The Chili Queen by Sandra Dallas

As much as I wanted to read this book, I was a little sad as it is the last of my stash of Sandra Dallas books.  I have now read them all. (Boo hoo!) This was a great one!

Set in the late 1800’s in New Mexico and Colorado, it is a true “Wild West” story done Sandra Dallas style. The plot has more twists and turns than a labyrinth. The whopper at the end had me so stunned it took halfway through the chapter before I figured out what was going on and had to go back and start the chapter over.

The story begins with Addie French, the ‘proprietor’ of a ‘hookhouse’ meeting Emma Roby, prudish spinster. They meet on the train going to Nalgitas, New Mexico where Addie is from and where Emma is to meet her husband-to-be.  Emma thinks Addie runs a boardinghouse and when her husband-to-be doesn’t show up she goes to Addie’s for a room. 

Emma tells Addie that her brother has cheated her out of her inheritance and together with Addie’s housekeeper Welcome and her boyfriend, Ned, they come up with a “investment” plan to get Emma’s money from her brother.  This is where the plan begins…

Dallas keeps the story moving forward and the reader doesn’t know who to trust.

4 stars (Rated PG-13 – There are a couple gruesome ‘Wild West’ scenes.)

Skeletons at the Feast by Chris Bohjalian

In the waning days of World War II, a small group of people start out for the journey of a lifetime.  They start out walking from Eastern Germany/Poland and plan to keep walking until they meet the American/British Troops.  The group contains eighteen year-old Anna, a daughter of Prussian aristocrats, her mother and younger brother. Also in the group is a tall, handsome Scottish POW and Manfred, a German Jew who jumped from a train on its way to a ‘camp’ and had been pretending to be an SS member to survive.

As any story of World War II and the holocaust it contains the normal pathos, but also included is the viewpoint of a ‘good German’ coming to grips with what their beloved country has done.  All the characters are well-developed and you feel their concern and anguish with them.  Once again Chris Bohjalian has written a masterpiece.  I am amazed at the varied subjects of his novels.

4 stars (Rated R – for war violence and one short, explicit sex scene)

The Island by Elin Hilderbrand

Birdie Cousins is busy working through the details of her daughter Chess’s wedding.  Her biggest problem seems to be getting her ex-husband to pay for the floating-island dance floor for the reception when Chess calls to tell her the wedding is off.  Birdie decides to take Chess, her other daughter Tate and Birdie’s sister India to their family vacation home on Tuckernuck Island for the month on July. 

The island is cut off from the world with no electricity and the only interaction is with the caretaker that comes twice a day to deliver ice, groceries and take away trash and laundry.  The caretaker is the handsome Barrett Lee who both Tate and Chess had a crush on in their teen-age years.

As the month of July goes on, Chess comes to grips with the loss of her fiancé and the other women grapple with their problems.  What will happen when the month is over?

I enjoyed this book, it was a great “beach read”.  Nothing too deep, including the characters, but pleasurable none-the-less.

3 stars (Rated PG-13 – brief language and sex talk)

The Heretic’s Daughter by Kathleen Kent

This is the first that I have read of the Salem Witch Trials and I was horrified that such an event could come from young girls and their fanciful stories.  This story is told by nine year-old Sarah Carrier.  Her mother Martha Carrier was one of the first women accused, convicted and hung as a witch in Salem, Massachusetts in the 1600’s.  Not only is this the story of a horrific event in US history, but it is sweeping family saga.

Kathleen Kent is actually the tenth great-granddaughter of Martha Carrier. These stories were told in her family all through her life. I am so glad she decided to tell them to us in a way that is gripping and compelling.

4 stars (Rated PG-13 for horrific details)

Before You Know Kindness by Chris Bohjalian

One of the blurbs on the cover of this book calls it a multi-layered book.  I second that!  In the first pages of the book Spencer McCullough is shot in the shoulder by his adolescent daughter, Charlotte.  It then takes Bohjalian 120 to get back to that spot in time.  He takes his time setting up the plot so deep and layered that it would be impossible to explain in this small space.  But questions such as: Why did she have the gun?  Whose gun was it? Why was it loaded? Why would she even try to shoot it? Even, What does Spencer do for a living? becomes an integral part of the plot of this book.   

It is a page-turner, suspenseful, at times wryly funny and often humane.  A story of family love and what can happen to destroy a family if allowed.  Wonderful characterizations.  People one cares about and can truly cheer for. 

4 (almost 5) stars (Rated PG-13 for violence and adult situations)

The Lobster Chronicles: Life on a Very Small Island by Linda Greenlaw

After 17 years on the deep-sea catching swordfish, Linda Greenlaw decides to go home to the small island of Isle Au Haut, Maine and try her hand at trapping lobster with her father as her partner.  She tells of life on the island with a winter population of less than 50; of fighting for fishing rights with ‘mainlanders’; of living with her aging parents and her yearning for a family of her own.

Her stories are heartfelt and often hilarious.  Following are a few excerpts that I especially enjoyed.

“Too warm to fall and hug the ground, yet too cool to rise, the steam hung in the air, a condensed mist as thick as melted pearls. “Pea soup,” that’s what old-timers would call this wet, raw oyster world of fog. No, I thought, as I made my way down the dock, this was not Carl Sandburg’s fog that came in “on little cat feet.” This fog had arrived in Stonington, Maine, driving a Mack truck.”

“I don’t know if there is such a thing as a “reading addiction.” But Mom gets nervous when she gets low on reading material. Years ago I mentioned to my mother that two of her bathrooms were out of toilet paper, and the third was on its last roll, to which she replied, “I’m going out to buy books on Friday. I’ll pick some up then.”

After describing her father and Uncle Charlie taking hours to intricately measure and cut a hole to install a stove, she goes on to say, “Charlie’s beauty is in his attention to the smallest of details. Dad, too, has impeccable manners, and is quite deliberate and punctilious in all aspects. My father is so methodical in both word and deed that he would surely drive the average amateur home repairman mad with frustration. The two old men work well together because they share an overzealous enthusiasm for being neither overzealous nor enthusiastic. Dad and Charlie take “measure twice, cut once” and multiply it by a factor that is astronomical.

I, on the other hand, am the prime example of the roughshod slam-banger, having learned a great deal of impatience from my best and oldest friend, Alden Leeman. Had Alden and I taken on the chore of installing a new stove in my folk’s house, we would have cut three or four holes through the wall for the vent by now, and all of them would have been wrong. (Not just wrong, but way off.) Where my father required a jigsaw, Alden would need a chain saw; my father, sandpaper, Alden an ax.”

Her stories feel genuine, true and just plain enjoyable.  I really loved the book.

4 stars (Rated PG – for language.)

The Forever Year by Ronald Anthony

Jesse Sienna, in his 30s, has never known his father the way he wanted to. Mickey Sienna, in his mid-80s, finds himself facing an uncertain future after his wife of 50 years dies. In a move that stuns even himself, Jesse asks his father to come live with him-an arrangement that begins disastrously.

Then Mickey starts telling his son the story of a remarkable woman Mickey once loved, a story that has stunning implications for the young man's current relationship with an equally exceptional woman. And in sharing this powerful part of the past, father and son are changed in ways neither could have imagined.  

I really wanted to love this story.  It starts out strong and when Mickey starts telling his story of his first love, you think, “Yes, now it’s getting good.”  It’s just that the story seems to fall flat and you figure out how his story ends so that when it comes, it is almost anti-climatic. 

3 stars (Rated PG-13 for some mild sex scenes)

Winter Wheat by Mildred Walker

Let me first say that some of the charm of this book for me was not only that it was published in 1944 (during WWII), but that the copy I had in my hands actually dated from that time and included a note in the front stating “This book is manufactured under wartime conditions in conformity with all government regulations controlling the use of paper and other materials.”

Ellen Webb is a 18 year-old woman leaving her family’s dry-land wheat farm in Montana for the first time to attend college in Minneapolis.  When she returns at the end of the school year she begins to see her beloved farm, parents and town through different eyes.  She thinks that what she is seeing is the ‘truth’, but is it, or is it she that has changed.

 Some quotes from the book. This is about the end of harvest:

"like a quiet day after a whole week of wind. I mean that wind that blows dirt into your eyes and hair and between your teeth and roars in your ears after you've gone inside."

"I hadn't meant to fall in love so soon, but there's nothing you can do about it. It's like planning to seed in April and then having it come off so warm in March that the earth is ready."

“We get mad, sure! Like ice an' snow an' thunder an' lightning storm, but they don't hurt the wheat down in the ground any.”

“The words came so fast they seemed to roll down hill. Nobody ever calls it all that; it's just spring wheat, but I like the words. They heap up and make a picture of a spring that's slow to come, when the ground stays frozen late into March and the air is raw, and the skies are sulky and dark”

It is a lovely story of learning that one’s parents are human, of having one’s heart broken, of other’s judgments and being disappointed with what life has to hand to you but making the best of it.  And the symbolism of the winter wheat!  Sigh!  eautiful!

 

Loved it!  A must read!

5 stars (Rated PG – just a few adult-ish situations)

The Last Life by Claire Messud

This is a coming-of-age tale about 15 year-old Sagesse LaBasse, who lives in the south of France with her French father and American mother.  Her father’s family lived in Algeria during the French occupation and would love to be there still if they hadn’t been forced out.  Her grandmother laments:

"Every morning, I wake up and look out my window at the Mediterranean sea, vast and creeping, and I smell the pines and the heat on the breeze, rising up the cliff top, and I'm in Algiers again. I live, still, in my heart, in Algeria."

Her grandparents run a hotel and dominate her parents.  Sagesse (along with her parents) are searching for their own identity. One night her grandfather shoots a rifle at a group of noisy teenagers in the hotel pool.  No one is seriously injured, but this incident puts the family’s livelihood at risk and long-simmering resentments come to the surface.  Sagesse finds herself quite alone and friendless. 

The story is a bit meandering but it kept me reading.  Ms. Messud forte is in her prose.  She is a beautiful wordsmith.  Here she witnesses the market:

"There were vegetable men and fruit women and stalls selling both, blushing mounds of peaches alongside plump and purple eggplants...pale, splayed organs of fennel pressing their ridged tubes and feathered ends up against the sugar-speckled, wrinkled carcasses of North African dates...the fishmongers sold their bullet-eyed, silver-skinned, slippery catch, blood-streaked fillets and orbed, scored steaks, milky scallops and encrusted oysters...."

And here, a painting of the Bay of Algiers:

"its apron of azure sea, erratically white-capped, broken by the sandstone finger of the port...the white rise of the city, a thousand precise terraces and roofs climbing into the sunlit sky, the European curlicues and the higgledy-piggledy casbah, all their outlines drawn as if with a single hair, interspersed with delicate little palms and cypresses and other trees of variegated greens, and with broad, brown avenues like branches."

Here is a partial list of some new words I learned from the book: panoply (wide-ranging, impressive array); chevelure (head of hair); intransigence (inflexibility); polyphonous (different sounds from the same letter or group of letters); limn (to portray in words or drawing).

It is a story where I would stop and re-read paragraphs just for the beauty of it.  All in all, if you like a book that will push your vocabulary and will make you think, give it a try.  If you want an easy read this is not the one.

4 stars – actually I would give it 3 stars for plot, but 5 for beauty of language, so I average that out to 4  (rated PG-13 for sex talk and adult situations)

The Beach House by Jane Green

Known in Nantucket as the crazy woman who lives in the rambling house atop the bluff, Nan doesn’t care what people think. At sixty-five-years old, her husband died twenty years ago, her beauty has faded, and her family has flown. If her neighbors are away, why shouldn’t she skinny dip in their swimming pools and help herself to their flowers? But when she discovers the money she thought would last forever is dwindling and she could lose her beloved house, Nan knows she has to make drastic changes.

So Nan takes out an ad: Rooms to rent for the summer in a beautiful old Nantucket home with water views and direct access to the beach. Slowly, people start moving into the house, filling it with noise, with laughter, and with tears. As the house comes alive again, Nan finds her family expanding. Her son comes home for the summer, and then an unexpected visitor turns all their lives upside-down.

At first there seemed to be too many characters, but you soon catch up and become attached to all of them.  There was a bit too much sex for me and to frequent use of the F-word. But it has a twist at the end that surprised me and overall I did enjoy the book.

4 stars (Rated R for sex and profanity)

Same Kind of Different as Me: A Modern-day Slave, an International Art Dealer and the Unlikely Woman Who Bound Them Together by Ron Hall & Denver Moore

...moreMeet Denver, a man raised under plantation-style slavery in Louisiana in the 1960s; a man who escaped, hopping a train to wander, homeless, for eighteen years on the streets of Dallas, Texas. No longer a slave, Denver's life was still hopeless-until God moved. First came a godly woman who prayed, listened, and obeyed. And then came her husband, Ron, an international arts dealer at home in a world of Armani-suited millionaires. And then they all came together.

But slavery takes many forms. Deborah discovers that she has cancer. In the face of possible death, she charges her husband to rescue Denver. Who will be saved, and who will be lost? What is the future for these unlikely three? What is God doing?

Same Kind of Different As Me is the emotional tale of their story: a telling of pain and laughter, doubt and tears, dug out between the bondages of this earth and the free possibility of heaven. No reader or listener will ever forget it.

4 stars (Rated PG – for adult situations)

Tender at the Bone: Growing Up at the Table by Ruth Reichl

Ruth Reichl grew up to be the food critic for The New York Times.  This book is about how her relationship with food started.  She grew up with a mother that was “The Queen of Mold” how several times gave houseguests food poisoning.  As Ruth grew up she realized the power that good food had and developed a love of food and cooking.  If you like food and reading about food you will love this story.

4 stars (Rated PG – for some adult situations)

The Laying on of Hands: Stories by Alan Bennett

Alan Bennett is playwright and screenwriter that has done quite a bit for BBC and most notably wrote ‘The Madness of King George’ which won him an Academy Award.

This was an odd little book.  It consists of three short stories. The writing was amusing and witty; however, when done reading there was nothing there.  I could see no purpose to or lesson to be learned from the writing.  The stories were just there, no plot.  Not worth it.

2 stars (Rated R – bawdy humor)

Here on Earth by Alice Hoffman

Why, oh why do I even bother with an “Oprah’s Book Club” book?  This one has been on my shelf for many years, so I decided to give it a try.  The big “O” on the front means awful, horrible, and demented. 

March Murray returns to her New England hometown after living in California for nineteen years.  She brings along her sixteen year-old daughter.  She meets Hollis—the man she loved so desperately as a teenager.  He has gone from a homeless teenager to a man who owns half the town and demands respect from everyone he meets.  Can they make love work this time (despite March’s husband who remains in California)? 

Appalling themes exists in this book…abuse in the name of love, greed, revenge, knowingly helping someone ruin their life, not to mention the sexual relationship that goes unnoticed between March’s daughter and her first cousin.  I found no redeeming value in this book. Why did I keep reading?  I couldn’t believe that a book with that many accolades couldn’t have some redeeming value. Don’t bother.

 

1 Star (Rated R for language, sex and violence)

One Heart by Jane McCafferty

Gladys and Ivy are sisters who live together and work at a camp for children cooking.  They are very different.  Gladys is glum and introverted. Ivy is more effusive and tries to break down the walls Gladys has built around herself. A young girl comes to visit Gladys and things start to change.

On the back cover, it is called a ‘charmingly poignant tale of two sisters’ and I like that description.  It is about families and what they mean.  It is about how you can know someone your whole life yet not know what it is like to be them.  It is about changing relationships and forgiveness (including forgiving yourself).  Some of my favorite quotes:

“Words get stuck in your eyes if you don’t let them out of your mouth.”

“..a tattoo on your body’s not too important compared to the things that end up tattooed on your soul.”

“Does time heal, or is that just something we like to say to people? I don’t believe it heals.  Not really.  Time goes by, and the buried pain gets duller, true enough. But is that healing? No. Healing is something else entirely. It happens within time, but it’s not just time doing the trick.”

“It came to me that we’re not really one age at all. We’re all the ages we’ve ever been.”

4 stars (Rated PG for adult themes.)

The Marriage Bureau for Rich People by Farahad Zama

Set in modern-day India, this book tells the story of a Mr. Ali. Retired long enough to be bored, he decides to start a marriage bureau to help pass his time.  He hires a young woman, Aruna, to be his assistant. Together they work to find matches for men and women and along the way encounter prejudice, extreme poverty, the intricate details of the caste system, and social activism.

Although the book doesn’t have an extensive plot the book did not drag.  Mr. Zama does a wonderful job of describing the country and sights.  He would often detail what they were eating and it made me want it, even tough I had no idea what it was. 

The cover touts this book to be a cross between Alexander McCall Smith and Jane Austen.  Also, I saw several reviews that compared this to “Pride and Prejudice”.  While I understand the comparison to Smith, I do not agree with comparing it to Austen unless it is to say, “This is NO Austen…” 

Now it sounds like I didn’t like the book and that is not true at all.  I enjoyed its meandering style and vivd descriptions.  I would probably read a second book by him.

3 Stars (Rated PG – nothing terribly objectionable, just some violence.)