Love Heals

Shelby Van Pelt’s novel Remarkably Bright Creatures is a story about healing and finding love again. 

After her husband dies, Tova Sullivan works keeping her home in tip-top shape and takes a job at Puget Sound’s Sowell Bay Aquarium cleaning and talking with the creatures of the sea. Her favorite is an octopus named Marcellus.  Staying busy helps quiet the 70-year-old’s mind from wondering about her son, Erik, who died at eighteen from suicide. Tova never believed the coroner’s ruling.

Her friends don’t understand why she mops floors at the aquarium when she has plenty of money. Tova has a steely determination to live her life her way and on her own. She even refuses all offers of help when she decides to downsize from her childhood home.

The novel keys in on another character, Cameron. A thirty something, down-on-his-luck young man looking to find his father and get money for all the child support payments never made to his mother.  His mother suffered from mental illness and left Cameron with her sister to raise. Abandoned, Cameron can’t get his act together. Without a stable family, his ability to form secure attachments always falters and his relationships fall apart. Frustrated about his life, he leaves his hometown to find his father from a picture he found in his mother’s belongings. Cameron arrives in Tova’s town – coincidental?

Love – it’s what we all crave. It doesn’t always come in the Prince Charming package. And slowly, Tova Sullivan, let the pain of her incredible losses subside and allowed moments of affection, caring and love back into your life. 

And let’s not forget about Marcellus – the octopus.   If you happened to listen to the book, the narrator was amazing. Everyone at my book club loved this character.

We genuinely enjoyed this book. It’s a feel-good-happy book and it’s always nice to have a smile on your face when you finish a novel.  We discussed the general theme of the book – healing.  Everyone has people they loved who have passed away and the difficulty of grieving.  The deeper the love you have for someone – the longer the time you will mourn them according to a grief counselor I spoke with.  We also discussed love of family and friends and the great comfort they can bring.

It a lovely end-of-summer read. 

Enjoy!    

Rating: 8.0

Photo by Sigmund on Unsplash

The Innocence of Childhood

As part of the fabulous Pulpwood Queens our book club gets to discover lots of different books and their authors. During the last Girlfriend’s Weekend, I met quite a few. One author was Lesley Kagen who wrote Whistling in the Dark.  I’ll have a few more posts on other discoveries from that Weekend as my book club reads them.

The author is quite the entrepreneur. She’s also an actress, voice-over talent and a restaurateur.  Where she finds the time…. Her book Whistling in the Dark takes me back to my own childhood. We were pushed out the door by 9 am on Saturday and expected back for dinner around 6.  Somewhere in the neighborhood we would grab a p&j at someone’s home around 1. We were unsupervised and left to our own devices.  We made up games and entertained ourselves with made up stories and adventures. No one worried about child predators.

The novel introduces us to the O’Malley family in the summer of 1959 in Milwaukee. Sally O’Malley had promised her father on his deathbed that she would look after her sister Troo and keep her safe. But life had other plans. Sally’s mother had remarried an alcoholic and was in the hospital battling cancer. The stepfather abandoned Sally, Troo and their older sister Nell. Food was scarce and so was big-sister, Nell, who was more interested in her boyfriend then her sisters. 

Sally’s ten-year-old imagination goes into overdrive as two young girls go missing. She is convinced that her sister Troo will be next. Sally is spooked by all the attention a local cop is giving her and thinks maybe he’s the murderer. The tale spins as we follow the story through the eyes of this bright, inquisitive young girl.  

My book club loved this book. We talked about the freedom of our childhoods. No supervision, going from one neighbor’s home to the next with no thought of danger. No scheduled play dates.  We discussed the difference between our childhoods and our children’s. We all loved the detail and richness of this story. We felt like we were there running in the neighborhood or bicycling down by the lake. But the story really highlights the vulnerability of the children of this (our) era.

Pick up the book for your book club. It’s fun to reminisce.

Rating: 8   

Photo by Piron Guillaume on Unsplash

When family disintegrates

The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett

As the weather chilled and the leaves started to turn color, so did our taste in books.  We chose The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett.

What makes a family? Having dinner every Sunday at mom’s house? Genetics? What bond ties a family together? These were the conversations we had at book club about this superb book.

Mallard, Louisiana was home to light-skinned blacks who didn’t marry “dark.”  The Vignes’ twins, Desiree and Stella, were raised that way. One traumatic night their father was ripped out of their home by a gang of white men for no reason and lynched. This atrocious event scared the twins in different ways and at sixteen they ran away to New Orleans. But after only one year Stella left, disappeared without one word to her twin sister. The book then splits following each twin on their life course.

This book plunges beyond the surface of its characters down to their souls, laying bare their shattered lives.

We talked about how an event in our past affects the present.  How it impacts our daily decisions. We were intrigued by their story and wanted to find out more about the twins. Did they find happiness? Do they reunite?

Great book for discussion, which, of course, is always what book club is all about.

Rating: 8.5

Photo by Kool C on Unsplash

Mrs. Everything

Most of our book club members lived through the 60’s, 70’s and onward so we were all excited to read Jennifer Weiner’s new book, Mrs. Everything.

The two main characters are sisters, Jo and Bethie Kaufman and they grew up in Detroit in the 50’s and 60’s.  Jo never fits into her mother’s image. She’s awkward and a tomboy.  Her father shows her lots of love and tempers her mother’s sharper tones with his kind and gentle way.

Bethie, however, is the apple in her mother’s eye. Just perfect. Beautiful and smart with a lovely singing voice.  What could possibly go wrong?

Life intervenes, and everything goes haywire.  Bethie and Jo almost switch places and become each other.  Numerous secondary characters add lots of color to the book and the story. Some you’ll love and others are just awful. Like our own lives. 

Both sisters are steadfast in their love for each other through the tragedies and traumas they sustained. In the end it’s about finding yourself in a world with expectations and demands.  The pain and successes are better shared.

We enjoyed this read and talked about our memories during this time period – the songs, the hair, the clothes and, our own sisters and, of course our first loves. 

Enjoy.

Rating: 7.0

Summer of 1969

What goes through your mind when you think of the Summer of ’69 – free love, psychedelic drugs, Woodstock, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Charles Manson, Chappaquiddick, Vietnam, San Francisco and the moon landing-so many things.  I was too young to be anything other than an observer. But what a year it was.

Elin Hilderbrand takes us back to that turbulent time in her latest Nantucket read about the Foley/Levin family.  She explores the unique dynamics of families when life happens with all its unpredictability.

Kate’s son, Tiger, gets drafted out of high school.  She wants him to go to college and avoid the war, but he refuses and enlists and ends up in the thick of the fighting in Vietnam.  This starts Kate down a summer filled with remorse and alcohol. 

Kate, her children, Blair, Kirby, Tiger and Jessie and her second husband David spend the summers in Nantucket with Kate’s mother Exalta.  The name sure fits the person.  The story line follows these family members as they acclimated to the ever-changing events of the summer of 1969.

As the counter-war on the establishment rages and the young people burn draft cards protesting the Vietnam War, Kate’s family gets caught up in the upheaval.  Blair, Kate’s oldest is married and having twins. Her husband didn’t want her to continue her studies or work.  She’s miserable.

Tiger is fighting in the war. Kirby is working for the summer on Martha’s Vineyard and getting into her own mishaps as only a young person can. And Jessie, only 13, falls in love with a young man staying in the family’s home.  What could go wrong?

What we enjoyed in this novel was the family dynamic and how each member grew over that summer, some in small ways and others in leaps and bounds. It’s an easy and delightful read.  It was fun for us to talk about that summer (most of us were in middle school-some a little younger).  We talked about how that year was as magical as it was scary to us with all its mixed messages.  We also talked about how different it was for women in 1969 and how we need to continue to go forward – never to go back.

Rating: 7.5 Photo by NASA on Unsplash

As a side note:  Mary Jo Kopechne babysat me when I was a small child.  My grandparents lived across the street from the Kopechne’s in Berkeley Heights. When she was in high school, she would babysit my brother and me when our parents went out with our grandparents. I was very young and don’t have a good memory of her, a bit here and there. But I do remember seeing her parents when I visited my grandparents over the years. Mary Jo was their only child.

It’s such a small world.  

March 2016 Book Club

Book and Wine glassWe read “All the Light We Cannot See,” by Anthony Doerr for our February’s book club.  It was the Pulitzer Prize winner in fiction for 2015.

Not everyone in our book club likes to read novels set in war time, they are inherently sad and violent, but this book isn’t too graphic.

Survivors are not often inclined to talk about their experiences, some only give a condensed version when asked. I have heard a few brief stories of what the war was like.  My in-laws walked from the Ukraine into Germany and were placed in a camp during World War II.  They were more afraid of the Russians than the Germans.  On the arduous walk my mother-in-law, a young girl at the time, got sick with tuberculosis.  A German woman took her in and nursed her back to health.  Imagine what that must have been like.  Refugees struggling for food and water, walking endlessly amidst bombs and soldiers not knowing who was friendly or foe.

Doerr’s blind protagonist, Marie-Laure, had to walk with her father from Paris to Saint-Malo. They slept in fields or bombed-out buildings and ate scraps of food not knowing what they would find when they reached their destination. You felt their fear and apprehension.

How do you handle the chaos of war?  What would you do to survive? Where’s your line between good and evil? The book will provide plenty of discussions for book clubs.

Our book club liked the book and recommends it. See my complete review under Reviews on our site.

 

July’s Book Club

rfyn flower arrangmentAs always we had a great time at book club.  This was an open month – meaning no book was assigned.  Instead, we all shared books we had read that we thought were really good.   I had just completed  reading the classic “Rebecca,” by Daphne du Mauier (see my review to the right under du Mauier).

Everyone spoke about a recent book that had captured their attention.  Two of those were picked for future book club books.

Good books, good friends, good food, and good drinks = a wonderful evening, what more could you ask for!