Girls in White Dresses by Jennifer Close

Girls in White Dresses

I guess some would call this chick lit, but I hesitate because when men write good books, they don't call them "guy lit."  Actually I was thinking of putting a category on this blog called "Guy Books," but that's another story.  Here, we have a group of girlfriends who are like a cloud; constantly changing and floating around.  Sometimes peripheral characters have little vignettes, but somebody from the core group is always there.  These characters are so fleshed out that they seem alive.  This writing is so detailed without being tedious, that your synapses are gathering information in almost the same way you do in a live conversation with someone.  I just read The Family Fang on Kindle (despite all the publisher hype, that was ten bucks wasted), and the Fang family are like paper dolls compared with the characters in this book, and the writing was childish.  I'll state here that I listened to the AUDIO version of Girls in White Dresses.  It was so well read with little accents, nuances and inflections, that despite the wealth of female characters, it was not confusing.  Lauren was one of my favorite characters, and toward the middle and end of the book, I was laughing out loud.  If you can remember what it was like to be a young, single woman living in a city with your girlfriends, you will adore this book.  And I'd recommend it to anyone who just wouldn't mind stepping into that world for a bit, in the same way we do when we read books set in other countries.   Through the relationships (and lack thereof) and many hangovers, they stay friends, but this book is not sticky sweet.  I don't know if the humor will transcend reading the written form, but I hope so.  This is on free library download through Overdrive, so you can slap it on your MP3.  This is not the vapid chick lit that kills so many trees, but something elevated above that.  No crazy plot, no cute gimmicks, no big catastrophes, just realistic writing.  I'll be looking for any future novels by Jennifer Close.

Caleb's Crossing by Geraldine Brooks

Since I enjoyed the book The Heretic's Daughter, I thought there was a good chance I'd like this one too.  And I did. This was a great summer read for me; it really took me out of my element and to another place and time. The setting is the island of Martha's Vineyard in the 1600's. White settlers had arrived in 1641, and, while conning Native Americans out of lands, were hacking homes out of the wilderness, trampling on the clam beds, burning the forests, and infesting the native Wampanoag Tribe with deadly diseases, all in the name of God.   Although the book is called Caleb's Crossing, Bethia (beth-eye-ah) is our narrator; a comely 16-year-old girl, and this re-telling is from her journal.  The author, Geraldine Brooks, went to live on Martha's Vineyard in 2006, and became evermore fascinated by the Native-American and Early-American history.  This is her fictionalized account of Caleb, the first Native American to ever graduate from Harvard (in 1665), as seen through the eyes of a Puritan girl.  Bethia has a brilliant mind, especially in contrast with her brother, Makepeace, who obviously has some sort of learning disability.  Makepeace takes his frustration out on his sister, and she must endure it.  For me, Bethia in this book is a symbol of how women were made to kneel under the oppressive thumb of Puritan male society.  We feel it especially keenly because Bethia is so smart and kind and open.  There's a bit of The Scarlet Letter in this book (literally), although we can hold out more hope for Bethia than we ever could for poor Hester Prynne.  As for the pure and handsome Caleb, he was a real person.  In this book, he strives to save his people by adapting to the Puritan culture.  As Bethia eavesdrops in on Harvard lectures from an open vent while working in the buttery, her thirst for knowledge only grows.  She spends a good deal of her young life coveting the education that is wasted on her brother.  And she absorbs the complicated Wampanoag dialect through her great friendship with Caleb.  She must often pretend she doesn't understand what's going on, and when she does speak her mind, she is made to regret it.  Her frustration is palpable.  So great is her quest for understanding all things that at one point, she covertly drinks an hallucinogenic potion while visiting a local Tribe with her evangelical father.  Any female, young or old, can get a glimpse of what it would be like to endure the harsh living conditions and societal mores of the Puritan culture, but this is perhaps not the most important part of this book.  It's the love that Bethia feels for those around her, and her willingness to sacrifice everything for them, while still managing to keep her faith.  I don't want to put too much detail here because I read this book knowing hardly anything about it, and that's part of the fun.  Like Bethia, we can step onto the liberating path toward the beach, and find something unknown and wonderful, including friendship and love.  I have adored other books of Geraldine Brooks', including Year of Wonders, and her brilliant non-fiction book Nine Parts of Desire.  With all her novels that feature American history, I was surprised to learn that Geraldine Brooks is from Australia.  She won the Pulitzer for her book March, which is about the American Civil War as seen from inside "Little Women."  I'll end by saying that I've possibly made Caleb's Crossing out to be too dark, and it's really not.  It's moody, Puritanical feel was appropriate, and it was a fun read and I would even recommend it as a Young Adult novel, especially for girls.   There is a bit of romance in this book, but in today's world, it's very chastely done.  Thumbs up.

The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson

If Erik Larson never wrote another book, it wouldn't matter, because The Devil In The White City is so damn good.  This is  not only a page-turner/murder mystery, it's also a non-fiction, historical account of the 1893 Chicago World's Fair.  And, it reads like fiction.  The first time I read this book, it started out slow for me.  Not so this time, perhaps because I already knew it was going to get better as it went along.   Larson brings an entire era to life here, and this Gilded Age was packed with new inventions and discoveries.  This book will place you in the forefront of American Architecture and also Landscape Architecture.  Eiffel had created his famous Tower and the pressure was on for the Chicago World's Fair to compete with his graceful monument.  If all this isn't enough for you, there's a chilling thread of heinous crime that runs through this book like a dark river, perpetrated by a serial killer who's every bit as charming and deadly as Ted Bundy.  You'll wonder why you've never heard of this person, who's right up there with his contemporary, Jack the Ripper.  And I loved the detective who plodded along and doggedly closed in on the murderer, without the benefits of modern technology.  This Fair was a junction where all kinds of famous people came and went, everyone from Susan B. Anthony to Buffalo Bill.  And in with all the calamity are the inventions that were introduced at this fair.  Think peanut butter and Cracker Jacks, the Ferris wheel and electric boats.  Entire tribes of people were brought over for this fair, from the Middle East and Africa.  Union standards were changed forever, and so were the many laborers who toiled (and sometimes died) for two years to make this grandiose vision a reality.  You'll be up in the swank offices of the elite in the world's first skyscrapers, and down at the gates of Hell in the infamous meatpacking stockyards.  The Chicago World's Fair, also known as The World's Columbian Expedition occurred just 13 years prior to the publishing of Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle."  Chicago was a paradox; an epicenter of wealth and developing culture fueled by an abattoir.  And the "White City" created by the fair was so beautiful that some fainted upon seeing it.  This spectacle brought work and excitement to the city, and also many young women looking for employment and lodging.  With all the city embroiled in the affairs of The Fair, the killer found the crowds and bustle the perfect distracting environment for his activities.  Reading this book was not only a very entertaining history lesson, but also just a good read!

The Whistling Season by Ivan Doig

This is a somewhat sweet, old fashioned story.  We start out in 1950 with Paul Milliron, a school superintendent charged with the duty of closing down the old one-room schoolhouses out in the countryside of Eastern Montana.  As Paul worries over this onerous task, he flashes back in time to when he was a 13-year-old boy, and just such a schoolhouse meant the world to him.  His mother had died not too long ago, and his father Oliver was now raising Paul and his two brothers on their homestead.  Oliver, overwhelmed with raising his three sons alone and running a dryland ranch,  spies an advertisement in the newspaper.  A housekeeper looking for work has written a witty ad that starts with "Can't cook, won't bite."  They of course hire the writer of this ad, Rose.  Rose is full of surprises, beginning right from the moment she steps off the train, resplendent in a satin dress.  Rose has inexplicably brought along her brother Morrie, who eventually becomes the sole teacher of the one-room schoolhouse.  This book is really the adventure of childhood in the turn-of-the-century West, complete with horse races, revival meetings, Sunday suppers with the family and hunting for Indian arrowheads.  Rose and Morrie bring flash and excitement to the Milliron family, arriving in tandem with Halley's Comet.  Paul is mature for his age and perhaps this is why he's asked to keep secrets that trouble his dreams at night.  He literally learns a new language, helps his Dad navigate being a widow, mentors his younger brothers and comes of age in doing so.  The only parts I thought were overdone were Paul's nightmares; a little would have gone a long way on that front.  But if you want to saddle up and ride back to 1909 Montana, to a simpler place and time, this might be the book for you.   If you end up liking this book or this genre, I also recommend Here Lies the Librarian by Richard Peck.  Also, the PBS docu/reality series Frontier House (available on netflix).  And, The Wilder Life, Wendy McClure's memoir of trying to understand her childhood obsession with The Little House books by Laura Ingalls Wilder.   Finally, for a starker look at life on a Montana dryland ranch (this one is set in the 1940's), Winter Wheat by Mildred Walker.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

I could tell you that this book is an historical account of cell culture, but that's too confining, and too boring for some.  It's the story of how a woman unknowingly helped catapult science forward, and save millions and millions of lives.   It's about family and irony and ethics, and it's set in the most modern laboratories in the world of today, and the tobacco fields of Virginia in the Jim Crow era.   Henrietta Lacks is our heroine; a beautiful young Black woman with five children, and a fatally philandering husband.  The promise of work brings Henrietta and her family to the bustling Baltimore of the 1940's, and within the vicinity of Johns Hopkins Medical Center.  Due to Jim Crow era laws, Johns Hopkins was one of the few places African Americans could get medical care, and there our story begins in earnest.  One of the biggest ironies here is that Henrietta's children and grandchildren could not afford medical care or medical insurance.  The author, Rebecca Skloot, spent about 10 years writing this book, and got very involved with Henrietta's surviving family, especially the daughter, Deborah.  One of the other characters in the book that is not so often mentioned in the written reviews is the remarkable and brilliant scientist who discovered the perpetual growth of HeLa cells, George Gey.  He had a true love of science and could have become very rich for his efforts, but all his energy went to proceed ever on with his work, spending his and his wife's own modest incomes to build their laboratory at Johns Hopkins University, and at the end of his life, submitting his own body to torturous experimental cancer treatments.  In the interest of science, he gave away HeLa cells to other scientists and laboratories all over the world, and they were often carried in the breast pockets of airline pilots from one country to another.  The ethics of this book are incredibly complicated and many laws have since been established to protect patients.  These laws grew out of fascinating cases of modern-day patient exploitation that are also encapsulated in this book.  I couldn't believe what I was reading sometimes!  So, you've got everything;  science and family and race and ethics and history and greed and poverty and despair and politics, and love and betrayal of the deepest order.  The author, Rebecca Skloot, has a science background that no doubt helped her write this wildly popular book.  She's a contributing editor for Popular Science Magazine but also writes on other subjects, including food.  This book has been translated into 25 languages and is being made into an HBO movie produced by Oprah Winfrey.  There are good photos on the amazon page, as well as a great little author video, and I also enjoyed quite a few good podcast interviews on itunes.

The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein

The Art of Racing in the Rain is one of those books where the author has somehow struck a nerve with a lot of people, and I've been meaning to review this book for over a month.  A decade before this book came out, the author (who was a screenwriter at the time) saw a film set in Mongolia called "State of Dogs."  This film showed the Mongolian belief that a dog will return in its next reincarnation as a man.    Enzo is our dog, a mixed-breed with some wiry hair that possibly indicates a bit of terrier.  Enzo is also our narrator, so we see everything through his innocent eyes.  Enzo loves to watch TV, including the National Geographic channel.  Enzo wishes he had opposable thumbs, and so, so wishes he could talk.  He wants to be human even though it would mean adopting the inferior human body, and he is consumed with love for his people, especially Denny, his racecar-driving owner, and Denny's little girl Zoe.  There's a lot of racecar driving trivia in this book.  While i don't like car racing, I still loved this book, and this sentiment was repeated many times by other readers in my book club.  There are tragedies compiled on top of each other in this story, and this bothered some members of our book club.  But the Buddhist principals are all here, and they are part of the author's belief system;  the suffering in life, and the stripping away of material things, for example.  Denny must practice patience, have faith, forbear the wrongs of others, be tolerant and most importantly, accept his own role in and responsibility for his circumstances, all part of the basic Buddhist tenet.   Although the Buddhist principals are not explained outright, we travel through many of them in this book.  Enzo himself goes through a transformation and finds ways to help his circumstances.  He also has his own personal demons, including some of his own making (as we all do).  Yes, he is on watch for crows and a certain stuffed zebra.  It made me think of other reincarnation-related novels and short stories, such as "Breakfast with Buddha" and "You Are not Here" although this book is unique until itself, and possibly the best of them.  Several people in book club said they looked differently at their dogs after reading this book.  There are lots of good author interviews on itunes, by the way.  p.s.  The author was a race car driver years ago, who also wrecked while racing in the rain.

Yarn: Remembering the Way Home by Kyoko Mori

I'll say right up front that you might not enjoy this book as much as I did, if you are not a knitter.  My Dad gave me his old kindle, because he upgraded to an ipad, and this was the first book I ever bought and loaded onto it.  And it just stayed on there, unread for many months while I went vegan in the meantime.  You see, this book does involve knitting using animal hair.  That being said, i did enjoy this book.  The author wrote it several years ago and she was vegetarian (I was still eating meat at the time), and she was concerned enough about animal welfare to buy two rabbits to spin from.  Yes, the bunnies sit on your lap and you spin from the fur that they're shedding.  It's all very fairy tale.  And so, I was able to read this book and really get into the story, despite the contradictions that exist.  I'm sure the author had not made the dairy connection yet, and that she is a humane person.  She obviously loves her rabbits, adores her cat, and wants to find a source for non-factory-farm sheep wool.  While I'm more of an abolitionist regarding animal welfare, I already owned the book, and I am a knitter, and I was sitting at an airport and getting ready to fly (two of my least-favorite activities).  So, I began reading, and and I fell down the rabbit hole.  If you are a knitter, you'll like reading about the different patterns, and how she comes to knit them.  I learned how to highlight things on the Kindle device so I can go back and look up those patterns.  Maybe I can knit one of them on some organic cotton yarn someday.  As for the story, it's a memoir.  Kyoko Mori has some traumas in her childhood in Japan, and years later she goes to college in America.  She is seriously dating an American man and ends up staying here, living in Wisconsin.  I have vacationed in Wisconsin and so I enjoyed this part of the book also.  Not since reading "The Fourth Hand" by John Irving have I been able to revisit Wisconsin in this way.  Kyoko takes up her new life, but several things keep her from real joy.  Her childhood history is still haunting her, and she's very reserved, both in her relationships and her social life.  She is lonely, but knitting begins to help her as she navigates her new world, as it has helped women cope for hundreds and hundreds of years.  She takes a sweater workshop, she meets some new friends.  She spices her book with knitting trivia, such as the Knitting Madonna paintings of the middle ages, and St. Sebastian the patron saint of knitters.  She mentions patterns and pattern books and vegetarian recipes.  She creates a pattern for a scarf in the shape of a fox with silver bugle beads sewed on the feet that click like claws.  She knits her man socks made of rabbit fur.  She weaves in wonderful fairy tales, and she made me care about her and hope that all would work out well.  As her story moves back and forth from Japan to America, the mood is a bit dour, but as she hones her handwork skills, she begins to make friends, to connect and let go of the past and other fetters.  She even wisely lets go of something many people won't--money.  She takes a weaving workshop and weaves the colors of the world around her into her  scarf.  There is a slow, meditative quality to this book, and to knitting, so it was all simpatico for me.  I see on Amazon that her other two books are not as well reviewed, but don't let that stop you from reading this one.  p.s.  I want the pattern for that fox scarf!