Category: Modern Fiction

Clear

By Carys Davies

Published 2024

Read Nov 2024

Although this is the 3^rd book published by this author, Clear is the first one for this reader. 

Davies sets the story in 1843, the year of the Great Disruption in the Scottish Church and a year in which the Clearance of the Scottish Highlands and the Shetland Islands, both of which are important elements of the story. 

Davies’ language is very economical—this reader was reminded of Claire Keegan in this regard.  Her story construction slowly reveals information about the three main characters (John Ferguson, Ivar, and Mary Ferguson).  Using a shifting Point of View, each character tells the reader of their past, their hopes and fears, and their challenges.

We first meet John Ferguson when he is swimming from a boat to a shore.  Eventually we learn that he is a minister in the Scottish State Church who has joined about 450 of his fellow ministers in the Great Disruption of of Scottish Church to break away from the state church to form the Free Church of Scotland.  A significant consequence of this decision is loss of his salary as well as his home and church building for his congregation.  To make ends meet temporarily, he has taken a job to journey to a distant island somewhere between the Shetland Islands and Norway to survey the property of a landowner and move the sole resident off the property (part of the Clearance when landowners displaced tenants on their property to replace them with a sheep farm).  The day after he survives the swim from the boat to the shore, he slips and falls on rocks while still naked after taking a bath in the sea and is struck injured and unconscious.

We meet Ivar, the sole resident on the property.  His father and brothers were lost many years ago in an accident at sea.  His mother and brother’s wife left some years ago to find a better life.  He remained and has eked out an existence with a now blind cow, some chickens, and a garden.  He has paid rent to the landowner from bird feathers he collects, from knitted goods he makes, and from crops he works at growing.  He hasn’t seen the landowner or rent collector for 3 years, which is good as he’s been ill and his ability to produce anything of worth has greatly diminished. 

Ivar finds John Ferguson unconscious and takes him to his small abode where he tends to his wounds and hopes he’ll recover.  John Ferguson does regain consciousness and finds himself in a bit of a pickle.  This kind man is nursing him to health (he has much recovering left to do) and is providing him food and shelter despite clearly having little for himself—how can he tell him what he’s come to do.  An additional and huge complication is that Ivar speaks only Norn, a language that has since essentially died out. 

As part of the fall John Ferguson lost his “papers” including his translation of the gospels into Scottish—a mission he’s been working on for many years.  The paper remains, but the words have disappeared after their bath in the sea.  He uses this paper to write down words of Norn that Ivar is teaching him.  After a few weeks, this dictionary has reached 55 words (actual Norn translations although with Ferguson’s spelling) and the two men have formed a significant bond despite their lack of language.

Meanwhile, Mary Furguson decides she needs to fetch her husband as she becomes increasingly convinced that he’s not fully up to this rude task.  While she’s travelling, we learn about her life, her courtship with John Furguson, and her life with him. 

This reader won’t provide more details about John Ferguson’s stay on the island with Ivar or Mary’s arrival on the island.  In a spare 185 pages Davies packs quite a number of significant events and the various characters’ take on them.  In addition, her descriptions of the island enabled this reader to feel the mist, see the fog, see the fields, feel the cold water through which John Ferguson and later Mary Ferguson travel from the ship to the island.  The environment of the island, both the natural surroundings and Ivar’s home, are vividly presented.

Themes of loneliness, love, perseverance, faith, pursuit of a calling are all part of this slender volume.  The ending has an unexpected twist which this reader won’t reveal.  This reader found it to provide a hopeful ending considering the task John Ferguson has been employed to accomplish.

Davies provided this reader incentive to learn more about the Great Disruption and the Clearance as well as a desire to read her other books and to look forward to future ones.   

Machines Like Me

By Ian McEwan

Published 2019

Read July 2024

This reader has only read one Ian McEwan novel previously: Atonement.  This reader was underwhelmed by that book and irritated at the author for a device he used.  Thus, this reader picked up Machine Like Me with some hesitation but it’s on this reader’s book club’s schedule, and this reader does enjoy speculative fiction and some sci-fi so this reader was ready to be wowed by this apparently highly literary author.

The author sets the book in London in an alternate 1982.  Some reviewers have speculate this year was chosen so that Alan Turing could be an important character if he hadn’t been punished for his sexuality.  Alternate aspects of this 1982: self-driving cars are common, Margaret Thatcher is practically in hiding for losing the war over the Falkland Islands, and other changes.  It seemed to this reader the author may have enjoyed this aspect of the novel more than his characters. 

Charlie Friend is the narrator of the story.  He is unemployed and makes enough money to pay the rent by day-trading stocks.  He invests all his inheritance from his mother, some 86,000 pounds, on one of 12 Adams that Turing and his company have released into the market. (All 13 Eves were purchased ahead of Charlie’s purchase.)  He has a crush on his upstairs neighbor, Miranda, who is ten years younger than Charlie and a doctoral student of social history.  She has different views on what sex does or doesn’t mean compared with Charlie and she carelessly falls into a relationship with Charlie seemingly because there isn’t much reason not to do so.

Charlie has big dreams of using his Adam to build a life with Miranda.  He foists 50% of the responsibility for creating Adam’s personality of Miranda without anticipating how this could possibly go wrong.  But lack of thinking about decisions is par for the course for Charlie—an example being spending the entire inheritance on Adam when he barely makes his rent.

Whether planned or not, Adam is the most interesting character in the book.  He has access to the entire internet in his head.  He uses it to learn how to write haikus, to warn Charlie about Miranda’s past, etc. 

McEwan tries to focus us on some big philosophical questions which are interesting—what makes a human “human”, can a robot love like a human (yes he can have sex but what about the emotional aspects of love) for starters.  Unfortunately for this reader, the plot involving Miranda’s past and the plot involving her desire to rescue a young boy from his terrible parents don’t enable these questions to be explored as much as the author may think they do.  

This reader enjoys speculative fiction and sci-fi, especially when they deal with broader philosophical questions.  The authors of the best of these books don’t try to run away from the genre and say they what they write is literary fiction, not that sci-fi stuff.  That attitude dismisses some great books unnecessarily and unfortunately.  This author has experience an outcome of this trashing—needing to justify why serious book discussions can be had for speculative fiction and science fiction.   This reader replies:    Rubbish!

Reasons that this reader participates in three book discussion groups include being exposed to books that wouldn’t come onto her reading list otherwise altering this reader’s perception of books.  This reader looks forward to discussion of this book; will her views of this book be altered and how?

Heaven and Earth Grocery Store

By James McBride

Published 2023

Read May 2024

McBride’s book starts with the discovery of a body in an old well in 1972 near Pottstown, PA.  Little remains with the skeleton.

But we don’t hear anything about this situation for most of the book.  Instead, McBride takes us back to about 1925 and introduces us to Moshe Ludlow, a Jewish immigrant from Romania, who runs a theatre and dance hall in Pottstown that books musical acts catering to Jewish people.  He meets Chona, the daughter of a Jewish grocer on Chicken Hill, a neighborhood of Pottstown where Blacks and European immigrants dwell.  They fall in love, marry, and live upstairs from the grocery store which Chona inherits from her father.   Mosha expands his business to cater as well to the Black population while Chona runs the grocery store.  Moshe’s decision to expand his business causes some concern in the town.  Chona’s store doesn’t make a profit as she gives credit to the residents of Chicken Hill who need the help, and she rarely receives payment back.  Mosha wants to move down the hill, closer to downtown and closer to many Jews who have moved there but Chona will have nothing of it, so they stay.

As we read further, we are introduced to a whole variety of characters from Pottstown and Chicken Hill—Black, white, and Jewish-all of whom are well developed with strong points and flaws.   Impatient readers may find this frustrating as it’s not clear what these characters have to do with the main story which we might think is about Moshe and Chona.  But we’re told patience is a virtue and it certainly pays off in this book.  The connections between complicated web of multiple stories and their various characters slowly becomes clear when Nate, a Black man who often works for Moshe and whom isn’t originally from the area asks Moshe to hide Dodo, a boy who was hurt in an accident which left him nearly deaf and dumb.  Dodo is being pursued by the state to be taken to an institution for the feeble minded and disabled (it actually existed in the area for 79 years and closed in 1987).   By the end of the book we understand the connections, see some resolution of the various stories and have an answer about the identity of the skeleton and how it came to be there. 

 This is an absolutely delightful book.  Be patient!  Let yourself seep into the world McBride’s characters live. Enjoy the vibrant characters McBride creates.  Experience various prejudices that plague various parts of the community and the distrust each group tends to have for the others.    You will be hooked by this complicated community and likely, like this reader, you won’t quickly leave it.   

The Women

By Kristin Hannah

Published 2024

Read May 2024

It’s mid-1960’s and before the Coronado Island-San Diego bridge was built.  The book opens during the going-away party for the older brother and only sibling of Francis (Frankie) McGrath.  He’s graduated from Annapolis and is headed to Vietnam on a ship.  Frankie’s parents have made clear to her that their plan for her is to marry well, consistent with their stature in society.  Frankie’s dad never served in the military but has a wall of fame for those in the family who have.  The wall includes wedding pictures for the women.  Frankie has another idea, prompted by a comment by a friend of her brother at this party—women can be heroes too.  She has completed a nursing course and enlists in the army to be a nurse in Vietnam—the only military service that will ship nurses to Vietnam with no military experience.  Her brother is killed just before she leaves for Vietnam and her parents are both devastated by this loss and furious at her for enlisting.

We witness Frankie’s “trial by fire” as she’s dropped into a hospital dealing with all the Vietnam trauma we’ve heard about.  Hannah’s writing engages the reader rapidly and completely and we are quickly cheering for her and her sister nurses.  She’s smart and committed and manages to become a competent nurse that the doctors rely on—and hit on and might abuse if out at night alone.  She deflects potential relationships with married or engaged men even when she is in love with them. Things get even tougher for her when she is transferred to a unit essentially at the front. 

But the toughest challenges Frankie faces happen when her term is complete, and she returns home to a country that is routinely spitting at returning soldiers.  She learns her parents have lied to others, indicating she’s been travelling in Europe, not trying to keep soldiers alive in Vietnam.  The veteran support services don’t recognize that women were in Vietnam at all, so she has no legitimate claim to their services.  Her parents expect her to resume her role in their pre-conceived story for her and don’t even want to hear anything about her time in Vietnam.  Our hearts break as Frankie’s does. It’s not surprising this book became a best seller.  The author’s writing drives you to turn the pages; the protagonist is engaging and suffers mightily and believably state-side. The medical scenes, the relaxation scenes, the state-side scenes are all believable.  We want Frankie to find something to pull her through the transition that allows her to make a new life for herself. As an aside–this reader wondered how Frankie would have fared if she didn’t have parents who financially supported her during her darkest days, but it still worked.  Overall, the story is perfect for a movie or a streaming service series or both!  If the popularity of the book, movie, series, etc help highlight the little credit given women for the critical roles they have played in war throughout history it’s all good. 

Tell Me Everything     

By Elizabeth Strout

Published 2024

Read Oct 2024

Since the publication of Olive Kitteridge, this reader has read all of Elizabeth’s Strout previously published books and now often reads her newest book as soon as her place in line at the library allows.  For this book, an audio version was the first available and this reader devoured it.  The audiobook reader was great, especially when Olive Kitteridge is speaking.

Yes, Olive Kitteridge is in this book along with all of the (still living) major characters from many of the pre-Olive books, Amy and Isabelle and The Burgess Boys, as well as the Lucy Barton books, My Name is Lucy Barton, Anything is Possible, Oh William, and Lucy by the Sea as well as some of the minor ones in those books.  It’s not necessary to have read these previous books as the authors gives us sufficient background for the purposes of this book, but this reader’s experience was likely deepened having read them before this book. 

Much of this book focuses on conversations between various characters as they tell stories to each other, generally about other people and occasionally about themselves.  One such pair is Lucy Barton and Olive Kitteridge.  Lucy Barton is a successfully published author of memoirs who is now living in the Crosby, ME area with her ex-husband, William.  Lucy by the Sea told of their move there to escape the COVID-19 pandemic.  Lucy and Olive become acquainted when Olive asks Bob Burgess to have Lucy visit her so Olive can tell Lucy a story.  Lucy visits Olive at the senior living facility in which Olive, now 90, resides.  Lucy and Olive meet with some frequency to tell each other stories of “unrecorded lives”.  At one point Lucy is concerned about the purpose of the life of one of her friends who was the topic of Lucy’s story.  Olive was not impressed that Lucy asked about the purpose of a life, and when asked by Lucy for Olive’s view, Olive tells her she and her husband shared the view that the purpose of life was to work hard and help people.  This is one example of how the stories about people, which is a frequent part of most of Strout’s books, sometimes goes beyond just the story in this book into something deeper that the pair finds themselves discussing. 

This book has a focus on Bob Burgess, who was first introduced in The Burgess Boys and who reappears in Lucy by the Sea.   He takes on a murder case that is eventually resolved, he helps his brother, Jim, deal with his son, he helps his ex-wife deal with her alcoholism, he consoles his wife as she deals with her position as minister at a local church, and he walks and talks with Lucy Barton, something they started in Lucy by the Sea. Their regular walks cover a wide variety of topics and sometimes get quite philosophical.  Their walks are very important parts of both Lucy and Bob’s lives.  It becomes evident that Bob Burgess is an extraordinary person although he doesn’t realize it.  He does things for people that truly make a difference in their lives, and he makes hard decisions that impact his own life just because it’s in his nature to do what he knows should be done.

This reader became aware of an article in the Oprah Daily about the book which had this information:  “At the end of Oprah’s 107^th Book Club pick, Tell Me Everything, by Elizabeth Strout, a character references an article called “Love Is Love” that helped her understand that “love comes in so many different forms, but it is always love. If it is love, then it is love.”  The article publishes this article, which was originally published by Strout in German.  It’s worth a read. It turns out there are many fine examples of love in Tell Me Everything which is definitely worth a read.   

A Thousand Ships

By Natalie Haynes

Published 2019

Read April 2022; May 2024

Natalie Haynes has been a stand-up comic, a print, radio, and TV journalist, and has published several non-fiction and fiction books.  She studied The Classics at Cambridge and has spent much of her career enabling the public to engage with and enjoy the classics. 

In this book she tells tales about the Trojan Wars—through the perspectives of the women involved.  This reader was quite enchanted by this book.  When unfamiliar with a particular god, goddess, or story, this reader consulted Wikipedia to get a little background which enabled great appreciation for Haynes’ witty and often cutting take on the story. 

Thank you, Natalie Haynes, for breathing life into these stories and inducing me to learn more about them.

Tom Lake

By Ann Patchett

Published 2023

Read July 2024

This reader has read many, but not all, of Ann Patchett’s books including her essay collection, These Precious Days. Once again, this reader is impressed with Patchett’s ability to weave a story unlike any of her previous stories.

This story is set in the spring of 2020 during the early part of the COVID-19 pandemic when avoiding others was the primary source of prevention.  Lara’s three daughters in their twenties are back on the family fruit farm near Traverse City Michigan as a result of this state of the world:  Emily, the oldest and who lives on the property, works with her father, and fully intends to continue the family farm for another generation; Maisie, a vet student who is helping neighbors with their animal problems in a social distancing way; Nell, a theater student who desperately wants to be an actress and fears this pandemic is taking away precious years from her career.   The usual crews who helped the Nelsons pick their sweet cherries are mostly not working this year because of the pandemic so it’s up to Lara and the three daughters to pick the sweet cherries which require hand picking. While they pick, they pry from their mother her story of a summer at Tom Lake, a nearby summer stock theater, where she played Emily in Our Town and had a steamy summer romance with Peter Duke who is now a famous TV and movie actor.

Patchett moves between Lara’s narration of her story and the present day to day goings on at the farm.  Patchett opens the book when Lara (then Laura) was in high school and was roped by her grandmother into registering people for auditions for her New Hampshire town’s production of Our Town.  Lara decides to audition and wins the part of Emily.  She’s uncertain about what to do with her life so attends a state university and ends up getting the part of Emily again for her college’s production of the play.  She acknowledges she has a very lucky break when the uncle of another cast member attends a performance and decides she’s perfect for a part in a movie he’s producing in Hollywood. After the movie is completed and she’s done a few commercials, it’s suggested she takes advantage of another lucky break—the actress playing Emily in a summer stock theater (Tom Lake) has abruptly left and a replacement is desperately needed. 

The structure of the book is pleasant.  The reader gets some feel for the large amount of human labor involved in raising cherries near the Lake Michigan shoreline of Michigan, gets a look at Lara’s family, and gets a glimpse of summer stock life and Lara’s steamy romance.   Some critics have complained there isn’t much that happens in this book.  Well, this book is about life and most lives don’t have lots of extraordinary events in them, but most lives do require decisions to be made now and then that influence the course of that usually ordinary life.  That’s mostly what we get in this book although Lara acknowledges the lucky breaks she had and one unlucky break she had that helped her decide a course that she clearly doesn’t regret. 

Lots of themes in this book despite the lack of any major calamity:  family, friendship, love, loyalty, honor, ambition, regret, personal bravery, loneliness/connectedness.  We see a couple of actors/actresses trying to make it in their dreadfully challenging career path and we wonder if Nell will be able to make it. The COVID pandemic provided a device for the structure of the book and fortunately doesn’t otherwise get in the way.  It’s possible its use will “date” this book more than others she’s written.  But it’s really the multiple interesting characters we get to know in depth or at least a bit that make this book the joy that it is to read.  As usual this reader looks forward to more from Ann Patchett. 

A Land Remembered

By Patrick Smith

Published 1984

Read Feb 2023

A friend of this reader lent her a hard copy of this book.  When it became known that an audiobook was available, read by George Guidall, a favorite reader of this reader, the hard copy went back and the audiobook went on. 

This reader now lives in southwest Florida where new residents are flocking at a high rate.  Thus, this saga of three generations of MacIveys from 1858 to 1968 was particularly interesting.  During this period Florida began transforming from a wild frontier to a developer’s dream as people began vacationing in and moving to Florida’s east coast in droves.

Tobias MacIvey and his wife and infant son migrate from Georgia to the east side of Florida.  There they scratch out a meager existence.  Eventually Tobias learns to capture wild cattle, fatten them for market, and make a treacherous trip to Punta Rassa on the west coast where they sell the cattle which are then shipped to Cuba.  There is a full cast of interesting characters with whom the family interacts over time.  Much of the story focuses on Tobias’s family and their challenges living in the wilderness of Florida. 

Over time the wide open spaces across which they drive their cattle become purchased by various people and fences start going up.  Tobias buys some of this land as well.  Thus begins the family’s foray into property ownership and the transformation of Florida from a wilderness to a “settled” state in which developers buy and sell property and literally transform the geography of the state.

This book will appeal to those interested in the history of Florida, to those who are interested in family sagas, and to those who just plain enjoy good writing and a good story.  As this reader fits all of these categories,  this was a pleasurable and educational experience. 

The book was published by Pineapple Press, a niche publishing company that specializes in books about Florida in some way—non-fiction and fiction alike.