Consuming Passions by Michael Lee West

   West, Michael Lee. Consuming Passions. New York: HarperCollins, 1999.

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 A Southerner — did I ever mention I was born and raised in North Carolina? — writes about food and includes recipes. What’s not to like? Add the fact that Michael Lee West is often laugh-out-loud funny, and well, you have a little gem of a book. Yet again, I have my colleague Ruth Ann to thank for pointing me in its direction. She told me about the cabbage-eating ghost who appears in one of the chapters. The ghost was brought into West’s Aunt Lilly’s house when she came home from a dusty antique store with a Flow Blue (whatever that is. Despite having grown up surrounded by them and having a mother in the museum field, I know nothing about antiques) chamber pot and a ruffled apricot umbrella. It’s a great, convincing little ghost story.

West’s other stories are great, too: Sunday dinner gatherings at her grandparents house when she was a young girl will make you laugh and your stomach growl. West’s early culinary attempts are comfortably familiar to those of us who are self-taught chefs, well remembering days when rice didn’t cook; chickens that, after spending plenty of time in the oven, didn’t roast; and pea soups that insisted on being as easy to chew and swallow as dental floss (yes, I made just such a soup way back when Bob and I were first married). Her Aunt Dell is the member of the family every Southerner knows well. We all have at least one — if not more — eccentric aunts and cousins (and it’s fitting here that Dell is really a cousin and not an aunt. Southerners aren’t always pickily exact when it comes to identifying relations. Well, except my father, who can tell you exactly who your first cousin twice removed on your great granddaddy’s side was — but he’s a Virginian and a historian, a breed unto themselves). Finally, she makes you long to get into a car with her to take a leisurely road trip through all the Southern states, in search of sublime versions of barbecue, fried chicken, shrimp, and key lime pie. Or, you could just stay home with her and let her cook all these things for you — just don’t distract her so much that she forgets she’s cooking and catches something on fire.

The book made me wish I put more time into cooking and less time into thankless tasks (cleaning toilets and dusting spring to mind). Such tasks aren’t nearly as much fun and don’t provide such wonderful results. It also made me realize that if one has made New Year’s resolutions having anything to do with weight loss and diet, this is not a book you want to pick up and read before the new year is even two months old. Now that we’re about to enter the third month, though (New Year’s resolutions becoming ancient history), one can safely check it out and read it. I’ve already made her roast pork recipe, which was delicious. I think I’ll try her macaroni and cheese  next. Interestingly, it doesn’t start with a white sauce. This version is all cheese, milk, and eggs. If I can get it to work, I’ll let you know how it is.

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

Flynn, Gillian. Gone Girl. New York: Crown Publishers, 2012.

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I rarely ever read “It” books, because I generally find that they disappoint me. So many people had mentioned this one to me, though, and it sounded like such an interesting premise, I decided to give it a go. Boy, do I now want everyone to read it, so I can discuss it with him or her, but I really hate to recommend it to those who haven’t. Is it a page-turner? Yes. Does it live up to its reputation for giving us no “good” characters? Absolutely. Is it a fascinating study in  sociopathy? Unbelievably so – and yet I believed.

Flynn is a very good writer, which impressed me and is one of the reasons I was easily dragged into the book. So many “It” books these days are written at a third-grade reading level and feature an average one typo per page. They’re so poorly edited I often have to abandon them. Not only is Flynn a good writer, but she manipulates the reader in such a way that instead of being put off by it, a reader like me finds herself thinking, “Oh, keep manipulating me, please. I can’t believe how well you do that.”

The whole book is sort of a masochistic experience like that. Instead of thinking, “Oh, come on. Please give me at least one decent character,” I found myself thinking, “Wow, tell me more about all these horrible people. Are there any evil depths to which they can’t sink?” These are not your run-of-the-mill liars, cheaters, and murderers. They are insane connivers and contrivers, self-absorbed misanthropes to the nth degree. By the end of the book, I did find myself rooting for one of the characters, but barely.

The book was well written, detailed, and clever. It was also “un-put-down-able.” I read it in record time. So, why didn’t I like it? (Warning: the answer to this question includes spoilers.)

I didn’t like it because it was an extremely sexist book. I don’t think Flynn intended it to be. She might have been striving for what I once read Margaret Atwood say when her book The Robber Bride was published. Atwood said that women will never be equal to men in our society until women writers write truly evil female characters the way male writers write truly evil male characters (or something to that effect. I read that quote about 20 or so years ago). Maybe that’s what Flynn was trying to do, but I’m not convinced. To me, this book just evolved into the classic tale of a “psychobitch” (funny that term is bandied about so much in the book. It’s a term I hate), a selfish, self-absorbed, manipulative woman who eventually traps a man by getting pregnant. It’s a story men have been telling for years, and it reinforces the fear that all women have the potential of becoming like this, that men need to stay on their toes.

After keeping me mesmerized, the book just fell apart at the end. Flynn could have done so much more with these brilliant, unlikable characters. She’d set us up to have no clue who was and who wasn’t telling the truth. She could have given us a truth that was so much more dynamic and interesting. A book that, at first, had seemed so original just dissolved into a tired old story with a new hook and a couple of deceptive twists.

Bottom line? It’s too contrived and was such a letdown, despite the fact it got all those rave reviews from critics. If you read it and loved it, please let me  know what I’m missing.

Murder at Astor Place by Victoria Thompson

 Thompson, Victoria. Murder on Astor Place. New York: Berkeley Publishing Group. 1999.

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This is the first book in Thompson’s “Gaslight Mysteries” series, a series that was introduced to me by my colleague Ruth Ann. She also recommended the wonderful Dragonwyck by Anya Seton, because reading Thompson’s historic mysteries reminded her of reading Dragonwyck, another historic novel, but of the gothic rather than the mysterious sort. I’m not blogging about Dragonwyck, though, because PVPL doesn’t have a copy of it. I can highly recommend your buying a copy, reading it, and donating it to the library, if you’re so inclined (you’ll get to read a great book and do a good deed to boot), and then I can write about it here.

Anyway, enough of Dragonwyck and on to Victoria Thompson. People have made comparisons between Thompson’s series and the Maisie Dobbs mysteries by Jacqueline Winspear, but (judging by this first book, anyway), this series doesn’t have the depth that Winspear’s series does. It doesn’t matter. When you’re having this much fun splashing around in the shallow end, you can let the Olympic divers, and all their seriousness, have the deep end. What’s not to love about a mystery that takes place in late 19th-century New York City and that features a widowed, “slumming,” former-blue-blood midwife-turned-sleuth and a cranky Irish policeman (it’s an unwritten law somewhere that all late 19th-century NYC policemen have to be Irish and cranky)? We all know they’re destined to fall in love with each other even though, right now, they have a hard time being in the same room together without getting extremely irritated.

The mystery here was quite predictable, but this isn’t the sort of series you read for the mystery. You read it for the setting, the fact that New York is like a character in the book, and you read it for the characters’ stories, which you soon find more interesting than the mystery they’re trying to solve. I will say that the mystery’s solution would have been shocking, I’m sure, to its 19th-century characters, but we 21st-century types could have spotted our murderer all the way in New Jersey. I also have to admit that I very much enjoyed the fact that a disguise was used at one point in the book. The likes of Sherlock Holmes often encountered disguises when solving mysteries, but most of those who lead lives of crime in contemporary mysteries don’t resort to them.

But, as I say, it’s not the mystery. The historical detail is great fun. I haven’t bothered to verify any of it, but if it’s all legitimate, Thompson certainly has done her research. I can’t emphasize enough, though, that the most fun of all is being introduced to Sarah, our midwife, and Frank, our grouchy policeman. They both have mysterious pasts of their own (of course), and we now know just enough about both of them to want more back (and forward) stories on them. What’s the deal with Sarah’s husband? What happened to Frank’s wife? His son? Will Sarah reconcile with her father (and should she?)? Thompson knows we want answers to these questions as well as a host of others. She’s got all the time in the world to give them to us, and I, for one, am looking forward to taking the time to get the answers, in fact, have already begun the second book in the series.  If you’d like, meet me over in that corner, the one to the left of the chandelier, where I plan to be hobnobbing with the Astors and the Roosevelts at the parties I anticipate being invited to while making my way through the  other books in the series.

Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail by Cheryl Strayed

Strayed, Cheryl. Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail. New York: Knopf, 2012.

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Where do I start with this mesmerizing book? Maybe I should start with what I’d write in a fan letter to Cheryl Strayed, were I the sort to write such things, “Bravo! I wish I had an ounce of the sort of writing talent it takes to get a reader to suffer through unbearable heat and cold, a monster backpack that weighs a ton, lost toenails, dehydration, etc., etc. and still to come away from it all thinking, “I’d like to hike some of the Pacific Crest Trail.'”

Note I said some of the trail. I could never do what Strayed did, hiking the trail for months, 15-20 miles per day to total some 1100 miles. You should see me after a 10-mile hike in Acadia National Park in Maine, and those mountains are mere hills compared to what the West Coast has to offer. Still, Strayed is an inspiration, and she’s a beautiful and passionate writer. Read this book, and you will see, feel, taste, hear, and smell a little bit of everything she did along that trail.

Another thing I ought to tell you is that this isn’t the sort of book I’d typically read. I’m not a big fan of travelogues, and I’m quite tired of all the oh-woe-is-me-but-look-how-fascinating-my-bellybutton-is memoir, which were interesting when they were first being published but have gotten old. And look at that subtitle. I’m also one who reads a subtitle like that and thinks, “So you went on a journey and saw the light? Ho hum. Tell me something new.” I only decided to read it because quite a few people had read it and said it was good, and also because I’d seen an endorsement somewhere from Elizabeth Gilbert (another one who wrote a book — Eat, Pray, Love — that I thought I had no real interest in reading and that I fell in love with when I did).

This book is part travelogue and part memoir, a combination that works well, and Strayed knows how to blend the two without making the book jumpy or disconnected. She also writes in such a way that she doesn’t ask the reader for pity. Her life story is as fascinating as her hike. She had a very unconventional childhood in Minnesota, born into a family beaten down by a violent father until her mother finally left him for good. By the time she was a teenager, she, her two siblings, her mother, and her stepfather were living (by choice) a quite primitive life, homesteading on a large plot of land they owned in a house they’d built themselves. What helped them all survive, she tells us, was their mother’s love, the one constant for all of them in an ever-changing world. And then, the unthinkable happened. When Cheryl was in her early twenties, and her mother was in her mid-forties, her mother died of cancer. It was a relatively quick and agonizing death that rocked her family’s world.

Strayed spiraled out of control, destroying her marriage and embracing both promiscuity and heroin, which left her feeling empty on the one hand and full of self loathing on the other. Not quite — but almost — on a whim, she decided to hike the Pacific Coast Trail, a trail I’d never heard of that stretches from the Mexico-California border all the way to Canada. Strayed’s descriptions of this trail make its East Coast sister, the Appalachian Trail, sound like a luxury resort. This could’ve been a cliche’-ed tale of a woman going it alone and finding the meaning of life, but it isn’t.

Cheryl doesn’t find the meaning of life. She doesn’t meet God on a mountaintop and become a saver of souls. What she does do is prove to herself that she can do it, that she’s a survivor, and along the way, she heals old and new wounds (both emotional and physical), the healing of which helps her to take control of her life, and, yes, to appreciate it. She comes to grips with her mother’s death, her fractured family, her odd marriage and divorce, and she is able to let it all go in a way that brings her inner peace.

Meanwhile, we get to join her on her adventure, sharing marvelous, and often hilarious, details. Imagine facing bears and rattlesnakes numerous times, all alone and with no weapon greater than a loud whistle. Imagine watching one of your hiking boots go sailing off the side of a mountain. Imagine meeting all kinds of interesting people with whom you instantly connect in some primal way because you are all attempting to do this “crazy” thing, hiking through on this trail.

I especially loved the book when she got to Oregon, because so much of it was reminiscent of my first trip to the West 25 years ago. I went out to visit a friend who had moved to Oregon: Ashland, the Columbia River Gorge, Crater Lake — I was there, and I knew exactly how she felt seeing all that for the first time. She truly brought that part of her journey to life for me.

But, really, I loved all of it. I’d love to read a sequel to this book. She hiked the trail back in 1995. What happened after that? It has to be good. Until then, I’m strapping on my hiking boots and hitting some trails. Anyone want to join me? I’m sure I’m not as tough as Strayed, but I’ll give it all I’ve got.

Oh, one more thing, in case you’re wondering, her name is pronounced “straid” as in, “She strayed from the path and ended up in an enchanted forest.”

Salmon Fishing in the Yemen by Paul Torday

    Torday, Paul. Salmon Fishing in the Yemen. New York: Harvest, 2007.

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Finding good 21st-century farce is not an easy task. 21st-century writers and publishers seem determined to be harrowing, or heartwarming, or earnest, or magical. They’re under the impression that we readers don’t want to laugh at ourselves. Of course, the British have always been terribly good at laughing at themselves, so it makes sense that if a reader is desperately seeking farce, hoping to find something that will make her laugh out loud at one absurd-if-only-it-weren’t-so-recognizable episode after another, she ought to seek out a British writer.

I’m here to tell you, dear readers, that I’ve found one. His name is Paul Torday, and, no, the title of his book, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, is not a metaphor for some impossible love affair or something (although there is — sort of — one of those). He really does mean salmon fishing in the Yemen. A sheik from Yemen, who happens to be loaded with money, has become besotted with salmon fishing on his Scottish estate, and he has decided he wants to bring the sport to Yemen, a country completely unsuitable for cold-water fish. Enter Dr. Alfred Jones, a scientist from the National Centre for Fisheries Excellence who gets dragged into this project against his will. Whether you know or care anything at all about salmon fishing, you, too, will be dragged against your will into this hilarious tale that manages also to drag everyone from the British prime minister to Al Quaeda terrorists into its midst.

Torday pulls all of this off using a technique that might have seemed too contrived or precious but which isn’t at all. The entire novel is told through fictitious emails, letters, news reports, and interviews. The book is so seamless that I didn’t realize until I’d reached the end how difficult it must have been for him to write it. I got all the details — or, at least, was able to imagine what they were — without the help of any sort of narrator giving them to me.

The book has been made into a movie, and I’m afraid to watch it, because I’m sure the scriptwriters have seen fit to give it the sort of happy ending a “light comedy” ought to have. That would ruin it. The book could have ended “happily ever after,” but, instead, Torday chose a more difficult path. He turned what could have been a maudlin story into one that had its hilarious moments (think The Gods Must Be Crazy, if you’re into that sort of movie), so that the reader finds herself laughing instead of crying, while still thinking, “Aww, but wait a minute…”

But I won’t give anymore away. I’ve said too much already. You’ll just have to read it yourself.

Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand

    Hillenbrand, Laura. Unbroken. New York: Random House, 2010.

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Shattering! Absolutely shattering. This is the sort of book that’s exhausting to read, and yet, it’s impossible to put down until you get to the bitter end. In this case, making it to the bitter end is well worth the effort, because the ending is a good one.

I’m not much of a World War II buff, nor do I pay all that much attention to Olympic runners (which may lead you to wonder why I even decided to read this book. It’s because so many people have been talking about it and recommending it, and I’m nothing if not someone who, had she been born a cat, would’ve been killed long ago by her curiosity). Anyway, I knew nothing at all about Louis Zamperini, the “star” of this book, and, it turns out, I also knew next to nothing about the WWII prisoner of war camps in Japan, although, all my life, I’ve heard plenty of people refer to the horrors of the Pacific stage of that particular war. My father-in-law, who landed at D-Day, who was in the Battle of the Bulge, and who helped to free prisoners in a Nazi concentration camp, always talked about the huge relief he’d felt when the war ended, because it ended just as he and his friends were headed for the Pacific. They were more terrified of that possibility than anything they’d already experienced.

Reading this book, I could understand my father-in-law’s terror. This one is not for the faint of heart. Every time you find yourself thinking this life of torture and humiliation can’t possibly get any worse, it does. It also helped me understand how the clash of two cultures that have almost nothing in common can play itself out in war. The Japanese were so isolated (by choice) for so long that there was no way the Americans and the Europeans could have known much about them or have had any clue what they might encounter from these highly intelligent people whose ideas of things like honor (better to kill oneself than ever to be captured by an enemy) were so very different from ours. (It’s hard not to make comparisons to today, the way we send our young men and women to fight in the Middle East, to places many probably couldn’t even locate on a map, let alone know anything about the people’s customs and beliefs).

Louis is a true hero, though, the kind who, had he been born in this decade, would have been thrown into a juvenile detention center before he was even thirteen. Thanks to a persistent older brother, who was determined to channel his brother’s energy and intelligence into something worthwhile, he was given the chance to shine as a runner who made it to the Olympic games. His “tough boy” resilience and craftiness are what afforded him the ability to survive a plane crash and subsequent capture by the Japanese, which led to his imprisonment in several different POW camps.

The story is harrowing. “Edge of your seat” and “biting your fingernails to the quick” are clichés that were invented for books like this one. Hillenbrand writes clearly and passionately and with attention to detail, bringing the setting and characters to life in all their horror and glory. My shock, after reading it, is not so much that so many POWs died in Japan but, rather,  that any managed to survive at all.

I will remember this book. Next time I’m complaining because I have a bad chest cold; or it is 95 degrees with 95% humidity, and I’m stuck outside for an hour; or I’m sitting in traffic on the New Jersey Turnpike, and I’m tempted to think, “It just doesn’t get any worse than this,” I will remember this book and think, “Oh, yes it does. You are  extremely fortunate, and don’t you forget it.”

Like I said earlier, it isn’t for the faint of heart. But if your heart is strong, if you can handle torture and violence described in detail, give it a go. If there were ever an incredible, unbelievable story about a man, this one is it, and I assure you, it’s worth getting to the end.

11/22/63 by Stephen King

King, Stephen. 11/22/63. New York: Scribner, 2011.

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You can say I’ve grown up with Stephen King. My first introduction to him was being told I “looked like Carrie” when I was in seventh grade (which really means the girl who said it thought I looked like Sissy Spacek, an observation with which I’ve never agreed). I hadn’t seen the movie; I hadn’t read the book; and I didn’t know who Stephen King was. I soon would. I read my first Stephen King book about a year or so later. It was Salem’s Lot, and it scared the living daylights out of me, which means I loved it, and I immediately went in search of more.  It didn’t take me long to find The Shining, still one of my all-time favorite horror novels  (and movies). I went on from there, and  over the years, I’ve read plenty of Stephen King books, although I’ve come nowhere near reading everything he’s written — he’s so prolific, and his books are often so long, and, well, there are other authors in the world to read — but I return to him time and again when I want something spooky, especially something spooky set in Maine. This is the best of his I’ve read.

I find it funny to be saying that because, for me anyway, this book isn’t “typical” Stephen King, which is to say it falls more into fantasy than horror. I know. These two genres are sometimes indistinguishable, and this could be described as “dark fantasy,” rendering it even more indistinguishable from horror, but I guess what I mean is that this book didn’t scare me at all. What it did do was mesmerize me.

I’m always eager to read books about time travel, a subject that fascinates me, and this book was no exception. Everyone I know who’d read it (including my husband) had raved about it, and what could be a more interesting time travel tale than someone who goes back in time to try to prevent an assassination (in this case, JFK’s)? I was still in my mother’s womb when Kennedy was shot, so I’m not one of those, like everyone I know who was over the age of five when it happened, who can tell you exactly what she was doing and how she felt when she heard the news that day. I’ve never had a huge interest in the subject — just a very sad moment in U.S. history and the opening for what would become the turbulent sixties with other assassinations to come. But the idea of preventing any assassination and what the consequences might be is a great premise for a novel. It seemed reminiscent of another one of my favorite Stephen King novels, The Dead Zone, which has that same “what if” element to it.

I have to admit I was a bit worried when I first started the book. As much as I love time travel stories, they have to be really good — especially if they’re full-length novels — because I can get bogged down in details that make it very hard for me to suspend all disbelief. My favorites are A Traveler in Time by Allison Uttley, To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis, Time and Again by Jack Finney, and The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger — all of which have flaws in their logic but which also have such good, fun story lines I was soon willing to stop all my “yes, but-ting” and just enjoy the well-crafted tales.

I needn’t have worried. After all, this is Stephen King, storyteller extraordinaire. He had me before I’d hit ten pages, all disbelief suspended by strong ropes somewhere far away from my brain. The story is so imaginative and so well-told, and I absolutely love the fact that some of it takes place in Derry, ME, making use of characters and events in King’s novel It (which is the scariest of his I’ve read).

11/22/63 is a long book, yes, but I loved every minute of it. It was fun to travel back to that era in such an interesting way, obtaining details of the late fifties and early sixties from the perspective of someone experiencing them for the first time (our “hero” Jake is in his thirties, born long after JFK’s assassination, and like me, not really all that interested in it until this opportunity hits). King includes little things to make you chuckle (“One day, someone’s going to prove cigarette smoking is bad for you”) and others to make those who remember the years (like King himself) nostalgic (root beer had real flavor). And, of course, there is suspense. Jake hits 1958, and it doesn’t take long at all for him to be living a life that keeps the reader on pins and needles, worried about what’s going to happen next. There’s a nice little romance in there, too, and there were actually a few wry observations that made me laugh out loud (“instead of being the man who mistook his wife for a hat, I’m the man who thought he was in 1958”).

Sometimes (okay, quite often), King’s endings are weak. Not so, here. The ending is perfect — things are okay but not “happily ever after,” and he presents us with some real food for thought. If you love King and haven’t read this yet, you won’t be disappointed. If you’ve never read him, read this, but be forewarned: loving it doesn’t mean you’ll necessarily like anything else he’s ever written, unless you’re a fan of horror and dark fantasy (but if that’s the case, why haven’t you yet read him?). I’d be willing to go out on a limb and say this one is his Masterpiece.

I’ve Got Your Number by Sophie Kinsella

 Kinsella, Sophie. I’ve Got Your Number. New York: Dial Press, 2012

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Who doesn’t like some good chick lit now and again? Unlike some of the other chick lit authors I’ve read (Jane Green and Lisa Jewell spring to mind), Sophie Kinsella has not slacked off, pumping out books without much care or thought, knowing she’s successful and that her books will sell even if it seems no one bothered to give them any sort of editorial eye before publishing them. Kinsella’s a very good writer whose writing remains strong, not sloppy.

Yes, her plots are unbelievable. This one was completely so (young woman has cell phone stolen right out of her hands and, minutes later,  just happens upon another one that’s been tossed in the trash, so she decides to pick it up and start using it — and that’s one of the most plausible parts of the plot). My first question was: how is she charging this phone she’s found? Did its former owner just happen to have the exact same phone she did, so her charger works? She never mentions having to buy a charger for it. Unbelievable plots don’t matter, though, when you’re a writer who is laugh-out-loud funny and who has  a particular genre down to a science, the way Kinsella does. She knows exactly how to take a heroine, put her into impossible situations, and save her by the end of the story  — always getting the “right” guy in the end, no matter how many Mr. Wrongs she has to face along the way (typically only one but sometimes more than one).

Our heroine Poppy is a wonderfully endearing character, and I absolutely loved her fiancé’s stuffy academic family, so wonderfully over-the-top in all the right ways! The scene in which she is forced into playing Scrabble with them is priceless (and one to which I could completely relate, having played my fair share of similar games of Scrabble and also Trivial Pursuit). Sam, the rightful owner of Poppy’s “new” cell phone was an endearing character, too, although reading this book reminded me how ludicrous the corporate world is. Not for the first time, I found myself thinking “So glad no longer to be a part of all that.”

I like the way Kinsella handles her plot twists, too. She doesn’t bombard you with too many (again, I think of the last Jane Green novel I read — not that, mind you, I’m about to give up reading Jane Green. It’s just that she’s not the superior writer that Kinsella is), and she does manage to surprise. I loved the way Poppy’s possession of that phone played into corporate evil, and yes, I was as surprised as I was meant to be, when I discovered that it did, having paid as little attention to what was important as my friend Poppy did (sorry for being so vague, but I’m trying not to give away the surprise for when you read it, and you will, I hope, be reading it).

In the world of candy literature, this one is a perfect, dark-chocolate-covered marshmallow (of the Wilbur variety, of course). I’m licking the sugar off my fingers and looking around for more.

The Memory Keeper’s Daughter by Kim Edwards

 Edwards, Kim. The Memory Keeper’s Daughter. New York: Penguin, 2006.

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Back when this book first came out, I was still living up in Connecticut, and I had just discovered book blogs. I remember quite a few bloggers were reading it and reviewing it, so it stuck in my mind (even though I don’t remember what they had to say about it). When we moved down here to Lancaster County, I got a copy of the CD audio version from the library, all excited that it was performed by Martha Plimpton, an actress I’ve loved ever since I first saw her in The Goonies. Apparently, I was so excited about Plimpton that I didn’t  realize it was an abridged version until I was about two chapters into it. I hate abridged versions, always wondering what’s been left out and why (also, there’s that whole Cliff Notes sort of aspect to abridgments that I guess my inner-English teacher doesn’t like). Anyway, I abandoned it, without too much regret, because I hadn’t been all that enthralled. Now I’m wondering why I wasn’t.

You see, this go-round (and the only reason I read it was that Lisa chose it for the library’s book discussion group), I loved it. I was riveted from the beginning, immediately dragged into this story about a doctor who decides to give away his Down’s Syndrome baby (the twin sister of his non-Downs son) as soon as she is born, without ever telling his wife that she had this second child. I know we live in a different time and place, but it just seemed unfathomable to me that a man could choose to “get rid” of a less-than-perfect baby this way, especially once he’d seen her and held her.

Of course, in reality, it’s not unfathomable at all. Today, some choose just to abort such babies, but, of course, no one would have had that option back in 1964, which is when this story takes place. Anyway, Kim Edwards has taken this circumstance and imagined all its repercussions in very believable ways. She’s raised many, many good questions along the way, not the least of which are:

1) What is it, exactly, to “protect” someone the way David Henry decides to “protect” his wife Nora by not telling her about their daughter?

2)Does a child have to be “normal”, and what, exactly, does that mean? Can one not love as much and be loved as much by a child who isn’t “normal” by society’s standards, and how could someone not see that the answer to that question has to be “yes”?

3) How do secrets destroy a marriage? A family?

I felt sorry for Nora, the quintessential 1960s wife. She’d been taught to be the “good girl”, that this role brought reward. In the end, though, it didn’t. It meant “obeying” a man she barely knew, stifling her own sense of independence and adventure, acting out her rage through unsatisfying affairs.

Edwards draws a fascinating contrast between Nora and Caroline (the nurse who adopts the abandoned baby Phoebe). She explores the two children and the lives they inherit due to David’s decision, and, in doing so, she gives us a slight glimpse of the ways women’s lives evolved from the early 1960s to the late 1980s. She’s honest without being brutal, and presents her story with all its complications: the devastation I expected from such a story, but also a tenderness I didn’t expect. I enjoyed the book immensely, from beginning to end (much to my surprise).

Track of the Cat by Nevada Barr

    Barr, Nevada. Track of the Cat. New York: G.P. Putnam Sons, 1993.

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It seems so many people I know love Nevada Barr, and the premise for her mystery series is right up my alley, really: a park ranger who moves around the national parks in this country and encounters one adventure and mystery after another. When I grow up, I want to be a park ranger who moves around the country and solves mysteries. I read one of hers a number of years ago and enjoyed it (can’t remember which one), but I’m a stickler for wanting to read things in order, so I decided to go back to the beginning with this, her first. This one takes place in Guadeloupe National Park, which I didn’t even know was a national park (shows what a good park ranger I’d actually make), in West Texas.

The book introduces Anna Pigeon and suggests that she has moved from New York City out to the Southwest to get away from sad memories associated with the sudden, violent death of her husband. We don’t know what she did in New York, but now she’s out here studying cougars in the park. When she stumbles across a fellow ranger’s dead body, at first it seems like the woman was a victim of one of these cougars. Anna quickly begins to realize, though, that something isn’t quite right about this kill. The clues left at the scene don’t point to the way that either a cougar or a park ranger would behave. So now, we’re off and running with what turns out to be a very good mystery, especially for a first-time effort.

Anna has a sister who is a psychologist back in New York. I not only enjoyed Anna’s mystery, but I also enjoyed getting to know her character a little better via the phone conversations she has with this sister. These conversations are interspersed throughout the book. I like this technique Barr chose to use, and she’s a skillful writer. Her dialogue between the two sisters never rings false or seems too formal, and she doesn’t rely on the device too much, just enough to keep the reader’s interest.

Barr’s written plenty more in this series, and I’m looking forward to reading them. She hasn’t written too many that take place in national parks I’ve actually visited, but I bet the ones that do will be even more fun to read. If you’re looking for a solid mystery with an endearing sleuth, this book is for you.