Revisiting my childhood is like standing on the shores of a turbulent sea: achingly beautiful and dangerous – the thunderclap of breakers, the foamlicks of crests, the way swells undulate, graceful as pregnant women, the boil of froth through sand in a rip tide. And I, who never learned to swim, long to submerge myself in those pristine days when miracles were possible, when everyone still loved me. – from Solitaria, page 107 -

Vito Santoro’s body is unearthed at an Italian villa and this discovery sends shock waves through his large, extended family. For decades, Vito’s sister, Piera, has been telling the family Vito was sending her letters from Argentina – so what is the truth about his death? Piera seems to be the only one with answers, but she is refusing to talk to anyone except her Canadian nephew, David. Eager to solve the mystery, Vito’s siblings, wife, nephews and nieces converge on Piera’s villa in Italy where long ago secrets are revealed, rivalries are re-established, and the answers to Vito’s apparent murder become murkier than ever.

Genni Gunn’s novel, Solitaria, is told primarily during the 1940s in the first person voice of Piera, a solitary and intractable woman who is the matriarch of her family.

Donna Piera – La Solitaria, as she is referred to by the townspeople – is not docile or senile, ill or still. She rarely goes out of her house, yet people of her generation cross themselves when they hear her name – either as a protection against her or as a benediction towards her. She is not bedridden, penniless, or feeble. She interacts with the world outside her house through the telephone, with a tongue so sharp and barbed, people inspect their ears after a call, looking for puncture marks. – from Solitaria, page 136-7

Piera is controlling, manipulative and weaves tales from her childhood which at times seem hardly believable. In fact, Piera as narrator is unreliable. Her sisters and brothers have different memories of the same events and her sister-in-law (Vito’s wife, Teresa, who barely tolerates Piera) remembers Vito as a dedicated and devoted husband. The reason for the conflict between Piera and Teresa becomes more clear as the story unspools. Through Piera’s voice, Gunn explores the unreliability of memory, creating an uneasy novel where the truth is always a little out of reach.

Piera’s story is not the only thread which weaves through this literary novel. David, her nephew, is revealed in alternating chapters which take place in modern times. David is a man unsettled. He carries on a long-distance relationship with a woman named Bernette who is still a mystery to him. David seems to be as solitary in nature as Piera.

Two marvelous years of nothing. They hardly know each other. Three times this past year, they’ve met in a city mid-way between their homes and fucked for a weekend. Weak. Weak. End. – from Solitaria, page 10 -

Gunn meshes the lives of David and Piera to reveal the underpinnings of a complicated family. Vito’s murder becomes the lynchpin around which the lives of the characters spin. Through the memories of Vito, the reader begins to get a glimpse of the convoluted family relationships. If the characters cannot agree as to what happened to Vito, they can agree that he was the catalyst for the drama and dysfunction in a family whose lives were dictated by tradition, family secrets, and political and social upheaval in 1940s Italy.

The children were all seated in a circle around Vito. He was the stranger they feared and wanted to become. He was their black sheep, the disgraced one, their brother, their hero. – from Solitaria, page 95-

Gunn’s novel is an elaborate narrative which is quite literary in style. The pace of the book is slow at times, especially those chapters which deal with the modern day relationships. The sections where the reader gets to hear Piera’s unique voice are more compelling. Despite an ending which I could see coming, the novel manages to keep the reader engaged until the final page.

Readers interested in Italian history during the 1940s, and those who enjoy family sagas and literary fiction will find Gunn’s novel an interesting look at the complexities of human behavior within a family.

Solitaria was long-listed for the prestigious Giller Prize this year.

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Read more reviews:

• Historical Novel Review
• The Mookse and the Gripes
• The Koala Bear Writer
• Jenn’s Bookshelves
• Top Mystery Novels
• Reading Matters

Are you a book blogger who has read and reviewed this book? Leave me a link in the comments to your review and I’ll add it to the list above.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Genni Gunn is a writer, musician and translator. Born in Trieste, she came to Canada  when she was eleven. She has published nine books: three novels—Solitaria, Tracing Iris and Thrice Upon a Time; two short story collections—Hungers and On The Road; two poetry collections— Faceless and Mating in Captivity. As well, she has translated from Italian two collections of poems—Devour Me Too and Traveling in the Gait of a Fox by renowned Italian author, Dacia Maraini. One of Genni’s books, Mating in Captivity, has been translated into Italian. Two more are forthcoming next year. Read more about Gunn and her work by visiting the author’s website.

FTC Disclosure: Many thinks to the publisher who provided me a copy of this book through Diane Saarinen for a blog tour of the novel.

First Sentence: “I was born on a Tuesday morning. It was a difficult birth, because I was thirty-four years old.”

When Jonathan Hooper wakes up after six years in a coma due to a stroke, he is unable to speak and has lost his ability to understand numbers. His awakening is considered a miracle since he was never expected to recover. Jonathan has no memory of who he used to be. He ends up in a rehabilitation hospital where he meets Rebecca, a young woman who is also a stroke victim who is trying to rebuild her life.

From the Publisher:

A steadily accelerating story exploring the irony, humor, and opportunity that can accompany personal calamity, Me Again follows the intertwined paths of two people forced to start over in life: one looking for his place in a world that has moved on without him, the other struggling to navigate a relationship with a man who wishes she were someone else.

I read the first 75 pages of Me Again before setting it aside. Although I appreciated Jonathan’s voice and the struggle to recover from a devastating neurological event, I had a hard time buying into the novel. Perhaps because my profession is as a physical therapist, I found the scenes in the rehabilitation hospital mostly unbelievable. Jonathan’s physical therapist is represented as an unprofessional womanizer and nearly all the stroke rehabilitation scenes were inaccurate. Both Jonathan and Rebecca refer to their physical therapists as “trainers” – a phrase which I have never heard in the nearly 24 years I have been working as a PT. Rebecca’s physical therapist would rather watch a football game on television than assist Rebecca to walk in the parallel bars (this was especially odd to me given that I have never worked in a rehabilitation gym where there is a television on, much less a football game). So, although this book is getting some great reviews, it was not for me.

On a positive note – Keith Cronin is donating 25% of all proceeds from the book to the American Stroke Association.

Check out reviews by other bloggers on this tour.

About the Author:

Keith Cronin is a corporate speechwriter and professional rock drummer who has performed and recorded with artists including Bruce Springsteen, Clarence Clemons, and Pat Travers. He is also becoming informally known as “the title guy,” having provided the title for Sara Gruen’s blockbuster “Water for Elephants,” as well as Susan Henderson’s HarperCollins debut “Up from the Blue.”

Keith’s fiction has appeared in Carve Magazine, Amarillo Bay, The Scruffy Dog Review, Zinos, and a University of Phoenix management course. A native of South Florida, Keith spends his free time serenading local ducks and squirrels with his ukulele.

Visit him online at his website, keithcronin.com, or on Facebook.

I thought of reeds bending but not breaking in the wind, and the strength of roots holding down the reeds – and the force of wind itself, blowing. I was tired of being the reed. – from Touch and Go -

Kevin has been blind since a tragic childhood accident. He is still struggling with staying clean and sober after a drug addiction which left him homeless and hopeless. Now living with Isa (a woman he met in a drug treatment center) and her sometimes brutal and abusive husband, Patrick, Kevin clings to the love he has found with Isa and Patrick’s two foster children – Devon a black teenager on the verge of violence, and Ray, a twelve year old who still mourns the loss of his mother. When Patrick and Isa come up with the idea to load a garish coffin onto the top of their car and drive from California to Florida with their children in order to visit Isa’s dying father, Kevin decides to go along with them. The trip, ill conceived and tense, becomes a nightmare of lies, greed, betrayal, and finally Hurricane Katrina.

Touch and Go, Thad Nodine’s debut novel, is narrated in the perceptive voice of Kevin – a man who has lost his vision and his way and is struggling to find love and acceptance. Kevin is a character who finds himself involved in a love triangle with two very damaged people. Isa is bipolar, unpredictable, and battling her own demons while Patrick views the world through a narcissist’s eyes and uses his intellect and manipulations to get what he wants regardless of who it will injure.

Patrick was always threatening without filling in the blanks, so he couldn’t be held accountable. He called himself a Christian Libertarian; I don’t know if he invented the term or got it from somewhere, but it gave him a belief system (after the recovery home, anyway) that was open and rigid at the same time. As a Libertarian, he believed in maximum freedom – under God, which was the Christian side of the equation. Take it or leave it; it’s up to you whether you want to be saved, but don’t try to butt in on Patrick’s freedoms. – From Touch and Go -

The two children in the novel are compelling. Both Ray and Devon have lost their childhood innocence to adults who have failed in their basic responsibility to care for them. As part of Patrick and Isa’s family, they have come to count on two things: Patrick’s anger, and Kevin’s compassion. As the novel unspools and this patched together family finds themselves on the Gulf Coast in the path of Hurricane Katrina, the reader begins to fear the worst.

Touch and Go explores the definition of family by going deeply inside the relationships of the characters.

I don’t know how any of us find our place in this world except in relation to others. – from Touch and Go -

The novel also looks at prejudice, multiculturalism in the United States, domestic violence, drug addiction, redemption, survival, and the idea of self-determination. Nodine’s characters are multifaceted and carefully developed – none are all good or all bad, yet all have complicated and tragic pasts, as well as secrets, which influence their decisions and actions.

I raced through this book in just about two days. Nodine provides excellent pacing for a novel which is clearly in the literary genre. If there is a fault, it is that he tends to wrap things up a little too neatly in the end. Despite that minor complaint, I found myself thoroughly enjoying Kevin’s unique perception of the world. Some of the novel’s best moments were the glimpses into Kevin’s relationship with the two children – a heartwarming exploration of nontraditional parenting.

Readers who enjoy literary fiction will want to add Thad Nodine’s work to their must read list.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Thad Nodine grew up in Florida and now lives in Santa Cruz. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in many magazines. Touch and Go, which won the Dana Award for the Novel, is his first novel. Read more about Nodine and his work by visiting the author’s website.

FTC Disclosure: Many thanks to the publisher who sent me this novel for review on my blog.

I will tie the glass and stone with string, hang the shards above my bed, so that they will flash in the dark and tell the story of Katrina, the mother that swept into the Gulf and slaughtered.  Her chariot was a storm so great and black the Greeks would say it was harnessed to dragons. She was the murderous mother who cut us to the bone but left us alive, left us naked and bewildered as wrinkled newborn babies, as blind puppies, as sun-starved newly hatched baby snakes. She left us a dark Gulf and salt-burned land. She left us to learn to crawl. She left us to salvage. Katrina is the mother we will remember until the next mother with large, merciless hands, committed to blood, comes. – from Salvage the Bones -

Esch is fourteen and pregnant, living with her brothers and her father on a hardscrabble piece of land they call “The Pit” in the small, coastal town of Bois Sauvage, Mississippi. Left motherless when their mother died giving birth to Junior, who is now seven years old, the siblings are fiercely loyal to each other. Skeetah, devoted to his fighting dog, China, is determined to stand up to their father – a man who has been mostly absent and drunk, and can become volatile and abusive.

He reaches to grab Skeetah’s arm, to pull him to standing and then shove him, probably. This is what he does when he wants to manhandle, humiliate; he pulls one of us toward him, shakes, and then shoves us hard backward so that we fall in the dirt. So that we sprawl like toddlers learning to walk: dirt on our faces and our hands, faces wet with crying or mucus, ashamed. – from Salvage the Bones -

Randall, the eldest boy, longs to find his way out of The Pit through his skill as a basketball player. Junior, too young to fully understand the family dynamics, clings to Randall. Junior’s innocence, his childish body and desperate longing for attention, are heartbreaking.

Sometimes I wonder if Junior remembers anything, or if his head is like a colander, and the memories of who bottle-fed him, who licked his tears, who mothered him, squeeze through the metal like water to run down the drain, and only leave the present day, his sand holes, his shirtless bird chest, Randall yelling at him: his present washed clean of memory like vegetables washed clean of the dirt they grow in. – from Salvage the Bones -

Salvage the Bones is narrated in the observant voice of Esch in the ten days leading up to Hurricane Katrina, culminating in the storm and its aftermath. The novel opens with the birth of China’s puppies – creatures which represent money and prestige to Skeetah. As with all the characters in the book, the puppies are born into a world which challenges their very survival…and China, muscular and bred to fight, is far from a competent mother.

What China is doing is fighting, like she was born to do. Fight our shoes, fight other dogs, fight these puppies that are reaching for the outside, blind and wet. – from Salvage the Bones -

Jesmyn Ward’s writing is breathtaking, raw and completely honest. She portrays a family who is somehow surviving against all odds – ragtag, poor, and with only each other to depend upon. China takes center stage in a novel about determination and fighting for one’s life. She is sleek, muscular and focused. China’s heart belongs only to Skeetah, a young boy who has mastered a brutish beast with a penchant for killing. China’s presence is both a representation of loyalty and love, and a sinister threat – the siblings constantly admonish Junior to stay away from her, she is not allowed in the house, and Randall (a fit and toned athlete) is frightened of her. Against the backdrop of China is the myth of Medea. Esch is reading Medea’s story and the themes of betrayal, suffering, and injured love are strong in the novel. In the Greek play, Medea seeks vengeance against the father of her children when he betrays her love. Medea’s jealously is violent and murderous – and her story weaves in and out of Salvage the Bone, giving the novel a dark and foreboding feel.

Salvage the Bones is like nothing I have ever read before. I found it hard to tear myself away from these characters whose lives were so fragile and yet were defined by an inner strength which was both admirable and grim. Ward’s ability to draw the reader into a world which is sad, brutal and nearly hopeless, speaks volumes about her talent. Because, despite the bleakness, the novel allows for a glimmer of something which could be called hope. There is something remarkable about Esch, Skeetah, Randall and Junior – their fierce protection of each other, the love that surfaces through the dirt and despair of their lives, and the determination to find the light in the darkness.

Salvage the Bones is stunning, beautiful, tragic, heartbreaking, and wholly absorbing. Readers should be warned – Ward includes scenes of dog fights, and it is difficult to read – but, it is not gratuitous. China’s story is as much a part of the novel as the stories of Esch, Randall, Skeetah and Junior…in fact, China’s story provides the structure from which all of the other stories spool out.

Salvage the Bones is an original, beautifully wrought piece of literary fiction.

Highly recommended.

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Want to win a copy of this book?

Visit THIS POST to enter the contest to win a copy of Salvage the Bones (must be a book blogger and have either a US or Canada mailing address to be eligible).

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Jesmyn Ward is a former Stegner fellow at Stanford and Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi. Her novels, Where the Line Bleeds and Salvage the Bones, are both set on the Mississippi coast where she grew up. Bloomsbury will publish her memoir about an epidemic of deaths of young black men in her community. She is an Assistant Professor at the University of South Alabama. Consider following Ward’s blog.

FTC Disclosure: Many thanks to the publisher who sent me a copy of this book for review as part of a TLC Book Tour.

Today I have two wonderful books of Literary Fiction up for grabs. Both books are brand new. One book will go to a US or Canadian blogger; the other is up for grabs for bloggers world-wide. Please read all the instructions carefully to be eligible to win!

Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward
Hardcover: 272 pages
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA (September 8, 2011)

I was thrilled to be on the TLC Book Tour for Ward’s novel which is set in Mississippi just prior to and during Hurricane Katrina. This is a heartbreaking, beautifully written book which just blew me away – definitely one of my favorite reads so far this year.

ABOUT THE BOOK

Read my review.

From the Publisher:

A hurricane is building over the Gulf of Mexico, threatening the coastal town of Bois Sauvage, Mississippi, and Esch’s father is growing concerned. A hard drinker, largely absent, he doesn’t show concern for much else. Esch and her three brothers are stocking food, but there isn’t much to save. Lately, Esch can’t keep down what food she gets; she’s fourteen and pregnant. Her brother Skeetah is sneaking scraps for his prized pitbull’s new litter, dying one by one in the dirt. Meanwhile, brothers Randall and Junior try to stake their claim in a family long on child’s play and short on parenting.

As the twelve days that make up the novel’s framework yield to their dramatic conclusion, this unforgettable family-motherless children sacrificing for one another as they can, protecting and nurturing where love is scarce-pulls itself up to face another day. A big-hearted novel about familial love and community against all odds, and a wrenching look at the lonesome, brutal, and restrictive realities of rural poverty, Salvage the Bones is muscled with poetry, revelatory, and real.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jesmyn Ward is a former Stegner fellow at Stanford and Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi. Her novels, Where the Line Bleeds and Salvage the Bones, are both set on the Mississippi coast where she grew up. Bloomsbury will publish her memoir about an epidemic of deaths of young black men in her community. She is an Assistant Professor at the University of South Alabama.

ENTER TO WIN SALVAGE THE BONES

• Contest is open through September 18th at 5:00 pm PST
• You MUST BE a book blogger.
• Contest is open to US and CANADA mailing addresses ONLY.
  
• Click here to take survey
• Winner will be chosen at random and announced on my blog on September 19th.

I Curse the River of Time by Per Petterson
Trade Paperback: 240 pages
Publisher: Picador USA (August 2, 2011)

ABOUT THE BOOK

Read my review.

It’s 1989 and “three monumental events twine around one another in Arvid Jansen’s penumbral soul. His fifteen-year marriage is dissolving, his mother is dying of cancer, and the Berlin Wall is tumbling down. The parallels are obvious—worlds are ending, internally and externally—but the analogies Petterson draws among these dramatic endings are not….I Curse the River of Time is a little like the starker reaches of the West, a little like the stonier shores of Maine, a little like Edward Hopper, a little like Raymond Carver….There is a quality that I can only call charm, or something like charm, to Petterson’s essentially dark and lonely sensibility….It exerts a gravitational pull on the reader” (Stacey D’Erasmo, The New York Times Book Review).

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Per Petterson won the won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for his novel Out Stealing Horses, which has been translated into more than thirty languages and was named a Best Book of 2007 by the New York Times, TIME, Entertainment Weekly, and many other publications. He lives in Norway.

ENTER TO WIN I CURSE THE RIVER OF TIME

• Contest is open through September 18th at 5:00 pm PST
• You MUST BE a book blogger.
• Contest is open WORLD-WIDE.
• Click here to take survey
• Winner will be chosen at random and announced on my blog on September 19th.

Thank you for visiting today – and Good Luck!

Of course a writer rearranges life, shortens time intervals, sharpens events, and devises beginnings, middles and ends and this is arbitrary because there are no beginning nor any ends. We do have curtains – in a day, morning, noon and night, in a man’s birth, growth and death. These are curtain rise and curtain fall, but the story goes on and nothing finishes. – From Steinbeck: A Life in Letters, page 523 (1956) -

John Steinbeck spent his life writing letters. He sent thousands of letters, written mostly in pencil in his tiny handwriting. Steinbeck’s third wife, Elaine, and his friend, Robert Wallsten, gathered up more than six hundred letters written over the course of forty plus years to create an autobiography of sorts, a book which is as compelling as it is enlightening. Beginning in 1923, in his twenties,  and ending in 1968 just before his death,  Steinbeck’s letters reveal his deepest thoughts, emotions and fears, and uncover his process of writing. What is astonishing about Steinbeck’s letters, besides the sheer volume of them, is how they form a narrative of who he was as he grew from a young man into a wise and self-deprecating adult.

Robert Wallsten and Elaine Steinbeck organized Steinbeck’s letters in a chronological order. They have inserted helpful notes throughout which guide the reader as to what was happening in Steinbeck’s life at specific times, and which allow the letters to be read with perspective to events as they historically occurred. Despite its length of nearly 900 pages, Steinbeck: A Life in Letters never lags. It became apparent to me early on in the book that not only was Steinbeck an amazing novelist, playwright and short story writer, but he was an irresistible letter writer as well.

John Steinbeck’s sense of humor is, perhaps, one of the most entertaining aspects of the book. His humor was dry, sarcastic, and ironic. He often made fun of his own shortcomings, and although it is evident that criticism often wounded him, he also found humor in it (perhaps as a defensive measure).

I notice that a number of reviewers (what lice they are) complain that I deal particularly in the subnormal and the psychopathic. If said critics would inspect their neighbors within one block, they would find that I deal with the normal and the ordinary. – From Steinbeck: A Life in Letters, page 68 (1933)

The early years of Steinbeck’s life were filled with rejection and self-doubt, but also with a distinct yearning for greatness. Steinbeck’s letters show him to be a man who worked hard for what he achieved. It surprised me how he often felt that what he wrote was not good enough. Despite his occasional swaggering, he actually is revealed as a man of extreme humility.

Of course the hundred page ms. flopped heavily. Just now I am busy on another one. Eventually I shall be so good that I cannot be ignored. These years are disciplinary for me. – from Steinbeck: A Life in Letters, page 29 (1930)

Perhaps when people think of John Steinbeck, they first think of The Grapes of Wrath – a book which won him not only the Pulitzer Prize (catapulting him instantly into the limelight), but also won him a great deal of criticism along with a fair share of death threats. What amazed me was how, even after having completed the final draft, Steinbeck did not see The Grapes of Wrath as his greatest work.

I’m still tired and it seems pretty bad. And I am sure it will not be a popular book. I feel very sure of that. I think to the large numbers of readers it will be an outrageous book. I only hope it is better than it seems to me now. – from Steinbeck: A Life in Letters, page 172 (1938) -

Instead, Steinbeck believed East of Eden to be “the book” – a novel which he had practiced his whole life to write and one in which he took great pride.

This is “the book.” If it is not good I have fooled myself all the time. I don’t mean I will stop but this is a definite milestone and I feel released. Having done this I can do anything I want. Always I had this book waiting to be written. – from Steinbeck: A Life in Letters, page 431 (1951) -

Embedded in the letters are many interesting revelations about his novels and plays:

• Steinbeck’s editor begged him to change the ending of The Grapes of Wrath, but Steinbeck refused saying “I am not writing a satisfying story – I’ve done my damndest to rip a reader’s nerves to rags, I don’t want him satisfied.“
• A setter puppy belonging to the author destroyed half of his draft for Of Mice and Men: “Two months work to do over again. It sets me back. There was no other draft. I was pretty mad but the poor little fellow may have been acting critically.“
• Cal in East of Eden was the character who Steinbeck related to most: “Cal is my baby. He is the Everyman, the battle ground between good and evil, the most human of all, the sorry man. In that battle the survivor is both.“
• Elaine Steinbeck was the inspiration for the title of Travels with Charley.

Steinbeck: A Life in Letters reveals a man who was at heart an idealist, philosophizer and romantic; a man who married three times (he divorced his first two wives) and fathered two sons. Steinbeck was devastated by the divorce from his second wife, Gwyn. He returned to California and holed up in a cottage, angry, sad and bitter. During this time his letters lost their humor. Steinbeck seemed to have lost belief in love and marriage.

American married life is the doormat to the whore house. Eventually they will succeed in creating a race of homosexuals. And they will not be content with that. I am just beginning to see our mores objectively and I do not like what I see and I do not want my boys brought up by them. The impulse of the American woman to geld her husband and castrate her sons is very strong. – from Steinbeck: A Life in Letters, page 343 (1948) -

Throughout this time, as in other low points in his life, Steinbeck seemed to sink into a depression – unable to write or find the joy in his life. Eventually, he was to meet and fall in love with Elaine Scott who became his third wife…and his romantic view of love was to return to him, along with his humor. In a letter to his fourteen year old son, Thom, Steinbeck writes about love: “Glory in it for one thing and be very glad and grateful for it. The object of love is the best and most beautiful. Try to live up to it.”

Reading Steinbeck’s letters gave me a deeper appreciation for the writer he became – they humanized him and gave me great insight into his thought processes and intelligence. I must also say, that I was thrilled to see Steinbeck’s love of dogs appear in his letters. He owned many dogs, and often he wrote of their antics. What becomes clear in his correspondence is how much animals (and nature in general) meant to Steinbeck.

Dogs are curious extensions of ourselves. We have two – a cocker belonging to Waverly – Elaine’s daughter – a bitch of great appetite – in fact a walking stomach – greedy beyond belief, and also a big French poodle acquired in Paris – the most intelligent dog I’ve ever seen. I don’t need dogs as I once needed them but I like them as much as ever. Once they were absolute necessities to me – emotionally. But if I lived alone I would instantly get one. A house is very dead without a dog. – from Steinbeck: A Life in Letters, page 462 (1952) -

Steinbeck: A Life in Letters should be mandatory reading for Steinbeck fans or for those scholars who wish to learn more about the inner workings of a great author. In this day and age of computers, cell phones, and digital communication – handwritten letters are becoming a thing of the past. Reading this book made me realize how sad it is that we are losing the art of letter writing. There is something fantastic and confidential about reading someone’s letters – often people reveal more of themselves in a letter than they would ever verbalize in conversation. I think this was certainly the case with John Steinbeck.

Highly recommended.

Other quotes from Steinbeck: A Life in Letters which I loved:

What can I say about journalism? It has the greatest virtue and the greatest evil. It is the first thing the dictator controls. It is the mother of literature and the perpetrator of crap. In many cases it is the only history we have and yet it is the tool of the worst men. But over a long period of time and because it is the product of so many men, it is perhaps the purest thing we have. Honesty has a way of creeping in even when it was not intended. (page 526 – 1956)

I think I am without ambition. It isn’t that I’ve got so much but that I want less. And I do have the great pleasure in work – while it is being done. Nothing equals that to me and I never get used to it. (page 459 – 1952)

The Reader: He is so stupid you can’t trust him with an idea. He is so clever he will catch you in the least error. He will not buy short books. He will not buy long books. He is part moron, part genius and part ogre. There is some doubt as to whether he can read. Well, by God, Pat he’s just like me, no stranger at all. He’ll take from the book what he can bring to it. The dull-witted will get dullness and the brilliant may find things in my book I didn’t know were there. And just as he is like me, I hope my book is enough like him so that he may find in it interest and recognition and some beauty as one finds in a friend. (page 440 – 1952)

For myself there are two things I cannot do without. Crudely stated they are work and women, and more gently – creative effort in all directions. Effort and love. Everything else I can do without but if those were effectively removed I would take a powder instantly. (page 359 – 1949)

The ideal is to be banned by everybody – then everybody would have to read it.  (page 276 – 1944)

Other works by John Steinbeck which I have read and reviewed (follow the links to reviews):

• The Grapes of Wrath
• Of Mice and Men
• East of Eden
• Tortilla Flat
• The Pearl
• Travels With Charley in Search of America

This review is part of a John Steinbeck Tour through The Classics Circuit. Read more reviews of John Steinbeck’s books here.

The Homecoming of Samuel Lake by Jenny Wingfield
336 pages
ISBN 978-0-385-34408-1
Random House (July 12, 2011)

I am thrilled to have author Jenny Wingfield here today for a guest post…and also to be able to offer one lucky reader a copy of Wingfield’s novel: The Homecoming of Samuel Lake.

ABOUT THE BOOK:

Read my review

Read other reviews of the book by following the links on the TLC Book Tour page.

From the Publisher:

With characters who come to life like members of one’s own family, Jenny Wingfield’s THE HOMECOMING OF SAMUEL LAKE is a novel with the universal reach of the most memorable and lasting works of fiction.

ABOUT JENNY WINGFIELD:

Jenny Wingfield lives in Texas with her rescued dogs, cats, and horses. Her screenplay credits include The Man in the Moon and The Outsider. The Homecoming of Samuel Lake is her first novel.

Jenny Wingfield’s novel The Homecoming of Samuel Lake is about a family living in Arkansas in the 1950s. Included in the story, are not only the lovingly drawn human characters…but also a big white horse named Snowman whose zest for life and courage in the face of danger drew me in. In “real” life, Wingfield rescues dogs, cats, and horses…so her depiction of Snowman in the novel comes from the heart. Given that both the author and I share a common love of animals, I was delighted when Jenny agreed to post about her rescued dog, Charlie. I hope you will enjoy this as much as I did!

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MEET CHARLIE
By Jenny Wingfield

We had enough dogs. (In our household, the word “enough” is a euphemism, meaning “more than a dozen, but not more than we can count”.) Having just found forever homes for a couple of strays that we’d had so long we’d come to think of them as lifers, we were congratulating ourselves on our success.

“Just think,” we said to each other, “if we can do that again five or six times, we just might get our canine population down to a manageable number.”

Of course, things never stay manageable around here for long, because we can’t pass a starving dog without picking it up. Not to mention, people drop them off near our house knowing we’ll take them in. And other people call us to say that someone has dumped a dog at their place, and they just don’t know what they’re going to do unless we take it. Usually, they add that they reckon they’ll have to “haul it off”, since there’s no way they can give it the life it deserves.

We always take them, and that day was no different. A friend of ours came by with an emaciated female dog and five scrawny pups that she’d found scrounging beside the road. They were big-eyed bags of bones, nothing more.

Within a couple of days, one died. Another started failing. A trip to the vet and a quick surgery told us why. Those babies had been so hungry for so long that they’d been eating rocks and plastic, just to have something, anything, in their stomachs.

That was several months ago. Charlie is one of those pups, and if he remembers how bad things used to be, he doesn’t dwell on it. He’s much too busy nudging humans for love pats, or dozing in the sun. I’m sure that when he sleeps, he dreams.

Probably of a forever home.

Photograph of Charlie, courtesy of Jenny Wingfield

BOOK GIVEAWAY

• Contest open through 5:00 pm (PST) on August 16th, 2011.
• US and Canada mailing addresses only please.
• To enter, complete the form by following the link below:

Click here to take survey

• I will randomly choose one winner and announce that winner on my blog on August 17th. I will also email the winner for their snail mail address at that time.

GOOD LUCK!!!

On the way back home through the dusk, she’s going to ask her father for the story of how he met her mother. All she knows is that someone fell, and that everything beautiful began after. – from Everything Beautiful Began After, Prologue -

Three people’s lives intersect in Athens, Greece one summer.

Athens has long been a place where lonely people go. A city doomed to forever impersonate itself, a city wrapped by cruel bands of road, where the thunder of traffic is a sound so constant it’s like silence. Those who live within the city itself live within a cloud of smoke and dust – for like the wild dogs who riddle the back streets with hanging mouths, the fumes linger, dispersed only for a moment by a breath of wind or the aromatic burst from a pot when the lid is raised. – from Everything Beautiful Began After, page 11 -

Rebecca is an artist from Paris who has come to the Mediterranean to paint – but she is also searching for herself among the Greek ruins. George, a southerner from the United States who grew up in New England boarding schools, is also searching for identity. Brilliant in language, but lost in alcohol, he is looking for acceptance and the love that has so far eluded him. Henry is an archeologist who carries the guilt of his brother’s death – more than the bones of ancient people, it is forgiveness he really seeks. These three characters meet by chance, but are drawn to each other – three damaged people who are looking for deeper meaning in their lives.

Simon Van Booy’s novel unfolds slowly, weaving back and forth in time, giving glimpses of the characters’ lives and uncovering their secrets and desires. Readers familiar with Van Booy’s short stories will recognize the themes of identity, love, grief and the power of human connection as familiar. Van Booy’s prose has a poetic rhythm to it. He uses simple, yet powerful, sentence structure to create beautiful imagery, effortlessly drawing the reader into the world of the characters.

One strong theme in the novel is that of fate vs. choice. Rebecca is not a believer in fate. Abandoned by her mother, she sees the future as a series of personal choices – yet, she of all the characters, is the most impacted by chance.

Rebecca told herself that she did not believe in fate. She believed that she alone was responsible for everything that happened to her. If there was such a thing as fate, she thought, her mother would be blameless. It would have been her fate to abandon her daughters.

But it was not fate.

It was her decision. – from Everything Beautiful Began After, page 140 -

Van Booy also examines childhood experiences and how they impact adult lives. Each of the characters has had childhood losses: Rebecca’s loss of mother, George’s loss of parental love, and Henry’s loss of his brother. Those losses effect how each character is able to form connections to others and open their hearts to love. Van Booy weaves his narrative to allow the reader access to the characters’ deepest fears by showing their pasts. Some of the most moving passages in this novel revolve around the parent-child relationship.

A novel like Everything Beautiful Began After always risks becoming maudlin or depressing. But, Van Booy’s talent carries the book from despair to hope.

After every chapter of devastation, there is rebuilding.

It happens without thought.

It happens even when there is no guarantee it won’t happen again.

Humans may come and go – but the thread of hope is like a rope we pull ourselves up with. – from Everything Beautiful Began After, page 367 -

Van Booy manages to surprise his reader with subtle twists and turns of plot. He gives his characters room to grow. He enthralls with simplicity and careful, eloquent description of the small things in life.

And he is enchanted by the beauty of small things: hot coffee, wind through an open window, the tapping of rain, a passing bicycle, the desolation of snow on a winter’s day. – from Everything Beautiful Began After, page 401 -

I wondered whether Van Booy had the ability to pull off a novel-length work. But I should not have ever doubted his talent. I loved this novel as I have loved Van Booy’s short story collections. This is a gorgeous meditation on love and human connection, a poetic piece of work which completely captured me. Readers who are drawn to literary fiction and who seek out novels that transport them, will not want to miss Everything Beautiful Began After.

Highly recommended.

• Quality of Writing:
• Characters:
• Plot:

Overall Rating:

Don’t take my word for it. Read other reviews of this book by visiting the TLC Book Tour page and follow the links.

FTC Disclosure: Many thanks to Harper Perennial and TLC Book Tours who put this book in my hands for review.

Down From Cascom Mountain, by Ann Joslin Williams

336 pages
Bloomsbury USA (June 7, 2011)

It is my pleasure to welcome author Ann Joslin Williams to my blog today. I just finished reading her wonderful novel, Down From Cascom Mountain, and was excited when Ann agreed to a guest post. I am also thrilled to be able to offer one copy of the book as a give away to one of my US or Canadian readers. Let me tell you a little about both the novel and the author…

ABOUT THE BOOK:

Read my review.

Get links to reviews from the TLC Book Tour.

Read an excerpt.

From the publisher:

In Down From Cascom Mountain, newlywed Mary Hall brings her husband to settle in the rural New Hampshire of her youth to fix up the house she grew up in and to reconnect to the land that defined her, with all its beauty and danger. But on a mountain day hike, she watches helplessly as her husband falls to his death. As she struggles with her sudden grief, in the days and months that follow, Mary finds new friendships–with Callie and Tobin, teenagers who live and work on the mountain, and with Ben, the gentle fire watchman. All are haunted by their own losses, but they find ways to restore hope in one another, holding firmly as they navigate the rugged terrain of the unknown and the unknowable, and loves lost and found.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Ann Joslin Williams grew up in New Hampshire. She earned her MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. She is the author of The Woman in the Woods, a collection of linked stories, which won the 2005 Spokane Prize for Short Fiction, and her work has appeared in StoryQuarterly, the Iowa Review, the Missouri Review,Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She was the winner of an NEA grant for her work on Down from Cascom Mountain. Williams is an assistant professor at the University of New Hampshire.

Learn more about Williams and her work by visiting the author’s website.

My thanks to Ann for writing a wonderful piece for this post – I completely related to it because I grew up in New Hampshire, like the author, moved away from New England to the San Francisco Bay area, and later went on to volunteer in search and rescue. I hope that you will enjoy this guest post as much as I did.

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Guest Post: Author Ann Joslin Williams

I was living in San Francisco when I started writing Down From Cascom Mountain–a long way from New Hampshire where I’d grown up.  I was homesick for the woods and mountains of New England, so it was a pleasure to write every morning, following my characters through the woods and fields I loved and knew so well.

Leah, New Hampshire is actually a fictional town, an invention my father Thomas Williams, a National Book Award winner, used in his own fiction. When I’d started writing, often setting my stories on the mountain where my parents had built a cabin and where I’d spent my childhood summers, my father suggested I use his fictional geographical names.  He passed them on to me, and I am honored to use them in my fiction now.

Much like Mary Walker’s parents’ house in Down From Cascom Mountain, my parents’ cabin was isolated.  My brother was my playmate, but when he was old enough and elected to go to boys’ camp, I was on my own.  I spent a lot of time in the woods, carting my stuffed animals on adventures, constructing houses out of branches, and befriending boulders that looked like giant creatures.  I knew my way around our land.  There were shortcuts to the brook, paths that cut across the valley, logging roads leading to open fields and trails up the mountain.  For the most part, I was content with the wilderness and my imagination.

Then, one day I “got lost” in the valley.  I stood in the middle of a field I knew well and bawled, calling out for my parents until a strange man came out of the woods.  He was a logger who’d been working nearby.  Realizing that I belonged to the cabin on the hill, he took my hand and walked me up the logging road to my incredulous mother.  She was comforting, but truly baffled at my claim, given the logger’s description of where he’d found me.

In Down From Cascom Mountain Mary has a similar memory of “getting lost” when she was a girl.  In her loneliness, she wanted her parents to notice she was “missing” and come rescue her.  Later, contemplating the autonomy her parents had encouraged, she reflects, “The mountain had raised her as much as they had.”

In many ways, my own relationship with the New Hampshire landscape has informed the way I navigate life and view the world, just as many of my own experiences have found their way into Down From Cascom Mountain, shaping events and details.

As a teenager I worked for the Appalachian Mountain Club.  I spent two summers at the lodge not far from my parents’ cabin and one summer at Pinkham Notch at the base of Mount Washington, the tallest peak in the northeastern U.S. and a wilderness rich with ghost stories.  While there, I participated in the search for a missing albino man—the spark for the legend of the ghost girl who appears in Down From Cascom Mountain.

As a crew member for the AMC we cleared trails, led hikes, cooked, cleaned, served meals, mowed, dug drainage ditches–just about anything you can think of, including search and rescue.  Later, after I left the AMC for college, I learned a crew member had fallen from a cliff and died–an event that bewildered me in the details and influenced the early chapters in my novel.

Setting my fiction in this terrain is rewarding for me, not only because it can be rugged and sometimes dangerous which is good for creating tension, but the natural world is also beautiful, full of mystery and magic.  It’s through the eyes of this wondrous  teacher that my characters find their way, sometimes lost before they can be found.

Now, having moved back to New Hampshire I treasure “getting lost” in the White Mountains whenever I can.

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BOOK GIVE AWAY

I hope I have tempted you to add this book to your to-be-read pile! You now have a chance to win a copy of the novel from the publisher. Here is how to enter:

• Leave a comment on this post no later than June 23rd by 5:00 pm PST. Tell me one thing about the natural world which deeply resonates with you.
• Contest is open to US and Canada mailing addresses only.
• I will draw one winner randomly sometime after 5:00pm on June 23rd and announce the winner here on my blog by the end of the day on June 24th. I’ll also send the winner an email.

That’s it – easy, right? Good luck!!

[...] it was remarkable, he thought, how little mark the tumult of inward experience leaves on the external shells we inhabit. - from The London Train, page 315 -

Paul is grieving the death of his elderly mother and feels oddly detached from his wife, Elise, and their two small daughters. When he gets a frantic call from his ex-wife that their daughter, Pia, has disappeared, Paul boards a train from his home in Cardiff, Wales in order to travel to London in search of her. He finds Pia pregnant and living with her Polish boyfriend and her boyfriend’s sister, Anna, in a rundown flat. Inexplicably drawn to Anna, Paul eventually abandons his family in Wales and moves into Pia’s flat in London.

In a parallel story, Cora finds herself disenfranchised with her marriage to the much older Robert. She leaves him in London and moves back to her childhood home in Wales which she inherited after the death of her parents. When she learns that Robert has gone missing, she rushes back to London in search of him.

The London Train is about these two characters. What appears to be divergent stories, eventually weave together through a series of flashbacks, memories, and the unexpected crossing of paths during a train ride. The first half of the book follows Paul’s journey through grief and loss, betrayal and abandonment. The second half of the book, which I found much more compelling, examines Cora’s life shortly after her mother’s death and the disintegration of her marriage. It is through Cora’s story that the reader discovers the connection between Paul and Cora.

Tessa Hadley’s prose is subtle. Her narrative ebbs and flows, giving glimpses into the lives of her characters, revealing their flaws and fears, showing us their daily lives and how a chance meeting reverberates beyond them to touch the lives of those closest to them.

They were all of them sleepwalking to the edge of a great pit, like spoiled trusting children, believing they would always be safe, be comfortable. - from The London Train, page 90 -

Thematically, the novel centers around grief and loss, and  how we cover our emotional wounds. The journey through grief is symbolically captured in the relentless, monotonous movement of the London train – it moves forward and back, from London to Wales, and back to London – just as our emotions click back and forth from loss to recovery. Interestingly, the effect this had on me as a reader was almost hypnotic. The characters’ feelings are strangely muted at times – a disconcerting thing in the face of their great losses and dislocation.

With the loss of her parents behind her, and the loss of the babies she might have had ahead, she was withdrawn out of the past and future into this moment of herself, like a barren island, or a sealed box. - from The London Train, page 234 -

The London Train is a very slow moving novel. I must admit, the first half of the book dragged for me. I did not particularly like Paul, a man whose narcissism causes him to cheat on his wife, then abandon her and his children. Even when he returns to Elise, he seems to lack any understanding as to how his behavior has injured her. Luckily, the second half the book, which focuses on Cora, was better paced. Cora, although also seriously flawed and only marginally more likeable, was a character whose struggles were more relate-able to me. Cora’s grief over the loss of her mother, her inability to have children, and her loneliness were believable, and Cora becomes a more empathetic character as her story unfolds.

Overall, I found The London Train to be a mixed bag for me. On the one hand, I enjoyed some of the subtlety of the novel, and Hadley’s writing drew me in. On the other hand, the pace was so slow at times, and the characters so unlikeable (especially Paul), that I found my mind drifting – I wanted these characters to just get on with their lives, figure it out, and stop being so selfish.

The London Train was long listed for the 2011 Orange Prize for Fiction.

Readers who enjoy literary fiction and subtle writing styles might want to give The London Train a try. Read other reviews of this book by following the links on the TLC Book Tour page.

• Quality of Writing:
• Characters:
• Plot/Pace: 

Overall Rating:

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Tessa Hadley is the author of The Master Bedroom, Sunstroke and Other Stories, Everything Will Be All Right, and Accidents in the Home. Sunstroke and Other Stories was a New York Times Notable Book of 2007, and Accidents in the Home was long-listed for The Guardian’s First Book Award. She lives in Cardiff, Wales, and teaches literature and creative writing at Bath Spa University.

FTC Disclosure: I received this book from the publisher for review on my blog through TLC Book Tours.