Review: Somebody's Fool by Richard Russo

 

Somebody's Fool is the third book in Richard Russo's series featuring Donald "Sully" Sullivan and his family. The two preceding books are titled Nobody's Fool (1993) and Everybody's Fool (2016). I have to admit that the number of years between the sequels did make Somebody's Fool read more like a standalone at first, but once I became reacquainted with the characters and their relationships, it all started to feel like one big reunion. It was fun to catch up again with everyone in North Bath, New York. (Please do note that Somebody's Fool can definitely be enjoyed as a standalone.)

By this point in the story, "Sully" has been dead for ten years and he would barely recognize all the changes in North Bath. For one thing, the town is being annexed by the larger, wealthier community that abuts it - and the North Bath police department is being eliminated. Peter, Sully's son is still in North Bath, and is dutifully checking in on everyone on the list that Sully left behind for him while he renovates the old house Sully inherited shortly before his death. Sully would like that a lot. But things take a much less positive turn one day when one of Peter's two estranged sons suddenly appears on his doorstep carrying a grudge about the way that Peter abandoned him and his younger brother years ago to their crazy mother to raise. Now Peter worries that he has been as bad a father to his three boys as Sully was to him. And it looks like he's right.

As readers of the earlier books will remember, however, this series is not just about the Sullivans. All of the old characters, along with a few new ones, also get their day in the sun in this one. 

Ruth (Sully's married mistress) is struggling to find a reason to go on, caught in the middle, as she is, between her daughter and her granddaughter. Doug Raymer, the newly jobless police chief of North Bath, is wondering what will be next for him now that his former girlfriend has been appointed police chief in the annexing city, but he barely has time to figure things out before a body is found hanging in an abandoned North Bath hotel. Because Raymer is so familiar with everyone in town, it makes sense that he be hired to help figure out what that is all about - and he even inherits the mixed-up twin brother of his ex-lover to help him in the investigation.

Richard Russo (jacket photo)

As you can see, it is all rather complicated, but Russo does a masterful job telling the story by alternating chapters between the two main threads of the plot: what's going on with Peter and his sons, and what's happening with Raymer and his investigation while he tries to get back together with his ex. All of the secondary characters (some of whom prove not to be secondary at all in the end) come and go in both threads until everything merges beautifully by the end of the book. Russo has done it again. (I'm going to call this one a 4.5-star book, rounded up to 5 stars for rating purposes.)

Review: The Banned Bookshop of Maggie Banks by Shauna Robinson

 

Shauna Robinson's The Banned Bookshop of Maggie Banks is one of those light fantasies that avid readers really enjoy immersing themselves into for a few days...especially when, as in this one, an appealing bookstore is thrown into the mix. 

Lead character Maggie Banks is a young woman between jobs, so coming to Bell River to run a friend's bookshop while that friend goes on maternity leave is a complete no-brainer. Maggie plans to be in and out of Bell River in a matter of weeks so that she can resume her job search. But something happens; Maggie finds herself falling in love with the town, many of its residents, and one special guy who just so happens to work for the bookstore's majority owner - who turns out to be also the store's worst enemy. By buying controlling interests in various businesses in town, this man has been able to transform Bell River into a shrine to his dead grandfather, Edward Bell, a mid-century author whose reputation he fiercely protects and profits from. 

According to legend, Edward Bell wrote his breakthrough novel at a small table inside what is now Cobblestone Books. For that reason, Cobblestone has become almost a Bell museum and the store is now forbidden to sell any book published after 1968. Notably, there are no other bookstores in town, and the only reliable customers Cobblestone has are literary tourists who come there to purchase Bell's books along with an occasional classic.

Maggie, though, is not a rule-follower, and she is determined to make the store more profitable during her friend's absence. That, as it turns out, translates into selling books "under the counter" and an upstairs bookclub that finds creative ways to rewrite the classics being sold downstairs in the bookshop. Disaster, of course, is always a breath away because the Bell grandson is inevitably going to find out what is really responsible for the increased sales at Cobblestone sooner or later. And when he does...well you can imagine what will happen.

I had a lot of fun reading The Banned Bookshop of Maggie Banks, but I was a little disappointed in the way its ultimate climax is resolved. What happens is predictable, but that's not really my gripe. It comes down to more of a problem with how drastically one of the principle characters very suddenly has to change personality in order for this particular ending to make any sense at all. Bell River's problems are just too easily and quickly resolved for me to have felt comfortable in that wonderful fantasy world all the way to the end. Of course, other readers may consider that all part of the fantasy world that Robinson creates here. If they do, they will absolutely love The Banned Bookshop of Maggie Banks.

Shauna Robinson

What I'm Reading This Week (August 7, 2023)

 Last week was another good reading week for me during which I managed to read and review four of the six books I came into the week reading. I also made good progress on Richard Russo's Somebody's Fool and Shauna Robinson's The Banned Bookshop of Maggie Banks. And, happily enough, I'm really enjoying both of those - despite how really different from each other they are.

So I'll start with those two and then add the other books I've started or am about to start:

Richard Russo is the absolute master of the slowly building climax. Just about the time the reader begins to wonder where it is all headed, all of the seemingly unimportant, individual dramas in a Russo novel start to combine in ways that were hard to anticipate. I'm 300 pages into Somebody's Fool, and the intricacies of this one are finally growing clearer to me; now I'm finding it difficult to put the book down. I realized this morning that even though I've read about half of Russo's back catalogue, there's a whole lot of his work yet to enjoy and look forward to.

I keep saying (mostly to myself) that books like this one are not really the kind of thing I enjoy reading - but once again a Rom-Com of a novel is proving to be a whole lot of fun. I have about 75 pages to go, and The Banned Bookshop of Maggie Banks is right on the verge of reaching its long anticipated climax. It's all very far fetched, especially in the current business climate, but the characters are pretty much all enjoyable, even the villain of the piece, so it verifies that any book with "bookshop" in the title deserves at least a second look.

Actor Sam Heughan is, of course, best known for his leading role in the long-running Outlander series. About the only other thing I knew about the man when I began Waypoints is his extreme love of, and pride in, his Scottish heritage. I'm about 40 pages in, and have learned that Waypoints is as much a biography as it is a memoir about the author's 96-mile solo trek across the Scottish Highlands in the dead of winter. I've also learned that Heughan's prose is not all that compelling, but it's definitely enough to keep me turning the pages.

Chenneville (the last name of this historical novel's main character) is scheduled for a mid-September publication. I'm a fan of the novels of Paulette Jiles, so I was really pleased to get my hands on an advance reading copy of this one. I'm about 40% done now, and this story of a wounded Union soldier who returns to his family home near St. Louis several months after the war only to learn the tragedies his family suffered during the war is a compelling one. Set on personal revenge, Chenneville is tracking down the man responsible for what happened - from Missouri to Texas.

Fans of the kind of "pulp fiction" written primarily in the forties and fifties are likely familiar with the name Cornell Woolrich, one of the best, and most underrated, writer of that style of noir fiction. Black Is the Night is a collection of 30 new short stories supposedly written in Woolrich's style as a tribute to him. I've read the first four stories in the compilation, and I'm a bit concerned because usually a short story collection opens with at least one or two of its better pieces. If that's the case here, I might not be finishing this one...kind of underwhelmed at this point.

I've enjoyed Deborah Crombie's Duncan Kincaid/Gemma James books for a number of years now, but I've probably only read about half of the books in the series. Since I'm taking forever to catch-up on the series, I thought it might be a good time to read the latest of them, A Killing of Innocents. I still find it hard sometimes to remember that Crombie is a Texan and not a Brit because of how well she captures that part of the world in her novels. From the few pages I've read so far, this one promises to be another worthy addition to the series.

It always happens, and this week will likely be no exception; I'm probably going to pick up a couple of books not mentioned here, and there's always the chance that one or two of these will end up on my "abandoned books" list. But that's the fun of keeping a long TBR list, isn't it?

I want to briefly mention that I "discovered" a new genre author this morning at my local library. The library search-and-hold app has been acting up a bit these last two days, so I spent more time studying the shelves than I usually do. A little book titled Holmes Entangled caught my attention - and the description inside did the trick. In this one Holmes is a "real" person in his seventies who has retired from solving crimes and mysteries. But then he's approached by the Arthur Conan Doyle (author of all the Sherlock Holmes novels) to identify the person threatening Doyle's life. That premise is just hard to resist.

Right next to the Holmes novel sat one by the same author called Woman with a Blue Pencil about a Japanese American "academic" who can't get seem any help from the WWII era Los Angeles cops to solve his wife's murder. He's getting nowhere on his own - not realizing that he is an author's "discarded fictional creation," not a real person. 

The author responsible for both these novels is Gordon McAlpine, and I know absolutely nothing about him or his work. Any fans/readers of his out there? 

Review: Lucy by the Sea

 

Lucy by the Sea is Elizabeth Strout's fourth Lucy Barton novel, all of them part of what has come to be known as Strout's Amgash (Illinois) series. The earlier books in the series are My Name Is Lucy Barton (2016), Anything Is Possible (2017), and Oh, William! (2021). The Amgash books followed Strout's Olive Kitteridge, a collection of interconnected short stories that won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2009, and to the joy of Olive Kitteridge fans everywhere, Olive continues to make appearances in Strout's books - including several cameos in Lucy by the Sea. In between Olive Kitteridge and the first Lucy Barton book, Strout published The Burgess Boys, my own personal favorite of her novels. 

"We are all in lockdown, all the time. We just don't know it, that's all. But we do the best we can. Most of us are just trying to get through." Lucy by the Sea, Elizabeth Strout, page 287 

Lucy by the Sea, set largely in 2020 is also Strout's "covid novel," as it takes a brutally honest and vividly accurate look at how life was so drastically changed (if not ended) for so many people during the height of all the government-induced paranoia of that long, long year. As the novel begins, Lucy's ex-husband William has convinced her and one of their two adult daughters that they all need to flee New York City or face the likelihood of dying there. Consequently, Lucy and William quarantine themselves in a large rented home in Maine, while their daughter does the same with her husband on property belonging to her in-laws. 

The novel resolves some of the situations left open in Oh, William! over the next few months as Lucy, William, and the few people they manage to see during all the confusion (all the while, of course, socially distancing themselves and wearing masks even outdoors) adapt to the new lifestyle foisted upon the world. The novel ends on what I will call a hopeful note only after Lucy, William, and both their daughters resolve soul searching issues of their own. Now I can't wait to find out how Lucy and William are doing in the relatively post-covid world. Here's hoping this isn't the final chapter in the Lucy Barton saga. 

Review: Where I Come From by Rick Bragg

 

I recently found myself in the mood for an audiobook and, as it turns out, I could not have chosen a more perfect one to fit my mood than Rick Bragg's 2020 collection Where I Come From. And just to top it all off, Bragg himself is the perfect reader/narrator for this collection of columns originally published in the likes of Southern Living and Garden & Gun magazines. The book, in fact, turns out to be one of the best memoirs I've read this year.

Rick Bragg grew up in rural Alabama, and he only has to open his mouth for people to figure that out. The man's heart took its first beats  in Alabama, and it still beats strongest when he is somewhere in the Deep South. (A word of advice: Listeners to Bragg's narration should not expect him to get the job done quickly. Southerners don't work that way. So, please, for your own sake, resist the temptation to kick up the man's verbal pace to 125% - or more - on your listening device. You'll soon learn to appreciate the author's pace and how much it adds to his substantial storytelling charm.)

The collected columns are all very personal ones addressing everything from what Harper Lee and her book mean to Southerners and the world, to his deep love for Tupperware, to the most satisfying way to kill fire ants (especially the ones that have already claimed their pound of flesh from your legs), to sharing a series of fictional letters he has written to Santa over the years in an attempt to stay on the fat man's "good list." And those are all great.

But I got some of my best laughs at the author's thoughts on his experiences of being solidly locked inside Atlanta's terrible traffic jams, his wonderfully comic takes on his mother's behavior and opinions, his sincere love of mongrel dogs, and his banteringly competitive relationship with his brothers. Bragg shares a talent usually only found in the best of comedians; he can make you laugh out loud because of his willingness to expose the silliness and absurd behavior of himself and those closest to him - all the while making you laugh with those people, not at them.

Where I Come From is a reminder that we are pretty much all alike, and how important it is these days to be able to laugh a little bit at ourselves. Don't read this one...let Rick Bragg read it to you.

Review: All the Sinners Bleed by S. A. Cosby

 

All the Sinners Bleed is S.A. Cosby's fourth standalone novel, and I'm sad to say that I never fully engaged with this one, primarily because it seems to lack almost all of the subtlety evident in Cosby's earlier novels.

Sheriff Titus Crown is the first black sheriff in the history of his  Virginia county, and he is still finding it a bit hard to settle into a job he never really expected he would have in his hometown even after a career with the FBI. He knows that some in the community will never accept a black man in such a high position of authority, and he knows that there is really very little he can ever do to change their minds. 

But that's not even close to being Sheriff Crown's biggest problem after he is suddenly confronted with a school shooting in which a young black man kills a beloved school teacher before himself being gunned down by deputies in front of the school. Crown's investigation leads to the discovery that several black teenagers have been tortured and murdered in his county without anyone even noticing. Equally horrifying is Crown's discovery that there is still an active serial killer out there somewhere threatening not only every young black person in the county, but also Titus Crown himself and everyone he personally holds dear. 

The plot has all the makings of a rip-roaring crime novel, and Cosby executes it well, disguising the identity of the serial killer right up to the end of the novel - although for readers who take pride in solving the crime before the Big Reveal, I'm not sure that enough clues are given to make that likely in this case. And Titus Crown is a very sympathetic character right from the beginning, although early on he does comes dangerously close to being too good to be true. So why did I not enjoy this one as much as the three Cosby novels that precede it?

Because it's preachy and heavy-handed when addressing racial issues and race relations. Rather than send the same messages, and make the exact same points, in the subtle manner Cosby managed it in his earlier novels, he beats readers over the head with it in All the Sinners Bleed. At one point near the end of the book, three chapters in a row become almost boring because of that technique, and all I could think of was getting past them to see who the killer is. And that's a shame, because Cosby's other novels left me thinking about the issues he addresses in them. This one not so much. Too, I can't help but notice that this one has more than its share of stereotypical characters, just one more thing that makes All the Sinners Bleed less believable and emotionally touching than previous Cosby work. 

I'm disappointed more than anything else, I suppose, because I don't see a lot here that will make All the Sinners Bleed stand out from the crowd in the long run.