From the Book Pile

Here are some other books I've read in the past couple of weeks:

 

Alace LaPlante's debut offering, Turn of Mind, is yet another new novel featuring a central character with memory loss of some sort. (Here are three others.) In this case, the character is Dr. Jennifer White, an orthopedic surgeon who stopped practicing when her dementia became noticeable to herself and others.  The story is about the possible role of the doctor in the murder of her best friend, Amanda, whose body is found with several fingers amputated — with surgical skill. When police repeatedly interview Dr. White, she remembers nothing about her whereabouts on the day of her friend's murder.  The cops keep trying to unlock the good doctor's mind to see if she can remember anything that will help them discover whether she is the murderer. 

It's a great idea for a novel, an ambitious premise. But LaPlante's exposition of the story is a bit too opaque for my taste, and it lacks whatever spark that's required to compel the reader to keep going. I didn't end up caring whether White had done the deed or not.   ★★☆☆☆

 

Heather Gudenkauf's second novel, These Things Hidden, is a story about Allison, a 21-year-old woman who is released from prison after serving five years for a horrible crime. Will Allison be able to fit back into life in the small town from which she hails?  Will her family welcome her?  With the help of her lawyer and the manager of a halfway house at which she initially stays, Allison gets a job at a local bookstore, where she befriends the store's owner and her little boy.  Other characters enter the story in ways that reveal surprising things about Allison's culpability.  

The book is written in alternating viewpoints of different characters.  Gudenkauf slowly and deftly reveals the truth about the crime that put Allison behind bars.  It's a good read. ★★★☆☆

 

 

The End of Everything by Megan Abbott is yet another novel about an abducted child.  (Yes, it makes for a compelling story line, but — my god! — can't writers come up with something new?)  In this case, what makes the story slightly different is the possibility that thirteen-year-old Lizzie might have wanted to go away with her captor.  Also, the clues about her abductor's identity come from her best friend and neighbor, Evie, who becomes centrally, though clandestinely, involved in finding Lizzie. 

The book succeeds more as a psychological exploration of adolescence and the loss of innocence than it does as a thriller or mystery. There certainly are lots of worse ways to while away a summer afternoon than reading this book. ★★☆☆☆ 

 

 

The Gap Year, the new novel by Sarah Bird, is a story about a single woman and her seventeen-year-old daughter who are going through the inevitable tensions in their relationship in the year before the daughter is set to go away to college.  As the novel unfolds across chapters that alternate point-of-view between mother and daughter, we see the daughter jettison her good-girl, band-geek persona as she gives herself over to the unexpected attentions of the high school football star.

The mom grows more and more desperate with worry that her daughter is changing into someone she barely knows and, worse yet, seems to have lost her interest in attending college. Oh, my. 

There are some funny moments in the book, and Bird is not a bad writer.  But this novel is a silly trifle. There's lots of better stuff to put on your reading list. ★☆☆☆☆ 

 

 

French Lessons, by Ellen Sussman, is a very pleasurable read. The story is about three Parisians who work as French tutors, hired through an agency to help people (mostly rich Americans) polish their language skills.  The three French tutors are linked by friendship and romance.  The opening chapter establishes their characters and relationships.  Then, we essentially have three novellas, each devoted to the different tutors and their students.  We follow the pairs as they talk, interact, and connect emotionally. These long sections are then followed by a short concluding chapter that brings us back to the three tutors. It's a creative, thoughtful design for a book.

There's a lot to like in this novel. First of all, it's set in Paris.  Enough said.   Secondly, Sussman writes with a sensual touch. This book throbs — not in the fashion of overtly erotic prose, but more deftly, subtly. (I guess she knows whereof she writes: I notice on Amazon that she also is the editor or compiler of Dirty Words: A Literary Encylopedia of Sex and the editor of Bad Girls: 26 Writers Misbehave. I'm not going to argue with her about her sex scenes.) Finally, the novel has some very likable characters and some heartfelt emotion.  I liked it.  Mostly because Sussman is a fine writer.  ★★★★☆

“The Paris Wife,” by Paula McLain

I've done lots of reading in the past ten days, too much to report in any detail.  So, I'll simply comment on the best of the five novels and note the others.  The best is good literature; the others are beach reads of varying quality.

 

Paula McLain's The Paris Wife is a luminous look at the young Ernest Hemingway and his crowd of Paris compatriots in the 1920s, seen through the eyes of his first wife, Hadley Richardson.  Though a fictional rendering of that time in Hemingway's life, McLain's novel is thoroughly informed by biographies of Hemingway and by his own writings. Consequently, the reader learns a lot about the great author (the bad as well as the good) and the people with whom he surrounded himself — Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and others.   To me, the book felt much like Nancy Horan's fine novel about Frank Lloyd Wright, Loving Frank, an intimate portrait of a great (but deeply flawed) figure on the American landscape. 

This is an excellent novel. ★★★★★

 

And here are four other novels to consider.  

The Arrivals, by Meg Mitchell Moore — A story about empty nesters whose adult children, each facing problems of different kinds, find themselves gravitating back home to their parents' home one summer in Burlington, Vermont.  The characters, dialogue, and human dramas are very real.    ★★★★☆ 

 

London is the Best City in America, by Laura Dave — A story about a young woman whose brother's impending wedding forces her to revisit her own decision three years earlier to abandon her fiance right before her planned nuptials — and to deal with her brother's ambivalence on the weekend of his wedding.  This is a really skillful novel that nicely captures the angst and paralyzing indecision that many twenty-somethings and thirty-somethings feel when facing life's big decisions.  ★★★★☆

These Things Hidden, by Heather Gudenkauf — A story about a young woman, recently released from five years in prison for a heinous crime, who tries to fit back into an unwelcoming community and to reconnect with family members who want nothing to do with her.  It's partly a suspense novel, partly a domestic novel. Though it has some flaws, it's diverting entertainment.   ★★★☆☆

 

Heat Wave, by Nancy Thayer — A story about a young woman (32) whose husband has just died of a heart problem, leaving her house-rich but cash-poor, and needing to find a way to support their two young daughters.  They live on Nantucket, so the island itself is, of course, a strong presence in the book, as are the young woman's close female friends, in-laws, and a particularly handsome and available man who was her late husband's best friend.   It's not a bad book, but Thayer is one of those authors whose characters address each other directly by name far more often than people do in real life, distracting the reader (this one, anyway) from some of the book's qualities.  All in all, if you want a good beach read that's set on Nantucket, you're better off going with any of Elin Hilderbrand's books.     ★★☆☆☆