Books

What to Read While You Wait for the Magic Mike XXL Blu-ray: Dietland, by Sarai Walker

/ Carolyn O / 6 Comments

I’ll admit it: I did not believe the feminist hype about Magic Mike XXL that I kept reading on Twitter.

But then I went to see it.

There is a magic place where you can still see a movie after 6 p.m. for under 10 bucks. That magic place is Rhode Island.

There is a magic place where you can still see a movie after 6 p.m. for under 10 bucks. That magic place is Rhode Island.

In a tiny theater on a Tuesday night, my husband (the only man present, but let me tell you, men should see this movie) and I sat with about a dozen women, and all of us laughed and clapped and practically cheered. It was the most positive, enthusiastic, demonstrative crowd I’ve seen at the movies, bar none (this from a woman who saw the Lord of the Rings movies at 12:01a.m. on opening day, mind you).

Why, you ask?

Well, it’s not just the good looking guys dancing around, though that’s fun (for the record, I don’t find Channing Tatum particularly attractive. No offense, Channing—you seem like a nice guy and I’d be happy to chat with you over a beer, but let’s keep it to just friends, m’kay?). You can see the same kind of thing in the first Magic Mike movie, which was a Steven Soderbergh take on the guy-trying-to-get-a-break-and-start-new-life-gets-pulled-into-old-life story. It was a good enough movie, but it didn’t leave me with a grin on my face like this one did.

Nor was it the jokes, which were pretty good, but not Anchorman quality, if you know what I mean.

I think what made me (and the audience) so happy was that (1) this is a movie about men who are out to make women happy. Are they interested in sleeping with women? Sure. Does that drive the plot? No. It’s unbelievably refreshing.

And (2), in this movie, women don’t have to be afraid. No woman is killed, raped, beaten, harassed, pressured for sex, humiliated, called names, or treated as a passive object. Not one. Not a single one. It’s like an alternative fantasy world in which women are safe around men, period.

And (3) I’m talking about women of all colors and all sizes. The fat (which I am not using in a pejorative sense) women in this movie are happy and beautiful and sexy—and being treated that way by extremely (conventionally) attractive men. And those men rely on women—including a woman of color—for help of all sorts.

To see depictions like these in a mainstream movie is like some kind of feminist fever dream. Naturally, I loved it.

Which brings me, at last, to the book you should read while you wait to watch the movie at home.

Magic Mike XXL is a movie fantasy that’s explicitly about men trying to make women happy. Dietland*, by Sarai Walker, is a fantasy in book form about women making themselves happy.

IMG_4255Plum Kettle is convinced that her real life will start once she has weight-loss surgery and becomes thin. Then she’ll be Alicia, her true self—the self who won’t be stared at, or mocked, or judged simply for moving through the world. In the meantime, Plum works for a teen magazine, answering the agonized emails of teenage girls in the vapid persona of the magazine’s editor.

Then one day, she realizes she’s being followed by girl in combat boots and bright tights, and eventually she’s drawn into the orbit of Calliope House, which is a quasi-radical feminist collective funded by Verena, a diet guru’s daughter who completely rejects her mother’s work. Plum gets to know the women who filter in and out of Calliope House (artists, activists, the occasional spy at a beauty magazine) and finds her eyes opened to what’s expected of all women, fat and thin, in the culture around her: that they make themselves attractive, by any means necessary, for men. Diets, waxing, shapewear, contouring, lingerie ads, high heels, porn: all part of the world that normalizes and encourages the objectification of women.

As Plum undertakes a difficult challenge (to live as she thinks Alicia would before she has the surgery) something darker is afoot. It’s a literal feminist conspiracy, if you will: A mysterious vigilante group called Jennifer starts to fight back, worldwide, against male oppression. Rapists are dropped onto freeways. A male editor is kidnapped and forced to replace topless female models on page 3 with nude male models. People who make hard-core porn that glorifies rape are killed. Athletes and film directors who got away with rape (thinly-veiled analogues for real people), along with a revenge-porn website founder, and several other despicable men, are kidnapped.

And then other women start to fight back. Women at a “prestigious Connecticut university” (ahem) destroy the fraternity house of a group of men who walked around campus shouting an abhorrent slogan—when “in previous years, this type of misbehavior would have been handled by a tweedy disciplinary committee in a conference room” (231). Men start to think twice about what they do or say.

Now, would you believe me if I told you this novel is hilarious? It is.

While these two plots aren’t always perfectly woven together, reading a book in which genre tropes are turned on their heads and in which every ridiculous thing women are asked to do to be beautiful is laid out and subjected to scrutiny is so rare, so exciting, that I turned pages with glee. Plum is a wonderful character with a rich interior life; she feels real, and she holds this cri-de-couer of a novel together.

Think of every rom-com you’ve watched in which the happy ending depends on the woman becoming pretty and getting the man. When was the last time you saw a mainstream movie in which a fat woman was happy, sexy, confident, and treated as such (see, there’s Magic Mike XXL, standing  in not very much company)? Think of every diet ad you’ve ever seen. How many were marketed to men?  How much time out of our lives do women spend thinking and talking about what will make us thinner, or what will make us look thinner? Think of all the professional women you know—how much harder do they have to work to get ready in the morning than their male counterparts, not because they want to, but because their company and coworkers silently expect them to?

There’s a difference between getting gussied up because it makes you feel fabulous, exercising because you dig the endorphins, or eating food that makes you feel good—and working to change your appearance because if you don’t you’ll be embarrassed or shamed. Dietland lays out those differences in technicolor.

Dietland makes the point that if we didn’t have to waste our time on the expectations a male-dominated (and often women-enforced) culture has for us, we could not only grant ourselves more time and space to be happy (to read a book, play with our kids, visit with friends, watch a Channing Tatum movie, whatever) but also tackle the really big problems without needing Jennifer’s approach, problems like violence against women, human trafficking, and suffering in its myriad forms.

Now that’s a feminist fantasy.

P.S. Speaking of which, I also highly recommend Feminist Ryan Gosling to while away the hours. Hilarious.

*I received a copy of this book from the publisher for review consideration, which did not affect the content of my review.

Writer to Watch: Nuala O’Connor

/ Carolyn O / 10 Comments

IMG_4252Nuala O’Connor’s Miss Emily* is an upstairs/downstairs novel about Emily Dickinson and an imagined Irish maid-of-all-work. While it is Ms. O’Connor’s first novel published in the United States, she has published two novels, short stories, and poetry in the U.K. and Ireland, where she often writes under the name Nuala Ní Chonchúir.

Miss Emily takes place over the course of a year or so, when 18-year-old Ada Concannon leaves Ireland for America, where she finds work in Amherst with the odd but locally esteemed Dickinson family. Chapters alternate between Ada’s voice and that of Emily Dickinson, who in her mid-30s is headed toward the seclusion she’s well known for. Despite the gaps in age, class, education, and origins, Ada and Emily form a friendship, trading recipes and observations about goings-on in the natural world.

The novel’s strongest aspects include its descriptions, particularly Ada’s recollections of Dublin and her grandmother’s cottage, and Ms. O’Connor’s rendering of Emily’s facility with language and adept way with peculiar images. Readers fond of realistic renderings of everyday life in historical fiction will find much to please them here.

Miss Emily moves very fast, thanks to its short chapters that change perspective, but I would have preferred a longer version with more expansion on the Dickinson family’s relationships and those within Ada’s family. Readers conversant with Emily Dickinson’s biography will pick up on the family dynamics, but those who don’t know much about the poet may find themselves lost at times.

Without giving too much away, I’d also add that I found the novel’s ending disappointing, shifting agency away from the main characters we’ve spent so much time with in favor of male characters who aren’t as fully drawn. In the last quarter of the novel, Emily and Ada react to events, rather than choosing their own paths, which is unfortunate and not in keeping with the tone of the novel’s first half.

Despite these issues, I’d still recommend Miss Emily for a quick summer read, and I’d be happy to read more of Ms. O’Connor’s writing, particularly her poetry. And I suspect that after you read this book, you’ll be curious to see, as I am, the Homestead, the Dickinson family home. I’ve lived about two hours from it for years, and I’m sorry to say I haven’t been to see it—but I hope to get out to Amherst later this summer, Emily Dickinson’s own words in hand.

You can read more about Nuala O’Connor here. And if you’re interested in visiting the Emily Dickinson Museum, you can read more about it here. 

*I received a copy of this book from the publisher for review consideration, which did not affect the content of my review.

 

Summer Reading, Two Ways

/ Carolyn O / 8 Comments

Long ago, when the world was still getting used to Pierce Brosnan was James Bond, I started reading Ian Fleming’s novels at my grandmother’s house, where the slim paperbacks, spines emblazoned with the title and the minimalist “/Fleming” had been left behind by my uncles. (Thankfully, I didn’t start with The Spy Who Loved Me.)

Since then, I’ve had a fondness for both short books and spy novels, which, despite their content, tend to make me think of open windows, box fans, and tomato sandwiches eaten with one hand. They’re summer books, at least for me, serving as quick palate cleansers between heavier main courses.

IMG_4137And so I was happy to zip through Daniel Silva’s The English Spy*, which is, I learned, the latest installment in a long series of best-selling novels (which appear most summers) featuring Gabriel Allon, an Israeli spy and art restorer. I should note here that I haven’t read any of Mr. Silva’s previous novels, but I had no trouble jumping into the story and getting a sense of the characters, so don’t let prior unfamiliarity stop you from picking up the book.

The book opens when a skilled assassin sinks the yacht carrying a certain (unnamed) English former princess; Gabriel is called in to help find the killer, and he recruits an old friend to help him. Together they track the bomber, who has ties to an ultra-violent faction of the IRA and various terrorist organizations. And of course, as in any good espionage thriller, there’s always a bigger fish.

The English Spy features plenty of action and twists, memorable minor characters, and solid writing. It’s violent, but not unusually so for a spy novel, and features far fewer adult shenanigans or gadgets and far more politics than your average James Bond book (or movie, for that matter). More Patriot Games than Goldfinger. It’s a fun, fast read.

Now, I promised summer reading two ways. There’s quick-reading genre fiction, like The English Spy, and then, at least for me, short, serious fiction.

IMG_4138Colum McCann’s Everything in This Country Must (2001) is the latter, a mini-collection of two short stories and a novella. All three take place in Northern Ireland during the “troubles” (which made me pick it up after The English Spy‘s focus on the IRA), and all three feature young people and their parents trying to negotiate the uncertain world they find themselves in. In the title story, a girl and her father try to save their horse, unwillingly helped by British soldiers. In the second short story, a boy conceals his involvement in helping his mother make supplies for the Protestant marches. In the novella, Hunger Strike, a boy and his mother move to a small trailer in a new town, and the boy flounders in his anger as they live out the days of his uncle’s hunger strike.

The writing is just gorgeous, simple with impeccably-placed figurative language. These are bruising, brilliant stories; the book is a small masterpiece. Highly recommended.

*I received a copy of this book from the publisher for review consideration, which did not affect the content of my review.

On Poetry for Children

/ Carolyn O / 8 Comments
Photo courtesy Daniela Cuevas via Unsplash.

Photo courtesy Daniela Cuevas via Unsplash.

A long time ago—so long ago that I can’t find the post (although, to be fair, I only had the patience to look for three minutes or so)—I wrote about looking for poems for children. Nursery rhymes and jokey sorts are all very well, but I am a woman of distinctly unsaint-like patience (see parenthetical above), and when possible, I prefer children’s entertainment that is also meant to be palatable to adults (such as Pixar movies and a remarkable number of children’s books, which I would be happy to list in a later post if anyone is interested). Not for me are Saturday morning cartoons, Berenstain Bears, or The Wiggles, and I’m afraid to say that our son is deprived of these things thanks to his mother’s intransigence.

So some time ago, I thought to myself, “well, I should make a list of poems that aren’t meant for children but that they might like anyway,” since they seem to go over pretty well in our house (the principle applies to music, too, by the way). Edward Lear’s nonsense poems are great fun, and H likes Robert Frost quite a bit; I think the rhythms of formal poetry, particularly iambic pentameter, are soothing.

Of course, I was quite sure to file the idea in my Cabinet of Good Intentions I’ll Forget I Ever Had ™, where it remained until just a few days ago when I found that Lemony Snicket has done all the work for me.

So in lieu of a poem of the week, Dear Readers, I invite you to head over to the Poetry Foundation’s website and enjoy the hilarious introduction he’s written and the portfolio of poems he’s collected. 

Recommended Reading: Secessia, by Kent Wascom

/ Carolyn O / 11 Comments

photo (55)In its first few pages, Kent Wascom’s Secessia,* which is out today, seems like an ode to to Edgar Allan Poe: a teenaged girl walks into a crowded masquerade with blood—not her own, it turns out—trickling down her chin. This is not your average Civil War novel.

Seldom have I read a book whose language evokes so well its setting. Mr. Wascom’s long, adjective-rich sentences sink the reader into 1862 New Orleans, a city slowly going mad with heat and hatred, a “new and wild world” on the brink of capture by Union forces.

The word that immediately leapt to mind when I started reading was “baroque”; the sentences are so over-populated with sound and imagery that they should topple under their own weight, but Mr. Wascom balances them expertly in brief chapters that propel the narrative inexorably forward. Here’s a small sample of the kind of language I’m talking about:

Thrown back upon the hands that have him hoisted high, an officiate of a ceremony of extraordinary violence, with boot heel he pulps one face, then another whose spouted teeth fall like wedding rice on her husband’s black coat; two of his bearers drop at Elise’s feet, and she has rushed too son, come to close, must spin and duck the whirligig of mayhem of which her husband is a master component. (33)

In this passage, Elise is searching for her son in the chaos of the city as the Union forces approach. Her much older husband, Angel Woolsack, was a major character in Mr. Wascom’s debut novel, The Blood of Heaven (which I haven’t read, but which received excellent reviews), and based on what we learn of him in Secessia, he sounds like he’d be right at home with most of Cormac McCarthy’s creations.

The novel’s point of view shifts among Elise, a mixed-race woman who passes for white; her only son, twelve-year-old Joseph; Marina Fandal, a Cuban orphan rescued by Union soldiers who takes an interest in Joseph; Emile Sabatier, a prominent doctor obsessed with disease and the girl he met at the masquerade nearly twenty years earlier; and General Benjamin Butler, the man who’s come to take charge of the city, and who will soon be called “the Beast.” Through their eyes we see New Orleans in a year of tremendous upheaval, which will affect them all.

New Orleans (and the South in general) is absolutely not romanticized in this book; it’s a morass of darkness, greed, and hypocrisy. Still, we don’t hear directly from any of the city’s enslaved residents, though certain household servants appear from time to time. Maybe that’s because Mr. Wascom is making a point about how only certain people’s voices were heard (Elise’s is heard because she passes for white), but I think the book would have been stronger if the author had turned his considerable talents in, say, Ligeia’s direction (perhaps she’ll appear in his next novel).

If you are a reader of historical fiction, or searching for a book that’s utterly different from everything else you’ve been reading, or want to start early with an author who’s going to be a master one day, look no further than Secessia.

Boston readers: Kent Wascom will be at Newtonville Books this Thursday, July 9, at 7p.m.

*I received a copy of this book from the publisher for review consideration, which did not affect the content of my review.

Recommended Reading: The Shepherd’s Life, by James Rebanks

/ Carolyn O / 5 Comments
Gorgeous cover; the photograph was taken by the author. And this book has some of the best endpapers I've ever seen.

Gorgeous cover; the photograph was taken by the author. And this book has some of the best endpapers I’ve ever seen.

When Helen MacDonald says a book is “bloody marvelous,” you can bet whatever you like that I will read that book, and you will come out a winner.

And so I read James Rebanks’s The Shepherd’s Life*, an account of current shepherding practices in England’s Lake District, a landscape which is perhaps familiar to you from the poetry of Wordsworth or Coleridge. If that’s the case, Mr. Rebanks, the shepherd whose Twitter account with its gorgeous photos has made his farm famous, has a bone to pick with your teachers:

My grandfather was, quite simply, one of the great forgotten silent majority of people who live, work, love, and die without leaving much written trace that they were ever here. He was, and we his descendants remain, essentially nobodies as far as anyone else is concerned. But that’s the point. Landscapes like ours were created by and survive through the efforts of nobodies. That’s why I was so shocked to be given such a dead, rich, white man’s version of its history at school. This is a landscape of modest hardworking people. The real history of our landscape should be a history of nobodies. (19)

Angered by the contempt shown his parents’ and grandparents’ occupation in school—he is fervent about his secondary education’s uselessness—Mr. Rebanks only later continued his formal education (at Oxford, no less; clearly his teachers missed an opportunity to reach a bright student). But by the time he reached his twenties he’d been educated in farm life for more than a decade. His family farm raises sheep. “We are a tiny part,” he writes, “of an ancient farming system and way of life that has somehow survived in these mountains because of their historic poverty, relative isolation, and because it was protected from change by the early conservation movement” (23).

The Shepherd’s Life is split into four parts that correspond with the seasons; each part is composed of short sections on shepherding practices, geography, Mr. Rebanks’s grandfather’s life, and Mr. Rebanks’s own life’s trajectory, all of which are sometimes intertwined. The sections that deal heavily with shepherding practices are the most successful and interesting in the book.

For example, Mr. Rebanks shows in vivid detail what it’s like to herd sheep in craggy fells, how important a good sheep dog is (they aren’t pets, though very deeply valued), and just how brutal the long days of lambing season are. In his world, “things are driven by the seasons and necessity, not by our will” (32).

In these pages, Mr. Rebanks makes the passionate and persuasive case that traditional farming is a way of life that is worthy of respect, and worth preserving. However, while there is a great deal of material in the book to help readers appreciate the very hard work that he and his family do (and that this work is not particularly remunerative; many farmers have second or third jobs to make ends meet), I didn’t feel there were enough concrete prescriptions for how to go about supporting it in practice.

The Shepherd’s Life is a book for those who want to immerse themselves in another kind of life, one that we might think has already vanished or that is so grindingly hard that people must want to escape it. To the contrary; Mr. Rebanks rails against what he perceives to be the degradations of the modern world, which doesn’t leave people much choice about how they live and work (which might sound odd coming from a shepherd whose family has worked the land for generations, but, given Mr. Rebanks’s biography, makes sense). During a summer in London, he thinks, “it’s like the gods are showing me how tough everyone else’s lives are and what I have left behind. I understand for the first time why people want to escape to places like where I live. I understand what national parks are for, so that people whose lives are always like this can escape and feel the wind in their hair and the sun on their faces” (179).

Despite this sentiment, he also chides the conservation movement, which, despite its acknowledged successes and ways of helping the Lake District, often at times seemed to value land more than people, to look down on traditional ways of raising food. He reminds us that “when local traditional farming systems disappear, communities become more and more reliant upon industrial commodity food products being transported long distances [. . .] They begin to lose the traditional skills that made those places habitable in the first place, making them vulnerable in a future that may not be the same as the present. No one who works in this landscape romanticizes wilderness” (218).

My reservations about this book are eclipsed by its positive aspects, but I would note that the style, though excellent when it comes to description, was not wholly to my taste; there is a tendency toward repetition that is at times awkward, and the inconsistent tenses were a bit maddening, making some parts of the work sound like strung-together blog posts. And it is a book very much about men (fathers and sons, and grandfathers), though women (family members and other shepherds) do make appearances. I would have liked to see a fuller picture of the no doubt grueling work the author’s mother, wife, and grandmother put into running the farm. Particularly troubling here are two or three passages in the middle of the book that seem to belittle the author’s grandmother’s concerns and experiences.

These reservations aside, The Shepherd’s Life is a fascinating book, and well worth reading. Recommended.

If you’re looking for more on sheep farming, you might look at Evie Wyld’s novel All the Birds, Singing, or, for a very different take, Sir Thomas More’s Utopia. For a perspective on modernity that I suspect Mr. Rebanks would find congenial, and because there’s no opportunity I won’t take to recommend it, you might consider picking up The Lord of the Rings.

*I received a copy of this book from the publisher for review consideration, which did not affect the content of my review.

Recommended Reading: Music for Wartime, by Rebecca Makkai

/ Carolyn O / 3 Comments

photo (54)Last year I read and loved Rebecca Makkai’s novel The Hundred-year House (Ms. Makkai was kind enough to agree to an interview, too), and so I was delighted to read that a collection of her short stories would appear this summer.

Music for Wartime is that collection, and it’s excellent. In well over a dozen stories spanning more than a decade of her writing career, Ms. Makkai traverses a wide landscape of emotion, space, and time, drawing from her family’s history (some of the strongest pieces in the collection are very short family legends) and her own power of invention.

In one story, an elephant dies mid-act in a small town during the 1940s, ushering in some very strange weather and serious questions for the local pastor. In another, a reality-TV producer steers contestants into producing perfect soundbites—and maybe toward falling in love. In “Painted Ocean, Painted Ship,” a professor accidentally shoots an albatross, and the hefty fine is just the beginning of her bad luck.

Often funny, often sad, and always graceful, these stories are linked by themes of art and war, or at least violence, as you might suspect from the title. You’ll find painters, sculptors, violinists, circus performers, and even Bach within these pages. It’s a tribute to Ms. Makkai’s virtuosity that it’s very difficult, often impossible, to tell which stories are earlier efforts and which are more recent. I was only disappointed when I turned the last page.

Boston Readers: You just missed Rebecca Makkai at Newtonville Books and Harvard Bookstore—sorry about that—but if you’re trekking up to Vermont this summer, you can hear her read in Burlington at Phoenix Books on July 28th at 7p.m.

*I received a copy of this book from the publisher for review purposes, which did not affect the content of my review.

Recommended Reading: Stir, by Jessica Fechtor

/ Carolyn O / 7 Comments

IMG_3839One of the pleasures of reading, the truism goes, is the pleasure of recognition. We see in characters or settings or allusions or experiences something  we know, which opens up into a whole host of secondary associations. And this is in addition to the delights of reading, in the first place, the text on the page, which the author has written without knowing just what kinds of associations it will call up in readers.

This brings me to Jessica Fechtor’s moving memoir, Stir: My Broken Brain and the Meals That Brought Me Home*, which is out today, and which was so peppered with moments of recognition for me that I kept nodding in appreciation (more on this in a little while).

When she was twenty-eight, Ms. Fechtor’s calm, happy life veered quite suddenly off course. On a run one morning, an aneurysm in her brain burst, and suddenly the Harvard graduate student found herself close to death. Over the next few months, she endured multiple surgeries and infections (which left her with a facial deformity), lost the sight in one eye, and found she couldn’t taste anymore. Her plans to start a family with her husband were put on hold, as was her dissertation.

This is one of the best narratives of illness (and recovery) that I’ve ever read, in part because Ms. Fechtor gives readers not just the story of her illness, but of her life before it; a bit about her childhood, more about her time in college, and most of all about the charming love story she shares with Eli, her husband. Her family and friends make this book come alive, their support for Ms. Fechtor a testament not only to their loyalty and steadfastness, but to the love she inspires in them.

As a narrator, she’s a careful, unflinching examiner of both joy and pain, and her own thinking:

I was furious with myself […] for ever thinking that health was something I could count on. I’d always had excellent luck and my genes were enviable. No broken bones, maybe one cold a year, great-grandmothers and great-great aunts who lived into their nineties. I took care of myself. I ate oatmeal and kale. I flossed. I followed the rules that were supposed to keep me safe.

Don’t get me wrong–I’d imagined illness. Critical, devastating, out-of-nowhere illness. I was right there in the imagined hospital rooms of my worst nightmares, alongside Eli or a parent or a friend. Only I was never the one in bed. I was the big-hearted helper, the devoted cheerleader. I brought the cookies. (148)

When it turns out that she’s the patient in the bed, it was eating and cooking that helped Ms. Fechtor pave a way forward from the terrifying experience. Food and illness are always linked, of course; food helps us get well, or signals that we’re well, or tells someone we wish them well (who hasn’t delivered a casserole?). In Stir, Ms. Fechtor shares more than twenty-five recipes that have been meaningful to her, from a simple tomato soup, to her mother-in-law’s cholent and kugel, to pan-roasted salmon and baked apricots with cardamom pistachios. I loved the recipe-writing here: there’s enough backstory to give a sense of connection to the recipe’s origins, and enough detail to be precise and helpful, but they’re never overwrought.

And you know the recipes are going to be good, because Ms. Fechtor is the force behind the blog Sweet Amandine, which she started during her recovery as a distraction from all the trappings of illness (as she points out, “Being sick is like walking around with a microscope strapped to your face at all times with your own body squished beneath the slide” [187].). It’s a gorgeous blog (this is coming from someone who used to be a food blogger), and I highly recommend it, unless you’re hungry and lacking the prospect of a good meal in the near future.

The recipes are part of the recognition I was talking about at the beginning of this review; there’s a cookie recipe from the Hi-Rise Bread Company in Cambridge (one town over from where I live), a recipe for a gorgeous golden-clear chicken broth that reminds me of the matzoh ball soup my best friend’s mother makes (Hi, Mrs. Klein!), and—wait for it—Corbo’s cassata cake.

Cleveland readers know what I’m talking about: an unbelievably decadent white cake with layers of custard, strawberries, and whipped cream. It’s a cake that has bittersweet associations for me, but I’d still never turn down a slice.

The cake makes an appearance in the book because Ms. Fechtor grew up in Cleveland; I did too, as you’ve probably gathered. And our graduate student years overlapped in adjacent towns, so all the Boston landmarks, culinary and otherwise, resonated with me, as did quite a few other details. And her meditations on what it’s like to be sick struck a nerve for me as well.

I loved Stir for all those pings of recognition, for the recipes, for Ms. Fechtor’s charming, serious, and thoughtful voice. And I’m grateful to have read it because she articulated something I’ve wanted and failed to say for years. Predictably, she started hearing “everything happens for a reason” from well-meaning people trying to offer solace. But, she writes,

I don’t see it that way at all. To me, only the first part is clear: Everything happens. Then other things happen, and other things, still. Out of each of these moments, we make something. Any number of somethings, in fact.

What comes of our own actions becomes the “reason.” It is no predestined thing. We may arrive where we are by way of a specific path—we can take just one at a time—but it’s never the only one that could have led to our destination. Nor does a single event, even a string of them, point decisively to a single landing spot. There are infinite possible versions of our lives. Meaning is not what happens, but what we do with what happens when it does. (106)

Stir is a wonderful book, one that I highly recommend. One day, almost certainly, we’ll all find ourselves as the patient in the bed, or the one bringing the cookies. This book will help either way.

*I received a copy of this book from the publisher for review consideration, which did not affect the content of my review.

Off the Reading Path: The Library at Mount Char, by Scott Hawkins

/ Carolyn O / 11 Comments

The title sounds promising: The Library at Mount Char*. I’m bookish; naturally I love libraries. This book should be right about my alley. Right?photo (50)

Well, no—but somehow Scott Hawkins’s debut was pretty fun reading.

The protagonist’s name is Carolyn, which is my name. It’s not a particularly unusual name—I’ve met a half dozen other Carolyns in the last thirty years—but it’s not Jessica or Emma or Katie, names I run across in books pretty frequently, nor is it a strange enough name that authors often choose it to set their characters apart. What I’m trying to say is that it is really weird to keep reading your own name when not accustomed to doing so, especially when the book’s first sentence is: “Carolyn, blood-drenched and barefoot, walked alone down the two-lane stretch of blacktop that the Americans called Highway 78.”

See? Oh, and don’t worry: it gets worse for Carolyn. Much worse.

The Library at Mount Char is a book that’s way, way out of my reading comfort zone (it might be in Rory’s, for those of you, like me, who love being vicariously scared through Fourth Street Review): it’s very violent, and the genre is a cross between horror and contemporary urban fantasy, with quite a bit of Jacobean revenge tragedy thrown in. It’s a bit like Neil Gaiman’s American Gods (which I loved), I suppose. Maybe that’s why I simply could not stop reading it.

It’s disturbing and horrifying, sure, but it takes place in a world that is not ours, which makes the violence almost theatrical. Think Titus Andronicus. It is also a deeply bizarre book; it went in directions I certainly didn’t anticipate, and while I had one major plot point figured out in the beginning of the novel, it’s a testament to Mr. Hawkins’s power of invention that the book managed to surprise me in almost every chapter.

By now you’re probably wondering what this deeply bizarre, inventive, and violent book is about. It’s tricky to give you a plot without giving too much away, but here goes: Carolyn is a very special kind of librarian, one of twelve people taken in as children by Father after all their parents died. Each of them is an expert in his or her own (strange) catalogue, but Father is master of them all, and his power is unmatchable: he can bend the rules of time and space, and to disobey him is to suffer.

When the book opens, Father is missing, and the library that contains his secrets and his power is up for grabs. Carolyn wants in—very badly.

The Library at Mount Char is not for the faint of heart, but if you want a wild ride, some serious thinking about family, nature versus nurture, cruelty, and love, you might want to give this book a try. I didn’t love all of it—quite a bit is downright unpleasant, and I have some issues with the ending, which I would love to talk about with somebody—but I kept turning pages in surprise.

What’s the last book that took you out of your reading comfort zone?

*I received a copy of this book from the publisher for review consideration, which did not affect the content of my review

Visiting the South: Gwendolyn Knapp’s After a While You Just Get Used to It: A Tale of Family Clutter

/ Carolyn O / 5 Comments

No offense intended toward its residents (the vast majority of those I’ve met have been delightful), but as a general rule*, but I visit the South (meaning here the deep South, east of Texas) only in books or recipes, leaving the living there to souls braver and sturdier than I. I dislike heat, humidity, large flying insects, large crawling insects, the prospect of encountering reptiles capable of swallowing me or my limbs whole, swamps, Confederate flags, and okra.

However, I do like tales of swamp adventurers, almost anything fried, stories about terrifying fauna and rare flora, regional idioms, and the idea of warm weather in the winter.

photo (51)This is why reading about the South is so enjoyable: all of the interest, none of the sweat. And I tend to read nonfiction about the region: Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, The Orchid Thief (original, I know). And now After a While You Just Get Used to It: A Tale of Family Clutter** by Gwendolyn Knapp. Strictly speaking, this memoir isn’t about Florida, where Ms. Knapp grew up, or New Orleans, where she now lives and works, but her writing is so evocative of place that I could practically feel the boggy heat blowing through the window.

Ms. Knapp’s world is populated by colorful characters, many of them her own family members, including her mother, Margie, who can’t stop accumulating stuff; her Aunt Susie, an addict with a good-for-nothing boyfriend; and her sister Molly, who can’t wait to escape their house. There is all sorts of drama of the holiday, funeral, dating, and interstate-move variety, framed in Ms. Knapp’s observant and wry voice.

The book is a series of chronologically ordered vignettes, often jumping quite a few years in time, which makes for easily digestible, fast-paced reading, if an incomplete picture of the author’s life. After a While You Just Get Used to It, as its title suggests, tends toward the matter-of-fact acceptance of the way things are, even if the way things are is a pretty horrible state of affairs. It’s Southern Gothic as life-writing, essentially.

While mostly I cringed for Gwendolyn as she deals with her family, her own health problems, difficult jobs, and a series of unfortunate boyfriends, I also laughed. I’m glad Ms. Knapp is inviting readers to visit her world.

*I have made exceptions for one beach, several airports, and one wedding (worth it, J & P!)

** I received a copy of this book from the publisher for review consideration, which did not affect the content of my review.