When Will There Be Good News? by Kate Atkinson

I have a crush on Kate Atkinson. Her books are so clever, so original, so unexpected. They crackle with wit and sparkle with insight. Her characters live on in your head, continuing to make their mordant observations for months after you have finished reading about them. I just can't get enough of them, and like a good relationship, the longer I have known Atkinson, the better she gets.

When Will There Be Good News? is the third book featuring Jackson Brodie, ex-soldier, ex-cop, ex-private investigator, currently wandering around Scotland in search of some errant DNA. But Jackson is only one in a cast of thousands (or so it feels), the most compelling of whom is the orphan Reggie, a 16-year-old nanny who seems to have the worst luck in the history of luck. There is also Louise, whom we met in One Good Turn, now unhappily married and still in love with Jackson; Joanna, Reggie’s employer, who serves as a mother-substitute for Reggie until she gets kidnapped; and Reggie’s horrible brother Billy, whose mates burn Reggie’s house down. Could it get any worse? Oh, yes, there is that train wreck. And the guy who murdered Joanna’s family 30 years ago, he’s getting out of jail soon. Have I forgotten anyone?

For those familiar with Atkinson’s earlier work, Reggie is cut from the same cloth as Ruby, in Behind the Scenes at the Museum (I know, I know, I go on and on about that book). Both are plucky, snarky, smart. Both suffer and rebound. Both use their wit and their ingenuity to make the best of bad situations.

I read in an interview (which I can no longer find, so I can't link to it) that Atkinson is putting Jackson Brodie on hiatus for a while, as she has “gone off him.” That’s okay, I’m sure she’ll have something equally kinetic for us soon.

(Book 12, 2009)

Cherry Cake and Ginger Beer by Jane Brocket

Did you ever think up a good idea but do nothing with it, only to discover later that someone else not only had that same idea, but acted on it, thereby making some money and getting some attention in the bargain? How maddening! That is what happened to me with this book. As soon as I heard about it I was miffed. A collection of recipes from children’s literature was my idea! I had that idea at least ten years ago. But of course since I never told anyone about it or did anything to make it happen, it’s just my tough luck. But really, it’s true. I was going to include recipes from songs, too. Ask my kids about buckwheat chocolate chip apple raisin pancakes (from the song Mother’s Day by Tom Chapin). This information may cast a light on everything I say about this book from here on. Sour grapes, you may say. As well you might.

This isn’t a bad book, and I am not claiming I could have done any better. I just think maybe it’s one of those ideas that sounded better in theory than in execution. Do we really need a recipe for baked potatoes? (Muvver’s Lid Potatoes, from the Milly-Molly-Mandy books by Joyce Lancaster Brisley.) The problem with nursery food is that it is a bit boring and not very difficult to cook. (Further examples include not one but two recipes for boiled eggs, and a recipe for toasted cheese sandwiches).

What’s fun about this book is remembering the stories from which Brocket has gathered her recipes: the Mary Poppins series by P. L. Travers, Noel Streatfeild’s Ballet Shoes and Dancing Shoes, The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett. I remember encountering some of these foods as a young reader and being mystified by them: what, exactly, was parkin? On the other hand, many of these books are unknown to me and to most U. S. readers. Brocket provides over 20 recipes that originate in books by Enid Blyton, but Blyton was never popular in the U.S. so the references are lost on me. I think that Blyton’s characters must have done nothing but eat!

Is this book a cookbook, or a trip down memory lane with its author? Brocket lards her text with endless reminiscences of her own reading experiences with these books and it quickly gets old. The organization is quirky—rather than writing a chapter with just cake recipes Brocket organizes her chapters situationally, that is, breakfast foods are together, and then a chapter about picnic foods and another one on treats for special occasions. Thus recipes for various kinds of cake (which everyone seems to be eating all the time) appear in nearly every chapter.

And finally, a word of warning. U. S. readers who want to try baking some of these treats may well be frustrated. The recipes are written for British kitchens (thus they use metric measurements) and include ingredients such as treacle, golden syrup, and something called strong white flour, all of which are mysteries to most U. S. cooks.

(Book 11, 2009)

The Senator's Wife by Sue Miller

I once called Beth Gutcheon the “queen of domestic fiction” but when I wrote that I must have temporarily forgotten about Sue Miller. Perhaps we don’t need a queen and can instead elect a triumvirate or some kind of ruling senate with lots of members. In any case, Sue Miller should be right up there at the top of the heap.

Not to encourage any stereotypes or anything, but I can’t imagine that a man would like this book. It has the most graphic description of childbirth I’ve ever encountered and pages and pages about pregnancy and breastfeeding and other events that involve female bodily fluids. I’m not squeamish about these kinds of thing but even I felt a little overburdened by this level of realism.

This book really ought to be called The Senator’s Wife’s Next-Door Neighbor but that doesn’t sound as good. The only fully developed character is Meri, the neighbor to Delia; Delia is the estranged wife of a philandering Kennedy-esque 1970’s-era U.S. senator. Meri develops an unhealthy obsession with Delia and her life. Delia meanwhile stays at arm’s length (from both Meri and from us, the readers) and the two husbands (Meri’s husband Nathan and the ex-senator Tom) are even less accessible as characters. We follow Meri for a while in the early 1990’s as she gets to know Delia, and we also follow Delia for a while, both in the 1990’s and the 1960’s when she was still living with Tom (that is, before he left her for a woman half his age). The book doesn’t flow particularly well and I didn’t like Meri very much. In the end everyone gets what they deserve which is kind of satisfying in a perverse way.

Despite my complaints I liked this book. It was kind of like anchovy pizza—better to consider the whole thing rather than focus on the individual ingredients.

(Book 10, 2009)

Blogger Meet-up

One of my favorite bloggers, the Citizen Reader, happens to live in the same city that I do. Today we finally met for coffee. Despite our proximity, it has taken us years to get around to this. Why the delay? Well, neither of us gets out much, we observed. Too busy reading.

When I told my teenagers of my plan to meet her, they were horrified. “You can’t just go out with someone you met on the Internet! What if this person is a serial killer! If we did this you’d ground us forever!” Wow, turns out they’ve been listening to me after all. In the end I was able to dredge up the fact that Citizen Reader and I do have one actual live friend in common, (and a blogger, at that: Stephanie of Cooking with Two Dudes) She can attest that neither of us is a dangerous pervert. That seemed to satisfy them.

And what a delightful coffee date it was! We talked about books we were reading, about her new book (a guide to non-fiction, targeted at librarians), about whether or not to use the f*** word in blog posts (she does, I do not, though I certainly say it), about how much we hate Philip Roth and John Updike (but feel bad about admitting that second one, now that he’s dead), about the endlessly crappy choices on the New York Times list of 100 Notable Books, about working as freelance writers/editors/indexers, about publishers, about magazines, about libraries, about books for kids, The time flew by! It was great fun and I hope we do it again!

(A more organized blogger would have had a camera. Oh well. Imagine two bookish women in a coffee shop, laughing a lot.)

Twilight by Stephenie Meyer

I don’t want to get involved in a long justification of why I read this book. I have already had to defend my choice to skeptical family members who have not themselves read it. The reason for their objections? “Mom, when vampires go out in the sun, they don’t sparkle, they burn and die!” Well that may be so in your vampire mythology but it is not the case in Stephenie Meyer’s. And anyway, these vampires are just placeholders for all that is scary and forbidden in a young girl’s life. Their particular traits don’t much matter; it’s what they represent that is important.

If you have not yet read Caitlin Flanagan’s wonderful defense of this series in the Atlantic, please read it. She does an excellent job of describing the emotional life of young women and the role books like this play in providing fuel for their overheated imaginations.

And Twilight is the perfect fuel. Bella is “Everygirl”: smart but not a genius, pretty but not like a model, self-sufficient, and a reliable friend. And just as any girl can imagine herself as Bella, she can also imagine any unattainable boy as Edward. Meyer precisely captures what it’s like to be obsessed by this kind of boy, the one everyone wants but no one can get. And then, what it’s like when this boy favors you with his attention. The whole first section of the book is almost like a textbook example of how to write this kind of thing and I totally enjoyed it. (Another superb execution of this scenario is Angela Chase's obsession with Jordan Catalano in the short-lived television series "My So-Called Life." )

The problems begin once the vampire story gets going. Edward becomes annoyingly overbearing, Bella turns a little bit ditsy, the girl-in-peril aspect distracts from the pure romance. No matter. It’s still extremely entertaining, especially if you are a young girl, or you remember what it was like to be one.

I don’t think I will read the rest of the series. If I want to revisit the experience I’ll just re-read the first third of Twilight over again, then over again and again. That’s what I would have done when I was 14 and I don't see any reason to change my approach now.

(Book 9, 2009)

What Was Lost by Catherine O'Flynn

This is a quirky little book and it reminds me a lot of Behind the Scenes at the Museum by Kate Atkinson. Like that book, this one is narrated (for a while, anyway) by a young girl and is filled with an Atkinson-like blend of whimsy and despair. What Was Lost won the 2008 Costa prize for first novel. The Costa prize used to be called the Whitbread prize; Atkinson won the Whitbread prize for Behind the Scenes at the Museum in 1995. The Costa/Whitbread prize is a British award and I enjoy the winners of this (and the Booker prize) a lot more than I do their U.S. counterparts (winners of the Pulitzer, National Book Award, Pen/Faulkner, etc.).

Okay, enough of that. I also like lots of books that never win anything. It’s hard to describe the plot of What Was Lost. Most of it takes place at an enormous shopping mall in the English Midlands. The mall, called Green Oaks, has replaced the factories and the mills that provided employment for generations of folks in the area. Men who used to work in manufacturing are reduced to pushing brooms around its vast hallways or staring at mall security monitors, and we follow their sad lives and the lives of the sales clerks in the music store and the glue sniffers who hang out on the roof. It’s a dark and tragic world underneath the green oaks.

If the mall is a dystopia, Kate Meany provides us with a flash of light and humor. Kate is a 10-year-old girl who likes to hang out at the mall with her toy monkey, keeping a watch out for potential criminals. She owns a book called How to Be a Detective and she is working hard practicing her craft. Kate eventually goes missing, and the connections between her life, her disappearance, and events at the mall almost 20 years later provide most of the action in the book.

At first the switch from one set of characters (Kate and her friends and family in 1984) to another (Lisa and hers in 2003) is confusing. I wasn’t sure how it all was connected. But O’Flynn gradually reveals the way the plot threads wind around one another in surprising ways and the book’s resolution is simultaneously sad and uplifting.

(Book 8, 2009)