The Lake of Dreams | Kim Edwards

For those who read The Memory Keeper’s Daughter and eagerly awaited for Edward’s next book, you will not be disappointed! This story is well written and seems effortless in the telling, the sign of a good author.

In this novel Lucy Jarrett returns to her hometown of Lake of Dreams to find many changes in the town and in her family. Her brother is settling down, her mother is starting a relationship with a local guy, after being a widow for a long time. The lakeside is being developed and mansions appearing. Wildlife is marginalised and the wetlands are in peril.

Interwoven with Lucy’s journey is her family history which begins with her ancestors coming from England to America and watching the passing of Haley’s comet. In her mother’s house Lucy discovers a finely woven blanket with a moon and vines motif woven into the fabric. The motif appears in stained glass windows in a small local church being renovated. For Lucy it is all part of the mystery of her family’s past and the women the family doesn’t mention. Her pursuit of these women leads Lucy to discover something about herself and allows the family to move on from secrets that bind it.

Very good read, enjoyable on many levels and satisfying.  

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Tinkers | Paul Harding

This is the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. I try and read as many Pulitzer winners as I can so I can 'meet' authors I may not have read before. With 'Tinkers" I was underwhelmed. It describes the last few days of George's life where he is bed ridden and surrounded by relatives. He drifts in and out of consciousness and in the drifting revisits his life's story and more poignantly his relationship with his father, Howard.
George grew up on a New England farm which just made ends meet. His brother Jo seems to have had some mental illness, his mother worked hard to keep things going with the help of George and his two sisters. The Howard was an itinerant salesman to rural properties and suffered from epilepsy. Whether it was this illness or another condition is unclear but he had weird sensory hallucinations which he wrote in a notebook as he traveled through the countryside. He also muses a lot on his own father, a preacher whose mental state deteriorates to the point where he tells his congregation the Devil isn't all that bed. He is ousted by the parishioners and put in a mental institution
George struggles to relate to his father, and as his father's mental state deteriorates George is more and more confused in his emotions towards him. As an adult he became a clock repairer and he compares the intricacies of clocks to the intricacies of life and of his own family.
In his last few minutes of life we discover that Howard left his family and remarried and started a new life. He shows up at George's home and tires to reconnect but the impression is that George was distant and too removed to make any meaningful emotional connection with his father in the end.
There is a lot of reflection and musing on life and families and it is well written but I didn't feel it was a satisfying story and when finished it didn't linger in my mind at all.

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Percival's Planet | Michael Byers

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. The hunt for Planet X in the 1920's and 30's in Flagstaff, Arizona was not something I knew much about. Having read Bill Bryson's "A Short History of Nearly Everything" I became intrigued with some of the personalities involved so I read this book. It is a fictionalised account but has all the main characters from real life who were involved with the exhausting search for a planet they thought made mathematical sense but couldn't quite see.
What I really loved about both books is the crazy characters who make up the scientific community involved. Hard to believe they were real. Byers is very good at characterisation and in his book he depicts the search from a few different perspectives. People start in various walks of life in different cities of the USA and end up in Flagstaff.
Clyde Tombaugh is a farm boy from Kansas who aspires to bigger things and starts making telescope lenses in the barn. He knows he can get off the farm and a chance letter he writes to Lowell Observatory hits the mark and he is employed in the search for Planet X. Felix DuPre a wealthy man with not much to do and too much money decides to head out west to find dinosaurs. He ends up living close to the Observatory and becomes embroiled in the lives of the hunters.
Mary and Hollis Hempstead are brother and sister who through encounters and misadventures also end up at Lowell Observatory. Mary is slowly going insane and Hollis is trying to reinvent himself as an artist. And they all have a part to play in the search, and discovery of Pluto.
Not only is it an interesting story, it is beautifully told. Highly recommended.

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The Story Sisters | Alice Hoffman

I just finished this remarkable book. It packs quite a punch and delivers it in a beautiful style. I was a bit apprehensive given it is a little bit Gothic and deals with child abuse, but it does both in an understated way so that we capture detail out of the corner of our eyes rather than fully in the face.

The Story sisters of the title are three girls growing up on the north east coast of the USA. They are Elv, Claire and Meg and they are very close in age and have a very close relationship in which they create a secret language. They live in a big old house with a huge tree outside their attic bedroom. Also they have a French Grandmother so they spend their summers in Paris which adds a gorgeous European old world touch to the story and becomes very  important at the end.

Into this idyllic childhood steps a teacher who entices Claire into his car. Elv sees this happen, senses danger and yanks Clair out of the car and goes in her stead. The abuse is never graphically stated but it changes Elv and the whole family's life for ever. Various kinds of personal tragedy follows the girls in their teen years. Elv becomes an addict and absconder, and is taken to a rehab centre. Claire and Meg try and make sense of the separateness they feel from her and each other after that day. Meg is never told about what happens and the secrecy of the event really hurts the family, as mother is never told either.

I was really taken by this book, the light hand which describes the story intrigues and reveals little by little the depth of love that can happen between siblings and within a family.
Hoffman has written many novels and on the strength of this one I will investigate her other ones. Well worth a read.

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The Master Butcher's Singing Club | Louise Erdrich

This is one of my all time favourite novels. It is the story of Fidelis Waldvogel and friends Delphine Watzka and her partner Cyprian who try and make a life for themselves in the small prairie town of Argus, North Dakota. Fidelis and Cyprian fought in World War I and their children fight in World War II. 

When Fidelis goes home from his time as a sniper with the army he seeks out Eva, his best friend's fiancée. He tells her of his death and his promise to marry her and look after the child. Due to the poverty in Europe they head off to North Dakota to a German community where he becomes the butcher.

Delphine and Cyprian are the other main characters. They make a living as a vaudeville act who after a crisis return to Argus to Delphine's alcoholic father. In cleaning out his stench filled house they discover three bodies in the cellar and try to figure out that mystery. 

Eva and Delphine meet and become good friends. Their destinies are intertwined as Eva is nursed through her cancer which kills her. Delphine brings up her four boys who all go off to war eventually. 
There is a lot here with the themes of love, family, friendship, small town politics and the Singing club all developed into a memorable story.


The community is a German American one which is also part of Erdrich's own as well as her Native American heritage. i went on to read most of her books and they are all very good but this one is the best.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society | Mary Anne Shaffer and Annie Barrows

This is a delightful read, the sort of book you can give away time and time again because it has everything in it that makes a great story. Shaffer was in her sixties when she wrote it at the request of her many friends. She died soon after and her niece took up the editing and publishing of the novel. The story came to Shaffer after her visit to the isle of Guernsey in the 1970's where she learned of the German occupation of the island during World War 2. 

The story begins as a dialog between a young woman called Juliet who writes humorous column for her local Chelsea newspaper and Dawsey Adams, an islander. He came across her name in an old book of hers. In the correspondence between them he tells of the island, of it's many weird and funny characters and of the German occupation. This period was one of deprivation and hunger, fear and solidarity among the islanders.

The story emerges of the Potato Peel pie society which came about on the spur of the moment when a German officer interrogates Elizabeth, a local. She makes it up on the spot to cover the fact a group of friends had met to feast on a contraband pig. 
But in the end, the group decides to start reading and meeting together and through literature they find solace in those desperate times.

Other surviving members of the group follow Dawsey's lead and write to Juliet about their wartime experiences. She in turn ends up visiting the island. 
All in all it is a very satisfying read. Loads of interesting characters, anecdotes and the historical backdrop of the German invasion are woven into a great read.

The Poisonwood Bible | Barbara Kingsolver

This is a great story. It has everything in it to make us forget to eat and drink as it transports us to Africa.

There are some seriously troubled people in this book who seek redemption and who progress through life creating chaos and disturbing us at every turn. Meet the Prices, a missionary family from Georgia in 1959 who move to the Belgian Congo. They arrive full of zeal and self-righteousness. The image of them getting off the plane is indelibly fixed in my mind as it’s so beautifully drawn in words. They are wearing most of their clothes layered one on the other, with pockets full of small domestic implements…The story is narrated by the five women in the family, Orleanna who is the mother and her daughters Rachel, Leah, Adah and Ruth May.

The father tries to convert and change the natives. And slowly goes troppo. The children try to cope with being uprooted from southern USA to deepest darkest Africa and a father who is slowly loosing all sense of reality. There are mutinous natives, ferocious animal and murderous insects as well as the political turmoil Congo goes through in the 1960’s.

As the girls grow up they become aware of the complexity of the natives and their culture and embrace them. The father, however, cannot. Eventually tragedy ensues and the Price women flee and leave him to his folly. Their story is followed through to the 1990’s.

It’s a brilliantly written book a story which delivers at every turn. Kingsolver has a wonderful gift for poignancy and storytelling.

I went on to read all of her books and have enjoyed them all.

“Prodigal Summer”, “The Bean Tree’, “Pigs in Heaven’, ‘The Lacuna’.

A Gate at The Stairs | Lorrie Moore

 I really enjoyed this novel as it is well constructed and well written. From the start there is a niggling sense of impending doom. I was alert to what might happen just around the corner. The style of the story reminded me of Anne Tyler, but more tense.

The main narrator is Tassie a young woman from the Midwest USA who is going to college in a slightly larger town than the one she grew up in. Her family is dysfunctional. Her mother seems to spend a lot of time convalescing in bed. In a rural town full of farmers Tassie's dad is mocked as he is a hobby farmer growing eccentric crops for restaurants in the big city. Her brother Robert seems full of potential but encumbered by his small-town view of himself so goes off into the military seeing this as a bright future. He is deployed to Afghanistan. 

Tassie needs money to live away from home while at college so applies for a job babysitting. The couple who engage her are trying to adopt and want Tassie to be part of the process. Here is where the tension mounts. Sarah and Edward seem OK but there is an underlying unease about them. Sarah is a chef who owns her own restaurant. Edward is a scientist. They end up adopting Mary Emma, an African American toddler. Tassie bonds with  Emmie as her parents become busier in their jobs and have less time for her. 
Through the story line a lot of discussion is woven in. It is definitively a post 9/11 story and the characters engage in quite a lot of dialogue regarding race issues, Islam, the state of the Nation. 

Sarah gets together with other mixed race families in the small town and they start a support group which is used as a forum for the discussions. 

Yes, tragedy and disappointed ensure. All is not well in the Midwest!
I think this is a good read, satisfying and low key though it keeps your attention.

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