Years ago, when my venture into professional editing was just that—a new adventure—I was fortunate to be supported, and promoted, by author friends. Today, I am paying forward with an interview with fellow Pennwriter and Sisters in Crime member, Tamara Girardi. Continue reading “How About a Book Rave?”
book reviews
40 Days of Book Praise – Reading List
For 40 days, I chose books by and about women from my personal book shelf and wrote brief reviews with a plot summary, plus why it was a good reading choice for women.
Below is a full list of the 40 books I reviewed. Each includes a short description–a log line–to tell each title’s genre and capture what it is about.
40 Days of Book Praise – Reading List Continue reading “40 Days of Book Praise – Reading List”
40 Days of Book Praise, Day 40
For 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 book.
Day 40, Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson Continue reading “40 Days of Book Praise, Day 40”
40 Days of Book Praise, Day 39
For 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 book
Day 39, Middlemarch by George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) Continue reading “40 Days of Book Praise, Day 39”
40 Days of Book Praise, Day 38
For 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 38, “When Death Comes” by Mary Oliver Continue reading “40 Days of Book Praise, Day 38”
40 Days of Book Praise, Day 37
For 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 37, The Button Field by Gail Husch
A paper mill once stood near the town of South Hadley in western Massachusetts. The mill used old rags to make the paper, and sometimes buttons remained attached to the rags. Waste from the paper mill was washed out over area fields, and in that waste were thousands of buttons that spread out and settled into what became known as the Button Field. Students from the nearby college walking through the field could pluck buttons from the ground as if the buttons were flowers….
This odd detail is one of many in this artfully crafted novel based on the true disappearance of a student from Mount Holyoke College. Mount Holyoke was established as a “female seminary” in the first half of the 19th century as part of a movement to create institutions of higher learning for women. In 1897, Bertha Mellish–a real person–spends the summer between semesters working at the local mill. The daughter of a minister, Bertha was mostly raised by her older sister, a spinster twenty years Bertha’s senior. Her upbringing impressed upon Bertha that she is special, and she believes herself destined to rise above her family’s genteel but modest circumstances. But college, and her fellow students, are not what she expects, and she is not as special there as she has been raised to believe. And then one day, a perfectly ordinary day in every other way, Bertha Mellish cannot be found anywhere on campus. A search is undertaken, without success. As with any missing person case, surely someone knows what happened, but who that person is and why they won’t come forward to ease the agony for Bertha’s family and the Mount Holyoke community is a conundrum.
Why is The Button Field a good read for women? This fictional account of what happened to Bertha provides all the hallmarks of a mystery that can be reasonably explained, if not solved, with the combination of good research and informed guessing. In the capable hands of author Gail Husch, we see Bertha as more than the centerpoint of an investigation. Bertha was real, and in this novel, she comes back to life, and so does the pain of those who missed her. Bertha has hopes, dreams, and flaws; she suffers from ego and endures rejection, but nothing in her childhood or early adulthood hints that one day, out of the blue, she will simply be gone. This book provides a possible solution to Bertha’s fate, while at a deeper level it explores how young people thrown together by circumstance embrace people who are like themselves, and how they treat those who are not. Most of all, it is written with style and sensitivity about a young woman who mattered, but not only because she was the girl who disappeared, but because she was a young woman with promise.
40 Days of Book Praise, Day 35
For 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 35, Nora Jane by Ellen Gilchrist
Nora Jane is a “life in stories” and the collection of connected short stories and one novella begins with a death. Nora Jane is fourteen, living in New Orleans, when her beloved grandmother dies. Nora’s father was a Vietnam hero and her mother is an alcoholic, so Nora Jane now is adrift without any steady and loving influence. She wanders the city encountering a cast of people, from chefs who attend church and judges who hang out at bars, reflecting the upheaval of post-Vietnam society. At nineteen, Nora Jane falls for a charming anarchist named Sandy. He leaves her to go to San Francisco. To follow him, Nora Jane uses a prop gun to rob the bar and disguises herself as a nun to elude capture. She heads out to California, but Sandy is AWOL. This time, Nora Jane tries to rob an independent bookstore, but the owner is a TS Eliot-quoting rich guy named Freddy. Freddy falls in love with her because Nora Jane is also a raving beauty. When Nora Jane discovers she’s pregnant, she is not sure which of the two men is the father, but Freddy stands by her and raises her twin daughters in a big house next to a fault line.
In the stories that follow, an array of intriguing and bizarre people are drawn to Nora Jane and Freddy. There are visits from family and visitations from spirits, friends who hang around uninvited, and moments of fear and danger. Binding the story is the ever-surprising Nora Jane. She has two gifts: a beautiful singing voice and her grandmother’s wisdom. She is also gifted with Freddy, who is diagnosed with leukemia in the collection’s novella, and so it’s Nora Jane’s turn to stand by him. She does it in true Nora Jane style.
Why is Nora Jane a good read for women? This book is described as “intelligent comedy” and its excesses are its charm. Nora Jane is a reflection of the freewheeling times: she is a morally ambiguous but strangely grounded adventurer who takes a journey of self-discovery with her mind, soul, and body wide open. Ellen Gilchrist is a novelist of acclaim for good reason, and Nora Jane shows all that an author can do with a quirky character, a quirkier cast, and a concept that intrigues. Only the impetuous—or maybe only an optimist–would live in a mansion on a fault line.
40 Days of Book Praise, Day 34
For 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 34, Dahlia’s Gone by Katie Estill
Three very different women are connected by proximity and a crime in this country noir novel about facing the truth about yourself, your loved ones, and your fellow man. It begins with Sand, who has returned from aboard to her childhood home on a needed break from her career as a journalist. In the beautiful rural section of the Ozarks, a closest neighbor might be a mile away, and Sand’s is Norah, a strictly religious woman who has a complicated blended family and wants little to do with the world-weary Sand. Nevertheless, when she and her husband prepare for a trip, Norah asks Sand to check in on her two children, a girl and a boy, both teenagers who are not siblings by blood. Sand is surprised by the request, but who refuses to do a simple favor for a neighbor?
After Norah leaves, Sand makes a dutiful and uncomfortable check-in with these two young people she hardly knows. She delays a bit before a second visit and when she finally returns, she discovers the daughter, Dahlia, has been brutally killed in her bedroom. Enter the third woman in the story: Patty, the only female deputy in the county. Patty leads the murder investigation, but Patty has an undiscovered connection to Sand—an illicit relationship with Sand’s now-dead father, who owned the county newspaper. When Norah returns, she blames Sand for Dahlia’s death, by hand or by neglect, and Sand accuses Norah of being blind to her own family’s troubles. The three women circle one another with equal parts support and suspicion, as secrets and denial touch everyone now connected by the death of this girl.
Why is Dahlia’s Gone a good read for women? The opening line of this book is “A promise can change a life.” This is certainly true, and the book examines promises—casual ones as well as vows, pledges, obligations, and commitments—and how a casual agreement turns into an unwanted duty. How much, after all, do you owe someone if what they ask is unreasonable? The story is also about bonding and the expectation that women will automatically connect with one another just because they are women. Katie Estill digs deep here and asks questions that are not comfortable, but are illuminating. The story is sometimes bleak and always artfully crafted, a fine example of the country noir genre.
40 Days of Book Praise, Day 33
For 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 33, Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell
In the 1850s, Charles Dickens edited a journal called Household Words, which published affectionate and sometimes comic stories about small town life. The town of Cranford is not a real one, but the 16 chapters of Cranford the book bring it to life. The sketches appeared as serial contributions to Household Words and reflect the changing world in the microcosm of a English country town.
The narrator is Mary Smith, who is not a resident of Cranford but a frequent visitor, and so her eye and observations are not colored by inhabitancy. When she is not in Cranford, Mary keeps up with the changes and events through correspondence with the town’s leading ladies. Her first note of interest is that the town is possessed by the Amazons: “all the holders of houses, above a certain rent, are ladies.” There are love affairs, old and new; childbirths and deaths; upheavals caused by progress; scandals and tiffs and friendships—events that appear small on the surface but are big news to the lady who reports them to Mary. Into the mix of Cranford’s ladies comes Captain Brown and Mr. Carter and brother Peter, who add drama but who also usher in change to a place not built for or easily swayed toward it. But change comes, and Cranford adapts with it.
Why is Cranford a good read for women? Elizabeth Gaskell was a minister’s wife who raised her family and assisted in his parish work in a rough area in Manchester. Her other novels are set in and about industrial life, so the sweet, poignant charm of Cranford is a departure. In addition to possessing a socially aware eye about challenging conditions and social classes, Gaskell was said to be an uncompromising artist. The introduction to Cranford explains that she and Dickens often butted heads, but she would not allow the much renowned male author to bully her or make changes she did not approve. Her devotion to her craft is reflected in the upright and strong-willed ladies she portrays in Cranford.
40 Days of Book Praise, Day 32
For 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 32, Guests on Earth by Lee Smith
“The insane are always mere guests on earth, eternal strangers carrying around broken decalogues that they cannot read.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote this in a letter to his daughter, referring to his famously troubled wife Zelda. In this book by renowned Southern author Lee Smith, Zelda Fitzgerald is a “guest” of the Highland Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina. It is 1936, but this institution for women with nervous diseases is modern and innovative, so alongside treatments such as ice wraps and shock therapy, the doctors push patients outside for fresh air and to garden, to exercise and dance, to enjoy music, art, and theatre. In 1948, Highland Hospital burned. The fire devastated the building. Seven women who were trapped upstairs in a locked ward died. According to the police chief, the fire started in the kitchen, but that finding has been disputed. Guests on Earth investigates what might have happened.
The story is narrated by a child. Thirteen-year-old Evalina Toussaint was a music prodigy, so gifted at playing piano that the hospital director’s wife became enamored of her and had her play for the patients, at social functions, for the pleasure of all. Now, as an adult, Evalina tells the story of her childhood: her years in the Garden District of New Orleans with Mamma and a man named Mr. Graves who was somehow her father; of Mamma’s fall; of being sent to Highland. Because she is favored and a child, Evalina has access to more than the wards and grounds, and so can observe the patients and staff—and Zelda. As she writes her memories of the events leading up to the fire, she makes observations about sanity and insanity and the peculiar qualities of the human mind. She likens herself to Nick Carraway of The Great Gatsby and remarks, quite insightfully, that Gatsby was not Nick’s story so this one is not hers—yet, isn’t every story the narrator’s story?
Why is Guests on Earth a good read for women? Zelda Fitzgerald has been the subject of many books, but as Evalina notes, this is not wholly Zelda’s story. This memoir-style novel includes her observations about the treatment and mistreatment of girls and women suffering from mental illnesses that run the range from melancholia to schizophrenia to clinical depression. They are all at the mercy of their husbands or families or doctors or caretakers—just as girls and women suffering mental issues are today. And then there is the mystery of the fire. Lee Smith has a gifted hand with characters, and she weaves fact and fiction here for a heartfelt and riveting story.
Ramona DeFelice Long 