Not Quite Chick-Lit, But Close Enough

I'm glad to have finally found some engrossing fiction; I was seriously contemplating burdening you all with a posting on a veritable doorstop of a book (Jerusalem:  A Biography by Simon Sebag Montefiore.  Fascinating, but not for the faint of heart).  Fortunately, this week's random grab at the New Books section came up trumps.

First, Falling Together, by Marisa de los Santos.  This looks a lot like chick-lit; the cover features a small cafe table with three teacups, two grouped together.  The story itself is more complicated.  Yes, there is an enduring friendship thing going on, as well as an on-again, off-again relationship complicated by custodial issues.  The requisite cute-child-perpetually-wearing-tiara is present also.  However, something about this book sets it (just a little) above that genre.  Three friends meet at college.  One is male, two are female.  They share very little in terms of character traits, but Pen, Will, and Cat become fast friends.  Fast forward a decade, and they are no longer in touch, and the reader does not discover why for many pages.  There's friendship, trauma, travel, and enough humor to leaven the whole thing.

When I first opened the cover of The Time In Between, by Maria Duenas, I wasn't altogether sure that I would stay the course.  The jacket blurb mentioned the Spanish Civil War, and that is a period about which much has been written, very little of it easily readable (think Hemingway, think Falangists, think various Communists and all the death and destruction and depressing ideology.  What a bore.  And I firmly believe that more people claim to have read Hemingway than have actually made it through an entire Hemingway novel).  I was pleasantly surprised by this book -- it starts a bit slowly in a messy failed romance sort of way, but it turns out to be a really excellent spy novel.  The main character, a Spanish woman called Sira at the beginning and Arish when she begins her career as a dressmaker/spy, develops quite a bit over the course of the plot.  The book is 609 pages, which is a real treat -- when I am enjoying a book, I want it to go on as long as possible.

Last of all is a confection of a book that is more like a graphic novel than a work of writing.  The Scrapbook of Frankie Pratt is exactly that -- a scrapbook.  Circa 1920's dance cards, photos, advertisements, postcards, and typed commentary by the eponymous Frankie Pratt fill this book, as the reader traces her story from Cornish, New Hampshire, to Vassar, to Greenwich Village, to Paris, and then back to Cornish.
This is a book that can be read in one sitting (marvelous bathtub book), requires no intellectual exertion whatsoever, and has a movie-like happy ending.  Didn't you love picture books when you were little?  It's written (or should I say assembled?) by Caroline Preston.  Enjoy!

Little Women, Revisited

If you've never read Little Women, or if you've read it (or watched it) and loathed it, go play some Angry Birds, because this post is definitely not for you.

The Little Women Letters, by Gabrielle Donnelly, is a fluffy treat of a book.  It's nearly chick lit, but not quite, because there isn't anyone nasty in the book (and if they are, you soon see their redeeming features).  It's a feel-good book that will make you laugh out loud; in my case, I did so several times.

The book is based on the premise that the story of Alcott's Little Women is actually true, and that the March family did exist.  It focuses on three contemporary sisters, Emma/Josephine, Lulu, and Sophie, and their lovable but slightly odd parents.  There are truly no evil characters in this story -- everybody is really so nice!  Even the characters who initially seem standoffish or rude quickly are dealt with and their inner niceness is revealed.

Lulu, the middle sister, is going through a bit of a career crisis when she discovers the letters of her great-grandmother, Josephine March.  (Just a note of explanation -- the book takes place in England; her father is English and her mother is a transplanted American).   Through the letters, Lulu finds a lot of comfort, and of course the storyline cooperates.

The relationships in this book are ridiculously too good to be true, and the conversations almost sitcom-like, but who cares?  It makes its reader so so happy.  This is definitely a book to pick up if you're blue.

The Persistence of Memory

I just finished a new book called What Alice Forgot, which I haven't been able to stop thinking about. By Liane Moriarty, an Australian author who I have never heard of until now, this is chick lit with a twist.

Alice takes a hard fall during her weekly spin class, hits her head, and when she comes to, it's 1998 and she's pregnant with her first child (she calls it the sultana; I think this is Australian for raisin).  Except it's not 1998 -- it's 2008, and Alice has lost the memories of ten years, has no recollection of her three children, and is evidently about to divorce her husband and can't remember why.

The ensuing action is fascinating.  The 2008 Alice, as depicted through the eyes of the other characters, is a hardened woman with uber-mommy features and doesn't seem at all like the sweet, loving, idealistic 1998 Alice. My favorite part deals with an episode involving her teenager (the former sultana) who is suspended from school for some infraction.  It's clear that the 2008 Alice, full of resentment towards the child who's evidently been giving her a hard time, would have dealt with this in a very different way than the new/old Alice who has just met her.  1998 Alice thinks Madison is a lovely girl, and with none of the backstory to affect her behavior, deals with the problem easily in a loving and proper manner.

I won't give away any more of this delightful story, but I would definitely categorize this as a must-read.

This reminded me a little of another book that I've mentioned before, which shares the theme of memory and the effect it (and the lack of it) can have on one's life.  Welcome To The World, Baby Girl, by Fannie Flagg, kept coming to mind as I read this book, even though in many ways they are not alike.  However, in this book memories that are buried and forgotten set off a sequence of events that culminate in a real comfort of a novel.

Wild Ride, Indeed

It's not unusual to find overlap between different genres; a case in point would be historical fiction and mystery.  There are many good examples of books which represent the best of both types of writing.  More rare, however, is a book that is a fusion of, say, chick-lit and fantasy.  Wild Ride, by Jennifer Crusie and Bob Mayer, is just that type of book.

Crusie has published several entertaining chick-lit type books; I've never read anything by Mayer, but I'm assuming he brings the fantasy to the table.  Essentially, Wild Ride is a book about an amusement park that is inhabited by demons.  Called the Untouchables, these demons are enclosed in chalices to keep them from wreaking havoc; the longtime park employees make up a group called the Guardia and must endeavor to keep the world safe from the demons and their minions.  Add several young women, a few young men, family secrets, and a love interest, and, Ta-Da! chick-lit and fantasy meld quite entertainingly.

Another book I read this weekend got a song stuck in my head, playing in an endless loop.  Remember that Herman's Hermits song, Henry the eighth I am?  About the fellow who married the widow who'd been married seven times before?  Well, The Ninth Wife doesn't quite play out like that, but at its center is Rory, a man who narrates the stories of his eight marriages, interspersed with the story of Bess, who meets Rory and seems destined to be wife number nine.  The characters in this book are very likable and  don't necessarily develop the way the reader would expect. All in all, this is an engrossing and diverting book.

Brave Mom Writes "Brave Girl Eating"

This is, emphatically, not the type of book I typically select.  In fact, I've been seeing it on the library new book shelf for the last couple of weeks, and passing it by.  However, this week I took it out, and read it, and now I'm writing about it.  In part, this is my way of marking Mother's Day on my blog (why not?), but the impetus to actually read this book came from the fact that I was recently touched, quite indirectly, by the death of a friend's friend who was rumored to have suffered from anorexia most of her short life.
What I know about anorexia is fairly limited -- it's taught in the Abnormal Psychology class that was a requirement; nowadays most schools try to educate their female students about eating disorders, but this was not something that was talked about -- not out loud -- when I was a teenager.  It is also poorly understood; not just by the layman, but by experts as well.  The theories I learned in college are no longer in vogue and have been replaced by a new set, perhaps more valid, perhaps not.
Harriet Brown pens this memoir of her experiences with her daughter, Kitty, with remarkable aplomb.  What must have been a gut-wrenching experience for her comes through so remarkably and believably, the reader wants to reach through the pages and hug her.  Once Brown comes to the realization that her daughter has this terrible illness, she casts around for ways to help her.  Her choices at the time boil down to sending her away to a specialized residential clinic, or keeping her hospitalized on an outpatient basis.  Brown, helped by her sympathetic and ultra-competent pediatrician, decides on another path -- Family-Based Treatment, or the Maudsley approach.  This entails the support of the entire family, and their goal is to get Kitty to eat, whatever it takes.  This is much, much harder than it sounds.  At times, Brown writes of anorexia as a demon that has inhabited her daughter; she tries desperately to take her daughter's aggressive anxiety and separate it from the daughter she loves so much and whose life she actually saves.  Yes, saves -- this painful and wretched ordeal, calorie by calorie, saves Kitty's life, and gradually she begins to emerge whole again.
As a mother, I cried for Harriet Brown as I read her book, because (although I pray that I will never be tested) any mother should hope to do the right thing, as she did, even though it was so desperately hard.  The FBT was hard on Brown, it was terrible for her husband, it was traumatic to Kitty's younger sister, and it almost completely shattered any semblance of normal family life.  However, as a mother, she knew that this was her job, and that Kitty's mother, father, and sister were the ones to bring her back and rid her of the demon anorexia.  Anorexia has cruel statistics -- close to 20 percent of anorexics die, according to Brown, half of those from suicide.  Harriet Brown and her family continue to battle these statistics, as anorexia can be a lifetime disease, and they refuse to allow their child to become one of the 20 percent.

Gosh, what a downer.  I'll get a bit more cheerful now, and introduce another new book that I read over the weekend.  A Jane Austen Education:  How Six Novels Taught Me About Love, Friendship, and the Things That Really Matter is pure fun for the Austen lover.  One of the only negative things about Austen is that she wrote only six books, and Janeites who finish all six are left with a craving for more.  This has led to a small industry in Austen copycats, mysteries featuring Austen characters (cringe), Austen sequels (gag), and Austen spoofs (actually, some of these aren't bad).  This isn't one of the above list.  This is the nonfictional account of William Deresiewicz, who started off his adult life as an immature, obnoxious pseudo-intellectual.  Forced to read Austen in college, he slowly comes to the realization that it is not chick-lit, it is quite relevant, and it helps him gradually reorient himself and become, in a word, a mentsh.  This is an entertaining and light read, and it has a lovely happy ending.  What more could you ask?

What I Read This Weekend

This post is going to present a sort of smorgasbord of reading material; I had some themes in mind, but I got wrapped up in several books I read over the past two days.  Which reminds me -- before I launch into the meat and potatoes of this post, I would like to address a personal issue.  Since I began this blog, I've been frequently asked, "When do you find time to read?" and variations of that question, many asked in a borderline insulting way, have been getting to me.  I've said this before:  people make time for the pastimes they most want to do.  Some of you crochet, cook fiddly and complicated meals, carve watermelons (if you don't know what I'm talking about, don't ask, you'll never understand), exercise at the gym daily, paint, shop obsessively, surf the net -- you get my point.  If those are your favorite pastimes, you find time to do them, and more power to you.  I like to read.  I like reading better than any of the above.  So put a sock in it, please.

Back to business -- I started my weekend reading with Suffer the Children, by Marilyn Wedge.  A family therapist, Wedge proposes a whole new way of viewing the psychological maladies that are so often diagnosed in children today.  While I found her writing style to be a bit self-aggrandizing, her methods seem so sensible and down-to-earth when compared to the veritable frenzy of medicating that we seem to be doing lately.  In many cases where a child is displaying behavioral symptoms, Wedge finds that it is often a function of how the family is doing holistically.  For this reason, Wedge often meets with the parents alone after initially meeting the child, and she has, in many cases, treated a child successfully by addressing problems in the parents' marriage, for example.  Other situations included a child who was on the verge of being diagnosed as ADHD and on the autistic spectrum, whom she discovered was simply very nearsighted and no one had noticed.  It's a must-read for any educator, and if you're a parent, it will really make you think.  I know it gave me much food for thought.

A couple of fun books I got through this afternoon included The Peach Keeper,  by Sarah Addison Allen, and Friendship Bread, by Darien Gee.  Friendship Bread is a fluffy confection of a feel-good book; it features estranged sisters, more than one character with a tragic loss, a flood, and lots of talk about cake.  I can't resist books that talk about cake; it's almost as good as eating it.  Of course there's a lovely happy ending, but it's a worthwhile read just for the occasional funny parts -- Gee does a great job of spreading out the laugh-out-loud bits while keeping the tone fairly serious.  You don't want to miss the part where two characters are having a pregnancy-test marathon, one thrilled and the other disbelieving.
The Peach Keeper, on the surface, seems to be much the same, but a few pages in it becomes evident that this book has a touch of something different.  In a way it reminded me of Chocolat, which had an undercurrent of magical menace; The Peach Keeper has this supernatural vein running just below the surface; blink and you might miss it.  It's the story of a southern town, ladies' society and all, where an old mansion is being regentrified into a posh bed-and-breakfast, and old classmates return and reunite in unexpected ways.  Sounds familiar, no?  Throw in a corpse under a peach tree, and some weird poltergeist-like events, and that's the book.  I enjoyed it, even though I didn't expect to like it much.

I just put down another new book I wasn't wild about, but I'll mention it here because I have a feeling it will be talked about -- these types of books that feature historical figures, weird characters, and lots of subtext usually are.  Mr. Chartwell, by Rebecca Hunt, features the about-to-retire Winston Churchill.  If you're into that period of history, you may know that Churchill was prone to periods of depression; he called it his "black dog."  Well, Mr. Chartwell is the physical manifestation of that Black Dog.  He's on the cover as well.  At the opening of the story, Mr. Chartwell rents a room in the house of a widow, Esther Hammerhans, whose own loss is not immediately revealed.  Over the course of the story, Esther and Churchill are drawn together, albeit briefly.  It's not a comfortable story to read.  Some parts are downright disgusting (he is a large black dog, living in a house); but for the most part, it's not really a book to inspire and exalt the spirit.  Like the Black Dog, it depresses one.  However, because this shows every sign of being an Important Book, you may as well read it and seem to be up on things in the literary world.


I'm planning a post on Guilty Pleasures in reading -- I'd appreciate any comments and suggestions you'd send my way.  Think of the books that you feel a little sheepish reading, that you wouldn't necessarily flaunt but are just the thing for a bubble bath or with cake and tea late at night.  Thank you!

Chick Lit!

When you see these on the library shelf or the bookstore display, they're easy to pick out:  the covers are usually in varied candy-colored shades, a caricatured mom is prominently featured (usually with great hair), and the titles are catchy, if not terse.  This is the whole new genre of chick lit, literature for tired women who want to escape to the world of someone who has it harder than they do, even though the fictional woman is guaranteed a happy ending.

I Don't Know How She Does It epitomizes chick lit to me, if only because it was the first book of this kind that I ever read.  By Allison Pearson, it was ragingly popular when it came out, and is soon to be adapted as a movie (of course).  It's the story of Kate Reddy, an English career woman who -- literally -- juggles a superheated job, a husband, and two children.  Oh, and a very spoiled nanny, an overindulged cleaning woman, and the need to pretend she can handle preparing homemade baked goods for school events.  Although it's exaggerated to a great extent, it's amusing in the way that only a realistic story can be -- If you have a family as well as a life, you'll see that there's a bit of Kate Reddy in all of us.  As the book draws to a close, Kate has to make tough choices about the way she lives her life.  I didn't really expect it to end the way it did, but I enjoyed this book tremendously.

Lauren Weisberger, best known for her book (and movie adaptation) The Devil Wears Prada, has recently come out with another book which I liked much better.  Last Night At Chateau Marmont is a book that, sadly, seems practically written with the movie version in mind, but is a great story to read on the beach, in the tub, or on the plane.  It follows a period in the life of a couple, Brooke and Julian Alter, when Julian's slowly simmering music career suddenly comes to a boil.  Predictably, their relationship has a very hard time dealing with the series of catapulting changes his fame brings to both of them.  I liked this book -- you don't have to think too hard; it's a great book to read when you're really zonked but you want some undemanding entertainment.

For those of you who like Bridget Jones's Diary, by Helen Fielding, I have to tell you that she previously wrote a much better book, which didn't seem to ride the wave of Bridget Jones fame.  Cause Celeb is the story of Rosie Richardson, who goes to Africa to do something meaningful, as well as escape her life as a hanger-on of famous people.  In the fictitious country of Nambula, she finds her work with refugees rewarding until a locust plague strikes and promised aid does not arrive.  Tapping into her connections, Rosie rallies all the celebrities she knows to raise funds for the refugees.  Of course, there's a love triangle involved.  I will say no more.

A new book (I just read it last week) Emily and Einstein, features a husband who dies suddenly and comes back in the guise of a dog adopted by his wife.  Linda Francis Lee writes this story which so easily could have degenerated into a weird version of Ghost, but does not, thankfully.  It's meant to be a tale of atonement and redemption (for the lousy no-good husband turned dog) but also manages to be amusing and touching at the same time. 

The Secret Lives of Dresses (also new) is for you clothes-minded ladies -- if you just love it when books go into great detail on what everyone is wearing, this one's definitely for you.  Erin McKean tells this story of a woman returning to her hometown when her grandmother has a serious stroke in order to take over the running of Mimi's, her gran's boutique.  Yes, there's a guy involved.  Actually, more than one.  Oh, and there's someone plotting in the background.

A column on chick lit cannot fail to tip its metaphorical hat to the mother of it all -- Jane Austen.  Yes, I know all you classic-phobes are rolling your eyes now, but it's true!  The language may be (a lot) more polished, but all the other ingredients are the same -- unrequited love, boredom, adultery, cads, and silly women who are into clothing.  If you've never tried it, I dare you.  At least watch the movies!