No, that particular lava flow really IS Pele’s hair. So they don’t want you to take a pickax to it, to my husband’s disappointment. (It’s gotta be a lot easier to adhere to a religion like that in a place with no winter. In Vermont, one feels bereft; god is literally dormant for so long.)

This book brought it all to life. “Fire goddess Pele with her unyielding strength, birthing the land again and again in lava, exhaling her sulfur breath across the sky…”

The family suffers from poverty, must leave the Big Island for jobs in the cities in Oahu. The parents work hard to send their children to colleges on the mainland. The one who is blessed with healing powers, Noa, becomes a paramedic. The eldest, Dean, becomes for a short time a basketball star; and the youngest, Kaui, goes to school for engineering. But always, the poverty:

“My grandmother’s grandmother’s grandmother had no use for paper printed with the silhouette of some faraway haole man. It gave nothing. What was needed was food from the earth, housing from the earth, medicine from the earth… But ships from far ports carried a new god in their bellies… And money was the name of that god, and it was the sort of god that preyed on you, made demands and laid its hands on you with such force as to make the Old Testament piss its pants.”

In the end, it is not giving too much away to note that it seems significant that Kaui’s job pays her not in money but in food from the earth. But I did not like how Dean ended up; and I don’t know the significance of the fact that what he provided for the family was money. ( )

Addendum: I own this in physical form and will loan.

 

Black Is the Body by Emily Bernard

For book club. Local professor of black studies writes observational essays. I liked the shout-outs to Vermont, at first. It gradually became clear though that she does not feel at home here, and I started to feel judged. As an adoptee, I also enjoyed the segments about adopting her twins. Other than that, it was hard to feel interested. ( )

Bending Reality by Bernice Kelman

Really Chris?  You read a book mostly dictated by an energy force calling himself “Sir Garrod”?

Well, a lot of it, yes, I did.

Because it was given to me by my neighbor, the author, Bernice, with whom I’ve lately set up a weekly grocery shopping date.

And at least half of it, I skimmed or skipped.  Not of interest.  And yet… the underlying message is nothing wacky, nothing hard to get behind, nothing more simple than… love.

And I like that she – or, she would correct me, he/she/it, Sir Garrod – supports the theory of parallel universes, a favorite of mine.  To wit:
“Consider that this is a central path and that as you move along this path, every time you come to a decision-making point, you are at a crossroad where you create alternate versions of yourself that each explore a different decision.”

There is stuff in physics that suggests that indeed every ‘decision’ made by a quantum particle simultaneously goes both one way and the other, forking off an infinite number of universes.  So you see, scientific basis!

Seriously, it’s just a vision I like… it gives me a calm feeling to envision the dominoes of the universe all hitting each other, my path just being one path of dominoes among infinitely many.  Maybe this is what “belief” is, or spirituality, or somesuch.  Do I “believe” this?  What does “believe” mean?  That word has always rubbed me the wrong way because in practice it always seems to mean, “I aver this is true even without evidence.”  If you had evidence, you wouldn’t say “I believe…” you’d just say the fact that’s true.

All I can say about my parallel universe theory is that it could be true and I like to think about it.  Whatever that makes me – spiritual, wack – is what I am, so whatever.

But this is my own sidetrack, and not the central message of the book.  The central message is what Jesus was trying and failing to get us to do from the beginning: love one another.  Just love.

Gives me a warm rosy glow when I’m tipsy just before bed, but so hard to do in the glare of the morning.

 

 

Biloxi

I really enjoyed this. The protagonist is a 60-something-year-old male recently retired and divorced. He spends his time in his char, drinking beers, watching bad TV, eating horribly unhealthy foods by the sackful, and avoiding people. He dislikes his ex-brother-in-law who insists on visiting him, and seriously considers changing his phone number to avoid his daughter. His life turns around when he impulsively adopts a dog. I just really loved this story. ( )

PS  I own it physically and am willing to lend.

Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli

This was very tough to get into, and I’d say for the first 25% I was ready to abandon it. It started out very thinky and talky and I was afraid there’d be little plot. I kept giving it another shot because it was for book club. I felt like she felt about reading Kerouac on page 76: “I read like I had to finish an infinite bowl of lukewarm soup.” It was the kind of book that would throw a word at you like “edulcorated.” I’m 50 and I’ve polished off a fair number of books. This was a new one on me.

I’d say about halfway through, the plot got strong. About 75% of the way through, though, I wasn’t at all sure anymore. But at the end, I just said: Wow. It was just plain beautiful and powerful.

Do you want the plot? Couple, 10-year-old boy, and 5-year-old girl drive from NYC to the southwest for the father’s research project on Apaches and the mother’s attempts to help an immigrant locate her two missing undocumented little girls. First half or so is narrated by the mother. The ‘marriage is ending’ – this plot point is part of what gave me intense dislike in the first 25%, but let me not start complaining about that. Second half or so is narrated by the boy. I don’t think I’ll give away any spoilers, but things do happen.

I have to on balance give it only 3 stars because it threatened to lose me so often. ( )

Emma by Jane Austen

Write a review of EMMA? Well, as long as I am permitted to write three very dull things indeed, I should have no problem. Why, I am as sure to write three dull things the moment my fingers touch the keyboard, am I right?

Austen’s best story, IMHO. The annotated edition from Harvard is as usual superb. I absolutely love how he makes frequent reference to both the excellent Gwyneth Paltrow 1990s movie version, as well as CLUELESS from the same decade, the latter being for sure my favorite Austen adaptation ever. I know there is a new 2019 movie adaptation as well which I must see for completeness’ sake – somehow, as I don’t stream and they don’t seem to make DVD’s anymore.

Two of my favorite quotes from this work:

“Oh, Miss Woodhouse, for the pleasure of sometimes being alone!”

And, “One half the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other half” – I had that on a t-shirt once. ( )