Harbour Street - Ann Cleeves

 

(Not the cover on copy I read, but I much prefer this one.)

Harbour Street is book number six in Ann Cleeves's Vera Stanhope series, and it's a good one. Cleeves sometimes has a tendency to keep her main character behind the curtain until she's fully set up all the side characters and the mystery to be solved (even to approaching the 75-100 page-mark sometimes) but that's not the case with Harbour Street.

The first sentence of the novel is "Joe pushed through the crowd." As in Joe Ashworth, Vera's favorite detective, and Vera herself shows up on page 13 this way:

"Outside there was an enormous woman. She wore a shapeless anorak over a tweeded skirt. A wide face and small brown eyes. Her hair was covered by the anorak hood. On her feet, wellingtons. Her hair and her body were covered in snow...The abominable snow-woman..."

That rather comedic introduction of Vera is so dead-on that series fan will recognize the lonely detective long before Vera opens her mouth to introduce herself. And for me, this series is all about Vera and her evolving relationship with Joe, so this all made for a promising beginning to Harbour Street.

It's the Chrismas season, and Joe and his daughter are in Newcastle doing some relatively last-minute shopping when they notice that one of their fellow passengers has not gotten off the train with everyone else. For good reason. As it turns out, she's been stabbed to death.

Vera feels a little guilty about being so excited to have something interesting to take her mind off the season and her separateness, but soon she and Joe are trying to find out why anyone would have wanted to kill what seems to have been such a well thought of elderly woman like Margaret. Things begin to get complicated when a second woman is found dead in the little Harbour Street community because Vera is convinced from the beginning that the two murders have to be connected. She is not one to believe in coincidences like two murders happening so close together by sheer chance in a neighborhood as small as this one. And, of course, she's right about that.

So she and her crew start digging. And what they discover is going to take some real effort on everyone's part if any of them are going to be home on Christmas day. 

Harbour Street is intertwined with multiple suspects who come and go, and come again, as the investigation unfolds. Longtime fans of the series will already know this, but let me emphasize it for those who may be reading Ann Cleeves for the first time: keep a notepad handy. Jot down the names of side characters and how they relate to one another. Pay particular attention to flashbacks and how they seem to relate to the present day. If you do those things, you will fully appreciate just how intricately plotted an Ann Cleeves mystery always is. And although I've never managed to do it, you will have a good/fair shot at figuring out who the culprit is even before Vera figures it out for herself.

As usual, I enjoyed visiting Vera Stanhope and Joe Ashworth again, and look forward now to reading the few Vera Stanhope books I'm still holding in reserve. 

What I'm Reading This Week (June 10, 2024)

 

As mentioned in an earlier post, I finally broke down and decided to buy a copy of Percival Everett's James last week. It seemed like I had been waiting forever to get a copy from the library, so once I heard that James might be nominated for the 2024 Booker Prize I decided to go ahead and buy a copy despite my complete lack of bookshelf space. And at about 120 pages into it,  I'm glad I bought it. I finished two books last week (The Humans by Matt Haig and Harbour Street by Ann Cleeves) and I'm about to finish John Ohara's 1935 novel Butterfield 8. So coming into this new week, I plan to finish that one, continue reading James, and make more progress on Look for Me There by Luke Russert. I first came across the Luke Russert book over on Kathy's Reading Matters blog when I spotted this review there. If you want to know more about this one, Kathy's review is a great place to start. 

Luke Russert's father, Tim Russert, was one of the last journalists I trusted to tell me the truth consistently. I was shocked the day that the 58-year old Russert so suddenly died of a heart attack, and I still remember my feeling that a good man had been snatched from the world. I can only imagine how is son felt. Luke's memoir as it's subtitle says is about grieving his father and finding himself. In order to do that, Luke walked away from a news job that confined him to Washington D.C. and began to explore the world - and himself.

I'm almost done with Butterfield 8 now, and I'm still trying to figure out what I think of the novel's main character, Gloria. This is not an exceptionally long novel, but Gloria has been explored so deeply that my opinion of her has run the gamut, everything from admiration of her spirit to disgust at the deeply-seated racism she doesn't even try to hide when she's frustrated or angry at herself. I haven't read very much John O'Hara, so I don't have anything to compare it with, but this snapshot of the Great Depression and how so many wealthy people went on as usual is memorable.

I re-read Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn a few weeks ago to prepare myself for James. As you probably know, this Percival Everett novel is a retelling of Twain's novel through Jim's eyes (or as he thinks of himself, James). The differences between the two viewpoints are sometimes subtle, but often, especially at first, can be quite jarring. James is quick to point out that he and all the other slaves he knows are basically playing a game of survival with the white people they deal with every day...act dumber than you are and present yourself exactly as whites expect you to be. Even then, James and Huck manage to create a real friendship for themselves, something that surprises both of them.

I'll likely be beginning at least two new ones this week that probably will come from this bunch (unless another surprise book comes from nowhere to haul me in):

 

This last one will be a little hard to stomach if I do get around to it this week. It's not something I would normally read, but I'm intrigued by the opportunity to get inside the head of someone as evil as this woman must have been. I am watching Peacock's series The Tattooist of Auschwitz right now (and have read the novel), but I'm as bewildered as ever by the notion that that kind of thing is even possible. Maybe Mistress of Life and Death has some answers to that question.

I'm also hoping for another big surprise or two to pop up because that often ends up being the best part of my reading week.

(I'm actually writing this early on Sunday afternoon as I prepare to drive the 90 miles to College Station for game two of the Super Regional baseball series between Oregon and Texas A&M. Only the top 16 teams in the country get this far, and if A&M wins today they will be among the eight teams going to Omaha for the 2024 College World Series. I'm excited because tickets to this series are really, really tough to get but my granddaughter gifted me with a pair that she got from the school. I'm, of course, pulling for a win but if A&M loses this one, there will be a winner-take-all game tomorrow night. So...by the time you read this, I'll either be super-excited or extremely nervous. I'm glad I don't know which it turned out to be.)

Enjoy the week, everyone. 

Remarkably Bright Creatures - Shelby Van Pelt / The Humans - Matt Haig

 

So what do Remarkably Bright Creatures and The Humans have in common? Mainly, that they are both very predictable. But both novels are based on clever enough plots that make them kind of hard to resist, so I kept hoping for the best despite feeling pretty certain that I knew exactly where each was heading by somewhere around the halfway points of their storylines. I'm not sorry that I read either of them, but I did end up feeling a bit let down by both books - especially the overhyped (in my opinion) Remarkably Bright Creatures. 

The best thing, by far, about Remarkably Bright Creatures is Marcellus the octopus who introduces himself right at the beginning of the novel on what is his 1,299th day of captivity. Marcellus knows that his days are numbered, and he is determined to make the most of them. That's why the shape-shifting octopus so much enjoys escaping from his aquarium every night when all the tourists are gone. But then one night, Tova Sullivan, the seventy-year-old cleaning lady discovers him on the floor all tangled up in electrical cords and near death. Tova rescues Marcellus, they become fast friends...and the novel begins to morph into just another romantic comedy. Sadly, the best part of the novel is over.

But where Van Pelt really lost me was when she decided that Marcellus, even though he can't speak, has taught himself to read English. He even tries to write at one point. I finished this one only because I was already so far into it.

The Humans, on the other hand, was not much hyped by the publishing media, so I didn't feel all that disappointed by its predictability. In fact, this one reminded me so much of a TV series called Resident Alien that it felt kind of like a comfort read at first. 

The novel's premise is that an alien from far, far away has been sent to Earth with instructions to halt the mathematical breakthrough that a college professor has just made. Humans are considered to be so primitively violent that more sophisticated beings consider them to be "a danger to the cosmos," so dangerous in fact that they will be sacrificed it that is the only way to keep them forever earthbound. 

But - of course - our alien assassin soon begins to understand the real beauty of being human and of being loved and cared for by others, something he has never experienced in his own world. His handlers aren't thrilled by that turn of events, and they try to call him home immediately. Guess what happens? You guessed it.

Both novels have their moments, and they can be fun - but when I can predict every climax resolution in a novel, there's not much reason to keep reading. And that's what happened with these two. 

Bookstore Tricks

 

I finally found the time and energy to make it out to a couple of bookstores today. There are three good ones relatively near me, but I ran out of time before being able to swing by the indie shop that I like best. I shopped at Barnes & Noble and Half Price Books, and as usual, the experience left me a combination of frustrated, disappointed, and a little bit angry - the exact opposite of how I used to come away from shopping at B&N and Half Price Books not all that long ago. 

First stop was Barnes & Noble, a chain in which I've spent thousands of dollars over the years. Nothing much has changed, really, since my last visit except for the even greater sparsity of customers. Maybe three of us walking the floor and three or four others sitting with coffee and magazines. I did end up buying a copy of James because I'm so tired of waiting for my library copy (I was still number 36 on the waitlist after weeks of waiting). But the letdown in B&N is always the same: no current books on sale to speak of unless you consider $3 off a new hardback to be a game-changer, and absolutely no publisher overstock on sale. So instead of coming away with an armload of books the way I used to (usually for about $50 in total), I carried only my first edition copy of James away and still spent over $30, counting tax and the little magnetic page markers I also bought. 

I should add that I'm not at all a fan of those 3 for the price of 2 or buy one get the second for 50% off "sales" because I often end up buying something I really don't want to read just to get the discounted price on the one or two I did want to read. 

But that's not even the worst of today's visit. I was reminded again of just how poorly the Barnes & Noble "Rewards" program is run. In order to get a ten percent discount via the card B&N issues, a reader has to get ten "stamps" to their account, with each ten dollars spent earning one stamp. I've used the card several times now, and I'm convinced that B&N thinks we are all a bunch of dopes because the stamps are based on the ticket total for "eligible" purchases, whatever the definition of "eligible" is in this case (I do understand why tax should not apply). Every time I've used the card I get peeved because B&N refuses to round up the total spent to the nearest ten dollars that earn a stamp. For instance today, I spent $29 before tax and still was only given credit for two stamps. I figure I've missed out on almost as many credits now as I've earned, and I think that's wrong, if not insulting.

As for Half Price Books, this will be brief. I refuse to sell to Half Price Books anymore because I consider their offers even more insulting than B&N's reward program. Well today I found a book I sold to them a while back (my name is inside this one) for 50 cents marked $7 on the shelf. Honestly, that just made me laugh at myself for being too lazy to have refused the offer and carry those books back out to the car.

But it's not all doom and gloom today. Some of you know that I've been undergoing a lot of medical testing for almost 90 days now. I had another two-hour session yesterday that revealed that he autoimmune disease difficulty I've been having with my eyes has as mysteriously disappeared (at least for the moment) as it mysteriously first appeared early this year. The condition did leave me with what appears to be some permanent damage in the left eye, but the right one is back to normal.  So it's a happy day...and I need to keep reminding myself of just how lucky I am today, B&N and Half Price Books be damned. 

Small Mercies - Dennis Lehane

 

Mary Pat Fennessy is one of just a handful of fictional characters I will remember forever, a character whose very name will always rekindle the essence of Dennis Lehane's remarkable novel Small Mercies in my mind.

It's 1974. It's Boston. And the city's public schools are about to be desegregated whether anyone in Mary Pat's Irish neighborhood wants them to be desegregated or not. Mary Pat, who has already lost two husbands and her only son, lives in Southie with her daughter Jules, a high school senior. Southie is the only home Mary Pat and Jules have ever known, and both of them understand who really calls the shots in Southie. They know that real power lies in the hands of one or two ruthless Irish mobsters, and anyone who crosses the mob is not likely to live long enough to do it twice. That's just the way it is, and the way it always has been.

Mary Pat is fine with all that - right up until the night that Jules doesn't come home from a date with the young man she considers to be one of Southie's biggest idiots. Mary Pat has already experienced enough loss and tragedy in her life, and she doesn't plan to experience another anytime soon, especially one involving the only child she has left. So, Mary Pat starts doing Mary Pat things, rattling cages, asking those who should have seen Jules last some uncomfortable questions - and slapping them around if she thinks they are lying to her. Then it gets complicated.

It seems that the same night that Jules disappeared, a young Black man died inside the neighborhood subway station after being struck by a train - and the cops have reason to believe his death was no accident. Now, for some reason, the cops want to find Jules just as badly as she wants to find her daughter, and Marty Butler, Irish mob boss, is telling Mary Pat to go home and quit asking so many questions - to get on with the rest of her life. Mary Pat, though, is not about to play that game.

"...you can't take everything from someone. You have to leave them something. A crumb. A goldfish. Something to protect. Something to live for. Because if you don't do that, what in God's name do you have left to bargain with?" (Mary Pat to police detective Bobby Coynes)

Mary Pat is going to play her own game, and she's going to make up the rules as she goes along.

True, Small Mercies is a revenge novel, a novel about what one remarkably strong woman is able and willing to do when she's left with nothing to live for. But it's much more than that. Small Mercies is about racism, the deeply embedded kind of racism that becomes so common that it goes unnoticed by those most guilty of it. It's about a woman who only slowly becomes aware of the destructive power of that kind of automatic hatred as she begins to question everything she's ever assumed about herself and those around her. It's the story of a woman who at least begins to sense the truth about the world, but only when it's too late for her to do much about it other than violently strike out at those who have betrayed her.

Small Mercies (the origin of this title will put tears in your eyes) is dark, violent, and sometimes a little difficult to read, but most of all it is powerful. This is not a book readers are going to forget a week after they read it. This one leaves a scar.

Songwriter Kris Kristofferson may have gotten it exactly right when he said "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose." I think that Mary Pat Fennessy would be the first to agree. 

Dennis Lehane jacket photo

What I'm Reading This Week (June 3, 2024)

 Just as I hoped, Dennis Lehane's Small Mercies ensured that last week ended up being a really good reading week. I've read quite a few Lehane novels now, and this one just might be the best of the lot. But I'll have more to add on Small Mercies later in the week, so enough said for now. The wild card of the week turned out to be the unexpected copy of John O'Hara's Butterfield 8 that came my way. The only other book I finished was Why We Read by Shannon Reed, but I also made some progress on Matt Haig's The Humans and started reading Harbour Street by Ann Cleeves. Oh, and I DNF'd the Bill Mahar book, What This Comedian Said Will Shock You, because it was way more one-sided and biased than advertised.

I've kind of settled into a routine lately of having one physical book, one e-book, and if the right one comes along, maybe one audiobook going at the same time. That's what I'm doing with these three, and as long as the approach continues to work for me, I'll stick with the routine. Not sure what caused me to pull back that way, but it feels comfortable for now. I'm hoping to attack my shelves and Kindle backlist a little more successfully this way, but the only way to make that work for long is to limit temptation by cutting my library visits way back. And that won't be easy.

I'm having fun with The Humans but I can't shake the feeling that it has some kind of mysterious tie to the Resident Alien TV series I watched a while back. The premise of both stories is eerily similar: alien comes to Earth to eliminate mankind because humans have become a threat to the rest of the galaxy all of a sudden, but said alien learns to respect and even love certain humans enough to make the alien question his entire mission. They don't seem to be linked at all, but the similarity between the two is pretty astounding to me.

I noticed John O'Hara's Butterfield 8 was available when I opened the Libby app to return an e-book to my local library. I haven't read much O'Hara, but I do remember that Butterfield 8 was a semi-scandalous Elizabeth Taylor movie back in the day, so the title and cover caught my eye. I never did get around to watching the 1960 movie, but my memories of the publicity it got made me wonder how it could have possibly been written in 1935. I'm about one-third of the way through it now, and I'm finding the novel to be well written and and much more frank than I thought a 1935 novel would be. Still not sure where this one is headed.

Harbour Street is book number six in the Ann Cleeves Vera Stanhope series. I vaguely remembering watching the TV series version of this one a few years ago, but so far that hasn't impacted my reading of Harbour Street at all. I'm only ten percent in, and Cleeves is still in the process of setting up the crime scene and introducing all the players, but this one already seems a little bit easier to get into than some of the earlier books in the series. Maybe it's because Joe is the main character in the first chapter, and Vera in the second. No having to read 75-100 pages before Vera shows up for the first time. That's always a good thing.

Depending on what I finish this week, this is the small pool of books I'm likely to be choosing from for my next reads:

I'm also putting together plans for a ten-day roadtrip beginning on June 22 during which I hope to explore a couple of states with my youngest grandson. I want to introduce him to the history of blues music, Cajun culture, and a Civil War battle site or two, so reading time is going to be limited for the last week of June. Generally, the plan is to explore southwest Louisiana, ending up near Natchez, Mississippi, before heading north up Highway 61 (The Blues Trail), and over to Shiloh Battlefield in southern Tennessee. Then we'll head back down through places like Tupelo and Oxford before circling back through Louisiana and home. I'm familiar with all the stops we will be making, but I hope to lock in for him the same love for road trips that my father passed on to me. 

If you guys have any trip-tips for that part of the country, please let me know. Have a great week!

Why We Read: On Bookworms, Libraries, and Just One More Page Before Lights Out - Shannon Reed

While it's not exactly the book I thought I'd be reading, Shannon Reed's Why We Read works well in the long run. At first I couldn't decide if I was reading a memoir or a book about the reading habits of especially avid readers. Then I figured it out: this is a memoir written by someone who largely defines herself as a Reader, someone who cannot even imagine her life without the pleasure of reading each and every single day of it. To one degree or another, I'm willing to bet that anyone bothering to read my thoughts on Why We Read feels exactly the same way.

Many of the book's sections have self-explanatory headings listing one of the reasons "why we read." Here are a few examples:

• To Finish a Series
• To Learn About (and From) the Past
• To Feel Less Alone
• To See Ourselves Across Time 
• For Comfort
• To Feel Superior
• To Be Shocked
• To Shake Up Your Perspective
• To Learn How to Die (and How to Live)

Sections like these form the backbone of Why We Read, and Reed shares her personal experiences to illustrate each section's main points. The final two-thirds or so of the book focus on sections like these in contrast to the more humorous approach to the subject that Reed incorporates into its first hundred pages. For me, that's when the book saved itself and I firmly decided to finish it. Earlier chapters like "Signs You May Be a Female Character in a Work of Historical Fiction" ("Your name is Sarah; Your best friend is a horse; Your mother is either dead or dead set on getting you married as quickly as possible; etc.") or "Calmed-Down Classics of American Fiction for the Anxiety-Ridden" ("The Good Enough Gatsby; To Mildly Startle a Mockingbird; Fahrenheit 71 Degrees; The Beige Letter; etc.") just don't work for me. But that's not to say they won't work for you. That kind of humor never works for me, especially for as long as these lists go on.

As a fan of series fiction, I found Reed's observations on the subject particularly interesting even if I didn't agree with all of them:

"We have to orient ourselves to the world of the novel (setting, time period, closeness to or distance from our known lives), as well as the narrator and their attitude toward the world, the characters and dialogue...But a series usually only asks us to do that heavy lifting at the beginning of the first book, and from them on we can simply wander."

...

"...the pleasure of a series - the intimacy of its world and people - can also chafe.

Reed goes on to say that these days she's been "constructing her own" thematic series rather than relying on a single author to suck her into their world for months or years to come. That's exactly what I've noticed others doing lately as we chain-read our way through a few fiction titles about World Wars I or II, ancient civilizations, the Roaring Twenties, etc. And as Reed goes on to say, this kind of reading often leads to nonfiction titles on the same subject or period because of what we've experienced in historical fiction titles. 

Why We Read is three hundred pages long (my personal ideal length), and there are almost certainly sections and topics here that will appeal to any avid reader who gives it a try. I'm a huge fan of memoirs, and for me this is a good one, a memoir in which I found more commonality with Shannon Reed than I ever dreamed I would find. Shannon Reed is one of us, Readers. You will enjoy her company.

Shannon Reed jacket photo

Absolution - Alice McDermott

 

"...in truth it seems to me that it's not the world that's small, only our time in it."

 Absolution opens with a 1963 tea party during which a naive newlywed is about to meet the woman who will change her forever. Tricia, the novel's primary narrator, has just arrived in Vietnam along with her husband, an engineer who has been seconded to the Navy, and the gathering is her first chance to meet some of the other American wives in the city. Tricia vividly remembers meeting Charlene and her little girl - along with the girl's baby brother who threw up all over her -  that day.

Now, some sixty years later, Tricia has reconnected with that little girl, and she is telling Rainey (and, at the same time, the reader) all about what her mother was really like in those days, exactly what Charlene was up to and how she managed to get away with it all for as long as she did. Wives in 1963 Saigon, it seems, were expected to represent their husbands' brands. That's why they were there in the first place, and that's all they were expected to worry about.  Housekeepers and nannies assured that the women had more free time on their hands than they could possibly fill with tea parties, formal dinners, and book clubs - but because the number one rule they all lived by was "never, ever embarrass your husband," anything else they got up to was risky business. 

Well, Charlene, was having none of that. And the innocently naive Tricia would prove to be the perfect "front man" for Charlene's schemes. 

Almost before she knows what is happening, Tricia is visiting a children's hospital, is deeply involved in a complicated fundraiser to buy children's toys, and is even visiting a dangerously remote jungle leper colony. She is meeting people, Americans and Vietnamese alike, who need her help, and her eyes are opening to the real world her husband and his peers want to keep hidden from her. And Peter Kelly, Tricia's Irish-American husband, knows nothing about it. 

Following Charlene's lead, Tricia is exposed to the real world and learns much about pain, suffering, courage, familial bonds, and what desperate people are capable of doing to and with each other. But most importantly, she learns who she is - and who she wants to be. Charlene may have only passed through Tricia's life for a few, brief months, but she changed it forever.

I always remember Alice McDermott's characters, and she has created some memorable ones here, but Absolution reminds me again of just how good a storyteller McDermott is. It's also a reminder of just how "small" our time in the world we live in really is. Think about it: 2024 is just as far from 1963 Saigon as 1963 is from 1900 America. So much has changed...but so much hasn't, and never will. 

Alice McDermott publisher photo

What I'm Reading This Week (May 27, 2024)

 

After finishing two novels last week (Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler and Dad Camp by Evan S. Porter), I begin the new week with three books in progress. I set Matt Haig's The Humans aside all of last week, but I'm looking forward to reading it this week, am almost halfway through Shannon Reed's Why We Read, and am completely taken with Dennis Lehane's 2023 novel Small Mercies. Of all five books I've just mentioned, I suspect that Small Mercies is going to prove to be the best of the lot.

I have mixed emotions about Why We Read at the book's halfway point. This is a collection of short essays about readers, how they became readers, and why reading is so important to so many of us. But still, it's not what I thought it would be. It often tries, I think, to be too cute and clever for its own good, even to the point of making me question at one point whether or not I would be finishing it. Too, I did not expect a memoir, but that's what Reed seems to be going for here as much as anything else - and it's not a particularly insightful memoir, at that. Still, there are some gems of insights to be mined here if only I'm patient enough to keep digging...so here I stand, shovel in hand, hoping to finish Why I Read this week.

I bought Small Mercies almost a year ago when I caught it marked down to 50% of retail not too long after it was first published, and I'm just now finally getting to it. The novel is set in 1974 Boston during the period in which Boston is about to begin bussing students in order to desegregate the city's schools. Mary Pat Fennessy, a lifetime Southie resident, is looking for her daughter who disappeared on the same night that a young black man was found dead nearby. It doesn't seem likely that the two events are connected, but Mary Pat starts asking the wrong people the wrong questions, and if she keeps it up much longer the Irish mob is going to have to shut her up. The casual racism in this story is shocking by today's standards, but it reminds me that this was the norm just fifty years ago.  

Right now, I'm limiting myself to two or three active books at a time, way down from the seven or eight I usually have going at the same time, because I'm curious as to how that might affect my comprehension and overall speed. Just a little experiment to see which style fits me best at this age. But if I do at least get to begin one or two new books this week, these are among the most likely candidates to be chosen:

It's always the wildcards, though, that make reading so much fun for me, and I wonder which ones will come out of nowhere this week to claim a spot. Have a great week, everyone, have fun.

Dad Camp - Evan S. Porter

John is in panic mode now that his almost eleven-year-old daughter is about to enter middle school. Suddenly, it seems to John that he has a pre-teen daughter who is determined to fill her life with afterschool activities that won't involve him. He has been Mr. Super Dad since Avery's birth, spending all his spare time with her, and now she's pulling away. But John is not going to give up that easily, so when he spots a special father-daughter camp for late summer, he books a week there without telling Avery about his plans. Big mistake, that.

Things don't exactly get off to a rousing start. Avery sulks during the entirety of a long drive to the remote camp; John's three cabin-mates seem to be in some kind of weird competition to see which of them can be the most obnoxious and hard to get along with; and the camp is a whole lot less physically impressive than the online brochure that lured John into signing up for the week made it out to be.

What happens during the next few days, though, is going to change the lives of four men and four little girls in a very positive, and hopefully lasting, way.

Dad Camp is a very heartfelt novel about a moment that most fathers of daughters experience at some point in their lives. It reminded me of what it was like when my own daughters were about to make the transition from elementary school to middle school - a bigger leap in so many ways than most realize until their children are there. That's why I wanted to read it in the first place, but the novel didn't quite work for me. I'm sure there's a big audience for books like Dad Camp out there; I'm just not part of it. I found it all the ups and downs, and their resolutions, too predictable to ever feel much sympathy for what the fathers are going through as they desperately try to re-bond with their girls. It was so obviously going to turn out well for all concerned in the long run that I knew there was really nothing to worry about.

I'm not a fan of Hallmark or Lifetime movies because of their predictability and overwhelming tendency for everyone to end up living "happily ever after" despite whatever trauma they first have to endure. But I know there's a huge audience for that kind of movie, my wife among them. Dad Camp would make a perfect Hallmark movie, and it deserves to find its audience. I hope it does, because they will love it.

 

Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant - Anne Tyler

 

I first read Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant in 1987, and I've since considered it to be one of my two favorite Anne Tyler novels. This afternoon, some thirty-seven years later, I finished reading the novel for the second time - and the tie is broken. I'm disappointed to say that Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant did not quite live up to my memories of it. I know...I know. I've changed. Or maybe I'm not in the right mood for a novel like this one right now. Perhaps I've seen too many similar stories told by now, or maybe even seen the same story told better. Whatever the case, this re-read reminds me that you don't always get what you wish for when your pick up an old favorite for the first time in decades.

Don't get me wrong. Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant is an excellent novel. It's just that it's an Anne Tyler novel, and I hold Tyler and other writers I consider among the best I've ever read to a much higher standard than the standard I use to judge lesser writers by (and I know that's not fair).

As are all Anne Tyler novels, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant is set in Baltimore. Pearl Tull is dying, and for the first time in a long, long while she is not angry at the world. She's tired of being angry at the husband who abandoned her and his three children thirty-five years earlier, and now that her children are all relatively successful adults, she doesn't have the energy to be angry at them either. Her children, though, are still struggling with the anger Pearl passed down to them. 

Cody, oldest of the three, still resents his mother for choosing his younger brother Ezra as her favorite, and he still sees Ezra more as a rival to be competed against than as a brother. Ezra, on the other hand, is so passive and easygoing, that Cody ends up largely fighting himself, not Ezra. And because this is not a touchy-feely kind of family, Jenny directs her empathy elsewhere and becomes a successful pediatrician. None of the three think much about their father anymore, and all of them have learned to get along plenty well without ever having known the man.

But Ezra, ever the idealist, won't give up on his family. He owns an unusual restaurant, a place purposely built to remind patrons of the kind of home-cooked meals they grew up on, even to Ezra occasionally choosing what meal his customers are going to have on a given night. For every big family event, Ezra invites his mother, his siblings, and their children for a special meal at the restaurant - but the Tulls have never successfully completed even one dinner. One or another of them (usually Pearl or Cody) always stalks off in a huff somewhere around the midway point of the meal - if not even before the first bites are taken. Ezra, however, is not a quitter, and he has one last chance to make it happen. 

A family dinner has been planned for right after Pearl's funeral - with one surprise guest.

Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant is a generational saga about a family slow to learn from its past. It is a warning about what can happen when families are incapable of change, and how the sins of one generation can make life miserable for the next. Now the question is whether or not this latest Tull family dinner at the Homesick Restaurant is also going to be the last one - or if they finally get it right.

Dust jacket photo, disclaimer and all

Clete - James Lee Burke

 

I finally discovered James Lee Burke in 1990, some four books into his Dave Robicheaux series, when my favorite bookseller of all time put a copy of The Neon Rain in my hands and said "you have to take this one home with you." Thirty-four years later I've enjoyed almost forty of Burke's novels, including all twenty-four Robicheaux books, and I'm thrilled that Burke is still adding to the series. But the series addition I've been itching for for a while now is one featuring Clete Purcell, Dave's soulmate, and I finally got it. 

Clete Purcell has shared most of his life's experiences with Dave Robicheaux. The two had each other's backs in Vietnam, then again as frustrated New Orleans Police Department cops, and have continued to watch over each other now that Dave is a sheriff's detective for New Iberia Parish and Clete is working as a New Iberia private detective. If one of them is in trouble, the other can be counted on to show up with guns blazing - and this time around, Clete is going to need all the firepower he can get. 

Trouble has a way of finding people like Clete Purcell even if it has to find his Cadillac convertible first. Shortly after picking the Caddy up from a local car wash, Clete wakes up to find four thugs systematically taking the car apart. What they are looking for he hasn't a clue, but Clete does have a good idea about who might have stashed something in the car without his permission. Clete's grandniece died of a fentanyl overdose, and if there's anything he hates more than fentanyl, it's the people who deal it. So it's a red hot Clete Purcell who returns to the car wash to get some answers.

But it won't be that simple because before Clete even gets started a pretty young woman calling herself Clara Bow asks him to investigate her evil ex-husband. Clara pushes all the right buttons. She's exactly the type of woman Clete can never resist rescuing, even when it puts his own life in danger, so now things are certain to get a lot more complicated for Clete Purcell and Dave Robicheaux. If they don't figure this thing out quickly, it is not only Southwest Louisiana that's in trouble - the rest of the world will pay a heavy price.

James Lee Burke paints a dark picture when it comes to good vs. evil, and he pretty much always has. When it comes to portraying evilness, Burke doesn't blink - but he saves his best writing for flawed white knights like Clete and Dave. Burke believes that a few good men willing to stop evil in its tracks no matter the personal cost can impact the world for centuries to come. Dave Robicheaux and Clete Purcell are two of those good men.

Longtime readers of the Dave Robicheaux series will especially enjoy Clete because they get to experience Dave through the eyes of the man who knows him best. As powerful as this story is, I still could not help but chuckle when I realized that each of the men sees the other as the craziest and most dangerous of the pair. They both believe that the other has to be protected from himself and his urges - and both of them are correct. What a team.

James Lee Burke author photo

(Clete will be published on June 11, 2024. Look for it then.)

What I'm Reading This Week (May 20, 2024)

Last week turned out to be a lot different than I had anticipated it would be. First the good news: it was one of those rare weeks during which I actually finished up four books: Remarkably Bright Creatures, Displaced Persons, The Coast Road, and Clete. Even better, I really enjoyed the latter three books...a lot. 

Now for the bad news: Houston endured one of the most powerful thunderstorms in its history on Thursday night. We all know here what to expect from a hurricane or one of those tropical storms that sit atop the city for two or three days, but the intensity of this thunderstorm surprised all of us. Overnight we experienced wind gusts of up to 117 mph and sustained winds of 60 mph over much of the county. Seven people were killed, most of them from being crushed by falling trees, and well over a million people lost power anywhere from a few hours to several days. As of this morning, some 300,000 people in the area still don't have electricity - and high temperatures are going to be in the nineties all week long so I pity them. Thankfully, repair crews from Oklahoma and Louisiana are here in large numbers to help out the local utility companies. Below is an example of what that kind of wind is capable of and what the repair crews are dealing with:

These are the massive transmission towers that you see in lots of the county right-of-ways around here.

So there was that. 

Although I begin this new week with three books in progress, I'm really not far enough into any of them yet to know if they will stick: Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler, Dad Camp by Evan S. Porter, and The Humans by Matt Haig. I am pretty certain that I'll be completing my re-read of the Tyler novel, and I like what I've read from The Humans so far, but Dad Camp is not really doing it for me. Only thirty pages in, and I already find myself avoiding it in favor of just about anything else I have on hand. Definitely not a good sign.

I also spent a little time slimming down my immediate TBR last week, resulting in the abandonment of two books and the decision not to begin another at all. I have two library holds to pick up this week that I'm really curious about, so I needed to make a little room for them anyway - an essay collection by Shannon Reed called Why We Read and a fantasy novel by Julia Alvarez called The Cemetery of Untold Stories. But since I'm also in the mood to pare down the number of books I have going at once, I think it was a good time to dump those three.

The only other Matt Haig novel I've read up to now is The Midnight Library, a fantasy novel I had mixed feelings about, and The Humans sounds every bit as strange as that one. It's a story about an alien from a planet much more advanced than Earth who is sent on a special mission to this planet by his leaders - a mission that Earthlings, for good reason, are not going to appreciate. The alien is at first disgusted by everything about humans, but he gradually changes his mind and learns to appreciate them. The main reason I want to try this one is because I recently enjoyed a season of a television series called Resident Alien that seems to share much the same premise. I don't know if the television shows were based on this novel - they don't appear to be - but the similarities are striking. 

Dad Camp is described this way by the Dutton people: "A heartwarming novel about a loving dad who drags his eleven-year-old daughter to 'father-daughter week' at a remote summer camp - their last chance to bond before he loses her to teenage girlhood entirely." I was in the mood for an old-fashioned feel-good novel when I chose this one, but through the first thirty pages or so, all the characters feel like such clichés that I'm struggling to get back to it. I hope it proves me wrong soon; otherwise it's going to end up in the DNF basket.

I'm curious to see if cutting back to two simultaneous reads slows me down or speeds me up. I hope that choosing the right two books will keep me invested enough that I don't stray during the week if something shinier catches my eye. It's not so much that reading six or seven books at a time hasn't worked well enough for me, because it has. It's more a desire to shake up the whole reading experience a little bit than anything else.

In the relatively immediate wings are these:

I have the feeling that I'm going to be DNFing books a lot quicker than in the recent past because it doesn't happen very often that continuing with a book I was already doubting at the 50-page mark has paid off. I'd say it happens positively for me maybe twice in every ten decisions to keep reading beyond my arbitrary page-limit. I've only abandoned seven books during 2024, but I can think of at least another half-dozen I wish I'd abandoned - and that's not a fun way to read for anyone. Thank you, Remarkably Bright Creatures.

Here's hoping that you all have great weeks, reading and otherwise. I'm looking forward to making my 220-mile roundtrip to have lunch with some old high school friends on Thursday, something I always enjoy. Happy Reading!

The Coast Road - Alan Murrin

 

The Coast Road, set in Ireland in the mid-nineties when divorce was still illegal in Ireland, is a story about three women and their families. The women live in one of those small towns where everyone knows the business of everyone else in town and lives to talk about it, so when Colette convinces Dolores and her husband to rent her their empty cottage, a cottage in sight of the family home, secrets are not destined to be kept for very long. And that's going to be a big problem for all three of them.

First we meet, Izzy and her husband James. Izzy is not particularly happy with James, a local politician, these days. James probably feels the same way, but he doesn't seem to focus a whole lot on anything much other than staying popular with the voting public, so he's happy enough, really, with things as they are. Next up, are Dolores and Donal, parents of three small children, who are working hard just to make ends meet. Now, Colette, who has abandoned her own three sons to live with a man in Dublin, offers them the chance to earn a little rental income on a property otherwise never used so, of course, they jump at the chance.        

The three women obviously have cracks in their marriages, but in 1995 Ireland there is little a woman can do to end an unhappy marriage or to escape an abusive husband. She is forever tied to her husband in the eyes of the law as well as, according to the Church, in the eyes of God. And this combination of Izzy, who gets roped into helping Colette see her son behind her husband's back; Dolores, whose husband recognizes just how vulnerable Colette is as soon as he sees her; and Colette, who in her despair turns to drink, is not one that is going to help anybody's marriage. 

It's hard to imagine that divorce was still illegal in Ireland only 30 years ago, but I remember what a big deal it was when the referendum on legalizing divorce passed by a one percent margin in 1995. Alan Murrin has done a remarkable job capturing that period and the quiet despair that so many thousands of Irish women experienced then. Izzy, Colette, and Dolores are three women right on the cusp of being at least offered choices they have never had before. Whether or not it will be too late for them is the rest of the story Murrin tells in The Coast Road.

And it's a good one.

Alan Murrin publisher photo

(The Coast Road will be published on June 4, 2024. Look for it then.)

Displaced Persons - Joan Leegant

 

I generally read about ten short story compilations a year, and even though I've been doing that for quite a long time now, I've found very few story collections as consistently good as Joan Leegant's Displaced Persons.  

The stories, half of which take place in Israel and half in the United States, share a common theme hinted at by the book's title. Each features one or more "displaced persons" struggling to fit into a world that bears little resemblance to the one left behind. Some characters manage the transition with limited difficulty, some take years even to begin feeling comfortable with the change, and others never manage the job at all. Regardless, Leegant's people have more in common than not. 

The seven stories set in Israel are presented in "Part One: The East." "The East" includes stories about those who left and the people they left behind, such as "The Baghdadi," in which an Iraqi Jew moves to Israel against the wishes of his father, or the story about a young Israeli who, against the wishes of his mother, wants to make a fresh start by moving to Germany. There are stories about "displaced" Americans naive enough to get themselves into dangerous situations, such as the one about two sixteen-year-old girls whose youthful rebelliousness places them in life-altering danger they will be lucky to escape. And there are stories about others who come to Israel expecting to go back home soon only to find that they have finally found in Israel the real home they've been yearning for.

The seven stories in "Part Two: The West" are about a different kind of displacement, one in which American Jewish families are more often than not coming apart at the seams. These stories are more about generational and religious displacement than about the physical kind. Some stories tell of children who no longer feel connected to the old ways of their immigrant parents, others of disillusioned elders who have lost the faith much to the dismay of their children. There are stories here about redemption and the kind of wisdom that comes only with age and experience. They are stories about people trying to figure out who they are and where they fit into the world. 

Displaced Persons offers, I think, an especially timely glimpse into Jewish life both in Israel and in the United States, and what it is like to be caught between those two very different worlds during the turbulent times we live in today. Joan Leegant has packed so much into these twenty-something-page stories that I will remember them for a long time to come. 

Joan Leegant jacket photo

(This New American Fiction Prize winner will be published in early June 2024. Look for it then.)

What I'm Reading This Week (May 13, 2024)

 

Remarkably Bright Creatures was one of the hottest books of 2022 and, at least in my recollection, of 2023. I got on my library wait list a little late and finally threw in the towel when I realized that it would be most of a year before I would get hold of it that way. It wasn't until this year that I thought about the novel again and decided to get back on the list - and I still started at number 65. But I had also signed up for the large print edition book and started the wait for that one in the mid-twenties. As it turns out, the wait for that edition was only three weeks, and I spent a lot of time last week finally reading Remarkably Bright Creatures. With just a few pages to go, I'm still not sure what to think of it - and that's probably not a good thing. 

I did finish up both Alice McDermott's Absolution and the Mark Twain classic The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as well, and made good starts on James Lee Burke's Clete and Alan Murrin's The Coast Road. Too, I've started re-reading Anne Tyler's Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, the novel that turned me into a lifetime fan of Tyler's work the first time that I read it back in the eighties - and I'm down to the last short story in Joan Leegant's Displaced Persons. This was one of those weeks that I found it particularly hard to focus, so I found myself moving from book to book quicker than I normally do, with shorter bursts of reading that I don't find nearly as satisfying as reading at least fifty or so pages from one book before moving on to the next. I do hope that changes this week.

Clete is a little bit different in that it is being correctly marketed as book number 24 in James Lee Burke's Dave Robicheaux series despite Dave being very much a secondary character in the novel - at least through the first third of the book. This time around the narrator is Clete Purcell, a private investigator who has been Dave's closest friend since their days in Vietnam. Once again, Dave and Clete are dealing with some truly evil people in small town Louisiana, but it's been eye-opening to see Dave through the eyes of a man who knows him better than anyone else in the world could ever know him. (I've read the first 23 books in the series so it's interesting to learn that Clete sees him a bit differently than I see him.)

I'm about thirty percent of the way through The Coast Road and I still haven't settled into it comfortably. The characters, all of whom are women with marital problems of one degree or another, have not separated themselves in my mind yet, and that makes it hard to keep up with the intricacies of their day-to-day experiences together. It's still hard to know which of them can be relied on to tell the truth and which of them are lying to themselves. I do expect this one to suck me in soon - well at least I hope that's about to happen.

I first read Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant in 1983 or so, and it turned out to be one of those books that influenced my reading for decades to come. It made me a lifetime fan of Anne Tyler's work, and I've pretty much read everything she's ever written now. But guess what? I don't remember a whole lot about the plot anymore, only how immersed I ended up being in the world Tyler created and how fascinating I found the characters to be. This is one of those risky re-reads that I hope doesn't end up lessening my fondness for a book that's been on my shelves for a long, long time.

Oh, and I also gave up on Susan Orlean's On Animals because the pieces I read from the essay collection didn't seem to work together as a whole. Maybe if I had read them as standalone magazine articles they would have struck me differently. 

The little stack of books still waiting for their turn includes this bunch:

That's my Monday morning start to the week. I do have a couple of short road trips scheduled for later this week: a baseball game against Arkansas over in College Station and a lunch date with a few of my old high school friends down toward Beaumont, but it looks like we're in for another round of hard rains that are likely to wash out both trips. Whether that ends up translating into more reading time or more time frittered away remains to be seen. 

I hope you are all doing well, and I hope to visit a bunch of blogs this week that I missed out on last week...have fun.