book review

40 Days of Book Praise, Day 10

by Ramona DeFelice Long

RamonaGravitarFor 40 days, I am choosing a book from my personal book shelves. It will be a book that is insightful, intriguing, or illuminating about women. I will write why I think this book is a positive one and worth a read. This isn’t advertising for me or to promote any of my friends. It’s simply praise for good books.

Day 10, Prairie Songs by Pam Conrad

prairie songs

Few people would argue that it took strong, stout, and brave people to settle in the American midwest. Native Americans understood the harshness of the land and seasons, and young pioneer Louisa loves the miles of grasslands and open skies in the only home she’s ever known. But vast spaces are not for everyone, most particularly for the new arrivals in Louisa’s world: a doctor from New York City and his wife, elegant and mercurial Emmeline. For a while, Emmeline brings exciting changes to Louisa’s life. She gives Louisa and her shy little brother Lester reading lessons. She introduces Louisa to poetry. Louisa can’t help but compare her own mother to Emmeline, and for the first time, she sees her mother as a woman: hearty and warm, but also as wrinkled and worn as a walnut. Momma is also insightful, and it is she who recognizes that Emmeline’s quick-changing moods are more than a temperamental nature. As the harsh winter descends, Emmeline falls first into depression, and then into despair, and finally into madness, and neither Louisa nor Momma nor her doctor husband can help Emmeline.

Why is Prairie Songs a good read for women? As in her other Nebraska book, My Daniel, Pam Conrad’s descriptions are both lovely and harshly illuminating. Pioneer life is often romanticized, and the relentless hard work women performed each day just to feed and clothe their families minimized. Conrad explores the isolation prairie women suffered to the extreme in Emmeline, but her story is tragic and unforgettable.

NOTE: This book was published in 1985. Pam Conrad died of breast cancer in in 1996, at age 48. Reading this and her other stories and poems will keep her work and memory alive.

40 Days of Book Praise, Day 9

by Ramona DeFelice Long

RamonaGravitarFor 40 days, I am choosing a book from my personal book shelves. It will be a book that is insightful, intriguing, or illuminating about women. I will write why I think this book is a positive one and worth a read. This isn’t advertising for me or to promote any of my friends. It’s simply praise for good books.

Day 9, Feeling Sorry for Celia by Jaclyn Moriarty

feeling sorry for celia

This YA novel by Australian author Jaclyn Moriarty (sister of Liane and Nicola, also authors) is the first of several stories set at two imaginary high schools in Sydney—Ashbury, the toney private school; and Brookfield, the raucous public school. The five Ashbury-Brookfield books are standalones with crossover characters, and all are written using narrative as well as media. In Feeling Sorry for Celia, we meet Elizabeth Clarry, a typical high school girl whose life suddenly gets complicated: her absentee father wants to reconnect; her wacky mother communicates through notes on the fridge; her best friend Celia keeps falling off the grid; and an unidentified boy on the bus has begun leaving “secret admirer” type notes. When a teacher assigns an Ashbury-Brookfield pen pal project, Elizabeth finds a place to spill her questions and record the crazy events through letters and postcards. The pen pal responds in kind, but so do several imaginary organizations—such as the Cold Hard Trust Association and The Best Friends Club—who offer sympathy, criticism, cheerleading, and comeuppance. Elizabeth discovers the world is a small place as the unconnected bits of her life begin to reach out and touch other another.

Why is Feeling Sorry for Celia a good read for women? Elizabeth Clarry is an Everygirl. She is both special and not special at all. You’ll guess alongside as she tries to figure out which of the Brookfield boys is leaving the notes, and you’ll hold your breath in dismay when she wonders if she’s the butt of a practical joke. In Moriarty’s capable hands, the teenage characters are real, but they are also mostly nice. They are people, not kids or people-in-progress. This is also a story about relationships and taking the chance to learn about and like someone who is not like you, and to embrace people who are odd. Such as Mom. The  mother-daughter relationship is quirky, but it’s full of trust and caring. Mom is an individual, and her portrayal makes it easy to understand why Elizabeth is independent and sensible, but also likable and fun.

40 Days of Book Praise, Day 8

by Ramona DeFelice Long

RamonaGravitarFor 40 days, I am choosing a book from my personal book shelves. It will be a book that is insightful, intriguing, or illuminating about women. I will write why I think this book is a positive one and worth a read. This isn’t advertising for me or to promote any of my friends. It’s simply praise for good books.

Day 8, The House by the Sea by May Sarton

house by the sea

This journal was my introduction to the work of poet, novelist, and essayist May Sarton. It has been described as her “second act” and is a personal account of her move from her longtime home in inland New Hampshire to a house on the coast of Maine. In this house by the sea, May lives alone—but for her beloved cat Bramble and the first dog May’s ever owned, a puppy named Tamas—in a place described as nothing but endless ocean, woods, and vast skies. The small village is isolated most of the year, and isolation is a theme May addresses here and in much of her work. The journal entries are casual, sometimes rambling, and run the topical spectrum from deep themes of aging, friendship, failure, envy, sexuality, and success, to the everyday annoyances of a racoon that makes regular and noisy visits to her garbage cans at night. May loved to garden and her observances of nature are sometimes meaningful and sometimes matter-of-fact. She reflects upon her life and enjoys visits from friends, but the self-doubt that is never far from her as an artist appears as well. She finds tranquility in her garden and her pets, so much so that she wonders if she will ever write again. Luckily, her passion to create returns and she shares the joy when it does.

Why is The House by the Sea a good read for women? May Sarton was a complex person whose journals are an honest, intimate account of her simple but layered life. It is not pleasant to grow older. It is sad to part from a lover after 15 years. It stings to read a bad review. It is hard to balance giving and taking. It is a struggle to be creative when your work comes from a fragile internal place, but it is also a celebration when a poem or a paragraph works. May Sarton’s journals are brilliant work, and like her poems and novels, show her gratitude for simple pleasures and appreciation of the natural world, while acknowledging that the interior one is fraught with complications.

40 Days of Book Praise, Day 3

by Ramona DeFelice Long

RamonaGravitarFor 40 days, I am choosing a book from my personal book shelves. It will be a book that is insightful, intriguing, or illuminating about women. I will write why I think this book is a positive one and worth a read. This isn’t advertising for me or to promote any of my friends. It’s simply praise for good books.

Day 3 – The Dearly Departed by Elinor Lipman

dearly departed

I own a stack of Elinor Lipman’s novels and love her wry portrayals of sisters, daughters, friends, and lovers across a range of ages, careers, and life experiences. Elinor’s writing style is warm-hearted and witty, but her stories address life and love with as much pathos as humor.

Why is The Dearly Departed a good read for women? In it, the sudden – and somewhat odd – death of her mother makes Sunny Batten return to King George, New Hampshire. Sunny’s recollections of the one-stop-sign town are mixed. She was both outstanding and an outcast as the girl who broke the glass ceiling of the all male high school golf team. Returning home with her grudges still intact, Sunny discovers that her old tormentors have matured into nice people. Is it possible that growing up in King George wasn’t quite as awful as she remembers it? She also discovers that her mother’s involvement in the town’s theater group made her a better actress than Sunny ever suspected. With a new vision of her past, Sunny plans her mother’s funeral aided by the chief of police. Joey Loach was a goofball in high school and maybe he still lives with his own mother, but now he’s solicitous, gallant…pretty cute.

The Dearly Departed is light-hearted in tone, but Sunny’s return to her roots allows her–and the reader–to think about longtime hurts from a mature perspective. It shows a daughter who begins to view her mother as a woman: a person engaged in her own life, pursuing her own interests, with desires and admirers. When did you stop thinking of your mother as Mom and began to regard her as a woman?

 

 

40 Days of Book Praise, Day 2

by Ramona DeFelice Long

RamonaGravitarFor 40 days, I am choosing a book from my personal book shelves. It will be a book that is insightful, intriguing, or illuminating about women. I will write why I think this book is a positive one and worth a read. This isn’t advertising for me or to promote any of my friends. It’s simply praise for good books.

Day 2 – This One and Magic Life by Anne Carroll George

anne george

Mystery readers will recognize Anne George’s name from her Birmingham-based Southern Sisters mystery series. Apart from writing the adventures of Mouse and Sister and their view of the Vulcan’s naked backside, Anne Carroll George was also a poet, a publisher, and a Pulitzer Prize nominee. The subtitle of This One and Magic Life is “a novel of a Southern family” and it is true. The book portrays a Southern family in all its glorious dysfunction.

Why is This One and Magic Life a good read for women? A few pages in, a chapter begins with “The Deep South is still a mystery. It is even a mystery to those who live there” and the novel proceeds to show why and how one woman’s choices ripple through the lives of people she loves. This is not a mystery novel, but who is more mind-bending and alluring than a Southern woman with a secret?

In the story, there is a death near Mobile Bay, and the family gathers for a tender and troubling send-off for Artie—mother, wife, aunt–whose last wishes, if honored, will shiver every branch on the family tree. This story’s prose reflects Anne George’s poetic style that makes it an evocative and thoughtful read.

A writerly note: Anne Carroll George chose to write this in the present tense. It was published in 2001, proving to naysayers—as strong-willed Artie might–that a present tense narrative is not some newfangled fad.