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My Dear I Wanted to Tell You by Louisa Young

My Dear I Wanted to Tell You by Louisa Young is a WWI novel and love story that illustrates the toll that war takes on couples from mere recruits to the officers that give them orders.  Young’s novel examines social and monetary class distinctions, even providing slight nuances to the “poshies” in how they treat the working class.  Truly, this is a love story — the story of Riley Purefoy and Nadine Waveney, childhood sweethearts separated by more than the war.

The narration sets it up so that readers get to know Nadine and Riley in their early years and the timid beginnings of their love, which helps not only anchor the emotional arc of the story but the connection readers feel to them both.  Nadine is from an upper class family with artistic roots — her father is a famous conductor — and Riley is from a working class family.  Both end up under the tutelage of Sir Arthur, a famous artist, who sees potential in Riley and Nadine.  Eventually, they are separated by her parents who refuse to send her to Sir Arthur’s for lessons if Riley is still working there, which ultimately pushes Riley to see his fortunes through a different lens and join the military.

“He had to pull the bayonet out again, which was strange.  And that wasn’t an end:  it was just a moment on a long line of moments, and time went on, and they went on.  He stepped away in a mist of red, a numbness spread across him, a sense of capacity.  He smelt the blood, and took on the mantle of it.  He ran on, screaming, til he found himself alongside Ainsworth, and felt safer.”  (Page 40-1)

The introduction of CO Peter Locke, his wife Julia, and his cousin Rose serve as a juxtaposition to the love of Riley and Nadine, but although Locke’s story is of interest in how the war can change a man, his wife Julia can be trying and insipid — wearing on readers’ nerves.  Julia is self-absorbed to the point that she finds her actions for self-improvement as a way to “do her bit” for the cause by becoming the perfect wife in looks and caring for the household, rather than volunteering to care for the soldiers.  Locke, himself, is more in the background providing support for the soldiers and holding in the horrors and losses he’s experienced, but eventually, his story jumps to the forefront and readers see a broken man wallowing in women and booze.

If no one won that, after all that, that — if neither side won that, then neither side can win. The war won, and goes on winning.” (Page 125)

Young has the skill and detail to capture the horrors of war from the adrenaline rush of battle to the devastation of losing one’s companions and comrades. She also captures in realistic and devastating description the medical procedures used to reconstruct faces and other body parts of wounded soldiers — so much so, that some readers may squirm in their seats.  The war itself becomes a character taking over all that is good and twisting it, shoving the best bits into the waste bin.  However, the overarching themes celebrate the perseverance of the human spirit and its ability to recover from even the most devastating injuries — no matter if they are physical or emotional.  My Dear I Wanted to Tell You by Louisa Young is by turns endearing and horrifying, and WWI is ever-present in everything these characters face and endure.

About the Author:

Louisa Young grew up in London, England, in the house in which Peter Pan was written, and she studied modern history at Cambridge. She was a freelance journalist and has written ten books, including the Orange Prize–longlisted Baby Love. She is the co-author of the bestselling Lionboy trilogy, which has been published in thirty-six languages. She lives in London and Italy with her daughter and the composer Robert Lockhart.  Check out her Website.

This is my 50th book for the New Authors Reading Challenge 2012.

 

 

This is my 13th book for the WWI Reading Challenge.

The Reckoning by Alma Katsu

There are some books that you read quickly through and there are those books are almost too seductive and you want to slow down and savor every moment with the characters, and The Reckoning by Alma Katsu — the second book in The Taker series (check out my review of The Taker) — is the latter.  Once plunged into this world of immortal, devilish, and sometimes wayward beings, readers will not want to leave and by the end of the book, they will be clamoring for more.

The novel picks up just where Lanny and Luke leave off in the previous novel, and just as he begins to settle into their new life together — helping her to purge her past — the unthinkable happens.  The terror Lanny feels is palpable and forces her to take action in a way that she never thought she would, leaving Luke devastated.  What makes this all work so well is the tables are turned not just on Lanny forcing her to react, but the tables turn on other characters as well, including the powerful and frightening Adair.

“Inside, he detected a scent that he associated with Lanore, her musk making a part of his brain fire excitedly, re-creating the feeling of being in her presence.  She felt so real, so present, that he expected her to walk around a corner or to hear her voice carry down the staircase, and when neither happened, he felt his loneliness more profoundly than before.”  (Page 236)

The Reckoning is not only about the revenge that Adair will take upon Lanore and the events that lead her back into his path, but also it is about the judgment we all must make of ourselves, our past deeds, and our future path.  Readers will uncover more of Adair’s secrets, learn about the great Lord Byron, and come to find out that Lanore is not as immune to the charms of the dark side as she’d like to think she is.  There is a great blurring of the line between good and bad, with each character playing along the edges in their actions and thoughts.  Lanore’s character grows stronger here, burning with fear, yet conviction, while Adair’s softer side is revealed without taking over.  Katsu does well to blur these lines and show us the reality of this surreal world — that not everything is as black and white as it seems  (dare I use the pun that there are more than 50 shades of gray?).

The Reckoning by Alma Katsu is an addictive world that readers will plunge into without looking and emerge from emotionally spent and eager for the next whirlwind with The Descent.  Katsu is a phenomenal writer who is adept at building worlds and atmospheres that will hold readers in their grip and never let go, and many of these worlds straddle reality and fantasy like no other.  History, even its alternate versions, come to life in her hands as her characters run through the pages, fearing the worst and never expecting redemption.

She’s made me into a believer, enticing me back into the world of fantasy, horror, and, dare I say, the Gothic, which I had given up as trite and overwrought long ago.  I’ve been seduced.  The Reckoning by Alma Katsu is one of the best books I’ve read this year, and I don’t say that about many sequels.

About the Author:

Alma Katsu is a 30-year DC veteran who lives in two worlds: on one hand, she’s a novelist and author of The Taker (Simon & Schuster/Gallery Books). On the other hand, she was a senior intelligence analyst for CIA and NSA, and former expert in multilateral affairs.  Check out this Interview With Alma.

 

 

 

 

 

This completes my first series for the Finishing the Series Reading Challenge 2012.

Sea Change by Karen White

Sea Change by Karen White is told from the alternating points of view from three women — Ava, Gloria, and Pamela — who each hold secrets close and family closer.  Ava is a midwife who is impulsive and marries a man, Matthew Frazier, she knows little about and moves from her hometown and family to St. Simons Island, Georgia.  Gloria, Ava’s mother, has secrets that she barely acknowledges in the presence of her mother, Mimi, and has never told Ava.  Meanwhile, Pamela Frazier is a midwife from the 1800s who allegedly ran off with a British Army man, leaving her husband and son behind and whom the community branded a traitor and erased from history.

“Storms bring the detritus of other people’s lives into our own, a reminder that we are not alone, and of how truly insignificant we are.  The indiscriminating waves had brutalized the shore, tossing pieces of splintered timber, an intact china teacup, and a gentleman’s watch — still with its cover and chain — onto my beloved beach, each coming to rest as if placed gently in the sand as a shopkeeper would display his wares.  As I rubbed my thumb over the smooth lip of the china cup, I thought of how someone’s loss had become my gain, of how the tide would roll in and out again as if nothing had changed, and how sometimes the separation between endings and beginnings is so small that they seem to run together like the ocean’s waves.”  (Page 1)

White creates multifaceted characters with real problems and sometimes places them in surreal circumstances, including worlds in which ghosts exist and past lives are possibilities.  Ava is the only daughter in a family full of older brothers, and she escapes into the arms of Matthew to feel free and to roam as she chooses, but is her love for him real or contrived and will their relationship last even as the past surfaces to reveal some ugly secrets about him and his ancestors.  White uses water imagery in a way that connects the idea that a circle never begins or ends, but continues endlessly — forever — in a way that demonstrates the power of love and devotion to family.

There are intricate details in this novel that connect not only Ava and Matthew, but also some secondary characters, like Tish — the local florist.  White easily weaves in these details among the finer setting elements, ensuring that the island itself becomes a character in her novel about changes and the current beneath that connects everything.

“And in the moment before I closed my eyes, the flashlight caught on the corner of the wall by the stairs, where kudzu vines had begun to work themselves into a crack along the wall, climbing upward like a spider, relentless in its advance, lie the doubt that crept around my skull and took root in my chest where my heart beat.”  (Page 128)

While White’s characters are strong, particularly the women, Matthew is more of a stand in, the logic and realism that anchors the story.  He’s note as deep as White’s other characters, though this also is likely due to the drawback of having the present day sections told by Ava and Gloria and readers can only see him through their interactions with him.  Readers may not only find him distant and enigmatic, but a character too stuck in the past and not caring enough toward his wife, Ava.  As suspicions pile up around him, his behavior becomes more bizarre and he becomes more distant from Ava.

Sea Change by Karen White is like the ocean waves undulating against the shore, eroding away the beach of lies and half-truths that cover the reality beneath — the truth of Ava and Gloria’s lives and the mystery of Matthew’s ancestors.  Readers will discover that the lull of the rocking ocean waves can be easily churned into a roaring storm tossed seascape, but once the storm has subsided, there will be nothing left by hope.

About the Author:

Known for award-winning novels such as Learning to Breathe, the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance 2009 Book of the Year Award finalist The House on Tradd Street, the highly praised The Memory of Water, the four-week SIBA bestseller The Lost Hours, Pieces of the Heart, and her IndieBound national bestseller The Color of Light, Karen has shared her appreciation of the coastal Low country with readers in four of her last six novels.

Italian and French by ancestry, a southerner and a storyteller by birth, Karen has made her home in many different places.  Visit the author at her website, and become a fan on Facebook.

Also check out my reviews of The House on Tradd Street, The Girl on Legare Street, The Beach Trees, and On Folly Beach.

Ocean Beach by Wendy Wax

Ocean Beach by Wendy Wax reunites readers with Madeline Singer, Avery Lawford, and Nicole Grant on another renovation adventure in South Beach, Miami.  When you don’t know what the house looks like or have its address, but the Lifetime network comes calling for a pilot of Do Over, the cash-strapped friends have little choice but to accept, hoping for reboot to their lives and careers.  Kyra, Deidre, Giraldi, and Chase return as well.

“Avery’s hands tightened on the wheel.  She knew the sinking sensation in her stomach had nothing to do with the dizzying height of the bridge, but everything to do with fear of the fall.”  (Page 19)

From Bella Flora in Ten Beach Road (my review), the women became not only friends, but a YouTube sensation.  Their latest project in Ocean Beach is The Millicent, which is owned by an aging comedian, Max Golden, who has dealt with a heavy loss for many years.  Max is wildly eccentric, but fun, and he takes a shine to the girls and their crew.  Meanwhile, the girls are constantly at odds with the crew from Lifetime that was an unexpected and unwelcome surprise.

As the ladies mix it up with renovation, they are still remaking their lives after losing everything in Malcolm Dyer’s Ponzi scheme, and they are still struggling to rebuild their familial relationships.  Wax also throws in some suspense and a mystery to keep readers turning the pages.  It’s not all fun in the Miami heat as the paparazzi returns when movie star Daniel Deranian re-enters Kyra’s life.  Wax is great at describing the Florida coasts, architecture, and Art Deco homes, making the setting almost a character unto itself.

“Like a patient on an operating table, The Millicent lay open, her guts spilling out, her innermost self put on display.  The kitchen had been stripped down to walls, floors, and windows.  They were down to one bathroom for however long it took to replace miles of rusted galvanized iron pipe and reconfigure an equal amount of cast iron.  Because they were trying to preserve rather than rip out existing walls, tiles, tubs, showers, and sinks, it often took an excruciating amount of time to move a pipe as little as ten feet.”  (page 243)

Even the house begins to stand in as a metaphor for the women who are bared to public view and raw, and as the house is resurfaced and put together, so too are the women.  Maddie must use her new strength to find her backbone where her marriage is concerned and learn to care for herself as well as others.  Nicole must learn to rely on others rather than go-it-alone all the time, just as Avery must learn the same and to forgive past transgressions.  Ocean Beach by Wendy Wax is a great summer read that will take readers to the beach, show them what it means to come together, and triumph over the most harsh circumstances even without creature comforts.

About the Author:

Award-winning author Wendy Wax has written eight novels, including Ocean Beach, Ten Beach Road, Magnolia Wednesdays, the Romance Writers of America RITA Award finalist The Accidental Bestseller, Leave It to Cleavage, Single in Suburbia and 7 Days and 7 Nights, which was honored with the Virginia Romance Writers Holt Medallion Award. Her work has sold to publishers in ten countries and to the Rhapsody Book Club, and her novel, Hostile Makeover, was excerpted in Cosmopolitan magazine.

A St. Pete Beach, Florida native, Wendy has lived in Atlanta for fifteen years. A voracious reader, her enjoyment of language and storytelling led her to study journalism at the University of Georgia. She also studied in Italy through Florida State University, is a graduate of the University of South Florida, and worked at WEDU-TV and WDAE-Radio in Tampa.

Flesh by Khanh Ha

Flesh by Khanh Ha is dark and dreamlike.  Tai’s coming of age story is fraught with trauma and hardship, but he maintains his determination and remains grounded despite the beheading of his father at the hands of his granduncle in Northern Vietnam.  Ha has woven a dark love story within Tai’s trip through adolescence that takes him to Hanoi and other places as he searches for the man who turned in his bandit father to the authorities.  Part dark adventure, Tai is thrown into the world of Vietnam’s opium dens and indentured servitude as his mother barters him away to pay for a safe, final resting place for his father and younger brother.

“He could not tell which one was my father’s as he passed under the banyan tree.  Those were the same heads he saw in the rattan baskets, but now they had no eyes, only black sockets with grubs crawling in them.  He spotted a hole bored under each jaw, and a rod was pierced through it to the top of the skull and into a limb.  The heads looked out in different directions, and in the early morning light they bore a pinched look neither of hurt nor sorrow.”  (page 18)

Each chapter reads like a short story, a memory recalled by Tai about his journey and the impact is at once immediate and lasting.  Readers are piggybacking on Tai’s shoulders as he runs through the jungles of Tonkin and the streets of Hanoi as the dark, mysterious Frenchman chases him and he bumps into Xiaoli, a young Chinese girl working in an opium den.  Ha’s prose is poetic as it paints the scene in which you can smell the opium, see and hear the brown of Tai’s village and the busy streets of Hanoi, and feel the delirium of smallpox or his pulse quicken as he begins to fall in love.

“The bank was steep.  I was a salamander, half naked, creeping on the clay soil, seizing knotty vines that bulged across the incline.  The dark odor of sundered organics.  Lying flat on the ridge of the bank, I felt unusually warm, and then a suffocating heat hazed my eyes.”  (page 42)

Tai’s journey is through darkness and fear, and Ha raises questions of nurture vs. nature — whether we are only who we are because of who our parents were or the circumstances in which we were raised.  From the atmosphere to the myths and legends, Ha generates a novel that will capture readers from the beginning, but there are times when the dialogue is a bit trite and wooden.  However, as there is little dialogue per se and that dialogue is often between characters that know little of the other’s language, it can be forgiven.

Flesh by Khanh Ha is a stunning debut novel that showcases the writer’s ability to become a young male narrator whose view of the world has been tainted by his life circumstances and tragedy, but who has the wherewithal to overcome and become a better man.  Through a number of twists and turns, Tai must come to terms with the loss of his father, his obligations as the remaining male member of his family to care for his mother, and the secrets that his culture and family hide.

 

About the Author:

Khanh Ha was born in Hue, the former capital of Vietnam. During his teen years he began writing short stories which won him several awards in the Vietnamese adolescent magazines. He graduated from Ohio University with a bachelor’s degree in Journalism. Flesh is his first novel. He is at work on a new novel.

Visit the author at his website.

 

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This is my 46th book for the 2012 New Authors Challenge.

Guardians of the Gate by Vincent N. Parrillo

Guardians of the Gate by Vincent N. Parrillo is a historical fiction novel about Ellis Island between 1893 and 1902 as immigration to the United States increases, particularly from Italy and other non-northern European nations, and sentiment in America turns against immigrants.  Dr. Matt Stafford and his wife have moved to New York City and are living the high life with a very busy social calendar as he works at Presbyterian Hospital.  After losing a child in a miscarriage, their relationship fractures and each seeks satisfaction in life through different means — Peg through social activities and Matt through his job as a surgeon and ultimately as a doctor at Ellis Island.  Stafford is a likeable doctor and clearly cares about his patients and learning different languages and cultures, but his morals become more flexible when his wife’s ailment takes a turn for the worse and he spends more time with a lovely nurse at Ellis Island — a relationship that starts too quickly given the set up of the nurse’s character as aloof and consummately professional, even shying away from small talk with co-workers.

Meanwhile, nearly half of the book is spent with Ellis Island’s lead administrator Dr. Joseph Senner, whose heavy handed management style rubs personnel the wrong way, but endears him to his kindred German immigrants.  Senner expresses his concerns about the operations at Ellis Island openly and sets about making changes.  Senner is aloof to his workers and his German accent remains thick, even after 13 years in America.  Parrillo’s adherence to the use of “v” rather than “w” and other typical German-American accented English words continue to pull the reader out of the story and could have been phased out early on after the cadence had been well established.  Given the aloof nature of Senner’s character from his employees, the relationship in the latter half of the book between him and Dr. Stafford is surprising.

“The impact of this grand hall was striking.  The hall was virtually the full size of the building itself.  Its vastness was enhanced by the cathedral ceiling and the light — even on this overcast day — that filtered through the tall, eave-high windows.  A wide-planked pine floor, resembling a sailing ship’s deck so familiar to the arriving ocean voyagers, set off the woodwork.  The place even seemed to have the scent of a ship.  Ten parallel aisles, framed by railings, marked where the immigrants began the screening process.  Potted plants, American flags, and red, white, and blue bunting festooned the hall.”  (Page 5)

However, Parrillo is clearly a student of Ellis Island history as details about the island, the immigrants, the inspection procedures, and even the buildings themselves pour into the dialogue between Senner, who is a new administrator, and his assistant Ed McSweeney.  The facts and figures, plus the inclusion of photographs from the real Ellis Island provide this historical fiction novel with a unique style, mimicking a piece of nonfiction.  There are good and bad workers on Ellis Island, but the story is less about them and the immigrants than it is about Stafford and his troubled love life.

While Parrillo does include fictionalized accounts of immigrants coming to Ellis Island and their histories, the prose merely tells and does not show the emotion of these characters, as it does when the immigration officials interact.  While the plot and Dr. Stafford anchor the story and keep the pages turning, readers may want greater depth from Parrillo’s characters who at times are wooden in their actions and conversation.  With that said, the historical details of the bureaucracy related to Ellis Island, the corruption of immigration officials, and the procedures that had to be put in place to accommodate an influx of immigrants is interesting.  Through carefully selected details, Parrillo ensures that Ellis Island comes to life, nearly becoming a larger-than-life character of the book and stealing the show from Dr. Stafford and others.

Guardians of the Gate by Vincent N. Parrillo is a satisfying look at Ellis Island’s struggles in the beginning of the 1900s as immigrants began flooding America’s shores.  Parrillo is adept at blending in historic details and data into his prose, bringing to life the historic buildings and struggles of those entering the country and those helping them enter.  Those interested in Ellis Island’s history (complete with photos) and immigration will enjoy the historic parts of the novel.

About the Author:

VINCENT N. PARRILLO is a professor of sociology at William Paterson University of New Jersey. An internationally recognized expert on immigration, he is the executive producer, writer, and narrator of the award-winning PBS television documentary, Ellis Island: Gateway to America (1991). He currently lives in northern New Jersey.

This is my 45th book for the 2012 New Authors Challenge.

The Queen’s Vow by C.W. Gortner

The Queen’s Vow by C.W. Gortner, published June 12, is another historical fiction powerhouse about a strong, young royal who cares for her family and her country more than herself.  Isabella of Castile is the daughter of the ailing Juan II and his second wife Isabel of Portugal, and she has a younger brother Alfonso, on whom she dotes.  Her relationship with her half-brother Enrique IV is tenuous at best, and when he is poised to takeover the crown when their father dies, her mother believes it is best to flee to Arevalo.

“I slowly reached up to take my mother’s hand.  I had never dared touch her before without leave.  To me, she’d always been a beautiful but distant figure in glittering gowns, laughter spilling from her lips, surrounded by fawning admirers — a mother to be loved from afar.”  (Page VIII)

Like most royal families, children rarely spend intimate time with their parents, though often they will spend more time with their mothers if they are girls.  Isabella spends little informal time with her mother until they are removed to Arevalo, and she has virtually no relationship with her father, Juan II.

“I was not yet four years old.  My father had been ill for weeks with a terrible fever, shut behind the closed doors of his apartments in the alcazar of Valladolid.  I did not know him well, this forty-nine-year-old king whom his subjects had dubbed El Inutil, the Useless, for the manner in which he’d ruled.  To this day, all I remember is a tall, lean man with sad eyes and a watery smile, who once summoned me to his private rooms and gave me a jeweled comb, enameled in the Moorish style.  A short, swarthy lord stood behind my father’s throne the entire time I was there, his stubby-fingered hand resting possessively on its back as he watched me with keen eyes.”  (page III)

Isabella knows that of all her siblings she is the last in line and as a female heir to the throne of Castile, she will likely be sold off into marriage for political or monetary reasons.  But as a young girl sent with her mother outside the company of the crown, she has the freedom to just enjoy her family.  Her and Alfonso have a great relationship, and she has a great relationship with Beatriz, her lady in waiting, but her respite from court intrigue does not last long.  Unfortunately, there are many times throughout the book that Isabella finds herself moving from place to place, fleeing those that would do her harm even her brother Enrique, whom she remains loyal to even though he is easily swayed by others.

Readers will experience the sorrow Isabella feels about her relationship with Enrique and how finally she must break that familial bond, if she plans to survive and marry the man she loves, Fernando of Aragon.  She is often tugged in more than one direction either between her family bonds and destiny or her duty as heir to the Castile throne and the pull of her heart. In a nation pulled this way and that by different powers and political interests attempting to usurp royal power outright or through the shadows, Isabella has many demands on her time and heart, and she’s pushed to the brink more than once. She’s a stronger woman than she realizes, and with Fernando at her side, they are a force to contend with.

The Queen’s Vow by C.W. Gortner is about a promise of a better tomorrow not only for Isabella and her loved ones, but also for the country she’s seen toil with her own eyes and hands. It is a novel of perseverance, following one’s heart and instincts, and justice, but it also is a novel of family and how it can be not only nurturing but also devastating if animosities and jealously are allowed to fester. Gortner is a master at historical details, weaving them throughout a narrative that is highly emotional, tense with drama, and at times poetic in its description of the Spanish landscape. Another winning novel from this author.

About the Author:

C.W. Gortner is the author of The Last Queen, The Confessions of Catherine de Medici and The Tudor Secret. He holds an MFA in Writing with an emphasis in Renaissance Studies from the New College of California.

In his extensive travels to research his books, he has danced a galliard in a Tudor great hall and experienced life in a Spanish castle. His novels have garnered international praise and been translated into thirteen languages to date. He is also a dedicated advocate for animal rights and environmental issues.

He’s currently at work on his fourth novel for Ballantine Books, about the early years of Lucrezia Borgia, as well as the third novel in his Tudor series,The Elizabeth I Spymaster Chronicles (US) or Elizabeth’s Spymaster (UK).

Half-Spanish by birth, C.W. lives in Northern California.

The Wonder of It All by Elizabeth P. Glixman

The Wonder of It All by Elizabeth P. Glixman is a very small volume of poetry, but has a large sense of humor that will at times have readers giggling to themselves about the absurdity of it all.  Many of the poems are very much in the here and now of the moment.  The collection can fit in your pocket and can be taken out on the subway ride in between stops.

One of the best in the collection is “The Man from TSA — Unrequited Love Did Not Stop Glenn Close,” in which the narrator opts not for the scanning machine, but the gloved hand of a TSA agent and falls in love — or is it obsession?  Pop culture references infuse these poems, grounding readers in their own lives to draw parallels, but oftentimes the situations are too surreal for readers to connect with.  In a way, this may be the point that Glixman is trying to get to — that life is a series of absurd moments that we categorize to make sense of them and their meaning.

Other poems, like “Avalanche Worry,” have a tongue-in-cheek humor to them, telling readers to always have a cell phone, a year’s supply of groceries on hand, and other supplies so they are prepared.  But many of these poems are narrations of moments, offering vignettes, but little else.  While these characters and stories are fun and humorous, they lack the poetic nuance many readers are looking for in terms of images and larger connections to the human condition.  However, there are gems in this collection that poke fun at pop culture and its pervasiveness, including “The Wonder of It All” in which Minnie Mouse is transformed into a flirtatious girl, like Brittany Spears.

The Wonder of It All by Elizabeth P. Glixman is a mixed bag of poems, but entertaining in fits and starts.  There are some poems that could have ended sooner and more powerfully, but there are others that are deftly crafted.

This is the 17th book for my 2012 Fearless Poetry Exploration Reading Challenge.

 

 

 

This is my 42nd book for the 2012 New Authors Challenge.

The Opposite of Me by Sarah Pekkanen

The Opposite of Me by Sarah Pekkanen is about an empty shell of a woman whose career is her life and nothing else matters, other than being smarter than her twin sister, Alex, who looks nothing like her and is a beautiful model.  Lindsey is in line for a vice president position at her advertising agency in New York City when she’s outmaneuvered by a competing colleague who is not afraid to use her sexuality to get what she wants.  Cheryl’s down-and-dirty tricks shatter Lindsey’s hopes, leaving her twisting in the wind and rudderless after the announcement that Cheryl is the new VP.

“He kept hold of my hands as he rubbed his thumbs along my palms.  Doug made Bill Clinton look like a nun wearing a chastity belt at a Victorian tea party.”  (page 67)

While this may sound like the crux of the novel, it isn’t.  Lindsey is tough to like from the first pages with her obsessive nature and her workaholic personality.  It’s almost like she’s forgotten how to be a human being and interact with people beyond work projects and business dealings.  Although she knows the ins and outs of her job and refuses to play dirty, she also lacks the social skills to really connect with her co-workers and fails to have friends outside of work.  Her only friend is her colleague Matt, who she jokes with about Cheryl and other work-related things.  Once forced to start over, she heads back to Washington, D.C., and rethinks more than her advertising job.

“I put on my new black bra and matching panties, then slipped into my Rock & Republic jeans and black turtleneck.  The turtleneck looked simple and classic from the front, which made the flash of bare skin in the back all the more unexpected.  And my jeans hadn’t gotten any looser since yesterday.  I squatted and squeezed and shimmied my way into them, working up a light sweat.  On the bright side, if I wore them often enough, I wouldn’t ever have to go to the gym.  (On the not-so-bright side, I might be developing multiple personalities.  But hey, at least one of my personalities would be skinny!)” (page 174)

Pekkanen has created a dynamic that any reader with siblings can relate to, a deep-seated jealousy of what the other sibling seems to have.  Whether it’s Lindsey’s jealousy of her sister Alex’s beauty or the nuanced envy of her sister Alex for what Lindsey has, Pekkanen has created a set of characters with stories interwoven in a way that keeps readers in a state of anticipation.  What’s even more ironic is the job Lindsey lands once back home living with her parents and how much in common she has with the desperate people she meets.

In many ways, the title of the book is ironic because her sister is no more different from Lindsey than the clients she meets.  Each searches for the human connection that’s missing from their lives, whether that means connecting with their soul mate or connecting with their sister.  Lindsey’s clients help teach her to seek out what’s been missing from her life.

The Opposite of Me by Sarah Pekkanen is fun and serious, with a deeper message about finding confidence in yourself and your skills so that you can grab everything that life has to offer, even if it isn’t exactly what you planned. To answer Lindsey’s question about how you know which life is the right one for you: You Feel It. And Sarah Pekkanen has definitely chosen the “write” life.

About the Author:

Sarah Pekkanen is the internationally-bestselling author of the novels The Opposite of Me and Skipping a Beat and the upcoming These Girls, as well as the linked short stories available for ereaders titled “All Is Bright” and “Love, Accidentally.” For more information please visit her Website, Facebook, and Twitter.

 

 

 

 

This is my 38th book for the 2012 New Authors Challenge.

Perla by Carolina De Robertis

Perla by Carolina De Robertis (giveaway following the review) is captivating and intoxicating in its setting, mystery, and the psychological unraveling of the main protagonist, Perla.  She’s growing into a young woman, but her cloistered existence threatens to explode until she begins to release herself in books and in her relationship with Gabriel.

The past haunts everything around her, though she does not know it at first.  She is proud of her family and her father’s naval career and her mother’s quirky penchant for picking up new hobbies and discarding them.  But her pride is suddenly shaken when she learns of the Disappeared, Argentinians who were silently taken from their workplaces and homes in the 1970s and 1980s by the government for allegedly being subversives.  In school she writes a short story that wins a prize and is published in the newspaper, but her story has other unintended consequences.  It opens up hidden fissures in her family, and forces her to rebel and question the father she’s loved with blind devotion.

“He was uninvited moisture.  He had leaked into this house.  I had every reason to find his presence an affront, to be enraged at his invasion, or at least to eject him in calm tones.  Certainly he made me feel combustible, unsafe in my own skin.  But though I didn’t know why, though the feeling shocked me, I did not want him to leave.”  (page 28)

The fluidity with which De Robertis tells the tale is much like the Dali painting, “The Persistence of Memory,” hung in Perla’s childhood home, weaving in and out of reality and shaping a psyche that is struggling with secrets that are too devastating to hold inside.  Perla is a novel about identity and how it is created or comes into being and whether it is alive within us before we are even born.  In accordance with this look at identity, the novel examines the harsh treatment society places on new generations for the transgressions of the past.  Struggling with the truth of her father’s job and how it may have contributed to the disappearance of many Argentinians is enough for Perla to deal with as a young adult, but she also must confront the sneer and the unspoken disgust in the eyes of her classmates and friends when her father’s occupation is revealed.

Retreating into herself and her books, Perla finds a way to cope and becomes strong in a way that even she is unaware of, and when she meets Gabriel, her strength is tested once again.  Can she love her father and still love this man who writes articles condemning the actions of former military and government leaders who now have immunity?  Can she reconcile the two worlds of her life into one and live with herself?  And how can she explain her love for her father amidst the knowledge of what his actions before she was born did to the country and to other families?

De Robertis takes readers on a psychological journey through Perla’s mind as she processes the revelations of her family life and the nation she was born into.  Legacy plays an important role and it is clear that Perla must uncover what that legacy should be as she grows into a woman and leads her own life.  The prose is so enchanting and intoxicating, hours of reading fly by as streets in Buenos Aires become crowded with footfall percussion beats and musical laughter countered with the closed off rooms of Perla’s childhood home and the dark, swirling violet waves of her aunt’s painting.  Water also is a significant image throughout the book as it gives life and sustains it in the womb and in the soil, but it also connects everyone and everything in the story, running underground and supplying the sustenance to the tale.

“Flowers lurked at every turn.  You could not rest your gaze without encountering a geranium, two geraniums, hundreds of geraniums, and you could not walk without the feeling that geraniums were following you close at heel, bright mobs of them, crowding the air at your back.  You could not help feeling vastly outnumbered.” (page 90)

In a few sections when Perla’s mother has taken up gardening as a hobby and begins overpopulating the house with geraniums, it is clear that these flowers are like the bodies of the disappeared blossoming despite the cover up and lurking around every corner, haunting those that took part.  These bodies even when the blossoms fade from lack of care, continue to haunt the house and its inhabitants, prodding Perla’s family to look about them, to question, to uncover the truth beneath the well-manicured soil.

Perla by Carolina De Robertis melds the supernatural with reality in a way that it becomes a testament to all of the disappeared and the children of the disappeared who were restored and not.  It is an examination of an ugly part of Argentinian history in which women, children, and men were taken from their families and homes without warning, tortured, and released from planes above the Atlantic Ocean — erased from existence.  De Robertis does not dwell on the horrors of those times, but on the consequences of those actions and the reverberations felt for generations following the political upheaval that caused them.  She does so with aplomb and breath-taking imagery that transports readers to a South American nation ripe with beauty and dark secrets to explore what it means to have an identity and to be an individual in spite of what your family may have done in the past.  One last note, get the tissues ready!  Another for the 2012 best of list.

Author Carolina De Robertis

About the Author:

Carolina De Robertis is the author of Perla and The Invisible Mountain, which was an international bestseller translated into fifteen languages, the recipient of Italy’s Rhegium Julii Prize, and a Best Book of 2009 according to the San Francisco Chronicle, O, The Oprah Magazine, and BookList. Her writings and literary translations have appeared in Zoetrope: Allstory, Granta, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She is the translator of Alejandro Zambra’s Bonsai, which was just made into a film, and Roberto Ampuero’s internationally bestselling The Neruda Case, which will be published for the first time in English in July 2012. De Robertis has been awarded a 2012 fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

De Robertis grew up in a Uruguayan family that immigrated to England, Switzerland, and California. Prior to completing her first book, she worked in women’s rights organizations for ten years, on issues ranging from rape to immigration. She lives in Oakland, California, where she is currently elbow-deep in writing her third novel, which explores migration, sexual frontiers, and the tango’s Old Guard in early twentieth century South America.  Connect with her on Facebook, Twitter, and through her Website.

tlc tour host

This is my 37th book for the 2012 New Authors Challenge.

 

 

 

To enter for 1 copy of Perla by Carolina De Robertis (US/Canada), leave a comment about what you’d like to learn about the disappeared of Argentina.

Deadline is May 17, 2012, at 11:59PM EST

Indie Lit Award Poetry Winner: Catalina by Laurie Soriano

Indie Lit Award Poetry Winner Catalina by Laurie Soriano, which was selected unanimously as the winner and also is published by Lummox Press, is a cohesive collection that maintains more than one theme throughout and simultaneously.  The narrator travels from east to west coasts and from innocence to corruption and recovery; the journey is bumpy and fraught with obstacles and stumbles.  Soriano uses imagery that jolts readers to the heart of her themes; parts one and two focus on how the narrator grows up in an abusive home with an alcoholic parent, while the final two sections focus on parenthood and how the past can shape us, but should not rule our actions.

There are some satiric qualities to these poems as well, like in “Betty’s Dive,” where a young woman takes on a dare and pays the ultimate price, and those issuing the dare laugh at what they think is her mock “dead-man’s float” until realization slowly creeps over them.  There is a great sense of irony in some of Soriano’s poems as well, such as the “no dogs” sign that is clearly the subject of many dogs’ walks in “Venice After Work.”

In addition to the deft use of these literary devices, the poet also clearly ties her poems together as a story unfolds, and it is most prominent in the movement from “Red Wine” to “Crash.”  In “Red Wine” (pages 44-5), the narrator is descending into the alcoholic abyss of her father: “. . . My hands/grip the flesh of their waists as I stumble/further toward the land of my father,/the shifting land of regret and soggy laughter./” and “I ask daddy if we want win.  He fills/our glasses like love, daddy never loved me/like wine, and we start thinning our blood/with this red stuff, our words flow/like liquid, we laugh fit to bust, and/we walk home arm in arm,/like we never did.//”  In “Crash” (pages 46-7), the narrator has followed the path of her father with her drinking and now driving along, experiences the worst kind of regret and shock:  “the effect of all our causes,/you and I shuttle separately to the spot//where our masses would marry/and your blood would stain the street./For a moment, one of those out of time,/we hung in the air, as breathless as sweethearts,/before we came together, your motorcycle/tearing a path through my car,/as your body flew/three car-lengths forward.//”

Soriano’s poetry is highly emotional, leading readers into tumultuous memories and through happier times, and in many ways, her poetry reminds me of the poetic prose of Beth Kephart.  Each writer’s words are chosen carefully and it shows — quiet little powerhouses of emotion that grab the heart strings and do not let go, though they may release their stronger grip for a moment or two depending on the mood of the poem.  In Part three — “Being Here” — Soriano emphasizes the “in-the-moment” nature of experiencing new life and parenthood, which can include struggle and joy.

Catalina by Laurie Soriano is more than stunning; it’s luminescent.  It’s a collection that will stay with readers long after reading, and will share a space on the shelves with those books that you’ll want to re-read again and again.  One of the best collections of the year, and unconventionally, this review is going to end with my favorite lines:

From "To the Attacker" (page 42-3)

You've slashed apart the ripe
abandon of my trust, torn away
the quietude I wore like a dress.
I am left with what is in the box.

Other Indie Lit Award Poetry Panel Reviews:

Diary of an Eccentric
Necromancy Never Pays

Poet Laurie Soriano

About the Poet:

Laurie Soriano is the author of Catalina (Lummox Press 2011). Her writing has appeared in Orange Room Review, FutureCycle Poetry, Flutter Poetry Journal, Gloom Cupboard, Heavy Bear, and West/Word, among others. She is also a music attorney, representing recording artists and songwriters and others in the music industry. She lives in Palos Verdes, California with her family.

Please also check out her interview for the Indie Lit Awards.

 

***For Today’s National Poetry Month blog tour post, visit Mr. Watson.***

 

 

 

This is my 30th book for the 2012 New Authors Challenge.

 

 

 

This is the 12th book for my 2012 Fearless Poetry Exploration Reading Challenge.

The Day the World Ends by Ethan Coen

The Day the World Ends by Ethan Coen, one half of the Coen Brothers film making team with great films under their belt like Brother, Where Art Thou? and No Country for Old Men, is a twisted and unexpectedly thoughtful collection in places.  The limericks are bawdy and remind me of Christopher Moore’s humorous prose, but less in the smart and sassy humor and more in the low-class bathroom humor sense.  Necromancy Never Pays stated that the poetry in the volume is geared toward a male audience, and in most cases, that is true — particularly with the dirty limericks.

"Stone-age man, thawed from glacier, aghast:
'Was some snowman in my recent past?
And if so, who fucked who?
My dick's numb and quite blue
And there's freezer burn all up my ass.'" (Page 28)

Additionally, Coen appears to love rhyme, no matter how trite or over-stretched it might be.  Readers could find this collection amateur at best in how Coen chooses his rhymes, even when they have a tongue-in-cheek quality.  Like the “bathroom” humor, these rhymes can get tiresome.  Take for instance the rhymes in “Vine-Covered Verse” (page 53), “Lord, keep this farmer’s soul in peace,/For, though he dallied with his niece,/And cow, and nephew, none can claim/He, during, failed to praise Your name;/And how commit a lesser sin/When neighbors are but kine and kin?//”   However, even in this poem, there are moments of deeper thought in which the narrator is asking what sins are worse and should they all be forgiven or all be condemned.  It also questions how well we know our partners or other humans in general and what secrets they will take to their graves.

Coen’s poetry in this collection seems built for laughs among men mostly, though there are moments in which the poems are not trying so hard to be humorous.  There are some with an anachronistic quality to them, while others like “My Father’s Briefcase” are more serious and reflective.  “Therapy” uses humor and disdain to point out the inane struggle we have against aging and the depression that accompanies the process of aging, as the narrator talks of his depression to a less-than-helpful therapist.

The Day the World Ends by Ethan Coen is not for everyone and could be trying if read from cover to cover, but for those looking for a humorous romp on the underside of humanity, take a dip into these pages.

Poet Ethan Coen

About the Poet:

Ethan Jesse Coen is one half of the American film making duo the Coen brothers.  Their films include Blood Simple, Fargo, The Big Lebowski, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, No Country for Old Men, and True Grit. The brothers write, direct and produce their films jointly, although until recently Joel received sole credit for directing and Ethan for producing. They often alternate top billing for their screenplays while sharing film credits for editor under the alias Roderick Jaynes.

To enter to win one of 2 copies for US/Canada readers:

Leave a comment about what tour stop on the National Poetry Month Blog Tour you’ve enjoyed most, either here or on one of the participants’ blogs.

Blog, Tweet, or share the link on Facebook for up to 3 additional entries.

Deadline is April 30, 2012.

***Today’s tour stop is at Arisa White, so check it out!***

 

This is the 11th book for my 2012 Fearless Poetry Exploration Reading Challenge.

 

 

This is my 29th book for the 2012 New Authors Challenge.