This Strange Eventful History by Claire Messud – Book

From a Google Image Search – NPR

Claire Messud’s book This Strange Eventful History tells the fictionalized life of her extended family. Not quite a memoir, it resembles an Ancestry test result, fleshed out with familial and historical details, that resurrects the essences of a family’s life. Gaston and Lucienne live in Algeria, a colony of France which promises residents that they are French citizens, equal in every way to Frenchmen. As the Nazi’s are beginning their occupation of France, Gaston, a civil servant climbing the ranks, thinks about volunteering for the French navy. He ends up going to Beirut where his bosses direct him, which is not into the French navy. His family, living in France at the time, leaves France to return to Algeria. There are two young children in the fleeing family of Gaston and Lucienne; François and Denise. When the war ends, the Cassar family is still living in Algeria. Messud describes Gaston’s decision and his relationship with his wife in her elegant prose:

“Back and forth, Gaston had argued all possible permutations in his head in the forty-eight hours since hearing the broadcast. He’d considered the choice before him while walking, while packing, while lunching with Cotigny, though he didn’t speak of it to his adjunct. He wished above all that he could speak to Lucienne; in the night he spoke aloud to her untouched pillow, as if she lay beside him, though it smelled only of laundering. How could he know what to do without knowing her mind? He thought of them as joined by an invisible thread, always united, one heart in two bodies. The two halves of Plato’s Symposium, who had found each other and their life’s purpose.” (p. 58)

In possession of her grandfather’s notes (all 1000 pages), Messud offers us views of a man’s life and his inner thoughts as he moves from the public sector back to the private sector and becomes as successful as he will become. Then we follow his son François to school in America and to his life with his wife, Barbara. Denise’s life is portrayed just as believably. The Cassar family expands as family members age and have children.

Messud describes a time after WWII when Algeria wins its independence from France and the family has to leave the country they know best to return to France. Many countries gave or were forced to give independence to their colonies in the twentieth century. Gaston’s upheaval was experienced by plenty of others and led us all to many discussions about the colonizing motivations of our forebears. Despite our negative judgements, if we go to space, I think we will be colonizers once again.

Although this book may be considered too literary for some readers, Messud creates for us the various places where these characters reside and immerses us in lives that we can comprehend but which are most likely dissimilar to our own lives. It reminded me of the biography of Winston Churchill, although without the degree of historical significance of Churchill. Walking with Destiny by Andrew Roberts shows us Churchill living through some of the same historical eras as the Cassars, and similarly takes us to geographic locations we may never have visited with much discussion of Britain’s colonies.

Now I will apologize in advance for expressing maudlin thoughts, but I am at an age where my demise could be imminent. Messud not only covers the lives of these family members; she also covers their deaths. She doesn’t dwell on biological details, just on the way a full life dwindles and becomes circumscribed as we age, or if we have a fatal illness. We die alone, she does not pull her punches about this, but our deaths do affect those who love us. The details of the care we receive as life leaves us (or we leave it) may not resemble those enjoyed by the Cassar’s who lived in different times and who did not have to worry about financial matters, but still Messud has us contemplating the possible details of our own dying moments. I appreciated time spent with Claire Messud’s family, fictionalized or real. Good stuff. In fact, Messud’s book is shortlisted for the Booker Prize, 2024.

The Husbands by Holly Gramazio – Book

From a Google Image Search – Holly Gramazio’s author website

Lauren, Lauren, Lauren. OMG. Or should I say Holly, Holly, Holly because Holly Gramazio wrote the very bizarre book, The Husbands. Her book is unique, a real trip to modern culture, to reality – to somewhere. Lauren and her sister Nat own a pair of flats in London. Lauren lives in one and her sister, mother of Magda lives elsewhere. When the bulb in Lauren’s attic is replaced, it triggers some kind of electric wormhole in the universe or an anomaly in the space-time continuum. From that time on Lauren’s attic seems to offer her an endless supply of husbands.

Lauren is single, but one day when she comes home from work and finds a guy in her flat who says he is her husband, Michael. Lauren plays along. She even finds pictures of their wedding in her phone. Her apartment is painted in different colors. There are other changes – furniture and layout. One day she sends Michael into the attic, and he disappears. But a new husband climbs down. Who remembers husband’s names? We are simply fascinated as Lauren temporarily lives with each new husband or sends him immediately back to the attic. While it’s interesting to meet some of the 200 plus husbands Lauren meets and discards, it becomes somewhat repetitive and then unnerving. How many examples does one need to learn a life lesson? Is there such a thing as a perfect husband?

Lauren gets attached to a couple of these guys. She falls for Carter, but he does not fall for her. She learns, eventually, that these are real guys who exist in her world. She sees what happens in some of their lives after she discards them. Lauren decides to fly to Denver, Colorado when she learns that Carter lives there. She also meets someone (the name is unusual so it’s hard to grasp it on Audible – perhaps Vorhees) who is experiencing the same anomaly, only with wives. They correspond.

The great thing about discarding husbands (not always great) is that her financial circumstances, her jobs, her decor all change with each new husband. Sometimes these circumstantial changes help her decide whether a husband should be instantly discarded or kept around for a while. One really useful change is that debts disappear with each new adventure in husbands.

The book is too long. There are a few too many husbands. But it is entertaining and in the end there is a point, which I will leave it for you to figure out. If someone tells you there is nothing new under the sun, Holly Gramazio will make you rethink.

Lucky by Jane Smiley – Book

From a Google Image Search – New York Times

In Lucky, a novel by Jane Smiley, the author gives us a whole life – the life of fictional folk singer Jodie Rattler. Sadly, Smiley, describes what sounds like an exciting life in a rather monotone and unemotional way. Written all in first person, Jodie rattles off what she did first and what she did then, offering up the tick-tock of her life.

She’s an adventurous character who takes money from a successful day at the races and squirrels it away as a good luck talisman. She writes songs, tours with bands, cuts records but never reaches rock star status, seemingly by choice. Jodie lives in New York City, London, in a cabin she buys in the Hudson Valley, and on and off in St. Louis. Her Uncle Drew helps her recording royalties grow from one to 8 million dollars. Lucky. Jodie, like many women who are freed by the pill has sexual adventures. Unlike many a brokenhearted real live girl, she chooses her men wisely. Although left with many fond memories she decides to stay single and not have children. She meets many people at her concerts, at her gigs, and as she travels but does not keep them as close friends, something she comes to regret and works to change.

Smiley also offers us a love story to a city, the city of St. Louis. Jodie loves to walk around the neighborhoods she admires in St. Louis and repeats the names these neighborhoods are known by. She stops her musical travels and comes back to St. Louis to take up parental caregiving duties as many of us have been called on to do. Caregiving teaches many lessons. In the end Jodie weighs in on current political anxieties and her own gratitude and regrets.

It’s a slow book, but Jodie lived through times familiar to many of Jane Smiley’s readers. Jodie’s lyrics did not connect with me, but it seems there could be many worse lives than that of a musician. I liked the novel but didn’t love it. (OK, perhaps spending too much time on Facebook.)

The Armor of Light by Ken Follett-Book

From a Google Image Search – Lit Stack

Ken Follett’s fifth book in the Kingsbridge series is The Armor of Light. The Pillars of Earth is the most famous book in the series covering the era when the cathedral was built in Kingsbridge in fascinating, if fictional, detail. Reading this book enticed me to finish the rest of the books. Although not quite as good as The Pillars of Earth, all the books in this series tackle different eras in British history. The Evening and the Morning tells a story of the Middle Ages. World Without End brings readers to Kingsbridge two centuries after the building of the cathedral. A Column of Fire immerses us in the period of the Reformation. The Armor of Light focuses on the ways progress in the textiles trade affected the residents of Kingsbridge along with the involvement of England in the war against Napoleon Bonaparte.

In each case Follett writes about the injustices that arise from having only two classes, the wealthy who control government, laws, and the courts, and the worker class at the mercy of the rich who show little or no compassion. He uses real historical moments and peoples them with fictional characters we can relate to. In Part I, The Spinning Engine, 1792-1793 we meet Sal Clitheroe, her unfortunate and beloved husband, Harry, and their son Kit. They are picking turnips and loading a cart under the watchful eyes of the Squire’s son Will Riddick, a coldly entitled and incompetent overseer. They are serfs who are paid tiny wages for hard physical labor. The workers can see that the cart is overloaded and not safe, so they are not surprised when a wheel breaks and Harry is trapped underneath. When Harry dies a distraught Sal has to fight for Poor Relief, she has to let her six-year-old son go to work polishing boots at the Manor House. Sal’s challenges are unending because she must stick up for herself and Kit, usually unsuccessfully as employers would rather fire injured workers than pay them, and the courts are manned of the powerful aristocrats or church officials. One church official says, “I’m not in the business of feeding other people’s children.” (An Anglican church leader talking of Methodists) (p. 49)

Here we have the moment when cottage industries must give way to machines, in this case a spinning jenny that spins 8 threads at a time, and right on its heels, a machine that spins 48 threads at a time. Housewives in cottages tend to produce 3 threads per day.

In Part 2, The Revolt of the Housewives, 1705, when inflation arrives because of war with France bread becomes very expensive. Eventually, the housewives who don’t have enough grain to make their own bread become an angry crowd when they find that Kingsbridge has not bid high enough to stop their grain from going to another town. Local bread will be costly, and supplies will run out quickly. The housewives do not want the flour to go to another town when they will be left with no grain. Again, there is Poor Relief, but it is difficult to get enough to live on as Harry’s widowed wife Sal learns. Bread has become unaffordable just as people are losing jobs because of the new machines at the mills, a conjunction of events that can lead to social pandemonium. The militia is called to stop the insurrection of the housewives, but these local boys won’t fire on their neighbors. Steam machines are more reliable than those that run on the water from the river so workers must adjust to new methods and new job insecurities once again.

In Part 3, when workers try to form groups to be able to force owners and gentry to inform workers when more efficient machines continue to replace workers Parliament passes The Combination Act in 1799 which makes it illegal for workers to gather to try to get protections from owners who tend to keep advances in technology secret (to unionize). One owner imported “scab” workers from Ireland when workers tried a strike. In Part 4 we meet The Press Gang, 1804-5. As the war escalates England needs more and more soldiers. “My guess is that about fifty thousand men have been forced into it (the military),” Spade (David Shoveller) said. “According to the Morning Chronicle there are about one hundred thousand men in the Royal Navy and something like half of them were impressed. Part 5 finds Britain at war with the French led by Napoleon Bonaparte and most of the men and older boys from Kingsbridge go off to war. Wars are often social levelers. When the war is won Parliament passes workers’ rights reforms begin to create fairer conditions.

There are plenty of characters whose lives intertwine with the events related to the workers’ rights battles exposed in Follett’s book. Some marry, have affairs, have children, and form same-sex pairs which must be kept secret. Some run afoul of the gentry or the factory owners and suffer out-sized consequences because the same people that own and run the factories also control the courts. If you like to learn history while enjoying the literary presentation of fictional characters affected by that history, Ken Follett is someone who does a great job with both.

Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange-Book

From a Google Image Search – MPR News

Tommy Orange continues the story of the Red Feather and Bear Shield offspring from his book There There in his new novel Wandering Stars. We have already learned of the Trail of Tears from history class (maybe). We are removed in time from these sorrowful events, but we still bear the shame of our ancestors’ cruelties. Jude Star’s story opens the novel as the most distant traceable ancestor of the children in this story.

We are reminded that wars are always cruel and colonial wars are even crueler because they will always erase or reduce the powers of one party or the other. Jude Star ends up in a prison-castle in Florida from which he eventually escapes. Jude and Hannah Star’s son Charles Star and Opal Bear Shield have a daughter, Victoria Bear Shield. From one partner Victoria gives us Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield, and from another partner Victoria gives up Jacquie Red Feather, the grandmother of the four children in the Red Feather clan who are being cared for by Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield who is not their grandmother but who shares a mother with Jacquie.

Orvil, our focal character, has recovered from being shot by a terrorist. This happened the first time he went to a Native American celebration where he danced in public. Of course, even when you physically recover from a near-death experience, your spirit may not heal. It could take time, or it could be psychologically fatal.

Jude Star is the name chosen for Orvil’s ancestor when he is imprisoned in Florida and attempts are made to force former member of tribes to “assimilate” and forget their traditional lifestyles and beliefs. The Star men are wanderers who cannot find their place in an America captured by white folks, white folks who cannot see a way to live beside the people they fought with over this land.

Opal, who now heads Orvil’s family, has changed the fate of the Star offspring. She has purchased a house in Oakdale, California where Orvil, Loother, and Lony can find some stability as a created family. The grandmother Jacquie lives nearby and helps when she can. Opal pays tuition to send Orvil to a good school. The family is about to learn that stability is always in danger from outside forces over which they have little control. Orvil needs pain meds. He is on opioids for pain but when they are no longer prescribed, he must find other sources. He is addicted. This leads the whole fragile little family down a sad path that makes it hard to believe that even the best of intentions can turn some lives around.

Things turn out better than you might ever think, but the family loses its nascent cohesiveness. Colonialism has consequences and Tommy Orange wants us to know that.

Tommy Orange’s books have a historical and cultural significance quite apart from their literary bona fides. They are authentic expressions of a person and a people trying to preserve their culture whose values were expressed by the way they lived lightly on the earth and by rich spiritual traditions. Placed alongside the materialism and power struggles of a culture that is so antithetical to the lived beliefs of America’s indigenous people the contrasts and challenges are clearly exposed in Orange’s novels. Here is a young voice we don’t often hear from illuminating the torn souls of a proud people or set of people with much to offer, especially the way to live lightly on the earth part.

The Blueprint by Rae Giana Rashad – Book

From a Google Image Search – Paper Literary

Imagine if Martin Luther King never existed, or if the Civil Rights movement came too late to prevent a second Civil War. It’s not hard to imagine if you just find old videos of Strom Thurmond on You Tube. In Rae Giana Rashad’s book The Blueprint, we meet Solenne and Bastien, who sound like characters in a romance book. But this is no ordinary romance. Bastien is a Councilman headed to become President of the new America known as The Order. Solenne is a young Black woman, fifteen years old, headed to become a ‘concubine’. Since this book is written by a Black woman, I will use her words to offer insight into her story. In the Author’s Note, Rashad refers to female slaves in real America as “forgotten handmaids,” so here is another handmaid’s tale, every bit as chilling as the original, except it explains how Atwood’s tale of the handmaids is even more fraught for Black women.

Page 13

“Then he was gone, ballroom lights tunneling the dark, the hush of champagne on my tongue. THE PATH WE WALKED TO BECOME Black women wasn’t straight; it was a loop. Starting from nowhere, it brought you back to nowhere. A man at one end, a man at the other, humming the same song. ‘It’s just a body. Nothing special.’ If that were true, why did they want it? Why couldn’t it belong to me.”

Page 25

“I would never know how it felt to walk boldly because this world wasn’t mine…There was no protection for me, a Black girl, no tender touch, no consideration for a delicate exterior. No space to scream.”

Page 31

“They bragged about their accomplishments in private, boasted about the difference between them and their brother. But skin quality and quantity of sleeve emblems aside, from neck to ankle, the men were identical.”

“Councilmen were the Order’s most decorated men. The talented, skilled, brilliant. Engineers, physicians, cryptographers, developers. But fundamentally they were soldiers. Killers.

Page 104

“And still, this country is better than it was when it was the United States. An economy outpaced by the rest of the world, the racial unrest, the increasing crime and abortion rates, no, we couldn’t go on with so much death.”

Page 133

“From his frame above the fireplace, Thomas Jefferson watched me. What had Sally seen in him? He brought her to France at fourteen, where she worked, lived, and earned money as a freed woman. When he decided to return to America two years later, she didn’t stay like the French urged her. She returned to America, where she remained enslaved, and the babies followed like footsteps.

Page 214

“Seven years of militias, fragmented state governments, and millions of deaths. We’re fortunate the Founders of the Order had a vision for the country. Their sacrifice ended the war.”

(Solenne’s great-grandfather wounded, and in the hospital, talks about that war and the aftermath.)

“In that unseasonably warm January of 1960 in Metairie, Louisiana, he witnessed a military dictatorship seamlessly replace the civil government. Where did these men come from, he asked his nurse. She couldn’t have been more than thirteen. Nobody knows, she said. They came from nowhere. But that wasn’t true, they were military officers police officers, senators, governors, a World War II veteran like Bastien’s grandfather. While my great-grandfather slept, Black and white men stood in offices letting the ink dry on treaties. In those documents women had fewer rights than they did before the war, and Black women caught the worst of it.”

[Black men were given the state of Louisiana as a free state, but they had to relocate by 1962 or accept the new Constitution]

Page 249

“They knew that once you get that taste of freedom nothing will keep you in line. Lucas [Bastien’s rival] knew it. I’d already seen the sunset over Sanibel Island in pink and orange. Seeing something like that makes you feel like somebody created something just for you. It was like unwrapping a present every time I blinked. I wanted to keep it forever. Not a piece of it. All of it.

Page 277

“Pleading. This was the only system designed for us. We were girls, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen. We were our ancestors, forbidden to read or write while lying under the arms of men who drafted legislation.”

Page 293 Author’s Note

“It was difficult to read these stories of forgotten handmaids and their forced reproduction. Though the United States outlawed the international slave trade in 1808, slaveholders found a way to increase the slave population by exploiting the domestic slave trade. They forced Black women into men’s beds, punishing those who didn’t have multiple children by their teens and rewarding those who did.”

Who wins, Bastien or Solenne? Find out how they both win, and both lose. Clearly this book connects to the America that we live in now, in 2024. There is talk from time-to-time about the possibility of a second Civil War when discourse heats up or when rights are lost. Women’s rights recently experienced a setback in the Supreme Court, a setback that will figure in the upcoming election and that could escalate depending on the results of the next election. The fears of Black women, that they might become “concubines” if the right-wing wins must be quite real and harrowing. Throughout Rashad’s story of Solenne, she is writing a book about a slave from 100 years ago, Henriette (Kumba) drawing parallels between the two women’s lives, reminding us that Black women are not property or sexual objects and warning us about the dangers of allowing racism to rule ever again.

I feel a kinship to Rae Giana Rashad because I wrote a similar book about losing freedoms if America becomes an authoritarian state. She did a better job than I did since she had to create all her characters from scratch, and I used both real and fictional people. My attempt in this genre is entitled 2028: The Rebellion. Rashad is offering fair warning to everyone. You should read the book.

The Fox Wife by Yangsze Choo-Book

China is an ancient land with some ancient superstitions leading to tales to tell, either delicious or horrific depending on the storyteller. Although we are wary of foxes here in America, we haven’t built up a mythology about them. They are predators and it’s hard for domesticated humans to coexist near predators. Sometimes that is also hard in China since foxes are not considered good neighbors.

The Fox Wife by Yangsze Choo has us mixed up in the business of three foxes. Unusually this is a love story and a mystery. Snow is a fox who can shape-shift and live in human form. In human form foxes are quite beautiful and have charisma that almost tips off the humans around them that something supernatural is afoot, Some humans become obsessed with their foxy friends.

Snow had a baby fox, a girl, that was dug from her snug hole in the ground and then died. There is guilt since mother and father had both left the baby alone but who would have thought anyone would dig in that spot. Snow is grieving the loss of her lovely child, and she is out for revenge. A photographer from Mongolia is involved and she must find him and kill him for what he has done. Her sad passions are so deep that she is not rational. Fortunately for Snow, the man is difficult to find. We follow her (human name -Ah San) on her wild journey to find Bektu Nikan, the photographer. On the way, we run into two more foxes, two males, both known to Snow. One is Shiro, the white fox, the other is Kuro, the black fox.

Two concubines have been found dead with brilliant smiles on their faces, one propped at a restaurant’s back door, frozen. The owner of the restaurant, familiar with Bao’s (Bao is a human) reputation as a detective asks him to find the dead woman’s name so that she can be buried properly by her family. Bao takes the case.

Bao has carried an old love in his heart for years and perhaps a curse, or a cure gone bad, that has affected his luck in business and in life for decades. He had a childhood friend, Tagtaa, from Mongolia and they built a fox shrine together. He fell in love with her, but this family would not allow the relationship. When Snow takes a job with Tagtaa as a companion, we realize that Bao’s path will cross that of his old playmate and young love once again. Because of his childhood experiences with the fox shrine, he knows that foxes are involved in this somehow.

Snow reunites with Shiro and Kuro but she is angry with both of them. Three foxes, all in human form is a lot. Tagtaa’s grandson and his friends also get involved in this mess which somehow has the photographer at the center. Fables are not my normal reading fare, but this one was entertaining, full of sorrow and also hope. Snow brought sweetness and her loss of her child, her beauty and her anger to pull us into the story.

Snow speaks.

“I wept bitterly then. Because I was the one who told Kuro to get out. To never come back or speak to me again. I hope you die, I’d said, snarling and furious. Because you can never bring our child back.Sometimes our wishes come back in the darkest, most twisted ways, like a thorn that pierces and grows through your flesh. A tree that drinks blood and blocks out the sun. The sin was mine; I had watered it with hatred and tears of rage, and it had grown to cast a monstrous shadow.” (p. 346)

In the Epilogue, Kuro speaks.

“I was very sad without you,” he said simply.

“There’s not much one can say to declarations like that. It’s my fault for having married someone who makes me blush with his seriousness.”

I enjoyed the story immensely.

Outline, Transit, Kudos: Rachel Cusk Trilogy – 3 Books

From a Google Image Search – Literary Hub

Rachel Cusk’s trilogy encompasses books entitled Outline, Transit, and Kudos. In every case Cusk presents character stories of people met in chance, or occasionally planned, encounters. In Outline, the author, Faye, (characters are typically unnamed or given only first names) is on a plane headed to a Book fair in Greece where she will sit on a panel and be asked to speak. Her seatmate on the plane gets in-depth treatment as we learn the story of his life and his marriage. Even at the book panel, the event runs out of time before the author speaks, but one outgoing male author has plenty to say.

Hardly any of the characters in these books have names, or they might have a first name, as already mentioned. This seems to be a new trend in fiction which probably has a purpose, as in allowing us to relate to the character, not wanting to create a character that jumps off the page and becomes an icon or to make it easier for the reader to imagine that s/he is the main character. The main character in this case is an author who has been through a crushing divorce. She and her husband have two sons. But her writing career is taking off, first literally to the Book Fair in Greece.

Rachel Cusk has a talent for telling stories of the people who meet this author as she travels, renovates an apartment, and goes to a second writer’s convention where awards are being given. But we know little about the author or her book. We are treated to an in-depth exploration of all the people she sits next to or interacts with. She seems to have no close friends, but this story is not really about the author. It is about men and women and the difficulties of intimate male-female relationships, especially in marriages in the twenty-first century.

Even as she fights off the bile of her new downstairs neighbors in Transit, she finds out the details of the life of the contractor who spends the most time on her renovation. Her neighbors are a nasty pair who knock on the ceiling with a broom as they follow her footsteps through her new flat. The downstairs couple seem to be bound together by their hatred for whoever lives upstairs, and they delight in intimidation. These are people I would want to run away from, but she stands her ground (without a rifle). When they realize that she is soundproofing the floor their hatred knows no limits but never gets physical. It is all bluster, an act to drive her away. The author has sent her sons to stay with their father while the reno is undertaken and although they beg and cry to come home to her, she encourages them to be independent. Is she a bad mother?

In the last book, Kudos, the author has obviously had some success and is attending a conference where she is supposed to be interviewed on television. Although she learns the life story of the interviewer, the technicians are never able to make the electrical hookups and the interview is called off. She meets another interviewer, a book critic, and he never learns a single fact about her, but we learn all about him. Almost all the people we meet are men and what they have to say about marriage is not encouraging. She also meets a wealthy woman who has given up on men and now invites writers and artists to come stay in her mansion where they can be warm all year long and enjoy more sun than the author has ever enjoyed in England where she lives with her sons in her redone flat over her miserable neighbors. Will she take Paolo up on her offer? Although this exploration of modern relationships is relevant this is a literary book than many readers are likely to skip. Rachel Cusk, however, has earned much praise from those critics who know and love well-written fiction.

Tom Lake by Ann Patchett – Book

From a Google Image Search – The Harvard Crimson

Tom Lake by Ann Patchett is a pandemic book of sorts. Lara and Joe Nelson own a farm, rows of cherry trees, some plum trees, some pear trees. The cherries are the money makers. Sweet cherries must be hand-picked. The tarter cherries for pies and cooking can be shaken from the trees onto tarps and they can be frozen.

The pandemic has made it difficult for their usual pickers to arrive. Lara and Joe’s three daughters, all grown but not yet married, come home to ride out the pandemic and to help pick the cherries. When Lara’s daughters find out that she dated Peter Duke, a famous and handsome movie star, Emily, Maisie, and Nell enliven a tedious repetitive task by prying the story of their mom and Peter Duke out of their reticent mother.

Once upon a time a local presentation of the play Our Town finds Lara and her friend registering local actors for the upcoming production in their New Hampshire town where Lara’s mother and father live. Our Town is a big deal in New Hampshire. If you have read the play, you know why. If you haven’t read it, you should. After a failure to find an “Emily” to play that important role, Lara ends up trying out. Turns out she is a natural. Her Emily is so well done that she is invited to go to Hollywood to test for a movie. Lara feels a connection to the Emily character but is she a great actress she wonders. After she wins the part in the movie playing another Emily-style character the film is shelved for several years. Lara is packed off to play Emily in Our Town again, this time in a professional summer theater in Tom Lake, Michigan.

Lara’s daughters, picking cherries and prodding their mother to get to the part where she meets Peter, find that they are finally there. But they want more, they want details. Because these daughters did not come home to tend to their mom on her deathbed (as in some novels and movies), this is a far lighter novel with only a few tragic elements. It’s basically a book that would make a great Nora Ephron movie. Do we have a new Nora Ephron? If Ephron was a product of her times, then we may never have another Nora Ephron, nor another Ann Patchett.

The challenges of being an independent farmer are braided through the other elements in the book and the specter of all those cherries which represent the farm’s income rotting on the trees with no one to pick them is a pressure as intense as our desire to hear about Lara and Duke and why Lara is a farmer’s wife rather than a movie star. Readers also get an interesting peek into what it’s like to work in a summer theater.

Tom Lake was a good read, but it’s also a trip to more carefree, innocent days even though it is during the COVID pandemic. Perhaps people envy America these days in the 21st century because some people still get to live such a life. How much longer? How many of us? Although it is a new novel it already feels nostalgic. The orderliness of a well-run farm, the lines of heavily laden cherry trees under blue, blue skies. You might enjoy spending some time in a place that seems so fragile so in danger of disappearing altogether. I borrowed this book from my local library.

The Secret Hours by Mick Herron-Book

From a Google Image Search – Audible

The Secret Hours by Mick Herron is a sort of spy story, but it’s not James Bond. No loveable Moneypenny or Q here. No clever devices that look ordinary but have magical abilities to save an agent in dire straits. In fact, half of the characters are not even spies, but their story begins when the Berlin Wall falls and an actual spy comes out of the East and meets a grieving wealthy man who lost his sister and who knows what happened to her and who did it. Who is Max and why is he being chased down the Green Lanes as the book begins by people who seem intent on killing him?

You will have to spend some time in the Regent Park Office in London where a group has been set up to find what kinds of unethical business the hired hands in the spy business have been up to. The committee’s remit is called Monochrome, which perfectly describes how Griselda Fleet and Malcolm feel about being assigned to this investigation. Both thought they were headed up the ladder to plum assignments and both are unhappy and worried to have been shunted sideways. They did not even have access to documents from Regent’s Park where actual scandals might have been expected to lurk. If you happened to read any bits from David Foster Wallace’s unfinished book, The Pale King, which takes place in the IRS, then you feel right at home in the home office.

Don’t get too bored because you are going to have all the action you can handle in Berlin (the spook’s zoo). They are a depraved bunch who have seen it all and are jaded and deep in the aftereffects of WWII. Myles has been embedded in East Berlin and has experienced the peak moments of postwar Soviet spying, the dossiers, the imagined crimes, the real crimes, the Stassi, the paranoia, the tattling, and the terrible repercussions of the tattling. Into this foreign office enters Allison, a young intelligent innocent who had expected to work at a desk and now finds herself pretending to complete assigned paperwork. At the same time, she does the real work assigned her which is to spy out what is going on in Berlin. However, the crux of this matter is personal, not professional. So, not about true spying at all, although it feels exactly the same. It’s about people, people who will surprise you. I can’t tell you; it’s a spy story, sort of.

Clearly wars do not end when treaties are signed, when spoils are divided, when horrendous war crimes are turned up, when revenge is planned and eventually taken. Names change, years pass, people age and disguise themselves and become unrecognizable. Justice gets done but not in a court. First Desk proves to be not all talk and no action. The author knows how to set a scene. Don’t you just love a good spy story. This one is very good while you are reading and great after contemplation. Don’t just move on to your next book until you have sat with this one for a bit.