Tag: maine

You Must Remember This by Kat Rosenfield

Writing: 5/5 Plot: 4.5/5 Characters: 5/5

When Mimi, elderly and suffering from dementia, comes back to the family home (Whispers) in Bar Harbor for Christmas, the family knows it will be for the last time — she will either be gone or completely lost in the past by the following year. But they didn’t expect it to happen so quickly: somehow escaping the house, Mimi goes walking on the ice surrounding the estate in the middle of the night and freezes to death. What sounds like a simple accident evolves into a bit of a mystery and an ongoing hash of family dynamics both past and present.

The characters were both interesting and surprising, especially as they shifted in the eyes of the narrator — Mimi’s granddaughter, Delphine. Del who is also living in Whispers after (spectacularly) blowing up her life in New York City. Del loves hearing Mimi’s stories, and I loved hearing them too. The shifts and connections between past and present bring surprises both in plot and in our perceptions of character.

I’m a big fan of Rosenfield’s columns on various aspects of culture — she goes deep and original. I always find her interesting and most often agree with points made that I hadn’t even considered before. I had no idea she wrote novels and am finding her characterization and plot points to be fully steeped in her cultural acumen and clear writing style. She’s very good at essence! Time to go seek out earlier books — I love discovering a new novelist!

Great for fans of Carol Goodman.

The Frozen River by Ariel Lawhon (Historical Fiction)

Writing: 4.5/5 Characters: 5/5 Plot: 5/5

1789 — Hallowell, Maine. Midwife and healer Martha Ballard — 54 and unusually tall for a woman — is called to attend the fresh body of a man pulled from the ice. She recognizes the man at once — a thoroughly unpleasant man recently accused of participating in the rape of the local pastor’s wife. Thus launches the story of Martha, the town, and various ideas about the pursuit of justice across a period of approximately a year, with parallel leap backs for key pieces of context.

This is a phenomenal story in every dimension — a gripping plot, well-fleshed characters full of life, propulsive writing (impossible to put down) and a complete immersion in the specifics of an historical time and place. At no point did I forget that I was in the late 18th century in a small New England town — small details continually reinforced the setting and I didn’t notice any modern sensibilities sneaking in (I am so vigilant on that front).

While the story was compelling all on its own, I loved the fact that she took the time to explore the characters and their relationships and the way they evolved amid the very real context of the times. I also loved the many bits of history that were tossed in — history like the laws requiring a midwife to ask unmarried women to identify the father while in the throes of labor on the assumption that the circumstances would force out the truth. Also, the fines and punishments laid on both for the “transgression.” Hint: the punishment for the woman was far harsher. I should quickly add that although there were some truly despicable men in this story, most of the men were decent, good and held women in good esteem. This is not a male-bashing recounting of life 200 years ago.

I was quite surprised to find out that most of the plot actually happened. I was thinking to myself that it was a little over the top but that I enjoyed it anyway, but it wasn’t over the top of reality in any case! This piece of biographical fiction (a new term for me) was about the very real Martha Ballard as documented in her diary (unusual for a woman of that age as most were illiterate) and Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s Pulitzer Prize winning history book based on the same . No wonder the details were so persuasive! The author’s note very clearly identified the (small) fictional additions and modifications.

Highly recommended.

Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout (Literary Fiction)

This is (yet another) beautiful and deeply thoughtful book by Elizabeth Strout, featuring two of our favorite characters from Crosby, Maine: Lucy Barton and Olive Kitteridge (who until this book have not actually met). With plenty of small town plot, including an actual dead body mystery and a “different” sort of affair, this takes us through samplings of post-Covid Crosby life in lively detail.

In truth it is all about connection, knowing yourself and others, and the joy of being allowed to be genuine. (As an aside, I feel like it is harder and harder to meet people who immediately feel genuine — possibly because our culture requires people to curate their presentation so very carefully). It’s about loneliness and the comfort we receive from even the tiniest “real” connections. It’s about the nature of a real friend who makes you feel not alone, regardless of how often you see them, talk to them, or what they do for you. While some of the story takes place in the present, there are many interludes in the form of Lucy’s “stories of unrecorded lives” which she and Olive exchange. Lucy (and Elizabeth Strout) is a writer and these stories are therefore no longer unrecorded. Also a great new phrase for me: “Sin eater.” Some people eat the sins of others… It’s an interesting concept and you can learn more by reading the book. A bit of a slow start but that’s more about the mood you’re in when you sit down to read. Come to it in a meditative and curious state.

Some quotes (plus the last line — as always — is great but I can’t include it here):

“Didn’t anyone ever have anything interesting to say? They talked of movies they were all watching, of series on Netflix, they spoke about their children, but always carefully and in terms meant to hide their private disappointments, and they talked about one another. Of course.”

“I mean, we don’t ever really know another person. And so we make them up according to when they came into our lives, and if you’re young, as many people are when they marry, you have no idea who that person really is. And so you live with them for years, you have a house together, kids together. But even if you marry someone later in life. no one knows who another person is. And that is terrifying.”

“…because nobody can go into the crevices of another’s mind, even the person can’t go into the crevices of their own mind, and we live — all of us — as though we can.”

“And yet, as is often the case, those of us who need love so badly at a particular moment can be off-putting to those who want to love us, and to those who do love us. Bob, as he looked at her — she seemed like a beached sea animal to him with her eyes that had almost disappeared — he did love her, he did.”

“Solzhenitsyn said the point of life is the maturity of the soul.”

Thank you to Random House and NetGalley for providing an advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. The book will be published on September 10th, 2024.

Reunion by Elise Juska (Literary Fiction)

June 2021 — Three friends anticipate a Covid postponed college reunion at the Maine campus. Hope — a stay at home mom with an increasingly distant husband — is desperate to return to what she remembers as her happiest time; Adam looks forward to reconnecting but feels guilt at leaving his perpetually sad wife with the twins in the house that she hasn’t left in a very long time; and NYC based single-mom Polly who doesn’t share her friends fond memories, but is persuaded to attend by her reclusive son who wants to visit a nearby friend.

This character-driven novel explores friendships and personal growth against the backdrop of lock down parenting and recovery alongside some pretty intense environmental anxiety. With every relationship comes inevitable clashes and this story covers quite a few. I particularly “enjoyed” the generational clashes — some familiar and some brand new to me as successive generations bear less and less in common with my own. Well written probes into the evolution of friendships
— what connects people with little in common and what decisions can impact the closeness over time. I really liked that the ending for all of our protagonists had a closure that was more about understanding the nature of their issues, thereby clarifying a path towards closure, rather than any kind of quick solution to the problem itself — because there really are no quick solutions to relationship issues…

One kind of funny (to me) quote as Hope thinks about her teenage daughter Izzy: “Meanwhile, Izzy was skeptical of all things where Hope was concerned. Her Spotify list. Her low-carb bread. Her Facebook posts — too frequent, too obviously curated — why was she even on Facebook? Her overuse of exclamation points. Her leather tote. Sometimes Hope secretly wondered if Izzy had become a vegan primarily to get on her nerves.”

Thank you to Harper and NetGalley for providing an advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. The book will be published on May 11th, 2024.

Lucy by the Sea by Elizabeth Strout (Literary Fiction)

Writing: 4.5/5 Plot: 4/5 Characters: 4.5/5
This third chapter in the Lucy Barton series (I am Lucy Barton and Oh William!) might alternately be titled Lucy Gets Through the Covid Pandemic as it extends from just before Covid slams into New York City and continues through the availability of vaccines. Lucy and her first husband, William (the parasitologist), head to Maine for what (very) naive Lucy is told will just be a few weeks to escape the ravages of Covid. William is — very simply — trying to save her life.

I’m a huge Strout fan and have read most or all of her books — I love her clean, clear writing and insight into personal experience. I did find this book a little more preachy than previous novels to the point where I liked the main character much less than I did previously. This is largely because the book took on political topics (Covid, George Floyd, the Capitol Riots) and manipulated the story to show how very correct her side of the political spectrum was in every case (the Capitol Rioters were all nazis and racists but the George Floyd riots were all peaceful; everyone in her book who did not adhere to strict covid protocols were rashly stupid and were all punished by death or hospitalization, etc.). While worrying about the state of democracy and bemoaning child labor in foreign countries, she has access to lots of money, and while befriending people with very different beliefs and professing love for her born again sister, she comes off as feeling superior to them. Of course, it is Lucy’s story and to be fair, the author does let some characters blast Lucy for just that! She even has Lucy (a writer) write stories about people very unlike herself so … overall I enjoyed the book, and it gave me a lot to think about (I think I’m still just sensitive to the many sanctimonious people I weathered Covid with, some of whom called me a “grandma killer” when I went out to run on deserted streets).

Thank you to Random House and NetGalley for providing an advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. The book will be published on September 20th, 2022.

It all Comes Down to This by Therese Anne Fowler (Literary Fiction)

Writing: 4/5 Characters: 5/5 Plot: 4/5

Three grief-stricken sisters (Beck, Claire, and Sophie) wondering how to go forward without their mother, one recently released felon trying to move forward after the drastic side-swipe of events leading to his conviction, and one old house (which said dead mother insisted posthumously be sold) on a gorgeous and remote island off the coast of Maine. These are the components of Fowler’s “messy-families dramedy.” Beck — a freelance journalist with a quietly crumbling marriage; Claire — a pediatric cardiologist whose marriage crashed when her secret unrequited love was inadvertently revealed; Sophie — living an instagram life hobnobbing with wealthy art investors while house sitting because she can’t afford rent; and CJ — poster child of the poor little rich boy who wants nothing more than a peaceful place to paint after a harrowing three years in the pen.

Very good writing full of tart observations on life from a variety of perspectives. Good character insight. I found it interesting that I actually liked CJ more than I liked any of the sisters — probably because he was a little less self centered than the others having already gone through his lesson learning phase (prison will do that to you I hear) while they spend much of the book going through theirs. Some great background stories featuring Manhattan, LA, Dubai, and the wealthy world of art collectors. Also, an adorable little boy who kind of stole the show from my perspective.

Very enjoyable read.

Some good quotes:

“I needed to be humbled — I see that now. It’s the antidote for self-pity, which I admit to indulging more than a few times during the Great Undoing, when I allowed myself to think about how well everything was going for everyone else.”

“I never meant to get so caught up in all the artifice. I never thought the lifestyle would come to own me. It was a kind of addiction, I can totally see that now. … No more fueling myself with the facade of adulation from strangers who think I’m more than I am.”

“What unreasonable, illogical bastards feelings were.”

“Besides, a wealthy, liberal man with high intelligence and a sense of ethics like Sophie wanted was probably not going to look at her and see spouse material. Leaving aside her fine-tuned physical appearance, what did she have to offer? Being nimble, being wily, being conniving when that’s what was necessary to do the task at hand — this was not a compelling attribute list for a future Mrs. Liberal Billionaire.”

“Maybe because Mom was the glue. You know? Dad was … he made us like dandelion seeds, scattering us all over the city so that we could see and do everything. But then Mom held us all together, and now we’re adrift because neither of them are here.”

“CJ could not speak for every man, but in his view softer parts were just fine! Softer parts were natural! If God had meant for women to look like praying mantises, he’d have made their ability to bite men’s heads off literal.”

Thank you to St. Martin’s Press and NetGalley for providing an advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. The book will be published on June 7th, 2022.

The Disinvited Guest by Carol Goodman (Mystery / Thriller)

Writing: 4/5 Plot: 4/5 Characters: 4/5
Don’t read this book before bedtime!

Reed and Lucy Harper — along with Reed’s sister Liz and her lover Niko, and Lucy’s best friend Ada and husband Crosby, and Mac, the caretaker — all head to a remote island off the coast of Maine in the year 2030 to wait out what appears to be an even more deadly pandemic. The island, now owned by Reed and his sister, was once a quarantine hospital for (mostly Irish) immigrants with Typhus back in the mid 1800s. It is a creepy place, with three generations of deathly illness — the Harper parents died there of Covid in the previous pandemic, and numerous Typhoid patients met their end there the century before.

From the tense start until the surprising finish, the plot twists and turns in a Lord of the Flies meets locked-room Agatha Christie meets part Hitchcock’s Rebecca unfurling. When bad things start happening and the brutality of the island’s history starts bleeding through to the present, Lucy feels her sense of reality slipping.

This is a mystery / thriller with a huge amount of character development. The interpersonal dynamics are nuanced and ever evolving with the threats of unknown origin inserting suspicion and fear where there was once cameraderie and friendship. Very difficult to put down or to get out of your head.

The last thing I wanted to read was a dystopian books about pandemics, so let me reassure you that pandemics really didn’t feature except as an impetus to get them on the island in a quarantine state.

Thank you to William Morrow Paperbacks and NetGalley for providing an advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. The book will be published on July 12th, 2022.

Oh William! by Elizabeth Strout (Literary Fiction)

Characters: 5/5 Plot; 3.5/5 Writing: 5/5

I loved this deeply meditative book about how much we can really know one another. This is written as a novelized memoir of the fictional character introduced in a previous work — I am Lucy Barton. It felt so incredibly real to me that it’s hard to remember that she is a work of fiction. Here, Lucy reflects on her first husband — William — with whom she is still friendly and the prior and current relationship between them. The “action” takes place a year after Lucy’s second husband has died and William’s third wife has left him.

I resonated with so many of the feelings and experiences described in this book. Strout has a beautiful and apt writing style that captures the essence of what is important in any human interaction — even within oneself. I was often brought to tears — not because anything particularly sad was happening — but because she captured it so perfectly.

A great line:
“Grief is such a – oh, it is such a solitary thing; this is the terror of it, I think. It is like sliding down the outside of a really long glass building while nobody sees you.”

I also loved the last line but I won’t list it here — you need to read the rest of them first!

Thank you to Random House and NetGalley for providing an advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. The book will be published on October 19th, 2021.

Olive, Again by Elizabeth Strout (Literary Fiction)

Writing:  4.5 /5 Plot: 4/5 Characters: 4.5 /5

Olive Kitteridge — gruff, direct, honest and with absolutely no patience for pretense or pretentiousness. Some people love Olive for just this reason — many others consider her a rude “old bag”.  I love the fact that Olive — in her late seventies now — continues to have epiphanies about herself and her life.

The book is a collection of snapshots of life in the coastal town of Crosby, Maine. Some are centered on Olive herself, but in others she plays only a peripheral, though impactful, role. Ranging in age from middle school to elderly and incorporating contextual situations such as drug use, sexual harassment, suicide, Somali immigration, and even the value provided by a dominatrix (!) — the stories are full of introspection and reflection. They are more about how people absorb experiences into their own perspective, rather than the experiences themselves.

Strout is the master of the imperfect relationship — no closure, no solutions — just the reality of evolving relationships with ups and downs and fresh interior “ahas” rather than the drama of abrupt discovery via loud confrontation.

For those who loved Strout’s 2008 work Olive Kitteridge, Olive,Again takes up where the latter leaves off, covering the next decade of Olive’s life (it’s not necessary to read the first book, this one stands up well on its own). It’s a fascinating look at life from the perspective of old age, and while there is loss and plenty of “old age indignities,” there is also a great sense of hope, understanding, and wisdom.
Great Quotes:
“It seemed to her she had never before completely understood how far apart human experience was.”

“And then he thought: how does one live an honest life?”

“It’s just the way it was, that’s all. People either didn’t know how they felt about something or they chose never to say how they really felt about something”

“…and during the night they would shift, but always they were holding each other, and Jack thought of their large old bodies, shipwrecked, thrown up upon the shore — and how they hold on for dear life!”

“What frightened him was how much of his life he had lived without knowing who he was or what he was doing. It caused him to feel an inner trembling, and he could not quite find the words — for himself — to even put it exactly as he sensed it. But he sensed that he had lived his life in a way that he had not known.”

“But it was almost over, after all, her life. It swelled behind her like a sardine fishing net, all sorts of useless seaweed and broken bits of shells and the tiny, shining fish — all those hundreds of students she had taught, the girls and boys in high school she had passed in the corridor when she was a high school girl herself, the billion streaks of emotion she’d had as she’d looked at sunrises sunsets, the different hands of waitresses who had place before her cups of coffee — All of it gone, or about to go.”

“Because as her heart became more constricted, Henry’s heart became needier, and when he walked up behind her in the house sometimes to slip his arms around her, it was all she could do to not visibly shudder.”

“Cindy Coombs, there’s not one goddamn person in this world who doesn’t have a bad memory or two to take with them through life.”

Thank you to Random House and NetGalley for providing an advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. The book will be published on October 15th, 2019.

Evvie Drake Starts Over by Linda Holmes (Women’s Fiction)

A feel-good, heartwarming, story about the unlikely relationship between a woman whose husband died just as she was (literally) leaving him and a star Yankee pitcher who “loses his stuff” in a spectacularly public way.

Well-written with great banter, an array of likable characters, and plenty of humor. The premise is plausible enough and I enjoyed the social commentary and details of every day life in this small town on the mid-Coast of Maine. There is a lot more depth to the characters than is usual for a women’s fiction offering of this sort.

The author is the host of NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast — I haven’t heard of this (I’m not a big podcast person), but I like the title, and I can guess that this explains a lot about the great character interactions!) Interesting to note that in two of the primary families, it is the mother that left, leaving the father to raise the children alone. I’m noticing a trend of this kind of gender role swapping which is always interesting!

One small annoyance for me personally — a (pretty humorous) diatribe on the part of one character about a woman who was destroying their book club because she wanted people to actually read the books and didn’t accept that book clubs were just for socializing. I am that woman, and I stand by my demands!!

Great for fans of Kristan Higgins.

Thank you to Ballantine Books and NetGalley for providing an advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. The book will be published on June 25th, 2019.