Week 51: Major Pettigrew's Last Stand - Helen Simonson (358 pages)

A story about a 68-year-old retired British Major and a 58-year-old Pakistani shopkeeper does not, on the surface, seem like it would be an enjoyable read. You would be wrong. This delightful book was a great read for this holiday week. Reading this story was like taking a leisurely stroll in your favorite park or savoring that last bit of your favorite meal. It definitely was not to be rushed. For a super-fast reader like myself with very little patience to spare - this was initially a tough book for me to settle down and enjoy. Once I did, though - it was fantastically worth it.

Major Pettigrew and Mrs. Ali are drawn together by loneliness and literature (Rudyard Kipling) in particular. Each have their own family obligations that keep them at arm's length - but each have an inner strength that compels them forward. Both characters have lost their spouses and hold very particular positions a sleepy English village. As they develop feelings for one another, the small town of gossips begin to impart their subtle prejudices toward the two. This book does a great job of covering multicultural issues, village politics, good manners and family dynamics. The village is such a throwback to the past that I often had to remind myself that it was set in modern day Britain. The Major often fussed about mobile phones, the internet and the general lack of decorum of the young generation (including his son Roger).

The writing-style that Ms. Simonson employs in this debut novel is witty and reminiscent of Austen. If you are interested in a story filled with colorful characters that drink lots of tea, this is the book for you. A fantastic read.

Week 50: Goodnight Tweetheart - Teresa Medeiros (240 pages)

I am in love with love and always have been. This week’s book “Goodnight Tweetheart” is a lovely romantic novel set in 2010 NYC (the most romantic American city??). Very timely and quirky this book was an incredibly fast read. As a matter of fact I finished it in one day over the span of 6 hours. 

In my teen years I would spend hours reading romance novels. Danielle Steel, Johanna Lindsey and Catherine Coulter were my friends who wrote love stories that unfortunately helped to form my misbegotten knowledge of men! Sometimes the “members” did throb – other times, not so much. And sometimes the coming together was so sadly un-romantic that I was sure I had done something wrong. As I grew older and my pleasure in reading these books was deemed “guilty” I started to back away from the genre. But – lingering in my mind – was a love. I could read “Outlander” by Gabaldon – not outwardly romantic, but epic in scope and breadth and thank goodness for Philippa Gregory and her tales of “The Other Boleyn Sister” (steamy stuff with history thrown in)! So when I came across this book at Borders, I was intrigued. I got a love story with pop culture references thrown in – bonus!

The story is about author Abby Donovan who was the literary “it” girl when her debut novel was chosen for Oprah’s Book Club. We find her four years after the fact with a colossal case of writer’s block and a book deadline that looms in front of her like the Grand Canyon. She “meets” Mark on Twitter and embarks on a fantastic ride. This book is very different from those classic romance books that I was a big fan of in my younger years. There was no sex in this book, no bodices ripping, no members – throbbing or otherwise and very little “language”. The story is told in 90% Tweets (those lovely conversations using 140 characters or less). The correspondence is perfect and genuine and quite fitting. Since it is a romantic novel – things go sideways and there is a push to set things straight, but I must say that although I had a hope as to how the book would end – I was surprised at the path the author took us down to reach the conclusion.

I love reading and I love escapist reading. Sometimes I like to learn new things, but often when I read, I want to suspend disbelief and enter someone else’s world. I can’t say how much I loved this book and how lovely it was to enter the world of Abby and Mark – it was all I could do not to look them up on Twitter and join in their conversation. This is a perfect book to read on a cold (ish) winter night. It definitely warmed my heart. My pleasure is my pleasure – others can call it guilty, I call it fun to read!

Week 42: Smile - Raina Telgemeier (224 pages)

I may have misspoke earlier in this book project when I declared my dislike of memoirs. Generally - I still am not a big fan, but I find that if the memoir is in the form of a graphic novel, I can be engaged and really like what is being said. SMILE is just the kind of memoir that I can get into!

Set in 1989 in San Francisco, author and illustrator Raina Telegmeier tells the tale of the awkward time in a tween's life when they have to get braces. She wants so badly to be a normal teenager, but after an unfortunate fall she has to  get braces! Thus starts the tale of Raina. This lovingly illustrated gem is just as rich in story-telling as it is visually. My daughter raved about the book and devoured it in one sitting (it took me 2)!

Whether you had braces in your youth or not - Raina is very relatable. We all had some awkward moments growing up. The angst and excitement is deftly managed by the author. I am sure the fact that it is her life that we were reading about lent itself to the close editing. Nice touches about the past popped up throughout the book (Nintendo, San Francisco earthquake and even a reference from the 80s show Silver Spoons). They were nice reference points, but did not distract from the overall storytelling.

This is a great book to share with a tween in your life, or even read alone. I got a great chuckle from the story and would gladly read it again!

Week 23: The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner: An Eclipse Novella - Stephenie Meyer (178 pages)

It is highly likely that if you enjoyed the TWILIGHT series, then you will enjoy this book. In this novella, Meyer does something that I can't recall very many authors doing - she decides to tell the story of a very minor character from this series of books. 


Bree Tanner appears near the end of Chapter 25 in ECLIPSE in a brief but moving scene. She is a mere blip on the radar, we recognize her and she moves the story along, but once we turn the page she is almost instantly erased from memory - at least she was erased from mine. Meyer had a tougher time shaking this character from her mind. She decided to write this short story to give the reader a background and motivation for Bree and some of the other vampires in her coven. 


The TWILIGHT books focus mostly on "good" vampires, we are told that there are other 'bad" vampires around but since the TWILIGHT series is essentially BELLA SWAN's love story - we are blind to elements other than those that don't directly affect her world. What we get in this book is the tale of a young girl turned into a vampire and the subsequent manipulation of that girl. There are flashes of happiness for Bree, when she seems more like a 15-year-old girl - a crush on a boy vampire...but for the most part, MEYER lays it out in the title, it is to be a short life for Bree. 


The story is intense and it captures you right away. I found, as with most of MEYER's books, it was hard to put down. As a stand alone book - it wouldn't work, but it is a well-written companion piece about a character I didn't know I would care about.

Week 21: Snow Flower and the Secret Fan - Lisa See (269 pages)

This project has introduced me to many great new books and this week, I will say that it also introduced me to some new technology. I read this book on the Kindle, by Amazon http://www.amazon.com/. My good friend Claudia let me test-drive her Kindle to see if it was something that I might want to purchase. I must say that I enjoyed the book more than I enjoyed the device that I used to read it. 


This book takes place in 19th century China, in the inner realm of the women of the country. The story focuses primarily on Lily and Snow Flower, two young ladies from the Hunan province. The story takes us from their lives as young children to the mothers that they become.


This is an interesting book because it deals very little with men. This story took us into the brutal world of foot binding. It taught us about the secret language, Nu Shu, that women used to communicate with their female relatives and friends once they were married out to their husband's homes and this book also spotlights the laotong friendship between girls. The laotong is a lifelong friendship that is sometimes even more sacred and special than a marriage. 


The author made this story of fiction read as if it were the events of an actual woman's life. Lily, our narrator, is so real - you feel as if you can Google her or look her up on Wikipedia and this whole story would be corroborated. The conditions for women were brutal and they weren't expected to live past the age of 40. Women we told that they were useless and that the best that they could do was to marry out to someone respectable and bring in gifts and money for their family.


I found that, though Lily had a tough life, I sometimes didn't like her. I understood her reaction to many situations, but her intense need to be loved put her in precarious situations and in the end lead to a miscommunication. I am never a fan of 'the miscommunication' as a plot point, but LISA SEE handled this miscommunication relatively well. 


This is an excellent novel, if you enjoy the Kindle - check it out on that medium. I will go back to the old standard for next week's offering.

Week 20: The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald (180 pages)

The fun thing about this project is that I can re whatever I want to. I am not in a book club, so I don't have books that I am required to read - but I have many friends that give me great suggestions. I also have a bookcase full of favorite books that have made an impression on me over my lifetime  of reading. One such book is THE GREAT GATSBY. This was required reading in my sophomore or junior year in high school. I don't remember the paper that I wrote or the grade that I got on the test, but these characters resonated with me years after my initial discovery of them.


I chose to re-read this classic to see if the story stood up and to see if it affected me the same way as it had those 20 plus years ago. F. Scott Fitzgerald is a genius and the way that he used words and a turn of phrase to draw the reader in was brilliant. Jay Gatsby, Tom and Daisy Buchanan, and Nick Carraway are just as pretentious and elusively slick as ever. Reading again, I thought that I might want to skip bits that weren't exciting - but I didn't. From page one, I was sucked in to the showy world that is a facade for a world much darker than it appears. 


This is a book about deception, but I am not telling a lie when I said that this was a great book to re-visit. If you haven't picked up this book since high school, it may be time to check it out again. I don't think you will regret it.

Week 18: The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie (Flavia de Luce #1) - Alan Bradley (370 pages)

Set in England in 1950, we are introduced to Flavia de Luce. Flavia is a precocious young girl, aged 11, who is fascinated with Chemistry. Flave (as she is called by family) is the youngest of three children. Older sisters Ophelia (Feely) and Daphne (Daffy) tend to pick on or ignore Flave and her eccentricities. 


Mysteries are not generally a genre that I enjoy, but this book was quite the exception. Flavia is an engaging character and her curiosity gets her in and out of scrapes. The mystery at the center of this novel involves a body found in the garden of Buckshaw (Flavia's family home). Flavia, being the fearless and strong-willed person that she is, goes forth in solving the murder. Flavia confounds the local police and has a helper in the family "jack of all trades" Dogger. 


So as not to spoil the story, I will forgo anymore plot points. I will say that this is a great debut novel by Alan Bradley. Bradley is 70 years old and has five books planned with Flavia as the protagonist. He was about 11 years old in 1950 and the book may be a bit autobiographical - whatever the circumstance, this was an engaging novel and I am looking forward to picking up #2, The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag. I highly suggest this book, especially if mysteries aren't your thing - you may find yourself rooting out loud for Flavia!

Week 11 : When You Reach Me - Rebecca Stead (197 Pages)

I am not sure how to begin to write this review, this is a complicated, fun, deep and at sometimes depressing children's book. It is also, at the heart - a mystery. So there is only so much I can tell without giving away the story. It is also one of the best children's books that I have read and I can't wait to share it with my daughter when she is a bit older.

So - here is a very high-level overview. Set in the 70s, Miranda is a 12-year-old girl that is obsessed with Madeline L'Engle's "A Wrinkle In Time" (another favorite of mine). She is the daughter of a single mom who is destined to be on the $25,000 Pyramid. One day her best friend, Sal gets punched in the stomach out of the blue and her whole world changes.

The storytelling in this book is quite well done. Stead kind of does of show and tell in the story. She slips in that Miranda was named after the "Miranda's Rights", she casually mentions that she does not eat grapes because her mother does no approve of how migrant workers are treated, the fact that there is a fully operational dentist office in the school that Miranda attends is casually mentioned. It is those little pieces of information that keep the reader intrigued and that make the book hard to put down. As a matter of fact - this would be a great book to re-read, because as the end came, I could see how the puzzle comes to shape. I saw that things that were casually mentioned actually meant quite a bit to the story.

I suggest reading this book! It is phenomenal and then we can discuss it in depth.

Week 10: The Opposite of Love - Julie Buxbaum (384 pages)

What is the opposite of love? Many say it is hate – but I find that it is apathy or fear or the inability to love…that is what the main character of this book Em finds out as she faces challenges in her life. This is a very believable portrayal of a 29-year old woman that has to find the strength within herself to move forward with her life.

The book opens on Em, a young New York lawyer who seems to have it all together. She has a job, a boyfriend, and some great friends. Everything appears to be great – but the first line of chapter 1 is telling: “Last night, I dreamt that I chopped Andrew up into a hundred little pieces, like a Benihana chef, and ate them, one by one.” Something’s going on and the story takes us on that journey from the word “go”.

This book is more than mere chick lit, though – it certainly has its moments. I would say that it is an intelligent read. Em struggles with an ass of a boss, a grandfather who is struggling with Alzheimer’s, a very cold and distant relationship with her father and the breaking and repair of her relationship with her boyfriend. The pace of the story kept me connected, the humor kept me laughing and there were times that I even got a little misty as truths were revealed.

This book provided the perfect amount of escapism. Julie Buxbaum’s debut novel showed that she can mix humor and pathos perfectly. This was an enjoyable read.

Week 8: Madame M Presents Creepy Little Bedtime Stories - Madame M (128 pages)

This small volume of poems for children, set the perfect tone for this rainy week. I first discovered this collection of books at the  http://www.azbookfestival.org/ back in 2002. Madame M signed a copy of this book for my then 2 year old daughter. Of course - I did not give or read the book to her then, but I placed it on the bookshelf with the many other books that I had accumulated. 

This week, I decided to give my daughter the two books that I had purchased that day in '02 (the other title is "Madame M Presents Eerie Little Bedtime Stories). She has grown into quite a reader, like her mom. She loved the books! She went on and on about "Bat Boy" and "Witchy Boo-Boo" like they were new best friends! I was so intrigued that I decided to read one of them for myself. I chose "Creepy" because it was the first in the series.
 
This book hits the perfect tone for fun, kids poetry. Madame M writes a bit like Shel Silverstein, but with a darker feel. 9-12 year-olds will love this book. It meshes well with their discovery of the gross and the spooky. It was also great fun for me - someone who has aged way pass the 9-12 year-old audience. She is a very clever author, and she creates some unusual rhymes. She is kind of like a goth Mother Goose! 

Great fun for all ages, a fun read alone or with a child! Highly recommended.

Week 7: World of Pies: A Novel – Karen Stolz (176 pages)

This book project is nothing if not fluid, Lara and I decided there really are no rules – we would decide what we would read and we decided just because we started a book on Sunday, it might not be the book that we complete by Saturday. This week (Week 7) proved to be that kind of week for me. For various reasons, the book I started last Sunday is not the book I completed today. I won’t reveal the title of the book I was working on, as it is my hope that it will appear in this blog before year’s end.

“World of Pies” is a sweet novel set in the small town of Annette, TX. Each chapter of the book explores a different time in the life of the main character, Roxanne. The book opens in 1962 when Roxanne is 12-years-old and is crazy about baseball. It is the eve of the big Pie Fair and we are off and running. The book makes a seamless transition from age to age (often with 5-6 years passing) via each chapter. I guess this is what is called a “coming of age” tale. We meet Roxanne’s first love, share her embarrassment of having a dad that runs the local lingerie shop, and watch her deal with having a cousin be sent to Vietnam. We meet her husband and eventually her own child. It is a full circle that comes back to pies in the end. She has a lot of growing up to do and this novel delves into those situations and delivers a fun read.

This was author Karen Stolz’s first novel. I found it to be charming in a way that Southern Lit has perfected. A little sweet, a little sour but overall just right; I recommend anyone pick up this engaging read. I don’t think you will regret it.