potato peel pie?

For book club this month, we read The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, by Mary Ann Shaffer. 

Once you get past the initial question... (potato peel pie?!) this is a lovely novel.  Written entirely as an epistolary novel, it manages to keep up a strong pace and introduce you to a motley crew of characters who are loveable and totally three-dimensional.

I've decided I love novels that are made of letters.  Daddy-Long-Legs, if you've read it, is similarly charming to this one.  They make for easy and natural reads, but while this one is fun and sweet it also manages to do justice to really serious things.  I'm not sure how the author did it!

The heroine is Juliet Ashton, a columnist in London, immediately post-WWII, who is promoting a novel.  She receives a letter out of the blue from a Channel Islander.  A secondhand book she once owned has fallen into his hands, and he writes to the address in the front cover telling her how much he has enjoyed the novel.  As they begin to exchange letters, she finds out more about an unusual society started by some of the residents of Guernsey during the Nazi occupation of their island during the Second World War.  Before long, Juliet is hooked - writing regularly to the members of the society, and well aware that she has tumbled upon the next big story that needs to be told.

The characters are lovely and the story has got everything.  Good, evil, things in between.  Love, misunderstandings, friendship, enmity.  Hope in humanity, sorrow in evil too great for words.  A new slant on WWII literature.  It's not Great Literature but it is delightful and thoughtful.  I read it in only several days because I enjoyed it so much.

sight reading

Last time I read a novel by Daphne Kalotay, I raved about it.  So my expectations were set fairly high when I picked up her more recent novel recently.  It was published in 2013, but I'm going to call it a new release anyway.

Sight Reading is a novel about relationships, which happens to be set in Boston, USA, and in the context of the classical music scene.  It takes a journey through three separate periods in the characters' lives, slowly unravelling the ways in which they develop, pull apart and come together again.

Nicholas Elko is a talented conductor and composer who is going places.  He comes to Boston with his wife Hazel and their young daughter Jessica in 1987, to take up a new job in the conservatory.  He meets Remy, the young, determined violin student - and they overwhelm each other.  Suddenly, the Elko family is broken up.

The novel is a story of how these relationships adapt over time.  How does a family learn to cope with functioning as separate units?  With sharing custody and the love of a child?  How will Hazel come to terms with the change in her situation which was no fault of her own, and how will she function, forced to remain on acceptable terms with her ex-husband and his new wife for the sake of their child?  What happens when Nicholas and Remy become used to each other and all their flaws?  What happens when they face their own disappointments and failings?

It is also a story that is interwoven with creativity and people who are creative in different ways (but most particularly in music).  As Nicholas gains more and more critical and popular acclaim, he continues to work on his symphony which he knows will be a masterpiece but which never quite seems to become coherent.

In the end, this is a story that explores the complicated meaning of family and how it can expand and contract painfully, but ultimately beautifully.  It explores the way in which art gives voice to and reflects things that words cannot express.

Sight Reading is very well-written and readable, and the denouément comes strongly and smoothly just when it is necessary.  I normally find books with such sudden leaps in timing more difficult to read, but this moved along smoothly and masterfully.  I have to admit, however, that at times I skipped over passages, particularly descriptions of music that I had no way of hearing.

It was nice to see the author trying her hand at a story with less epic drama than her last novel (Russian Winter) but just as much human interest.  The characters were quite well-rounded and vivid, and the story was engrossing.  I liked how the perspectives changed, and you saw how different people misunderstood each other.

Something wasn't entirely there, however.  I wonder if the characters were all too talented and creative?  Is it really normal to only have friends that do interesting and magical things?  I suppose it might be that way if you work in a music conservatory, but it just felt like normal people were missing somewhere...  I also found myself wondering quite often where the story was going, and what the purpose of some of its elements were.  Sometimes this became clear, and yet sometimes it did not.

I do think this was a very good book.  I wouldn't rate it as highly as Russian Winter but that's not saying much, given that I gave Russian Winter my highest rating ever.  It's the kind of book that you won't regret reading, I would think, and it definitely gave me some thoughts to mull over.  I liked it very much.

it's a long way down

I have been absent for a while - probably because I have not been reading particularly often, unless you count that we read Little Women for book club in June, and I found it overwhelmingly disappointing.  I had read it when I was a child - once - and had watched the movie - once - and couldn't remember much about it when we agreed it could be fun to read it again.  It was not.  What a painful book.  I have to admit I didn't actually finish because I just found myself thinking I could be spending my time in so many different, more valuable ways...

This month's book club selection was much better:

Nick Hornby's A Long Way Down.

I've actually read this one before, but knew that I would want to read it again.

I see that a movie has recently been released and I hope that it is good, but I suspect it will Hollywood-ize this to an extent that misses Nick Hornby's graceful and careful handling of difficult subject matter.  This novel is well and truly a comedic novel, but it grapples with suicide with more empathy and realism than anything else I have ever read - at least, it feels that way to me. 

Four strangers meet on a London rooftop on New Year's Eve, intending to throw themselves off.  This is the story of their unlikely friendship - a friendship based on the fact that they are the only people they know who understand what it's like not to want to live anymore.  Apart from that, they are alien to each other - poles apart.

The two main things I admire about this book are that:

• Each of the main characters has a unique and distinctive voice, and the author inhabits them equally effectively.  It's not often that you see an author manage to narrate equally successfully through such different characters. 
  Even though I finished reading the book a couple of weeks ago, I still think of the characters and am absorbed in their stories.  I don't think of the mechanics of the prose or the plotline, but the characters are real to me.  That is what makes a good novel.
• I don't think the novel sentimentalizes or sugar-coats the issues.  It doesn't do away with the realities facing each of the characters, or suggest that life is going to become, miraculously, easy.  Somehow, nonetheless, it demonstrates the possibility of hope.  I really think that Nick Hornby has done a service to humankind in writing it.  I hope that it has helped people.

Highly recommended.

mad about the boy

I'm behind the times, reviewing the new Bridget Jones novel in February 2014 - but that can't be helped.  Here is my review.

It's been quite a long time since I read the first two Bridget Jones books, and I'd kind of forgotten what to expect when I picked up the new one.  I'm quite glad it worked that way - it was fun getting to know Bridget Jones again, in this, the new Helen Fielding novel.

I hope I'm not bursting anyone's bubble when I say right from the beginning that it is a widowed Bridget that we meet this time round.  Helen Fielding let us know that before the novel even came out, and although at the time I gasped and said "How could she?" I am glad she at least let us know or it would have been a terrible surprise.

She's still the illogically charming Bridget we (at least I) grew to love in the other books.  All the same, she's different... Widowed for about five or six years, in her late 40s (or early 50s?) with two small children, she's still somewhat scatty and adorably clueless at times, but she's responsible for two human lives - all by herself, overwhelmed but determined to 'Keep Buggering On'.  I would be lying if I didn't admit that I blubbed my way through much of the book.  Bridget has always been a character you invest in, root for, and this novel just builds on that.

Happily, Fielding has not got rid of ALL the old characters along with Mark Darcy.  It's great to see some of the old crowd - Daniel Cleaver, for example - in a different setting.  It's also wonderful to see a whole bunch of new larger-than-life characters in Bridget's new stage of life, e.g. Bridget's children, the school mums, teachers, nannies, et cetera.  I think this is what Fielding's really good at - a sort of social satire that is so true and so revealing but somehow also warm about people in general and all our eccentricities.  I also think she really hit the nail on the head exploring the theme of grief.

The plot is a little predictable, I guess - but it was skilfully orchestrated, and in this genre I think that's okay.  I enjoyed it, and it brought me satisfaction to see Bridget triumph over sadness and loneliness (and I don't think that is a spoiler - the book was never going to end sadly, it started too sadly, and you can't possibly tell me you thought it would not be a happy ending).

In the end, I thought this was a really lovely book.  I got quite wound up in it, and enjoyed every minute, even the sad bits.  It was a pleasure to read and I think that's a beautiful thing.  So I am giving it four stars.  Thank you, Helen Fielding!

P.S. The book did seem a little more explicit than they used to be, so be warned if that's a problem for you.