Thursday, September 26, 2013
Final Words
That will be my last post for now. I appreciate everyone who has read along and encouraged me along the way. If you ever get stuck for something to read, just ask: I am always excited about something I am reading! I may return sometime, but in the meantime, VERY BEST WISHES!
Wednesday, September 25, 2013
Marina Adair continues her Napa Trilogy with another amusing romance
Marina Adair’s Summer in Napa (340 pages, $12.95,
Montlake Romance) follows her Kissing
under the Mistletoe with her story about the Napa Valley and the DeLuca
family.
This time, a younger member
of the family, Marco, takes an interest in Alexis Moreau, who has come limping
home to Napa after a breakup with her husband and co-restaurant owner in New
York. She has taken a room over
her grandmother’s bakery, and while there seems quite willing to help with the
baking.
Meanwhile, her romance gets
off to a rocky start. Marco likes
her, but they had a history dating from their high school days, and this does
nothing but make Lexi nervous.
Just when it seems that she
and Marco might be on solid ground, and as she tries to open her own restaurant
in Napa, the rug is pulled out from under her, when her ex sues her for all her
recipes and even those of her grandmother’s bakery. It is complicated how and why this happens, but it does, and
it creates a crisis for Lexi. Not
only does she feel unable to compete or make it in any way on her own, but also
she wonders whether Marco can have time for a loser like her.
Needless to say, they work
things out. And as they do, Adair extends her range of likable eccentrics who
populate her version of the Napa Valley.
This novel is a quick read, and a fun read, and with Adair’s other
novels about the Napa Valley promises to hold its own among the work of other
romance writers.
Tuesday, September 24, 2013
Marina Adair sets her romance in the Napa Valley at Christmastime
Marina Adair’s Kissing Under the Mistletoe (310 pages,
$12.95, Montlake Romance) is the first in her series of Napa Valley
romances. While certain staples of
romance description, especially moments of sexual intensity that only manage to
tease the principle characters, leave me unimpressed, Adair has a way of
creating winning characters and putting them in very amusing, if not always
believable, situations.
In this novel, Regan
Martin, a talented wine expert, has come to Napa to fill an important job
vacancy. When she arrives,
however, she finds she has stepped on the toes of the most powerful local wine
families, and her job disappears before her eyes.
The family, the DeLucas,
have a longstanding tradition of power-broking in Napa. Now they are a younger generation—four
brothers and a single sister. It
seems that Regan was having an affair with the sister’s husband. Regan didn’t know about her, Abigail,
and when she did discover that the boyfriend was married, she was in the
process of being fleeced by him, too.
Regan has come out of this affair with a daughter and a whole family of
enemies.
The oldest brother, Gabe,
is the one who is commissioned to deal with Regan. And while he has blackballed her from getting a decent job in
any winery in the country, he nevertheless finds her breathtakingly attractive
when confronted with her face to face.
Regan feels exactly the same about him, and the two characters spend
hundreds of pages trying not to get into each other’s pants—or getting into
them and then figuring out how to get beyond that lapse.
While this is going on, Adair
creates a whole assortment of other characters in her Napa setting, and she
does a wonderful job with characters' descriptions, sometimes at the level of
caricature but often with a deft hand at the revealing detail or telling
secret.
Sunday, September 15, 2013
Ben Fountain writes about the Iraq War without leaving Texas
Ben Fountain’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (307
pages, Ecco, $14.99) is the most stunning Iraq War novel to have appeared. Bravo Squad, so-called because of a
misnomer that sticks, has had a visible and very highly publicized success in
Iraq and has returned home for honors and celebration. We meet them on the last day of their
leave, as they are feted at a Dallas Cowboys football game. They are guests of the owners and they
have a role to play during the halftime show.
The novel takes place only
during, as well as immediately before and after, the football game. There are a few flashbacks to a day or
two before, but they only help to amplify our understanding of the main
character, Billy Lynn. Billy is a
nineteen-year-old from Texas who was one of the key players in a battle that
resulted in one of his good friends being killed in the field.
Billy is a slow thinking young
man, but he is good looking enough to find himself often in the spot
light. When he has to speak, he
does; and sometimes what he says is profound. Billy started thinking more because of Shroom, the friend who was
killed. Shroom told Billy what to
read, how to carry himself, how to be self-aware. His death has affected Billy deeply, and the sorrow of that
loss infuses the entire narrative.
Billy and his squad are busy
knocking back whatever form of alcohol they can get their hands on. Their sergeant, Dime, checks up on them
from time to time, but it seems that mostly they do what they want. After all, they are being wined and
dined as victors from Iraq, and everyone around them in Texas and elsewhere
wants the reassurance that what they did in Iraq has larger significance for
the war.
One person who buys this
line is Albert, their now-resident Hollywood producer who is promising to bring
in a deal. As he throws around
huge numbers that a film deal would bring to the soldiers, they get off on all
sorts of fantasizing about who might play what roles and how their story will
look when turned into a Hollywood project.
They are all asked, but
Billy is especially asked, how they did what they did; what it felt like; and
whether they were scared. Billy
has a rote answer, but each time he is asked, it becomes clear that he has no
language to describe the intensity of that moment of holding his dying friend
in his arms.
As the game gets started
and the soldiers settle into their comfortable seats in the owner's box, sipping Jack and Coke, Billy locks eyes with one of the cheerleaders that will be
performing during the game. This
cheerleader seems to be interested in Billy, and when they meet later on, she
clearly seems to be ready to spend time with him. She gives Billy something to fantasize about while he and
his buddies are getting hammered during the game.
She plays in his mind
against the memories of his time with his family, especially his sister
Kathryn, who is trying to persuade him to resist the army’s demand that he
return to Iraq.
Fountain's novel is a
wonderful satire of the world of the Dallas football club and the ranks of
Americans who are trying to support this war without knowing anything about
what it is. At the same time, it
is a deeply touching story about a young soldier growing up through his
experience of war, especially as he has this distance on his own actions and
tries to put everything together as he prepares to step onto the halftime stage
in the football stadium.
Ben Fountain
Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk is available at Powell's, Vroman's and Amazon.
Ben Fountain
Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk is available at Powell's, Vroman's and Amazon.
Monday, September 9, 2013
Jacqueline Winspear takes Maisie Dobbs into harrowing memories of WWI
Birds of a Feather (336 pages, Penguin, $16) is another of Jacqueline
Winspear’s Maisie Dobbs novels.
Set in 1930, this novel begins when Maisie is called to the offices of a
difficult wealthy financier.
Maisie is meant to find his daughter who has gone missing.
Maisie is happy to take on
this case, but as she makes inquiries about the girl and her friends, it turns
out that some other girls that were associated with the missing girl have been
murdered in suspicious circumstances.
Winspear does a wonderful
job of creating a feeling of that era between the wars, and she creates the war
as a memory for her characters very beautifully. In this case, it seems to have something to do with the war,
that these women were together before the war and that they have hardly
socialized since. What holds them
together, or why the young heiress has fled, are all baffling to Maisie.
She seems to unravel the
mystery and find the girl almost at the same time, but that does not really
tell her what she is to do about the situation. She has a young heiress who does not want to go home,
several other girls who have been murdered, and a man who hardly deserves to be
called the girl's father.
This is a case for Maisie
Dobbs, and all I can say is she pulls it off beautifully. That is another way of saying that
Winspear is at her most deft in bringing all the details of this plot into an
effective resolution.
Jacqueline Winspear
Birds of a Feather is available at Powell's, Vroman's and Amazon.
Jacqueline Winspear
Birds of a Feather is available at Powell's, Vroman's and Amazon.
Sunday, August 18, 2013
Jacqueline Winspear creates in Maisie Dobbs an inspired detective.
As the first volume of a now several-volume series,
Jacqueline Winspear’s Maisie Dobbs
(294 pages, Penguin, $15) sets up an important back-story of the eponymously
named heroine. Maise was born just before
the start of the twentieth century, and she spent her formative years in
service. From the first, however, she
showed intelligence and verve; and before long she emerged from the downstairs
world to take lessons and eventually inspiration from the local professor,
Maurice Blache, who dabbles in detection himself. He gives Maisie and impressive reading list,
which she attacks on top of all her housework. Eventually this earns her
admission to Girton College at Cambridge, just before the outbreak of World War
I.
This novel actually flashes back to these wartime experiences, but tells us Maisie's story in the present of 1929 as she is setting herself up as
a private investigator. With the help of
her sometime assistant, Billy Beale, Maisie attempts to discover the truth
behind a wife’s seeming infidelity. This
search, enhanced by Maisie’s astonishing gift for almost visionary inspiration,
helped by her facility at mediation and projection, leads her to some hideous
mistreatment of veteran soldiers who have emerged from the war maimed and
depressed. As Maisie looks into a
supposed retreat for these men, she flashes back to her own wartime experience.
In the war, Maisie volunteered as a nurse, and not long into
her service she meets the dashing and delightful Simon, whose own experiences
of the war turn out to have shaped her understanding of love and loss. Without spoiling these rich chapters, I can
say that they have a direct bearing on what is happening in the present, and as
Maisie struggles to understand one series of events, she finds herself working
through some of the implications of the earlier experiences.
Maisie Dobbs is an accomplished and evocative novel. My guess is that later volumes in this
series, all of which I hope to read,
will deal similarly with this period between the wars, often looking back but
sometimes looking forward as well.
Maisie Dobbs is a detective to put with the best of them.
Jacqueline Winspear
Maisie Dobbs is available at Powell's, Vroman's and Amazon.
Jacqueline Winspear
Maisie Dobbs is available at Powell's, Vroman's and Amazon.
Sunday, August 11, 2013
Anne Korkeakivi writes an intimate thriller.
An Unexpected Guest (277 pages, Back Bay Books, $15), a debut novel from Anne Korkeakivi, tells one day in the life of the wife of a British foreign minister stationed in Paris. Asked to host a dinner party at the last minute, Clare Montrose finds herself having to prepare an occasion that will determine whether or not her husband gets his next posting, a promotion to ambassador in a new location. She goes into automatic pilot—organizing the staff, deciding on a menu, and working out details with the staff of the embassy, where the dinner was originally to have been held.
As she wakes in the morning and organizes her day, another
two complications begin to envelop her.
First, she discovers that her husband’s likely posting, if the dinner is
a success, will be to Dublin. The dread she feels at this suggestion at first
remains merely atmospheric, but it is real enough. She dreads the name of the city and to go
there, she imagines, will drive her mad.
Second, she has a call from the younger of her two teenage sons, the
fifteen year-old James, or Jamie, who is in private school in London. He seems to be in some kind of trouble and is
heading home. She doesn’t know whether he has been expelled or has simply
absconded, but in either case, she is terribly worried.
As the day advances, she proceeds in her dinner
preparations, always recognizing how very important this dinner is to her
husband. Edward has been her partner for
twenty years, and she loves him deeply.
But she harbors secrets from the past that she worries might destroy
their relationship. She plans the dinner
with care—deciding to choose the vegetables and the flowers herself—and in a
wonderful scene she works out details with the very talented chef Matilde, a Swiss
and Scottish woman who steals every scene of which she is a part.
As she attends to the various details of the dinner, she
also deals with the fact of her son’s misbehavior, the details of which she
seems unable to discover, and, shortly later, his very presence at the
minister’s residence. She doesn’t want
him to upset the dinner plans—it means far too much to her husband to let her
son disrupt the evening—so she pleads with him to hide out in his room. But this doesn’t stop her worrying about what
he might have done or what might be necessary to get him back in school.
At the same time, she allows herself to call up the distant
past and remember her own youthful transgression, a rather grand political
gesture, it turns out, that led her to Dublin and to activities that she
worries may have meant the deaths of innocent people. This is a rather damning interpretation of
what in reality seems to have been a young girl’s infatuation with a firebrand
from the IRA who persuaded her to do something down right foolish. That she did it, and did it successfully, is
all a measure of her feelings for the young man in question, a young Irish man,
who could persuade her to do almost anything.
That these memories are nagging at her more aggressively
because of her husband’s Irish posting does nothing to reassure her or
weaken their intensity, in fact they build to a climax, almost precisely when
the dinner party is meant to be coming perfectly together.
The book is described as a thriller, and this is the
thrill: will the dinner party come off
as flawlessly as it needs to in order for Edward to get the Dublin
ambassadorship? can Jamie be put back on the right track? and will the memories
of Clare's political past emerge to destroy the realities of her present. Anne Korkeakivi does a fantastic job of
balancing these possibilities and making it very thrilling indeed to see what
she succeeds in accomplishing in a world as harrowing as the one she
inhabits. This is a great first novel
that bodes only better things to come.
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