what lies beneath

Alice's Tulips by Sandra Dallas
Rating: 4 stars (out of 5)
Genre: historical fiction
Read 20 in 2020 category: published in 2000 (or history)
Review: Midway through the Civil War, Alice has been living for a year with her new husband and his mother on their small farm in Iowa, when her husband hears the call of patriotism and joins the Union Army.  Alice left the more genteel circumstances she grew up in to marry Charlie, and it does appear to be true love, as they're quite happy together.  He leaves Alice with his mother, a woman of very strong opinions, and the hired man to do the heavy lifting on the farm.  This seems somewhat problematic at first, as Alice's only apparent talents are quilting and flirting (which puts her one up on Scarlett O'Hara).

As the circumstances get tougher, Alice soon finds that she has more skills than she thought she did, including loyalty and the ability to work hard.  In this book, Sandra Dallas has mastered the art of showing the reader how a character develops, rather than simply saying so.  Told in the form of letters Alice writes to her sister, the reader can almost feel Alice developing both muscles and a backbone as she faces both day-to-day and rather more extraordinary challenges.

Dear Julie

Nuclear Family: A Tragicomic Novel in Letters by Susanna Fogel
Rating: 4.5 stars (out of 5)
Genre: fiction
Review: This book is so clever/funny/witty, I don't even know how to review it.  But I'll try, for the sake of getting more people to read it.

First of all, poor Julie.  Her family is crazy.  I mean, everyone's family is crazy in their own way, right?  I think most families have one or two "normal" people in them, but not Julie's.  Or at least, those relatives never wrote her any letters.  But she gets letters (e-mails in later years) from a wide assortment of other relatives, as well as from her boyfriend's dog, her dead grandfather and great-great-great grandmother, and her own IUD.  These last are perhaps the funniest of the book.  I was afraid these antics would get tired as the book went on, but they definitely don't.  Fogel holds the book tightly together almost right up until the very end (which is part of the reason I only give this book 4.5 stars - the last few letters pierce the fourth wall too much).

But who is Julie?  Well, we never really find out.  And that's the other reason I give 4.5 stars.  I kind of wanted to hear Julie's own voice, although I couldn't decide whether I wanted to hear her give her own explanations, or just hear her losing it with some of the nonsense her family comes up with.  To do so would have totally destroyed the wonderfulness of this book, though, so I actually give Fogel credit for not giving us an easy way out of this book.  But if a book ever cried out for a contiguous sequel, it's this one.  Susanna Fogel - please write more!  Please write from Julie's perspective.  Or at least give us another compilation of letters from her family so we can know what happens next.

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

guileless and lovely

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows

Rating: 5 stars (out of 5)

Genre: historical fiction, epistolary

Review: Epistolary novels can be such fun to read, and this one is certainly no exception. The technique of using the exchange of letters to tell the story allows the author to use each character's voice in an authentic way that traditional story-telling doesn't usually allow. In tone, I found this book similar to the delightful 84, Charing Cross Road. Juliet, the main character, or main letter-writer as the case may be, has a guileless voice that was a pleasure to read.

The one false note I found in this story was the ease with which the Guernsey Islanders allowed Juliet to adopt Kit (both literally and figuratively). That Kit herself should take to Juliet as well as she does I did not find surprising, as one can clearly tell from her letters that she is the kind of person children like (and, yes, that is high praise). But for a group as insular as the Islanders declare themselves to be, and as protective of and attached to Kit as the Literary Society was, to give Kit over to Juliet after only a few months acquaintance, did not ring as true as the rest of the story did.

Other than that, I loved this book. Each character has a distinct voice, and I wanted to be able to exchange letters with them all myself.