Review: Hello from the Gillespies

One should not be put off by the 600+ pages of this book. Despite its heft, it is really quite a quick read. This book brings the reader into the lives of the Gillespies, an Australian family living on a remote sheep station in the outback. Matriarch Angela Gillespie is becoming increasingly dissatisfied with her life. Her husband is becoming more distant, her children are facing various minor disasters. All of Angela's thoughts are accidentally emailed to her friends and family in a brutally honest Christmas letter. How the family handles the fallout is part of the book, until a car accident leaves Angela with amnesia and without her identity. 
The second part of the book is surreal. Angela is living with her family but thinks they are strangers, and the doctors encourage the family to play along. 

I was very into this book up until the amnesia. Once Angela got amnesia everything became quite predictable. We know that Angela isn't going to remain unaware of her identity forever, which means that there are only so many directions the book can go. The first half of the book was much stronger. I've heard McInerney compared to Maeve Binchy, and I can certainly see the resemblance in this book. McInerney can seamlessly enter the minds of numerous characters and weave their stories together into a broader saga. 

My main complaint with this book? Someone needs to throw Lindy to the wolves (or the snakes, or the rabid kangaroos, or whatever). Is it possible for an adult to be that whiny? Seriously Lindy, nobody cares about cushions. Nobody. Shut up, and quit whining. 

Those thoughts aside, this is a relaxing, feel-good sort of book. Definitely cozy.

Monica McInerney, Hello from the Gillespies (NAL, 2014).

Review: From a Sealed Room

This book was so very dull- nearly 400 pages of small print of people whining and having FEELINGS. The book focuses on three women living in Jerusalem: Tami- an unhappy, emotionally unavailable housewife, Maya, her American niece, and Shifra, an elderly Holocaust survivor. Everyone has issues. Tami's relationship with her son is deteriorating. Shifra has never really found her place in Jerusalem. Maya is concurrently running away from and trying repair her poor relationship with her mother. There's not very very much plot in this book. Maya travels from New York to study abroad in the hopes of finally proving her worth to her mother. She falls in mad, youthful love with Gil, a miserable, abusive, self-important artist. Maya drifts away from her friends and university and gets wrapped up in Gil's wants and needs. Shifra suffers from dementia and lives downstairs from Gil and Maya. She begins to hallucinate and think that Maya has arrived to bring her redemption. Meanwhile, Maya also meets her long-lost Israeli family members, including Tami. Honestly, that's about it. The story has little resolution, and there's not enough plot to sustain more than 300 pages. What the book does do well is describe Israel- it's environment and problems. The reader can really feel the sun, the grit, the sand of the Israeli desert. Kadish also illustrates the divergent desires of fundamentalists and moderates. Ultimately, while Kadish can write beautiful prose, there's too many tangents and not enough story here.

Rachel Kadish, From a Sealed Room (Berkley Trade, 2000) ISBN: 042517641X 

Review: The Sisters

This is an epic family saga, covering three generations of women. Early in the twentieth century sisters Mabel and Bertie fight poverty and their stepfather's sexual advances in rural Kentucky. Elder sister Mabel makes a daring plan for the sisters' escape from their stepfather's violence. An accidentally missed message creates disastrous consequences, consequences that will reshape life for generations of women.

The story of Mabel and Bertie, their daughters and their granddaughters, sucked me in and kept me interested to the end. Jensen provides an interesting and fast-moving plot. I did find it sometimes difficult to understand Bertie's absolutely refusal to communicate with her sister. Her obstinacy has grave consequences, and it's hard for me to imagine behaving in the same way. At the end I found Bertie and Mabel and their generation to be the most interesting. All in all, an engaging book and well worth reading.

Nancy Jensen, The Sisters (St. Martins, 2011) ISBN: 0312542704 

Review: Firefly Summer

A saga. This is a saga of a family, of several families, of a town. Mountfern, Ireland is a sleepy, rural community. In the summer of 1962, the wealthy American Patrick O'Neill arrives in Mountfern trying to reconnect with his ancestral roots. He purchases the old O'Neill homestead and plans to develop it into a hotel. At the center of the story is the Ryan family; their pub stands to be rendered obsolete by the new O'Neill hotel. Over the next five years the entire village is changed by the O'Neill venture, none more so than the Ryans.

This is early Binchy, and the book is remarkable in its scope and scale. There are many characters and many strands of narrative. It has the Binchy touches of tone that will be familiar to her regular readers. The book took some time to get started. It took me some time to get invested, which I haven't found to be an issue in other Binchy works. I appreciated Binchy's willingness to take on what must seem to many Irish people as the absurdity of Americans coming back to "claim" their Irish heritage and expecting to be welcomed with open arms. Ultimately this book requires an investment of time. It's not the best example of Binchy's work, but it does serve the sort of comfort-read purposes that many find in Binchy.

Maeve Binchy, Firefly Summer (Dell, 2007) ISBN: 0385341717 

Review: We Sinners

The Rovaniemi family. eleven members, fundamentalist Lutherans, eschew most of the pleasures of modern living, and many of the pleasures of emotional comfort. They avoid television and dancing and worry about emotional complacency. Told through the viewpoints of each of the family members, we see how eleven different individuals experience a particularly rigorous form of fundamentalism. Three of the nine children decide to leave the church.

This is a decidedly sympathetic portrait of a fundamentalist family. The characters are complicated, and their relationships to religion vary. That said, I was struck by how much sadness was intertwined with religion. None of the characters is happy. None is even content, and there is little way out, either through faith or outside of it. The Finnish fundamentalist community is a tight one, one I didn't even know existed. This was an interesting read, but a depressing one too. No one finds happiness, and it quickly becomes clear that no one will.

Hanna Pylvainen, We Sinners (Henry Holt, 2012) ISBN: 0805095330 

Review: The Twelve Tribes of Hattie

This is a devastating book, beautifully written, but devastating. In the early years of the twentieth century Hattie Shepard and her sisters journey north to Philadelphia. They hope to escape the violence of the Jim Crow south. What they find is a world that falls far short of the hopes and dreams they had for their new life. The book follows each of Hattie's children as they struggle to make their way in the world. Through these chapters we discover that a life of poverty and struggle has turned Hattie into a hardened woman. She can survive against all odds, but survival burns up all physical and emotional resources. Hattie's children experience problems of their own, from racial violence to unfulfilled marriages to mental illness.

Mathis does an excellent job of portraying the harsh realities of the Great Migration. The historical details of the book are well-done. We see the cruelties of a world in which babies die for want of a few dollars' worth of penicillin, and mothers are forced to give up children they cannot afford. As fiction the strength of the chapters varied, and I found that they got stronger as they went on. Some of the conclusions of each character's story are not altogether satisfying. Still, this is a worthwhile read, as it brings to life an important part of the American story.

Ayana Mathis, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie (Knopf, 2012) ISBN: 0385350287 

Review: A Small Fortune

The saga of an Anglo-Pakistani family, this book shows how family members face their demons under the premise of acquiring some of a small divorce settlement. The prodigal daughter has quit medical school, a nephew is falling in with a dangerous crowd, and a brother is desperate for help. At the center of the family is Harris, who is trying desperately to reconstruct his family and to reconstruct happier times. Harris has lost interest in the life he once relished. When he receives his divorce settlement he is torn asunder by the competing needs of his family members.

While the blurb and title suggested that the book was going to focus on Harris's efforts to get rid of his money, that really is not the major issue. Money is the background, really a premise to get the family members to work out some long-festering problems. This was an interesting enough book. I particularly enjoyed watching the relationship develop between Harris and his new love, the professor. Other parts of the story were more predictable. Still, a well-written tale of a believable family.

Rosie Dastgir, A Small Fortune (Riverhead, 2012) ISBN: 159448810X 

Review: Sarah Thornhill

Growing up in rural Australia, Sarah Thornhill, daughter of a transported convict, pursues her childhood sweetheart Jack. But Jack's mother was a native Australian, he has "black" blood. While this makes no difference to Sarah, it does to the rest of her family. Different cultures and family secrets try their relationship. Sarah fights for a future with Jack when all the forces of her family and community are against it. The best thing about this book is undeniably the setting. The Thornhills live in mid-nineteenth century rural Australia.

It is stark and unforgiving territory. White Australians have all of the anxieties and concerns of a colonial population. Native Australians are reeling from the brutalities of white colonists. It is a fascinating world, and one that Grenville portrays beautifully. That said, this book was too much of a standard romance novel to really speak to me. There are some fascinating themes, but they revolve to heavily around Sarah and Jack's relationship. I would have like a broader focus.

The most important takeaway? Grenville reminds readers that we have a collective responsibility for the past, one that a new generation cannot simply erase.

Kate Grenville, Sarah Thornhill (Grove, 2012) ISBN: 9780802120243 

Review: The Cottage at Glass Beach

Nora Keane has a troubled past and a troubled present. Her mother disappeared when Nora was five, and her marriage has been rocked by an affair. To get away from the scandal of her husband's affair, Nora packs up her two daughters and retreats to the small Maine Island where she was born. At the island Nora tries to sort out her marriage and find out what, exactly, happened to her mother.

The island is deeply steeped in Celtic mythology, and residents believe in the magical qualities of the sea. They believe that the sea brings creatures like selkies to aid mortals, and certainly some of the characters on the island have other-worldly qualities. This book is hardly fantasy, but it deals with how mythology functions in people's lives. These beliefs are particularly salient on a small island reliant on a tempestuous ocean for its safety and its livelihood.

Though Nora has clearly suffered, she is not always an especially likable character. She doesn't seem to take her older daughter's feelings about her home and father very seriously. I also found the resolution of the final series of events to be entirely unbelievable. In sum, not a bad book, and definitely well-suited to summer reading.

Heather Barbieri, The Cottage at Glass Beach (Harper Perennial, 2012) ISBN: 0062107976 

Review: Jenny Wren

This is a book about trying to live within the strictures of Victorian sociability when one does not fit neatly into any of the categories. Jenny Rendall's father married down, his wife Louisa was never quite able to adapt to middle class rules of behavior. Sidney Rendall was able to educate his daughters in social graces, and Jenny, in particular, takes to the demands and graces of middle-class life. Sidney's death creates a crisis for the family. To earn money Louisa and her daughters attempt to start a boarding house. The work and the clientele are shocks to Jenny's delicate sensibilities. She finds herself regularly embarrassed by Louisa, but disquieted by her embarrassment. When Jenny meets the heir to the local manor her shame leads her to adopt a fake persona, becoming the upscale Jenny Wren.

A novel about class and manners, the book presents Jenny as the parvenu. She is the woman who has been introduced to the sensibilities of the upper classes, but who can't materially sustain them. Jenny has acquired enough of the sensory delicacies of the upper classes to feel acutely upset at her situation, but she lacks the resources of the upper class that would prevent her problems. Louisa retains enough of her lower-class orientation to enjoy more visceral pleasures, but not enough to avoid being horrified by her sister the servant and her suitor/moneylender Mr. Grimshaw. The novel roils in intellectual and emotional discomfort. Everyone is discontented. Weeding through that discomfort takes a great deal out of each of the characters. Though the book is set in the early 20th century, it had a very 19th century feel to me.

E.H. Young, Jenny Wren (orig. 1932) ISBN: 0140161082

Review: On Beauty

A dysfunctional academic family, headed by a dysfunctional academic, fights intellectual, academic, and personal battles. Howard Belsey finds himself teaching at the same institution as his arch-rival. More disastrously, he finds himself infatuated with his rival's college-age daughter. Victoria Kipps is a bit of a temptress, and Howard has no ability to control himself. Add to this equation Howard's long-suffering wife, Kiki, his academic superstar daughter Zora, one son competing with his father for Victoria, another fighting political battles he doesn't understand, and it becomes clear that this family is on the fast-track to disaster.

The book is set in what looks very much like Wellesley, Massachusetts, and I kept thinking that the school was modeled on Wellesley College (it's co-ed, but in all other respects seems a match). At least, that's how I kept envisioning it. I enjoyed the academic setting of this book, and absurdities of that world, which Smith details well. There were many times during the book when I simply wanted to hit Howard. I learned that I have very little tolerance for the weak-male mid-life crisis. I also occasionally wanted to smack Zora, who has a tendency towards the obnoxious. So, the characters are not exactly likable, hardly so. It says something that despite that I enjoyed this book very much.

Zadie Smith, On Beauty (Penguin, 2006) ISBN: 0143037749