Peachy Reads

Not since Jeanette Walls's The Glass Castle has a memoir of a hard-scrabble childhood taken the literary world so by storm.  Tara is "home-schooled" by her fundamentalist Mormon parents in the hinterlands of Idaho.  Never entering a formal educational setting until she is 17, it becomes the turning point in her life.  But her childhood was a education in its own right, and this memoir lays it bare-- the end-of-days cult of her father, the rejection not only of public schooling but also the medical profession, the isolation from relatives, the cruel inter-sibling abuse she suffers.  Nevertheless, it's a beautifully written story.

French-Moroccan author Leila Slimani has crafted a plot that is every working couple’s worst nightmare—a nanny who walks into the life of their family and seems to make everything perfect… until it all goes so utterly wrong.   The novel is not for the faint-hearted, but it is skillfully written and a suspenseful, horrifying tale that the reader will not soon forget. The Perfect Nanny  has become something of an international publishing sensation and won the Prix Goncourt,a big literary prize in France which is sort of the equivalent of the National Book Award.   

Juliet is a young woman in war time London.   She is recruited by the secret service, at first to transcribe recorded conversations of Nazi sympathizers, but then bit by bit she becomes more involved in the game of counterespionage, which eventually escalates with an unplanned murder.    Atkinson bookends the story with some timeshifts, which seems to be her signature.   I liked the story well enough, but the characters were a bit one-dimensional, in my opinion.   Well written and plotted, but maybe not her best.

I never saw the movie, but I saw the trailer enough times that it piqued my curiosity.   I’ve given up on edge-of-your-seat movies for many years now, but intense books I can still handle.   So when this title was available for download from my library’s ebook service, I was ready to read it.   Apparently the movie took many liberties with the book, seems like really only the concept survived the translation.   Anyway, here’s the gist of the novel—an exploratory team of several women researchers goes into the mysterious Area X where strange goings-on hint that nature is becoming monstrous, and humans are unwelcome intruders.   There is some pretty weird stuff going on, and when the biologist inhales some suspect spores, she begins to leave the human world behind.  Part of a trilogy.

In The Fleur de Sel Murders a local journalist is murdered after she stumbles upon some mysterious goings-on in the salt basins where salt has been commercially produced for centuries.  There is another murder before Dupin and his colleague capture the perpetrator in a suspenseful conclusion. This is yet another installment in the enjoyable Inspector Dupin mysteries, set in Brittany.  I love the travelogue aspect of these books and if anything, it has made me want to travel to Brittany and discover some of its natural beauty and proud culture.  Interesting to note that the writer is actually a German named J ö rg Bong, and the series is immensely popular in his native country.

In this period piece, which takes place in London just after the Great War, Frances and her mother grapple to make ends meet   in their once-respectable home in a well-heeled neighborhood.   Their struggle in “keeping up appearances” is made worse by the war deaths of the two sons of the family and the demise of the father, who left them with more debts than investment income.   In order to hold onto the house they take in a married couple as “paying guests”.   Frances falls in love with Lilian and then Lilian’s husband Leonard is murdered.   Will their love survive the police investigation and the trial at the Old Bailey, which becomes the talk of the town? I downloaded this for free from the library’s subscription to Overdrive.

A mysterious robed figure appears in the sleepy Quebecois town of Three Pines, where Chief Inspector Gamache has his primary residence.   The dark figure stands and waits on the town green, bringing dishonor, in the tradition of a Spanish medieval custom, to an as-yet unnamed inhabitant who has a shameful secret to be revealed.   When the figure abruptly vanishes and a body is found, Gamache begins to pursue lines of inquiry that lead him to a drug smuggling ring.   During the course of a legal trial, elements of the back story emerge, and Gamache’s gamble with bringing justice in a decidedly unorthodox manner teeters on the brink of failure. I downloaded this for free from the library’s subscription to Overdrive.

The traditional Gods of America (Anansi, Wisakedjak, et al) are gearing up for an epic battle against the new Gods—Media, Superhighways, Television, etc.  Shadow, recently released from prison, somehow finds himself the protégé of Wednesday, the New World incarnation of Odin.  This is sort of an adult-version of The Chronicles of Narnia or Percy Jackson & the Olympians.  Gaiman’s creativity and gift for storytelling make this unique novel entertaining, and his travelling of the “blue highways” of America will make the reader want to take a road trip (not the least to the incomparable Rock City, just up the road from Atlanta!).

An elegy is a “poem or song composed especially as a lament for a deceased person”.     Things have clearly been tough for Appalachia’s white population during recent decades.   The author describes his difficult upbringing by a single mom and his grandparents split between an impoverished mountainous area of Kentucky and a southern Ohio town with manufacturing jobs.   Gradually, through the guidance of his grandparents, the discipline of the military, higher education, and a drive to pull himself up, the author defies the odds and leaves his hardknocks life behind. [This book seemed to take off after the election of 2016 with people trying to understand the context of the Trump voter.]

This is the first installment of the author’s Neapolitan novels, a series that has been translated from the original Italian into many languages and has become something of an international publishing sensation.    Focusing on the friendship of Elena and Lila, the first novel in the series follows the girls from elementary school to Lila's marriage.  A central theme is the limited opportunity afforded women at that time.  Elena pursues an educational path beyond elementary school, a path that is not easy and which she at first struggles with, but eventually excels at.  Lila, whose intellectual abilities might even surpass Elena's, instead drops out of school and helps out with the family shoe repair business before becoming engaged at the tender age of sixteen.  My Brilliant Friend is a wonderful look at growing up in a poor 1950s Naples neighborhood, but has universal touchstones that anyone of a certain age will identify with.

James Ivory makes beautiful films from beautiful books, so after seeing the Oscar-nominated movie, Call Me by Your Name , I was intrigued.  Would the sumptuous Italian setting get an E.M. Forster treatment like Room with a View ?  Were the characters as complex as those in The Remains of the Day ?  Was the social commentary as sharp as in Howard’s End ?   Well, the novel  Call Me by Your Name is basically a love story with plenty of young angst.  If it’s an ode to Italy you’re looking for (which I think I was), it really isn’t that.  There are many differences between the book and the movie, and as often is the case, many scenes from the book don’t make the cut, and an interesting character in the book is not in the movie at all. In fact, the seaside town in the book becomes a landlocked village in Lombardy in the cinematic version.  The trip at the end of the summer is to Rome in the book and not Bergamo as in the movie.  So...

Michael Crichton, author of Jurassic Park , died a decade ago, but his estate is still finding new   (actually old) manuscripts to publish.   This one has the tantalizing cover that might make the reader think it’s a prequel to his dinosaur saga, but it ends up being more of a western.   Which is okay. It follows a paleontological expedition to the untamed west in the late 1800s, when the new discovery and pursuit of the fossilized remains of dinosaurs coincided with the lawlessness of the Wild West.   There are shootouts, Indian raids, stagecoach chases, and the like.    The historical foundation is interesting, but I sort of understand why this manuscript remained at the back of the drawer.

Richard Mayhew leads a rather ordinary London life—humdrum job, average flat, and a   totally controlling fiancée...   It all turns topsy-turvy when a gravely wounded girl almost literally drops in front of him on his way to a restaurant and he is introduced to “London Below” and all its oddities. Readalike:   Rivers of London

The setting for this installment of the Bernie Gunther series takes place during the complicated post-war years, in which former Nazis frequently went to South America, were extradited, and tried for war crimes in Europe.   Bernie is picked up on a boat by a US Navy patrol off the coast of Cuba, and is then transported first to a prison in New York and from there to France and Germany, where the story of his time in Paris and Vichy France is gradually revealed.

There is a sometimes fluid boundary between reality and the fairy world. When a man returns after a long absence to his childhood home for a funeral, he remembers a friend who used to live down the lane.   When he visits, long discarded memories are reawakened and he relives the strange goings-on that occurred when a monster crossed from the netherworld into his own.

During the first World War Halifax, Nova Scotia, served as the gathering point for trans-Atlantic convoys. Merchant and military ships would mix in the harbor, and on one unfortunate day a transport containing highly explosive ordnance caught fire and eventually exploded in an event that nearly obliterated the Canadian town and its citizens.