Adult Fiction

Blessed are the Cheesemakers

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Not being a complete die-hard Monty Python fan, I didn’t get the reference in the title of this book by Sarah-Kate Lynch. Completely missed it (Hhubby, on the other hand, picked it up immediatly). The opening quote clued me in: “What’s so special about the cheesemakers?”

Unfortunately, this kind of warped my expecations of the book. I guess I expected it to be a bit sillier (I mean, it’s Monty Python folks. They’re not exactly serious) than it was. Granted, it wasn’t a straight up anything, so I guess I wasn’t too far off the mark. I guess I wanted more belly laughs, though.

The basic plot is a bit convuluted. There’s Corrie and Fee (who has a tendancy to “know” what’s going to happen) who make Coolarney cheese in Ireland. There’s Avis and the pregnant vegetarian singing milkmaids (that’s a funny concept) who help run the cheese farm. (Well, they milk the cows, and thereby are the “secret ingredient”.) There’s Abbey, who’s Corrie’s granddaughter, and running from a real schlep of a husband. There’s Kit, who’s trying to dry out after going on a drinking binge after he “lost” his wife. There’s Jesus, Mary and All The Saints, the three cats. Who really don’t have much to do with the story, except for their funny names. And somehow, they all come together and make cheese.

When Hubby asked me how I liked this book, I said that it wasn’t great but it didn’t suck. I know that’s a wide range there, but really, that’s how I felt. It’s not the worst book I’ve ever read, but it’s not the best. Maybe more silliness would have helped.

March

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First. It’s been a whopper of a week. We closed on our house on Monday, the 20th, and then spent the rest of the week prepping the house for our move on Saturday. Carpet people, vinyl/laminate people, cleaning (if you EVER sell a house, PLEASE clean it for the next owner. It SUCKS having to clean a house just to make it livable, and it’s still not done!), painting (the room was such a mess, M refused to move in until it was painted), packing, moving, hauling trash, and unpacking. Which gets us to today. Things are mostly unpacked. I’m happy to see our books, which have been in storage for the last four months. It makes me feel like I’m finally settled.

On top of all that, I tried to read Geraldine Brook’s March. I was excited about this one: she takes Mr. March from Little Women, imagines a backstory and fills in for the time that he’s missing in the book, until he gets ill and Marmee comes and gets him. Granted, I only got about 5 chapters in (it was a busy week), but I never could get into the book. It just didn’t feel right. I know, I didn’t exactly love Little Women. Still. I think it’s one of those books that everyone has their opinions about, and reactions to, and to… well, mess with the book is just wrong. Mr. March was too extreme in his views — too vegetairan, too abolitionist, too… too! — to make him the loving, caring, quiet father of the March girls. And Brooks tried to weave in the story line from Little Women, and it just didn’t fit with the wartime scenes, and the flashes of backstory that she gave him.

In the end, I put it down. It didn’t hold my interest, and at the end of some very long days it wasn’t what I wanted to be reading. Maybe someday I’ll try again. But probably not.

How Green was my Valley

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I can’t find enough good to say about this book. It was simple, poignant, honest, beautifully written, and totally engaging. However, when one asks, “What is this book about?”, it’s hard to say. It’s about a boy becoming a man. It’s about love. It’s about family. It’s about the disadvantage the worker has with the owners. It’s about coal mining. It’s about… life.

I felt a real connection to this book. My “people” as my grandmother calls them were coal miners in England. In fact, that’s why my mother’s side of the family came to America. Things weren’t going so well in the mines in England (something which Richard Llewellyn touches on in the book), so they immigrated to America to work in the mines in Wyoming. They were probably much like the characters in the book. At one point, Huw (don’t ask me how to pronounce that; in fact, if someone could tell me, I’d appreciate it), loses his chance at a scholarship to Oxford because he beats up a teacher. (Long story. Read the book to find out). His father laments because he wanted something “better”. Huw wants to work in the mines. His mother supports him in that: it’s been good enough for her husband and all her other sons, why not Huw? I got to thinking about how my family got out of the coal mines. Accidents, illness… I wonder if any left by choice?

My only complaints were the lack of information about time passing, but I think that’s nitpicking on my part. That, and I felt like it just petered out at the end, rather than having a good solid ending. But the rest of the book was so wonderful, I can forgive the little things. A great book.

Year of Wonders

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I was skeptical about this book. While I have enjoyed Geraldine Brooks’ writing in the past, I doubted that a book on the plague could be interesting. (Granted, I’d forgotten that I’d really enjoyed Doomsday Book, which is essentially a book about the plague.) Okay, so I was wrong to doubt. Year of Wonders is, while not an exquisite book, a very engaging one.

It follows Anna — a servant in the rector’s household in a fictional English mountain town (based on a real town, Eyam, in Derbyshire) — for a year, from the fall of 1665 to the fall of 1666, while her town battles the plague. Nothing new here, except that the rector — Mompellion — convinces the town to quarantine itself from the neighboring communities, thereby controlling the spread of the plague. And the book deals with the aftermath of that decision. There’s heartbreak (no mother of an infant should read the chapter where Anna’s baby dies. Much too hard.), there’s greed — both taking advantage of the ignorant and the weak; there’s anger; there’s more heartbreak. But in the end, there’s life and hope. Remarkable.

And Anna is an incredibly sympathetic main character. She’s strong, but she doubts. She does good by others, but not all the time. And she has desires, the biggest one being the will to live. Okay, I admit that she was probably more modern than the time period warrants, but for some reason this didn’t bother me. The ending — which was a bit abrupt — did bother me either. Perhaps because I’m lowering my historical fiction standards? Or maybe it was because the storytelling was so vivid that I didn’t let the little things nag at me like they sometimes do.

At any rate, it’s worth the read.

Katherine

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I think I picked this up from Guusje. She mentioned a while back (not going to find the post) that it was one of her favorite books. And, I have to say, it’s not a bad little bit of historical fiction. It’s one of those instances where I actually learned somthing from a fiction book. But, then, the amount of research that Anya Seton did to write this novel was admirable. (Okay, I’ll admit that I don’t have the book in front of me — it was due yesterday — so I’m going off the top of my head.) Reading Middle English, making sure even her minor characters were real people, having someone translate Latin. It made for a very authentic book. (We’ve talked about authentic books here before…)

The basic story: it’s the love story between John, Duke of Lancaster and Katherine Swynford. “Who?” you ask. It takes place in the mid- to late-14th-century, time of Chaucer (who shows up) and the black plague (which also shows up). John and Katherine have a 10 year affair, while John is married and after the death of Katherine’s husband, which results (in the long term) in children who become the parents of several kings of England. Not bad.

It held my interest and I enjoyed it for a long time. But… it’s a long book. And I’m short on time these days. Which adds up to me skimming the last 1/3. It all ends happily for John and Katherine, I’m happy to say. But I didn’t have the time to savor it. Or maybe I was just bored with all the plot twists and uprisings and courtly behavior. Whatever. Maybe I’ll come back to it someday.

Tooth and Claw

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What do you get when you cross Jane Austen with Anne McCaffrey? This chraming Victorian Dragon novel(Or is it a Dragon Victorian Novel?), by Jo Walton. It was a riot to read. The dragons acted like Victorian English: maidens couldn’t be without chaperones (I especially liked the way they “blushed” pink when they came into contact with the male dragons, which usually led to an engagement). They had a social system like the English: there were gently born dragons and servant dragons and lower class dragons. I loved the court scenes (there was a suit filed in the course of the story). I guess I just liked the whole premise of the story. Which, truth be told is quite simple: a father dies. The daughters go live with their siblings and find love. The son feels cheated out of his inheritance and takes his brother-in-law to court. Not much there. This book rides entriely on its premise. Thankfully, it’s a good one. Especially if you like Victorian novels and dragon books. Why not combine the two?

Rachel and Leah

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I have given my opinion of Orson Scott Card before. And I’ve come to the following conculsions: 1) he just can’t let things end. Rachel and Leah is the third in a series, and there’s going to be a fourth (for the good reason that the story was just too much for one book). Still. He does tend to draw things out. 2) I really like the first book I read in one of his series (Rebekah this time; I read them out of order), but the more I read, the less I like them. Maybe because they’re often the same story retold? 3) Card can’t write ancient women. Just can’t. I don’t know what they’re supposed to “really” be like, but I really doubt they had conversations with their betrothed about bearing children (and how it’s akin to the preisthood). He takes modern women and dresses them up in sandals and calls is Biblical. I felt The Red Tent was more authentic. And I didn’t even really like that one.

The good points: I liked how he balanced the four women. That’s a hard task, one that he did manage to pull off (in spite of my complaints). In my opinion, he tilted the scales in favor of Leah and Zilpah, rather than Rachel, as expected. I liked Leah, in the end, more than Rachel (perhaps that’s what he was going for in order to explain the whole wedding deception thing?). She was more honest, more forthright, more interesting. Maybe that’ll change in the next book.

In the end, I don’t know how I really think about this book. Nothing seems to leap to mind. Which is sad. Because Card can be a vibrant, exciting writer. I guess not just about Biblical women. (Maybe it’s that whole men writing about women thing again…)

Gap Creek

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I need to focus and actually write this. It’s been a busy week — M and C started school; it’s going well and it looks like we may become the proud parents of a cello (player) — and I’ve been meaning to get down to write this (shoot, we have DSL now; you think it would be easier) all week.

So. Gap Creek. By Robert Morgan. One of those Oprah books (I’ve yet to have a good experience with them.) Actually, it was for my church’s bookgroup (yay! a book group!) that I read it. And, it’s not bad. I kind of liked it. The story: Julie lives in the North Carolina Appalachian mountains in the late 1800s. She watches her brother and her father die. She works hard. She meets Hank, falls in love, moves to Gap Creek, South Carolina. Where she proceeds to Live Life. All sorts of trials happen: the man they live with is crumudgeony, he dies, they get swindled out of money, Hank is moody, the mother-in-law is cranky, the house floods, she delivers a premature baby, baby dies, and they Move On. There. Now you don’t have to read it.

I shouldn’t make fun of it. It really wasn’t a bad sort of time spent. It’s just that I’ve read similar stories that were written much better. And resonated much better. Which I think is the real problem here. Morgan put Julie through the paces, but I’m not sure if he ever really felt her. (Which begs the question: can men really write women well? Conversely, can women accurately write men?) If he did, I’m missing something, because I sure didn’t. But then, as we know, I often miss the boat on these Meaningful and Moving books.

The Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax

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One week left. Then I’ll renounce the state of Illinois (probably forever; it was good to us, even if the university wasn’t), and become a Kansasan. That still sounds weird. But then, so did being an Arkansasan, and I got used to that after a while.

(I told Julie when I had lunch with her in Ann Arbor that I’d try and put a little more of my life on the blog rather than just reviewing books… one has got to start somewhere, right?)

The Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax (by Dorothy Gilman) was pretty much the last book to be packed; it was loaned to me by someone in Wichita, so it doesn’t go in the usual book boxes, having the disinction of being left out so I don’t accidently not return it. There really isn’t much to say about the book. It’s fluff. But nice fluff. In short: Mrs. Pollifax (I kind of liked that she was always referred to as Mrs. Pollifax rather than her given name; gave it an English touch, I think.) is a retired widow without much purpose in life until she decided to fly to Langly and apply at the CIA for a job. (“No one just walks in here looking for a job!” says one of the characters, or something like that.) She ends up getting hired for a courier job (just pick up a package and bring it back), but it goes wrong (of course), and the rest of the book is how she gets out of a sticky situation. Compared to more recent action/adventure books (of which I read a lot — NOT!), it’s not all that exciting (it was written in the 60s). But still, it was fun.

And since I’m still in the market for fluffy books, it works for me.

The Mermaid Chair

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My dear husband gave me the chance this week to go to the library sans the kids. Made me ecstatic wandering the stacks without having to check every 30 seconds what the dear girls have gotten in to. Okay, only my 2 year old. The older ones are pretty responsible.

Still, I wandered looking for something to read (I even took my trusty list of recommendations, but none of them really sounded “right” at the moment. Speaking of recommendations, someone posted a comment a while back about an author who was a “modern day Jane Austin”. I know I wrote the name down, but can’t find it anywhere, and am too lazy to go searching through my blog looking for the comment. If you’re out there… PLEASE tell me who the author is!)

I discovered that Sue Monk Kid’s Secret Life of Bees was in, and it’s been on my list for a couple of years. But The Mermaid Chair was right next to it, and frankly, it sounded more interesting to me. So I got it instead.

First, let me say that I think Kidd is an excellent writer. Beautiful prose, very evocative imagry. And very Southern, which I loved.

But, this book made me peevish.

The story in short: Jessie is feeling despondent in her marriage and finds answers/escape/salvation when she visits her mother (who had cut off a finger with a meat cleaver on purpose) at her childhood home on Egret Island (off of South Carolina). It’s more complicated than that, of course, and it involves a monk. But that’s the basic jist of it.

I was talking to my husband about it after I finished last night (I liked the ending, by the way), and he suggested that I felt peevish because it’s asking some hard questions. And ones I relate to. I’ll be married 13 years this August (13 years on the 13th!). Am I happy in my marriage? Yes. Am I still my own person, though? Will I end up in 7 more years feeling like Jessie: trapped, despondent, an extension of my husband and children rather than my own person? How do I avoid that? I lay awake while feeding the baby early this morning thinking about all the ways in which I could find something that is myself , that isn’t “mom” or “wife”. And I haven’t found the answers yet.

I thoroughly admire what Jessie did in the end: she jettisoned her old life and found a new place for herself in her marriage, in the world. (I don’t approve of how she went about it, but it’s only a book, and it’s silly to pass judgment on fictional characters anyway.) I hope my life doesn’t come to that, though. I want to be able to keep what I’ve got, but find some… solitude of being, I think is what the characters called it.

But, then, isn’t that what we all want?