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Bloomsbury Girls, by Natalie Jenner

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In 1950s London, Bloomsbury Books is a relic of an earlier age. Offering new and rare books, the store has resisted change for a hundred years, and its stodgy general manager, Herbert Dutton, with his 51 unbreakable rules is determined to keep it that way. However, the three women who work there have other ideas.

Vivien staffs the Fiction department and loathes her one-time lover Alec who heads the department. She wants to introduce more female authors while Alec refuses all but the usual classics like Jane Austen and George Eliot. Ambitious and clever, Vivien provides much of the humor in the book. I especially love the way she comes up with witty and daring names for the people and places in the bookshop, like the Tyrant and the Via Dolorosa.

As Mr. Dutton’s secretary, Grace is the unacknowledged angel of the house. She helps Mr. Dutton manage his workload and tries to keep things on an even keel. She’s an anomaly for the time: a wife and mother who decided to take a job to avoid her abusive, unemployed husband. She cannot leave him because she doesn’t make enough to support herself and the children and fears she’d lose custody of them.  

Despite a brilliant career in Cambridge, a member of the first class of women awarded degrees by the university, Evie’s academic plans are crushed when she is passed over for a less accomplished man who takes credit for her work. At the bookstore she is in charge of cataloging the jumbled collection of rare books on the top floor, but she has an ulterior motive for working at Bloomsbury Books.

All tea-making is done by the three women, in obedience to Rule No. 17: ‘Tea shall be served promptly four times a day.’ Each of the four departments is run by a man, and they, of course, cannot be expected to make their own tea. The exception is Ash, head of the Science Department, who makes his own chai. As an immigrant from India, Ash’s presence brings portents of change and adds another dimension of discrimination.

I selected this story when looking for a light but engaging audiobook for a trip. Not only does it check those boxes, but it also features a few of my favorite things: a bookstore, London, one of my favorite actors as narrator—Juliet Stevenson—and the post-WWII time period. It also offers something I look for and rarely find: people, especially women, functioning in the workplace. Yes, raising children and running a household is work, and there are many stories about that, but little is written about the rewards and difficulties of working in an office (literal or figurative).

Jenner’s story abounds with the kind of rivalries and shifting alliances, the kindnesses and restrictions recognisable to anyone who has worked in an office. They keep the plot roiling and force the characters to show what they are made of. Other characters come and go, including real people of the time, such as Peggy Guggenheim, Daphne du Maurier, and Samuel Beckett.

Of course I hate the use of “girls” in the title applied to women, but it is true to the time period. I was a child then, but I see my parents in these characters. Many of those who survived the worldwide depression and WWII treasured security and stability, like Mr. Dutton and his 51 rules. And after the war many women like my mother had to give up jobs they found rewarding and confine their ambitions to home and family. Thus, I found Grace’s journey and her impulsive decision to work at the bookstore particularly touching.

If you’re looking for a cosy read with a bit of a bite, check this one out. You don’t need to have read Jenner’s previous book The Jane Austen Society which includes some of these characters. In writing this book, she was inspired by rereading 84, Charing Cross Road. She describes Bloomsbury Girls as “Mad Men meets You’ve Got Mail” which is pretty accurate. Of note, Jenner once owned an independent bookshop in Oakville, Ontario, where she lives now.

Can you recommend a story set in a bookshop?

The Redemption of Galen Pike, by Carys Davies

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After enjoying her novel Clear, I picked up Davies’s second short story collection. Each of the 17 stories here, most of them very short indeed, is a gem. 

We writers are told to write what we know. The stories here range through time and space: a woman isolated in the outback reluctantly entertaining her rough neighbor, an alderman in a small English town hosting a “bored and miserable and alone” Queen Victoria, a Caribbean immigrant working as a nursemaid in New York.

It may seem risky for a woman from Wales to write stories set in such wildly varied locales—others include Siberia, Africa and Oklahoma—but she pulls it off. Davies brings such a deep knowledge of people and emotions that our shared humanity shines through each story, however distant the place or unusual the plot.

Everything about her made Lenny think of a string pulled tight and about to be plucked, a figure balanced on the crumbling lip of a cliff and ready to jump; a brief electric calm before a storm.

Many of the stories convey a vulnerability or loneliness and consequent attempts to connect, all without naming those emotions but instead building them organically. Evangelina, whose husband disappeared more than a year earlier, is:

. . . the only person who didn’t believe that the emptiness out in the bay, the mist, and the water creeping soundlessly back and forth beneath the moon, in and out over the sands, were the silence of a man who was doing his best to disappear.

Sometimes I shy away from short stories because it can take me a little while to get into a book, and that seems like a lot of effort to go through for something that will soon be over. Not a problem here! I was instantly transported into each story and satisfied when it ended no matter how many or few pages later.

Davies often starts a story with some statement that gives us a person and at the same time raises a question (or three). Here are a few examples:

“His name was Henry Fowler and she hated it when he came.”

“Standing at her shoulder, no longer caring much about his future, Arthur Pruitt began to speak.”

“From the moment I arrived, they loved me.”

 

These deceptively simple sentences unsettle us because they assume that we know what’s going on; there are no long explanations, no backstory. And they hook us because we want to know more.

Once you’re in the story, what makes it so stunning is the deft way she uses the turn—what Steven James calls the pivot and poets call the volta. In a moment the story changes, and you see everything that came before differently. And that change is both unexpected and inevitable; looking back you can see the little details she has planted along the way, and the assumptions that led you astray.

Sometimes a turn comes  through a change in point of view. Sometimes it’s a reveal of some new information, or an event that calls up a memory shedding new light on what’s happening. It’s less a plot twist than an addition of something that makes everything slide into place—and not the place you expected.

Sadly, the front cover is the ugliest one I’ve ever seen. The back cover is better and says the stories are ”written with prickly wit and punch.” True, and the punch comes from the turn. Some stories have cascading turns where your understanding of what’s happening flips not once, but two, three or more times. Brilliant!

Davies’s use of long sentences, sometimes without commas or other punctuation, captures the swiftness of thought. 

I kept looking at Annie. I knew what she was thinking because I was thinking it too—that we could both of us let go of his hands and feet and leave him there till the tide turned and let him ride back out on it like a Viking and be dragged down by the current; the sea would take him and Bella would never know.

Short stories are notoriously difficult to write. The author has very little real estate in which to place the reader in time and space, introduce characters, and play out a plot. I’m so impressed by the variety and dexterity of Davies’s stories. I’ll be studying them for a long time.

What’s your favorite short story?

North Woods, by Daniel Mason

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Daniel Mason’s fifth novel is a shimmering tale of a patch of New England woods and those who pass through it over four centuries. We feel the flow of history as we navigate what is essentially a set of twelve stories keyed to the seasons. They are linked and validated by documents, such as song lyrics, pictures, and almanacs.

Mason brings each story to life with sensitive comprehension of both the people and their place. We begin with a pair of young lovers running away from their Puritan colony.

They had come to the spot in the freshness of June, chased from the village by its people, threading deer path through the forest, the valleys, the fern groves, and the quaking bogs . . . Gone was England, gone the Colony.

What fascinates me is the way Mason writes each section using style, language and social constructs appropriate to its time period. For example, there’s a former British soldier planting an apple orchard during the time of John Chapman, aka Johnny Appleseed, and a spiritualist during the time of the Third Great Awakening. There are murder ballads in the 19th century and psychiatric case notes during the early years of using lobotomies to solve neurological disfunction. What a challenge to set yourself as a writer!

The descriptions of the natural world are stunning as well. Mason has done his research and writes beautifully of the woods and the creatures—and insects—within it. One of his sources, whose wisdom I see throughout the book, is Tom Wessels, whose fabulous book Reading the Forested Landscape was given to me by my son.

I propose a new calendar: not one autumn but twelve, a hundred. The autumn when the birches are yellow but still have their leaves; when the beeches are green but the birch leaves have fallen; when the oaks tint to the color of ripe apricots and the beeches yellow; when the oaks turn a cigar brown and the beeches curl up into crispy copper rolls. And so on: I’ve missed a few. But to call it all just “autumn”!

 As in Jenny Erpenbeck’s novel Visitation, which is centered on a plot of land in Brandenburg and the houses built there, we see a yellow house built, damaged, added to, redecorated, and reconstructed while different inhabitants move through it. As Clara MacGauffin wrote in “The Unhomely House,” there is a peculiar tension when it is the home that is unsafe. “The disturbance is not simply fear. It is closer to a conflict in perception where what should reassure instead unsettles.”

My book club jumped at the chance to read this book; we’re fans of Daniel Mason’s novels such as A Winter Soldier and A Registry of My Passage upon the Earth. However, some thought this book depressing—in the course of four hundred years, every story ends; everyone dies—while others found a lot of it hilarious. There are ghosts here; former inhabitants who sometimes make themselves known, reminding me of Gabrielle Mullarkey’s novel The Ones Who Never Left which she wrote because she wondered if the people who used to live in our houses ever truly leave, an unsettling thought indeed.

Amused by the writerly games and deeply appreciative of the landscape and its history, I did get to a point when I thought the book might be a bit too much. I was overwhelmed by grief at the loss of the birds and the forests, the elm trees and chestnuts.

Then I was reminded of Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower thanks to Mason’s story of a post-doctoral fellow studying spring ephemerals, those lovely flowers I’ve tracked in that sliver of time between the coming of the spring sunlight and the canopy blocking it out. “Sometimes, overwhelmed, she retreats into the forests of the past . . . and she has found that the only way to understand the world as something other than a tale of loss is to see it as a tale of change.”

Cold comfort, but I’ll take it.

Have you read a book that has comforted you during this dark time in our history and/or has you thinking about what we leave behind during our brief passage on this earth?

 

We Begin at the End, by Chris Whitaker

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Overwhelmed as we are just now by atrocities and deaths, this novel invites us to take a moment to look at a single death and how it still affects a small town thirty years later. Walk, short for his surname Walker, is the chief of the two-person police force in Cape Haven, California. He’s a cautious, introspective man, still haunted by having testified against his best friend Vincent all those years ago. Now that Vincent is being released from prison, Walk nurtures a dream of restoring their idyllic past.

The other narrator is thirteen-year-old Duchess Day Radley, a self-proclaimed “outlaw” and fierce protector of her little brother Robin and her mother Star, who happens to be Sissy’s older sister. Duchess knows there are plenty of humiliating rumors about her family circulating in the small town, not just about the crime, but also about Star’s addiction and her job waiting tables and singing at a dive bar. Star usually has to bring the children with her and leave them in a booth where Duchess keeps an eye on the men who get loud and handsy after a few drinks and on the bar’s huge and dangerous owner Dickie Darke who might be Star’s protector or her abuser.

A sense of precarity underlies everything in Cape Haven. Houses are falling into the sea. People get beaten or killed. One misunderstanding and everything changes. Even the cadence of the sentences is unsettling at first. The characters struggle keep to keep their footing in an uncertain world. Because Star is a good friend from the old days, Walk watches out for her and the children, but Duchess doesn’t trust him. She doesn’t trust anyone but herself.

Whitaker’s portrait of Duchess is brilliant. She’s not sassy or precocious. She’s angry and smart and fierce and loyal. I knew many thirteen-year-olds when I was teaching in Baltimore’s public schools, and I recognise Duchess. She’s the real thing. So is Walk: someone who is always looking back at the past, someone who wants to do the right thing but isn’t always sure what that is.

While categorised as a thriller, this novel is more a quiet study of grief and danger and pain and tenderness. It unfolds the way real life does, tumultuous at times certainly, but not always. It asks how to go on after the worst happens, how to live with grief, and how to measure what we owe each other.

This book surprised me. Everything about it is so much better than I expected. I kept thinking it couldn’t get better and then it did. Whitaker manages to summon strong emotions without overwriting. He deploys plot pivots that surprised me in the best of ways: by seeming perfect in retrospect. Same with the characters. There is a moral arc here, but not the one I expected. There are no easy answers for these damaged people, for us, or for our damaged world.

 

Can you recommend a novel that surprised you?

The Frozen River, by Ariel Lawhon

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The blizzards that have been pummeling New England recently might hold us up for a while until the plows come through. They might send us scrambling for generators and firewood while waiting for the power to be restored, or putting on snowshoes to go out and assess the damage from fallen trees.

But what if we were in Maine in 1789 when the Kennebec River freezes and stalls activity in our small community? What if the river freezes early and traps a man’s body? Midwife Martha Ballard learns that two men fell through the ice that dark night: Sam Dawin who escaped and Joshua Burgess who didn’t. 

Called to examine the body Martha determines that Burgess was beaten and hanged before being thrown into the river. She’s interrupted by Dr. Page, a recent Harvard graduate and newcomer to town, who calls her an amateur and declares the death an accidental drowning. She later learns that her son Cyrus fought with Burgess shortly before the man’s death. Burgess and Judge North have been accused of raping a local woman, one of many secrets swirling in the village.

We follow Martha’s investigation through her activities as well as through the journal she keeps to record her work as a midwife and community events. Her story is “inspired” by the real Martha Ballard who lived in Hallowell, Maine, delivered over 800 babies, and left a diary covering 30 years of her life. While the author draws on the diary, a nonfiction biography of Ballard, and court transcripts, this story is firmly categorised as historical fiction.

I liked the use of the journal. Even when fictionalised, documents add veracity to a story. Although they sometimes repeated events already dramatised, these sections brought home the physical labor of using ink and quill. I also liked the use of a flashback at the end of each section to fill in information about Martha and her beloved husband Ephraim. These brief forays into the past come just when the information is needed.

The overriding image of the river is powerful; everyone depends on it and is controlled by it. The patriarchal limits on women are powerful as well. Martha’s work makes her an anomaly at a time when women had almost no power and rarely worked in a profession. A woman could not testify in court without her husband accompanying her. Midwives were being supplanted by male doctors who often lacked rudimentary knowledge of sanitation and dismissed women with complaints as lazy or crazy.

Being already well aware of these conditions for women in the 18th century, I found their frequent and unsubtle deployment made the story drag, as did the pace of events now and then. At the same time, I recognise that the slower pace is appropriate to life at the time, when it might take days or weeks to travel between towns, and that there are many readers who might not know about the limitations women suffered then. Similarly, the bullies and corrupt locals seemed exaggerated until I looked around at what is going on here today.

Without giving the ending away, I will say that I appreciated the story’s unusual path to resolution. I also appreciated how the Martha of this story adapts her strategies as needed during the investigation, sometimes backing down, sometimes attacking, sometimes negotiating.

The story also made me think about the body. Not just the dead man, the necessary start to a murder mystery, but also how we inhabit our bodies, whether it’s pushing a quill pen across rough paper or delivering a baby into the world, making love with a husband of 35 years or trying to move quickly through deep snow, riding a horse or dealing with the effects of rape.

Things have changed in the centuries since this story takes place, but not human nature, its insecurity and greedy grasp for power on the one hand and its generous care for everyone in the community on the other. And no matter how much we may think we’ve controlled the natural world since then, it only takes a blizzard to remind us how wrong we are.

What is frozen in your life? What will it take to unfreeze it?

Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott

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Meg, Jo, Amy, Beth: Those of us who grew up with the March girls didn’t know that what we were reading was not what Alcott originally published in 1865.

Book One of this classic novel covers a year in the life of the four March girls, from one Christmas to another. The sisters try to be good so as not to worry Marmee, Father being away with the war. Mostly they succeed, despite the usual sisterly feuds and jealousies sparked by four very different temperaments. Book Two was an afterthought, following them as they grow up and marry (or not).

Being only ten or so when I first read it, I didn’t pay much attention to Book 2. Of course, Jo was the only one who mattered to me, rebellious Jo with her apples and writing, her reading in the attic, her desire for  some privacy. Like Jo, I hid away to read. I made up plays for my (too) many siblings to enact. I devised outdoor games for us and the other neighborhood children. All my friends also identified with Jo—no surprise given that we were climbing trees and wearing pants which were all a bit shocking still in the 1950s.

I can draw a straight line from Jo, who was based on Alcott herself, to my later obsession with Emily Brontë. I moved quickly from the books by the Brontë sisters to their lives in that lonely stone house in Haworth. Of course I was drawn to rebellious Emily, independent Emily who loved the moors and being alone and refused to behave like a proper girl. Writing about her as a child, Emily’s father described her strong will. I hid mine to stay out of trouble, but it was there all right.

With their brother Branwell, the three sisters carved into two pairs: Charlotte and Branwell, Emily and Anne, just as the March sisters did: Meg and Amy, Jo and Beth. There are other parallels: delicate and good Anne like Beth, practical Charlotte like Meg. However, the Brontë siblings did not have a wise and loving Marmee. With their mother dead and their father cold and righteous, they were cared for by their aunt Elizabeth Branwell. She’s usually described as a stern disciplinarian, but now there’s some evidence that she was actually a devoted and caring parental figure.

Although we know Alcott drew on incidents from her own life, I wonder if she was thinking of the Brontës when she started drafting Little Women. The Alcotts were assiduous readers, and the dates fit. Wuthering Heights came out in 1847 and the first U.S. edition was a year later. Alcott started writing Little Women in May of 1868 and sent it to her publisher in June. Book One was published October 1868 and Book Two a few months later (January, 1869).

It is with the 1880 version, combining the two books into a single volume, that the mischief occurs. Her publisher asked Alcott to make certain changes designed to make it—especially the depiction of Jo—more bland and acceptable. In her brilliant introduction to the recent reissue of the original version, Elaine Showalter suggests that later editors probably made additional changes. She explains that many of the literary references were removed, Jo’s speech was smoothed out, and her behaviour made more ladylike. Even the description of Marmee was romanticised.

Original: “. . . a stout, motherly lady, with a ‘can I help you’ look about her, which was truly delightful. She wasn’t a particularly handsome person, but mothers are always lovely to their children…”

Revised: “. . . a tall, motherly lady, with a ‘can I help you’ look about her, which was truly delightful. She was not elegantly dressed, but a noble-looking woman, and the girls thought the grey cloak and unfashionable bonnet covered the most splendid mother in the world.”

Interesting, eh? The original, with Showalter’s introduction is available from Penguin Classics (2010). Showalter has also added footnotes, some of which identify the sources of those pesky literary references. I was tickled to stumble upon a reference that she hadn’t footnoted: In Chapter 21, Jo backs away from one of Laurie’s wild schemes and says “ ‘Prunes and prisms’ are my doom, and I may as well make up my mind to it.”

That’s from Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit:

“Papa is a preferable mode of address,” observed Mrs General. “Father is rather vulgar, my dear. The word Papa, besides, gives a pretty form to the lips. Papa, potatoes, poultry, prunes, and prism are all very good words for the lips: especially prunes and prism. You will find it serviceable, in the formation of a demeanour, if you sometimes say to yourself in company—on entering a room, for instance—Papa, potatoes, poultry, prunes and prism, prunes and prism.”

What do you think? Is it so weird to see both Jo and Emily as my wild sisters? Should girls stick to prunes and prisms? Is a part of you still in an attic reading books and eating apples with Jo?

What do you carry with you from an early reading of Little Women?

The Ones Who Never Left, by Gabrielle Mullarkey

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A frustrated and stalled artist, Lucy has thrown away all her work so far because none of it was worth keeping. Now, about to turn 30, she decides to try being impulsive like Hugh. After knowing him for only seven months, she’s married Hugh and two days later is setting to meet him in rural Yorkshire where he’s signed them up as property guardians for an old manor house that’s rumored to be haunted.

In Rook House they find a study that Hugh, a struggling writer of supernatural fiction, appropriates while Lucy turns the attic into a studio. They mostly spend the rest of their time in the kitchen because the dining room is empty and the living room features an unnerving portrait of the original owner of the house, a painting that seems to have a mind of its own.

These two babes in the wood know nothing about living the country. Lucy’s just bought her first car, a bit of a wreck, while Hugh doesn’t even know how to drive. They rely on the occasional housekeeper, Mrs. Bird, to teach them how to use the Rayburn so they’ll have heat and hot water. They hear peculiar noises and debate whether it’s safe to walk in the woods.

As they learn more about the history of the house, the family who owned it, and the ghosts who supposedly haunt it, the two young people encounter strange happenings. The bedroom they use, the only one furnished, is papered with a design of birds stealing strawberries. Not too strange so far.

Next, they explored the remaining six bedrooms, all uncurtained and empty of furniture . . . The smallest bedroom had an open fireplace and bird-free wallpaper—also William Morris—featuring old-gold and pale-green leaves in snake-like coils. “Acanthus leaves,” Lucy identified.

Glancing at the faded paper, she had the strange sensation, just for a second, that the curling leaves were flowing and reforming into Rorschach ink blots, as if the pattern—maybe even the wall itself—was writhing with dark, silent life.

But Lucy is subject to migraines, so perhaps that is what’s happening to her. As the incidents come faster and go from alarming to frightening, it’s unclear what’s causing them: maybe ghosts, a Bertha in the attic, or simply their imaginations? To make things worse, Hugh’s impulsiveness begins to look more like the self-centered recklessness of a spoiled child, and Lucy finds it harder and harder to connect with him.

Although the plot accelerates nicely, Lucy and Hugh’s relationship becomes less interesting as it devolves into squabbling and secrets. They are both only children and perhaps lack the emotional tools for a relationship. Orphaned Lucy loathes her stepmother, while Hugh courts disapproval from his cold, wealthy parents even as he accepts their money.

Still, I cannot resist a story about a haunted manor on the edge of a Yorkshire moor, reminding me as it does of my introduction to gothic fiction when I was fifteen. I’ll never forget that November dusk when I curled up on a windowseat in the living room and opened Jane Eyre for the first time.

The plot in Mullarkey’s novel kept me turning the pages. There are plenty of shivers and surprises. What makes the scary parts so effective, besides being well-placed in the story, is how they call on fears that many of us experience. These days in particular, we know in our hearts and bones what it’s like to be misunderstood, to be in danger, to feel powerless.

I love the title which came, Mullarkey says in her note, from her wondering if the former inhabitants of the houses we occupy ever truly leave. Now there’s a thought. Many of us experience strong vibrations in the houses we enter. I thought perhaps the strong emotions within may have seeped into wood and stone and become subtle exhalations. But after this book, I’m considering the places I’ve lived and wondering what part of me might linger there. I think, too, of those who lived in them before me, the ones I know of anyway. This is where the gothic space begins to open: that uncanny disorientation that suggests maybe we don’t know so much after all.

What novel have you read recently that unsettled you?

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a copy of this book free from the publisher. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

Anxious People, by Fredrik Backman

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In this 2019 novel by the author of A Man Called Ove, a bank robber fleeing the police takes refuge in an apartment and, finding that it is being shown to a group of potential buyers, takes them all hostage. Actually, that’s the background given by the rather bossy narrator. The story begins in the police station with the hostages being interviewed by a pair of police officers, a father and son. 

My book club unanimously loved the earlier book, but had mixed reactions to this one. Certainly some—most—liked it very much. However, some folks were confused about plot details and especially about the characters and the relationship between them. I think that confusion is meant to be, as we say nowadays, a feature not a bug. Yet it’s hard to enjoy a book if you can’t figure out, at least by the end, what’s going on.

As a result, we spent the first part of the evening comparing notes on who was who. As we got further into discussing the plot, even more elucidation was needed.

One person asked what the book is about. We all laughed. On the first page, the narrator tells us:

This story is about a lot of things, but mostly about idiots. So it needs saying from the outset that it’s very, always very easy to declare that other people are idiots, but only if you forget how idiotically difficult being human is.

On a side note, I wasn’t thrilled by the use of “idiot” throughout the book, but perhaps it has a different connotation in Sweden. Maybe the author or translator was thinking of the Greek word it’s derived from which means “common man.”

We discussed several ways to describe what the book is about: suicide, grief, marriage, change, connection. That last one points to the theme of the book which is similar to the theme of Ove.

The book’s structure is interesting: We have the interviews shown as dialogue only, like a transcript. I was amused by the first interview, but a little went a long way, and they increasingly irritated me as the book progressed. Later they made sense, yet I think if it hadn’t been for my book club, I wouldn’t have finished the book. I did remain interested in the longer dramatic scenes between the interviews which are flashbacks to what happened in the apartment.

As I mentioned, the narrator is quite bossy, ordering the reader about and fulminating about all kinds of things such as young people and cell phones. The narrator stays out of the interviews since they record what the two people said, but intrudes into the dramatic scenes, commenting on the action, the characters, society, etc. I may be misremembering, but I think in Ove, the get-off-my-lawn opinions are spouted by a character rather than a narrator. 

I thought about George Eliot’s use of a narrator in Middlemarch. It felt a little intrusive at first  since such a persistent narrator is rare in today’s novels. However, I came to appreciate the narrator’s explanations about the characters and warnings that a character may not be as bad as they appear. Perhaps the voice of Backman’s narrator in this book just isn’t my cup of tea, as the little ones in my life say when I offer them a new dish.

Several of us were not fans of the many coincidences in the story and the neatly tied-up ending. We suggested that it read like a fable or fairy tale, which is perhaps not inconsistent with Backman’s brand.

A lawyer among us recounted a long-ago incident in court—no names or identifying details—in which the prosecutor went for an unexpectedly light sentence. Later they told my friend that they just wanted to give the person on trial a little grace.

I had to stop and let that settle. Isn’t that what we hope for from each other: just a little grace? We all carry burdens, some visible and some not.

Maybe this book is my cup of tea after all.

Have you read a novel that changed the way you look at something?

 

 

DNF

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I had more Did-Not-Finish books in January than I’ve ever had in a single month. Even though reading is near the top of my list of favorite activities, I don’t force myself to finish every book if I’m not enjoying it; there are too many other books to read. Sometimes I’ll look at reviews or ask friends in case there’s something later on in the book worth continuing with it. However, each of the five January DNF books tossed me out of the story in some way. Perhaps exploring those ways—without naming the books—could be helpful.

A case could be made that the books themselves are not to blame. Certainly I’ve been distracted by worry over our increasingly perilous country and busy with responding to those threats. Another situation where the book itself is not at fault is when, in the past, I’ve occasionally given up on an audiobook because the narrator’s voice is annoying or, in one case, too ponderous.

This month, one highly-praised novel had a premise that sounded fascinating. It rumbled along slowly, but a slow pace is not necessarily a deal-breaker for me. What made my heart sink every time I thought about picking up the book again were the cardboard characters; stereotypes rather than real people. Worse, the secondary characters represented a particular population, all embodying the most common negative stereotypes for that group.

Another book was obviously going to be a light read—I needed a break—but seemed interesting. However, the plot meandered around without a enough of a problem to create suspense or concern for the main character. There may have been one later, but not enough of what Donald Maass calls bridging tension to keep me going. Not the book’s fault, I suppose, that it was a lighter read than I expected.

Two others didn’t hold my attention because, while the protagonists did have problems to solve, I found I didn’t care whether they did or not. There are several theories about how to inspire readers to care about a character. In Save the Cat, Blake Snyder says that having the protagonist do a good deed right away will have readers cheering for even a evil character.

Another theory holds that empathy comes from seeing the character’s goal and finding it a worthy one. The goal has to be big enough to power the whole book, and it has to have a strong emotional charge so that it matters to the reader as well as the protagonist. I especially appreciate a main character with a moral code that is threatened by the story. In these two stories, the goals did not carry that emotional charge for me. Also, perhaps unfairly for one of the books, the ugly cover made me flinch every time I picked it up.

The fifth book I wanted to like, and did at first. Then it got very confusing. I had trouble telling the dual narrators apart; the change from one to another was not signaled clearly enough for me. And then the whole thing turned into another story altogether with different characters. Part of settling a reader into a story is letting them know what the genre is. Getting well into a story in one genre and then suddenly switching to another lost me. Perhaps if there had been a signal in the beginning that it was going to be a genre-bending read, I might have been okay.

Lest you think I’m too picky, let me say that I finished quite a few other books in January and enjoyed them immensely.

Have you ever started a book and not finished it? What made you give up on it?

The Cherry Robbers, by Sarai Walker

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Reclusive Sylvia Wren is a famous artist, now in her eighties, living in New Mexico and painting flowers that resemble women’s private parts. Her peaceful life is upended when a journalist discovers her long-buried secret: She is actually Iris Chapel, an heiress who has been missing for sixty years. Concerned that her story might be distorted or sensationalised, she begins to write it herself.

With that, we leave the frame story and plunge in the life of Iris Chapel, the fifth of the six Chapel sisters, born in the 1930s and all named after flowers. Their strict father is a gun baron, owner of Chapel Firearms, while their mother is a distant woman, obsessed by her own fears and her belief that the victims of those guns are haunting her. Alternating between screams and silence, Belinda also believes that the women of her family are cursed, and tries to keep her daughters from marrying

However, as the sisters begin to come of age in the 1950s, marriage seems to be the only way to get out of their restrictive home. Some of them long to live “normal” lives and head for that escape hatch, certain that the curse is just part of their mother’s madness. Iris comments:

It’s easier to say that women like my mother are crazy. Then you don’t have to listen to them. And so maybe in a way she became crazy. Maybe she could communicate only by screaming.

This novel was recommended to me when I was reading ghost stories around the solstice last month. I love the way Walker handles the spooky side of the story. People are haunted for sure, and sometimes ghosts are mentioned, but the story remains in a liminal space where the reader can believe in the ghosts or not. What is unmistakable is the underlying unease, a sense that something is dangerously wrong, and the way that unease intensifies as the story unfolds.

Iris alone believes her mother and tries to help her sisters. I loved the depiction of the communal life of the sisters, with their quarrels and tenderness, their jealousies and generosity. Like the plucky heroine beloved of gothic novels, Iris tries to be the compliant, self-sacrificing young woman her society demands, but says:

When you live in defiance of yourself, you can adapt to your circumstances, but remnants of who you are at your core remain. A bit of wildness that can’t be tamed.

With Iris as an engaging narrator, the first part of the story absorbed me. I found the  characters strong; the setting atmospheric, and the pacing excellent. However, the story went on too long and became repetitious. Also, coming back to the frame story at the end felt a little flat and predictable.

The use of Georgia O’Keeffe’s life and work to characterise Sylvia Wren disturbed me. Walker did acknowledge the artist in her note at the end, and she has a right to imitate O’Keeffe this way, since the artist is considered a public figure. If O’Keeffe were still alive would she object to this imitation? I don’t know, but somehow feel that this depiction is as jarring as commercials of Fred Astaire dancing with a vacuum cleaner. Similarly, using Sarah Winchester’s supposed fears as the centerpiece for Iris’s mother earned a raised eyebrow. I’m reminded of Milan Kundera’s Immortality where he delves into the morality of manipulating a person’s image and reputation after they are dead and cannot protest.

The title comes from D. H. Lawrence’s poem with its sensuality, blood and tears. While the metaphor of the cherry seems almost too direct, the poem brings more context to the uneasiness summoned by the image of a robber. I ended up liking the title and glad I read this book.

What do you look for in a ghost story?