Tag: contemporary fiction

Day 503: Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots

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Cover for Tomorrow There Will Be ApricotsBest Book of the Week!
Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots is a brilliant, touching novel about the complexity of human relationships and the longing for love and acceptance. It is also a mouthwatering novel centered around food and the love of cooking. (I have no idea, though, why lemons are on the cover instead of apricots.)

Lorca is a teenage girl who yearns for love and affection from her mother Nancy. Nancy is a noted chef who remains emotionally aloof, so Lorca tries to please her by cooking food that she likes. The two live in a small New York apartment with Nancy’s sister Lou, who seems jealous of any attention Lorca gets from Nancy.

Lorca cuts herself for release, because something feels better than nothing. When she is caught doing it at school, she is expelled for a week. Instead of getting Lorca help, her mother informs her she is sending her away to boarding school.

One night Lorca overhears Nancy tell Lou that the best food she ever ate was masgouf at a restaurant that has since closed. Lorca believes that if she can learn to cook that dish for her mother, she won’t be sent away. So, she begins trying to find out about the restaurant with the help of her friend Blot.

Victoria narrates the novel in alternate chapters with Lorca. She is an old Jewish woman who fled Iraq with her husband Joseph when they were young. The two used to own and run the restaurant, which they closed when Joseph became ill. He dies early in the novel.

Victoria is full of regret, because she was so afraid that Joseph would love their child more than her that she insisted upon giving up their daughter for adoption when they were young and refused to have another child. Now she feels she deprived Joseph of part of his life and wants above all things to find their daughter. When she first sees Lorca, she is sure she is her granddaughter, and Lorca, whose mother was adopted, soon believes Victoria is her grandmother.

Whether this is magical thinking or not you can find out by reading the novel. It is ripe with the flavors and scents of the Middle East. This novel will touch you. It will also make you want to run out and eat some Middle Eastern food. Oh, and the recipe for masgouf is included.

Day 498: The Hour I First Believed

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Cover for The Hour I First BelievedThe Hour I First Believed is described on its jacket as an exploration of faith, and as such I didn’t think it would be very interesting to me. But it is really more about a man’s struggle to face the problems of his life and his own demons. It is an extremely interesting and affecting work.

Caelum Quirk is not always a likable protagonist. He has anger issues—went after his third wife’s lover with a wrench—can be withdrawn and drink too much, says the wrong thing quite often, and earned my personal disregard at the beginning of the novel by referring to two different women as a ballbuster and a nutcracker. Lamb had to work hard to get my sympathy for his character after that, but he did accomplish that by the end of the novel. Still, whether I liked Caelum or not, I couldn’t tear myself away from his story.

Caelum is trying to salvage his marriage after the wrench incident, so he and his wife Maureen decide to move away from Three Rivers, Connecticut, the town where his family has a lot of history, and get jobs in Colorado. They are settled there and are doing okay, although still having relationship issues, when Caelum is called back to Connecticut because his beloved Aunt Lolly has had a stroke. She dies shortly after he returns, and Maureen is making arrangements to come for the funeral but decides to work one more day at the high school where Caelum teaches English and she is a nurse. Unfortunately, the high school in question is Columbine, and the school day she works is the day two students go on a rampage.

Maureen would normally be out of the area of trouble, but that day she decides to help Velvet Hoon, a troubled drop-out, fill out some papers in the library. Although she is not killed, she hides in a cupboard for hours before she is found, and subsequently suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder that barely allows her to function. She also struggles with an addiction to uppers.

Caelum and Maureen move back to live on Caelum’s family farm, a place for which he has mixed but mostly negative feelings. His father was a drunk of whom he was ashamed. He remembers his grandfather as judgmental and his mother as cold. Only Lolly seemed to care for him.

Troubles are not over for Caelum and Maureen, but I don’t want to reveal more about that. Caelum must also deal with his feelings about his family. His great-great grandmother was an early fighter for abolition and women’s rights, and she was instrumental in establishing the women’s prison down the road from the farm. It had a long history of treating the women with dignity and had a low rate of recidivism until its values were changed by modern tough-on-crime politics. Caelum’s great-great grandmother’s papers are in a spare room of the house. When Caelum is forced by financial circumstances to rent part of the house to a couple evacuated from New Orleans because of Hurricane Katrina, the wife, a women’s studies graduate student, asks if she can examine them. This and other events lead Caelum to several discoveries about his family.

This novel is sprawling, even a bit messy, because it seems to want to deal with everything. It features large events such as Columbine, 9/11, and Katrina, as well as the inequity of the American justice system, PTSD, drug addiction, grief, love, trust, religion, infidelity, and other issues. It is interesting, frustrating, and ultimately worth reading.

Day 482: The Map of Love

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Cover for The Map of LoveBest Book of the Week!
The Map of Love is an absorbing novel to read now, just after the Arab Spring and during the troubled times that have continued on. It is a love story certainly, its title tells you that, but it also explores the roots of the political turmoil in present-day Egypt and some of the other countries that used to be a part of the Ottoman Empire.

The novel follows the course of two cross-cultural love affairs 90 years apart. In 1900 Anna Winterbourne travels to Egypt in an attempt to overcome her grief. She is the widow of a man who recently served in the Soudan, and even though their marriage was not a happy one, she is sorrowful that she could not help him overcome his despair at participating in an unjust war. Almost accidentally, she meets Sharif al-Barroudi, a Cairo lawyer and activist, and falls in love with him.

Anna’s diary and letters are discovered by her great-granddaughter, Isabel Cabot. Isabel herself has fallen in love with ‘Omar al-Ghamwari, a famous Egyptian-American orchestra conductor who is rumored to work with the Palestinians. ‘Omar feels that their age difference is too great for a relationship, but he suggests that Isabel take her find to his sister Aman in Cairo so that she might help Isabel translate some of the materials.

Aman becomes absorbed in reading Anna’s diaries and letters and realizes very soon that she and Isabel are related, for Anna’s beloved sister-in-law Layla is Aman’s own grandmother. With Layla’s diaries of the same time period, she begins to reconstruct Anna’s story and that of Egypt’s history during a turbulent period. Aman has returned from life abroad to live in Cairo in another turbulent time.

Anna’s courtship is fraught with difficulties, but once she and Sharif are married, she is caught up in his work for Egyptian independence from the Ottoman Empire and from British oversight. As the years go by, his efforts extend to attempts to keep Palestinian land, once owned by his family and by his neighbors and occupied by hundreds of thousands of Muslims, from being bought up by Zionists who would expel them.

The blurb for this novel stresses the similarities between the two love stories, and there are many points of similarity, but the focus of the story in the current time is more with Aman than with Isabel and ‘Omar. Aman is at first at loose ends in Cairo, but she becomes involved with trying to help the fellaheen who occupy her family’s land, as they are treated unjustly by a corrupt and paranoid government. I was frankly more interested in Aman and in Anna and Sharif than I was in Isabel and ‘Omar, who are much less present in the novel.

For me, not very politically aware in regard to problems in this part of the world, this was a fascinating and revealing reading experience. It points up the complex history of the area from a point of view we westerners seldom hear. It is affectingly told in the context of a great love affair between two lovingly created characters. The characters of the two sisters, Layla and Aman, are also vivid. This novel is beautifully written and evokes for us a vibrant culture.

Day 481: St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

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Cover for St. Lucy'sDifficulties of youth and adolescence are the themes of Karen Russell’s unusual collection of short stories. Many of them are set in the Florida Everglades among bizarre and tacky theme parks or tourist destinations, where children sled through the sand on crab shells or visit enormous conches.

The first story, “Ava Wrestles the Alligator,” provides an introduction to the two sisters who are more fully developed in Russell’s later novel Swamplandia! Abandoned momentarily at their Everglades theme park home, Ava has a murky encounter with the Bird Man and tries to rescue her sister Osceola from her ghost lover. That story is expanded in the novel, which I really enjoyed.

Although certainly all are unusual, some of the stories are more bizarre than others. In “from Children’s Reminiscences of the Westward Migration,” a 19th century family makes a difficult crossing west, their wagon pulled by their father, the Minotaur. In the title story, human children of werewolves are sent away to be raised by nuns so that they can have a better life than their parents.

Russell’s stories are at once peculiar and oddly touching, full of young misfits who are even more out of place than all adolescents think they are. At times funny, such as the descriptions of the wolf-girls’ canine behavior when trying to adjust to their new school, the stories all reverberate with longing. Russell’s writing is brilliantly fierce and original, sparked by her own peculiar vision.

A few of the stories felt to me as if the author was just trying to think of the strangest ideas possible, and she almost lost me in “Lady Yeti and the Palace of Artificial Snows.” But ultimately, I enjoyed the stories, although I prefer the more developed characters and plot of Swamplandia!

Day 477: The Fault in Our Stars

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Cover for The Fault in Our StarsBest Book of the Week!
It seems as if I have read more books lately from which I do not get a sense of the characters’ personalities. I don’t feel as if they could be real people but just projections of the author’s plot. But that is not the case with The Fault in Our Stars, which creates for us some unforgettable personalities.

Hazel Lancaster is a sixteen-year-old with thyroid cancer that has spread to her lungs. Unlike the other kids in the support group her mom has talked her into attending, she doesn’t have any hope of survival. She just wants to live as long as she can. At the group, she meets Augustus Waters, a seventeen-year-old ex-basketball player who has lost one leg to osteosarcoma but has a generally good prognosis.

Hazel is witty, smart, and well read. She is obsessed with a novel called An Imperial Affliction by Peter Van Houten, which is about a young girl suffering from a fatal illness, and literally ends in the middle of a sentence. As she and Augustus discuss their favorite books, Hazel explains that she just wants to know what happened to everyone else in the novel. Augustus decides to use his wish from the Genie Foundation to take Hazel to Amsterdam, where she can meet Peter Van Houten and find out what happened after the novel ended.

This novel is about teenagers falling in love, and rarely has fiction depicted two more appealing people. My one very small criticism is that they are scarily smart and funny, in intelligence reminding me more of Salinger’s Glass family than of normal kids. But Green has got the juvenile speech patterns down.

Frightfully well written, touching, funny, and ultimately sad, this novel has much to offer teens, young adults, and adults. Hazel and Augustus are affectingly human, and even Hazel’s parents, those cumbersome quantities so often ignored or eliminated in children’s or young adult fiction (note, for example, how much we see of Bella’s father in Twilight), are deftly characterized by their affectionate jokey interactions with Hazel.

Again, I feel that my capabilities are stretched here in my inability to adequately express how good this novel is. When I first started reading it, I was afraid of manipulation, as there seem to be a lot of “affliction of the month” children’s books out there right now, but that feeling left me almost immediately.

Day 474: The Travelling Hornplayer

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Cover for The Travelling HornplayerThe Travelling Hornplayer revisits some of the characters I loved in Brother of the More Famous Jack. But first it starts with Ellen. Ellen has always had a close relationship with her sister Lydia, and the two girls’ adolescent silliness and charm is vividly depicted early in the novel in lively dialogue. But Lydia dies at age 17 while Ellen is away at university. She runs unexpectedly out into the street from the home of the man Ellen and Lydia call The Novelist and is hit by a car. Lydia has been consulting him about (well, actually cribbing from him) her essay for her A levels on Wilhelm Müller’s Seventy-Seven Poems from the Posthumous Papers of a Travelling Hornplayer. It takes awhile before we find out the cause of her death.

The Novelist is Jonathan Goldman, whose family so charmed Katherine, the heroine of Brother of the More Famous Jack, now his wife. Jonathan and Katherine have only one child, Stella, whose childhood illnesses and learning disabilities have led Katherine to do everything for her. Finally almost on her own at university in Edinburgh, where she becomes Ellen’s roommate (almost on her own because her mother arrives periodically to do the cleaning), Stella makes a series of spectacularly poor decisions that result in tragedy for herself and others and a separation from her family.

This sounds like a sad tale, and in some ways it is, but it is told lovingly and movingly, with intelligent characters and witty dialogue. Trapido depicts characters of surprising depth and complexity. She is a really beautiful writer, and I love her work.

My cover of The Travelling HornplayerA word about this cover. I was unable to find a good-sized picture of my book’s cover without the Amazon Look Inside logo on it. That cover, which shows two young girls comparing their identical outfits, conveys the feel of the novel much more successfully than the one above, which looks like children’s fiction or chick lit to me. Here it is in a smaller size.

Day 471: Unaccustomed Earth

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Cover for Unaccustomed EarthBest Book of the Week!

Although all of the stories in Unaccustomed Earth feature characters who are immigrants and first-generation Americans of Indian descent, they are about a lot more than that. They are about the common problems of all people.

In the story “Unaccustomed Earth,” Ruma grieves over the loss of her mother while her father fears she is making the same life for herself that embittered his marriage to her mother. In “Hell-Heaven,” a girl observes her traditional mother’s infatuation with a young graduate student in light of her mother’s detached marriage with her father. Amit and his wife Megan try to create a romantic weekend while attending the wedding of a woman Amit once had a crush on in “A Choice of Accommodations.” The best of the stories are the last three, interlinked, about two people who meet each other several times at significant junctures of their lives.

Lahiri’s stories speak to us deeply. With details of life and human behavior so finely observed, they become stories about characters for whom we care.

I am generally a novel reader, because short stories often feel to me as if a lot is missing. But Lahiri’s gift is for saying so much in so few words. You find yourself pondering her stories and characters long after you stop reading. They reveal a profound insight into the human heart.

Day 467: Queen Sugar

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Cover for Queen SugarMany of the outcomes of Queen Sugar are foreseeable from the beginning. Charley Bordelon, an African-American widowed school teacher from California who has inherited a Louisiana sugar cane farm, will face multiple problems in an industry dominated by white men but will prevail. Charley, a suburbanite from Los Angeles, will create a place for herself among her relatives in the small rural community. Charley will have problems with her tween daughter Micah but will work them out. Charley will find love. And Charley may be able to mend her relationship with her estranged brother Ralph Angel.

Well, almost right. The fact is that Queen Sugar is predictable, but it still makes an enjoyable and interesting reading experience.

Charley and her daughter arrive in Louisiana a little late for the start of the sugar season, but she’s hired a manager, who supposedly has gotten started on his own. When she arrives at her farm, though, the manager has done nothing and hands in his resignation. With a late start and a bedraggled looking acreage, Charley must find a manager to teach her the sugar business. She just barely has the money to make it through the first year.

Charley and her daughter Micah are living squeezed into a small room in the home of Miss Honey, Charley’s grandmother. Miss Honey throws a party for Charley to meet all her Louisiana and Texas family, but everyone is dismayed when Charley’s half-brother Ralph Angel arrives with his little boy. Charley has not met Ralph Angel since she was a girl, but the rest of the family is angry because he pushed Miss Honey down and broke her arm the last time he was there. Still, Miss Honey wants the family to accept him.

Baszile does a good job of making Ralph Angel understandable. He bears a grudge against Charley, believing that she has been spoiled all her life and has had all the advantages due to him. He is also a criminal. He is not a villain, but his behavior is almost invariably self-defeating. He considers himself too educated for manual labor, consistently exaggerating his accomplishments, and works his way out of several jobs, cheats, lies, and steals. Still, Baszile is able to evoke in us a modicum of sympathy for him without magically providing him a happy ending.

http://www.netgalley.comCharley battles bad weather, difficulties finding a manager or affordable equipment, attempts to cheat her, and her own feelings of inadequacy trying to get her first crop to the mill. During the battle we learn interesting facts about the sugar industry. Baszile also creates a lively picture of this colorful area of the country, with its mix of cultures.

Charley’s courtship by a sugar grower named Remy Newell adds some piquancy without taking over the story. If you are looking for something light with a likable, determined heroine, you’ll probably enjoy Queen Sugar.

Day 464: Practical Magic

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Cover for Practical MagicI’m ambivalent about Practical Magic, the first novel I’ve read by Alice Hoffman. It reminds me a bit of the Vianne Rocher books by Joanne Harris, only it is more heavy handed and less principled.

Gillian and Sally Owens have grown up in their aunts’ house in Massachusetts and have always longed for something different. Their aunts are considered witches, and people walk on the other side of the street when they see the girls. Sally longs for normalcy and tries to keep the untidy house clean and feed everyone wholesome meals. Gillian is spoiled and beautiful.

Eventually, both of them leave. Gillian runs away to begin a series of ill-conceived marriages and affairs. Sally’s brief marriage brings her two daughters of her own, Antonia and Kylie. When her husband is killed in a car accident, she flees the dark old house for suburbia and a chance for a normal life for her daughters.

Thirteen years go by before Gillian arrives unannounced at Sally’s house bringing trouble. Her latest boyfriend Jimmy is a dangerous criminal, and Gillian has accidentally killed him. His body is out in the car, and she has come to her sister for help. Together, they bury the body in the yard, but soon they are being haunted.

This story is told in a fairy tale style, and despite several setbacks, we are in no doubt that everything will turn out all right in the end. Characters fall madly in love on sight, and the troubles between both sets of sisters are worked out. The final removal of the spirit requires the assistance of the aunts themselves. Of course, it turns out that Gillian didn’t really kill her lover.

I guess I felt as if everything was tied up too neatly in this story. It’s a romance novel lightly disguised as magical realism, and I haven’t much patience for either.

On the one hand, I found myself mildly enjoying the novel. On the other hand, I found it too cheerfully immoral. We are supposed to accept through most of the book that Gillian killed her lover, however accidentally, and that it is okay to cover it up. Finally, the law officer who tracks them down while looking for Jimmy is required to fall in love with Sally on sight so that he can help cover up their crime, despite his being perfectly straight-laced up to that point. Even if the “murder” turns out not to be as big a crime as they thought, now he has committed a crime, too, which everyone immediately forgets so that they can live happily ever after. It leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

Day 457: Sense & Sensibility

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Cover for Sense & SensibilityIn general I’m not a fan of the plethora of Jane Austen rewrites, although I will occasionally read one by an author whose work I trust. Such is the case with Joanna Trollope, who writes realistic contemporary fiction about family situations. So, I thought I’d give her reworking of Sense and Sensibility a try.

The story is a familiar one. The Dashwood women are ousted from their family home when the girls’ half brother John inherits. His selfish wife Fanny quickly talks him out of the generosity he promised his father he would show to his father’s second family.

Elinor Dashwood is in love with Fanny’s brother Edward Ferrars, but Edward’s future is uncertain. He has not spoken, so Elinor keeps her feelings to herself. Her sister Marianne, however, throws herself wholeheartedly and recklessly into an affair with handsome John Willoughby, who is visiting his aunt, a neighbor of their new home.

The reworkings I’ve read generally have some twist or contemporary slant to put on the story. In Bridget Jones’ Diary, for example, it was the surprise of finding you are reading an update of Pride and Prejudice and the charming narrative style of Bridget. Unfortunately, aside from updating the story to the current time, I don’t feel that this novel has much to add to or say differently than the original.

More importantly, I’m not sure that this novel translates very well to the 21st century, or at least not this version of it. The amount of money the Dashwoods are left would sound like a lot to most people, unlike the paltry amount left to them in the original novel, and the girls can always get a job in the current time period. Marianne’s behavior, while shocking to a 19th century audience, where ladies did not reveal their feelings for young men until they received a proposal, is mostly just excessive in the current day, except for the lovers’ behavior when visiting Willoughby’s aunt’s house. And while Edward in the original novel was behaving scrupulously in a time when a gentleman did not end an engagement, in the current times Ed just comes off as weak and indecisive. Frankly, I found myself sometimes wishing that Trollope would change the end of the novel to have Elinor end up with Bill.

I enjoyed the novel to an extent, but this modern version doesn’t involve me as the original does. The scene where Ed finally proposes to Elinor left me dry-eyed. Sense and Sensibility is one of my favorite Austen novels, and I think I’ll stick to Austen.