delicious but not sweet

Recipe for a Perfect Wife by Karma Brown

Rating: 4 stars (out of 5)

Genre: fiction/historical fiction

Review: Alice and her husband Nate have just left NYC for life in the suburbs.  Alice is very unsure about leaving the big city, but they think they're ready to start a family, and she's just left her high-powered PR job, and really she can't think of a reason to say no.  So off they go, moving in to Nellie's house.  Of course, Alice and Nellie will never meet, since Nellie's been dead for a year, but Alice will come to feel like she knows Nellie, after discovering a cache of letters and old magazines that Nellie left behind.

What follows is a not-unpredictable, but still satisfying, alternating of chapters.  Nellie and Alice are both keeping secrets from their husbands, but what are they and whose secrets will be found out and whose secrets may prove deadly?  The tension ramps up deliciously through the middle of the book, although Brown is a little heavy-handed with some of the clues.  Put together, the stories form two different, yet not altogether dissimilar looks at the inside of marriage, that though they may be 50+ years apart, may send that message that plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

FTC Disclaimer: I received this book from the publisher in exchange for this review.

cardboard cutouts

Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi

Rating: 3 stars (out of 5)

Genre: fiction

Review: Yes, you can travel through time at that café, but there are rules.  Very specific rules, the reasons for which aren't readily apparent, except as plot devices.  But an author is allowed to create his own rules, and as plot devices they work well to deliver tension to the narrative, which works well, as this book isn't about the rules as much as it is about the characters.  Each character has their own reason for wanting to travel in time, and, although one of the rules is that you won't change the present, each person comes back changed in themselves in some way.

This could have been a touching and tender story.  Unfortunately, and I don't know whether to attribute this to the writing or the translation, the language was very stilted.  The characters were sympathetic enough, but the wooden dialogue and strained narrative put a barrier between me and them, even between me and the story itself.  Some of this might be due to the fact that Kawaguchi is a playwright before he's an author, but making the transition to writing a novel requires more than just changing stage directions to sentences.

FTC Disclaimer: I received this book from the publisher in exchange for this review.

the ghost of a town

The Wonder Boy of Whistle Stop by Fannie Flagg

Rating: 4 stars (out of 5)

Genre: fiction (with a pinch of historical fiction)

Review: If you're like me, you've been waiting a long time to find out what happened to your favorite characters from Whistle Stop, Alabama, not to mention Evelyn Couch.  Where did they go?  Did they all lose touch?  I can tell you without spoiling anything that the answer to the latter is no, they didn't.  Dot Weems first sends Christmas cards and then discovers email to keep everyone in the loop.  But what about the town itself?

Well, it's probably better not to ask what Whistle Stop looks like these days.  But when Bud Threadgoode's granddaughter Ruthie meets up with Evelyn Couch they are unfazed by what 50+ years of neglect can do to a town.

It may have taken a while, but Fannie Flagg does not disappoint with this sequel.  In her typical chatty style, we learn about what happened to the town and its inhabitants when the trains started just passing through without stopping.  And then we zoom into the future to see how Whistle Stop lives on in spirit, and maybe even in reality.

FTC Disclaimer: I received this book from the publisher in exchange for this review.

get out of your own head

Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam

Rating: 3 stars (out of 5)

Genre: fiction (creepy)

Review: On the second night of their vacation in the Hamptons, Amanda and Clay answer the door of their Airbnb rental to a couple claiming to be the owners of the house.  Apparently, there's been a major blackout in New York City and they didn't know where else to go.  The mystery, the creep factor, has little to do with the question of whether these people are who they say are.  It becomes clear fairly quickly that they are telling the truth and that there has been a major event of some kind, but with cell phones, landlines, internet, and television all out, no-one knows any details.  Cue the dramatic music.

This book was very suspenseful, due to two things: First, the characters' lack of knowledge.  The reader, through the omniscient narrator, knows quite a bit more than the character do about what's going on.  Not that it helps.  Second, this book is deeply introspective.  Alam slides seamlessly from the perspective of one character another, and we are privy to each one's sense of insecurity that they aren't responding "well" to the crisis.  And it turns out that the inside of peoples' heads during a mysterious calamity is a deeply creepy place.

FTC Disclaimer: I received this book from the publisher in exchange for this review.

the devil is in the details

The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V. E. Schwab

Rating: 4 stars (out of 5)

Genre: fiction/historical fiction

Review: Addie LaRue is completely unable to make a mark on this world.  She is forgotten the moment she is out of sight, her writing erases itself, and she can't even manage to hold on to any material possessions, except a wooden ring that is the symbol of her deal with the devil.  Addie asked for freedom, to not be tied down to convention, but we all know that you have to be careful what you wish for.  Addie has all the freedom she could want, and then some, and her bargain is good until she tires of being unendingly forgotten, at which point the devil will claim her soul.

The devil thinks he's gotten a good deal, making a bargain with a rash young girl, but he didn't count on Addie.  Realizing that "ideas are wilder than memories" and can't be so easily controlled, she makes the terms of the bargain work for her.  Perhaps she is an artist's muse for a while, or she plants a musical riff that grows into a hit song, or finds some other way to live on (anonymously) through art.  On top of that, she really does have freedom to experience all the world has to offer, and she's been experiencing it for 300 years.

And then, someone remembers her.  After so much time, can Addie even have a relationship with someone who actually remembers her from one day to the next?  What will she learn about her relationship to the world?  And will it make her rethink the bargain she made so long ago?

Addie is a wonderfully strong, brave character, who will stick with you (haunt you?) long after you finish this book.  The book is a trifle too long, but the payoff at the end is worth it.

FTC Disclaimer: I received this book from the publisher in exchange for this review.

this is what a feminist looks like

Out of Left Field by Ellen Klages

Rating: 5 stars (out of 5)

Genre: historical fiction

Review: Katy Gordon doesn't think of herself as a feminist.  She doesn't think of herself as a fighter in the struggle for equal rights.  She know it's not fair that she was denied the place that she earned on her local Little League team just because she's a girl.  So she starts by writing a letter to Little League headquarters in Williamsport, PA.  When they respond by telling her that baseball is, and always has been, a sport for boys and men, she sets out to prove them wrong.  Her journey opens up a world of women in baseball that Katy (like probably most readers of this book) had no idea existed.

And what a world it is!  Of course, Katy learns about the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, which by 1957 has already faded away, but she also learns about women who made it to the minor leagues, only to have their contracts cancelled because of their gender.  She learns about women who played in the Negro Leagues, and women who formed barnstorming teams.  She meets some of these women and interviews them for a school project.  Through Katy, we learn so much about this history, and Katy's sheer excitement at finding so many other women who share her passion is infectious.

When I was a girl and played Little League, it didn't occur to me even to think about the girls and women who had come before me, let alone thank them, but after reading this book, I will never forget them.  That's due in equal measure to the wonderful writing as to the short bios of some of these players that Klages includes at the end of the books, ending with Maria Pepe, who in 1974, with the support of NOW, finally made Little League change their rules.  So, as someone who walked on the path they paved, I now know enough to thank them, and to also thank Ellen Klages for doing a masterful job at bringing their stories to a new generation.

two roads diverged at an airport

The Book of Two Ways by Jodi Picoult

Rating: 4.5 stars (out of 5)

Genre: fiction

Review: Sometimes, when I'm reading a book, I start writing the reivew before I finish reading.  I only had a few sentences put down for this book by the time I got close to the end, which is good, because I had to scrap them.  In other words, this book is not what it seems.  It's even better.

After surviving a plane crash, the airline offers to fly Dawn wherever she wants to go.  Does she choose to return to her daughter and husband of fifteen years, or does she choose to find her lost love, the man she thought of as the plane was going down?

Thus we are introduced to the theory of parallel universes, and so, the chapters alternate, beginning with Dawn choosing to return to Egypt to explore the what-if she left behind.  In the other chapters, Dawn returns to her home in Boston, and the familiar struggles of marriage and motherhood.  Or is that what's going on?  There's a twist (don't expect me to give it away!) and in typical Picoult fashion, there are no clear right answers.

Picoult is not coy about what she's setting up.  Dawn's husband is a physicist who explores just that topic.  As a graduate student in Egyptology, Dawn's thesis was on The Book of Two Ways, an ancient Egyptian text that essentially posited that, after death, one's soul can take one of two routes, but will end up in the same place, feasting with Osiris.  But sometimes, Picoult gets a little heavy-handed, such as having one of Dawn's clients face a very similar dilemma, and having Dawn learn a lot about her own life as she works things through with her client.

In Picoult's hands, even this last doesn't seem like much of a flaw, and if it is one, it's easily forgiven for the pleasure of the rest of the book.  This is the kind of book that you want to read again as soon as you've finished it, that will make you want to go out and learn all about hieroglyphics, and that you'll recommend to everyone you know.

FTC Disclaimer: I received this book from the publisher in exchange for this review.