One Plus One by Jojo Moyes

I’ve come to regard books by Jojo Moyes as little treasures, to be indulged in when I need a special treat. When I get a new one I hang on to it for a while before reading it, enjoying the anticipation. (The same is true for J. K. Rowling’s mysteries that she writes under the pen name Robert Galbraith; I'm reading The Silkworm now.) My only problem is that neither writer is cranking out books fast enough to satisfy me. Maybe I could stick them both into a parallel universe where there are more hours in a day, enabling them to produce more books, faster. I’ll have to get right on that.

In One Plus One, Jess is a single mother who is just barely getting by, working as a cleaner and barmaid in a resort community in southern England. She lives in a crappy apartment in public housing, her kids are being bullied at school, and her ex-husband hasn’t sent her a penny in years. In the face of these problems, Jess remains unrelentingly cheerful, buoying everyone along through creative budgeting, hard work, and unflagging optimism.

On the other side of town, where the rich folks have their beach houses, we find software entrepreneur Ed Nicholls, who is hiding out from, well, from everyone. Under investigation for insider trading, Ed is dodging phone calls from his ex-wife, his ex-business partner, his lawyer, and his sister, and sinking further and further into self pity.

Jess cleans Ed’s house, and she waits on him at the bar. She finds him arrogant and rude; he barely registers her existence. But through a series of events too complicated to get into here, Ed ends up driving Jess and her kids to Scotland so that Jess’s daughter Tanzie can compete in a math competition. It’s Jess’s last desperate attempt to get Tanzie, a math whiz, out of the local school and into a safer place where her skills can be nurtured. It’s this road trip (complete with a huge flatulent dog) that takes up the lion’s share of the book, and where of course, Jess and Ed fall in love.

Nothing in this book is as simple as it sounds here though. Moyes can sketch out a character in a few telling lines, and provide unexpected richness and depth to simple situations. She’s really a great writer and this book works on a lot of different levels: as a love story, a modern family drama, and an investigation of entrenched class differences in modern Britain.

The trickiest thing she does is to make Ed sympathetic. He transitions from a clueless self-absorbed whiner into a man who takes responsibility for his poor decisions and moves forward with insight and compassion. My favorite part of the book is where Ed dismisses £50 as “nothing” and Tanzie schools him on all the things that her family can buy with that amount of nothing (the school lunches, bus fare, and other expenses that Jess sweats every day). A lazier novelist would have been content to make Ed the knight in shining armor who rescues Jess from poverty. In this book the person who really gets rescued is Ed.

(Book 16, 2014)

The River of No Return by Bee Ridgway

World building is one of the trickiest aspects of writing fantasy and science fiction. Books are often front-loaded with detail—sometimes this detail is essential for understanding later plot developments but sometimes it’s just there because the writer was so enamored of her own creativity that she wasn’t a good judge of which elements were ornamental rather than strictly necessary. It’s no wonder that some readers find navigating a fantasy world off-putting or not worth the trouble.

Bee Ridgway, in The River of No Return, walks a fine line between these two extremes but in the end succeeds nicely. The book (a literary time travel feminist romance mashup) throws a lot of detail at you right out of the gate and I found myself, in the first 50 pages or so, thinking “Do I have to remember all this?” (Kind of the reader’s version of “Is this going to be on the test?”) The answer is yes, but it’s worth it: Ridgway’s details are all crucial to understanding what happens to Nicholas Falcott, Marquess of Blackdown, when, just as he is about to die in the Battle of Salamanca in 1812, he jumps forward in time to 2003 where, with the help of a mysterious organization called the Guild, he lives for the next ten years as Nick Davenant, a hipster organic farmer in Vermont. It turns out Nick has a special ability that enables him to swim around in the river of time (while the rest of us idiots are just carried along in the current). This skill qualifies him for admission to the Guild, a super-secret club for time travelers.

Threaded throughout Nick’s story is that of another time traveler from Regency England: Julia Percy, ward of the recently deceased fifth Earl of Darchester. Julia’s powers exceed those of all but the most practiced Guild members. Not only can she swim around in the river, she can stop it from flowing all together. But in the beginning of the story Julia is untrained; she uses her nascent skills mostly to fend off the unwelcome attentions of her new guardian, the Earl’s foul and abusive nephew. Julia and Nick meet when Nick is drafted by the Guild for an undercover operation wherein he must return to his old life as the Marquess to discover who is threatening the Guild’s sovereignty. Romance ensues but with a twist: Nick is now a 21st century guy who finds the societal strictures on women to be degrading and counterproductive. When protofeminist Nick meets superpowerful Julia, sparks fly. I loved it.

Ridgway includes all sorts of wink-and-nod references to traditional Regency romance tropes while turning the whole genre on its head. If that isn’t enough, she also offers sly interstitial commentary on the time travel conceit. If you’ve read/watched anything else in the genre you’ll pick this up. She even takes on that well-worn cliché about using time travel to change the future (all discussions of which now include killing Hitler), in this delightful conversation between Nick and some Guild leaders, when they warn him that he won’t be able to alter anything important when he returns to his own time. Alice says: 

“You will only be able to change the smallest things, things that get subsumed back into the big push of the river without making a difference.”

“No killing Hitler,” Nick said.

“No killing Hitler. No giving Queen Liliuokalani back her Hawaii, no saving Malcolm X, or Joan of Arc, or the princes in the tower. But smaller things—things that are just normal, everyday stuff of life? Those things are perfectly possible.” …

Arkady slammed his hands down on his thighs. “Why when we talk about time travel do we always have to kill Hitler or not kill Hitler! It is to make Hitler a commonplace! The point is this. You are small and the river is big. Live, love, die, my priest. The river will roll on.”

Ridgway has recently released a prequel to The River of No Return, available as an e-book from Penguin and Amazon. It's called The Time Tutor and is only 90 pages and costs $2.99. I'm definitely going to read this. I'm not surprised to find this—it was clear from the ending of The River of No Return that Ridgway was setting us up for a lot more to come. Which of course takes us back to the world-building discussion. After all, if you go to all the trouble to construct a world where the rules about time are all different, it seems wasteful not to keep using it, no?

(Book 6, 2013)

Waiting for Sunrise by William Boyd

What I’ve always liked about William Boyd is that he never writes the same book twice. But now I’ve read two of his books in a row that were espionage thrillers and I see from his website that he’s been tapped to write a new James Bond novel (click here for the link to the BBC news story about this). Too much of a good thing? I don’t know. It’s not that Waiting for Sunrise (which wins most nondescript book title ever) is much like Restless, his 2007 novel about a retired Russian spy. But I like never quite knowing what I’m going to get from Boyd and I hope he keeps us guessing, once he’s done with the Bond thing.

Waiting for Sunrise features Lysander Rief whose dual Austrian/British citizenship and his training as an actor provide him with skills that prove useful to the British army during World War I – whether or not Lysander wants to employ his skills thusly is beside the point. British diplomats help him out of a dicey situation in Vienna; now in their debt he must repay them by undertaking a series of dangerous jobs for which he is uniquely suited but not particularly enthusiastic. I liked this spin on the “jaded spy” character who gains the upper hand over his puppetmasters. Lysander is not so much jaded as just disinclined; he does his duty mostly because he knows he is over a barrel and if he can screw with his handlers along the way, so much the better. And I always love it when help comes from unexpected quarters – in this case from Lysander’s eccentric retired uncle Hamo (hero of the Boer war), who proves he’s still a crack shot when Lysander needs him most.

(Book 18, 2012)

Drifting House by Krys Lee

Regular blog followers know that I like to read fiction about the immigrant experience. Books like Away, by Amy Bloom (Eastern European Jewish immigrants); Brooklyn, by Colm Toibin (Irish); Shanghai Girls, by Lisa See (Chinese); and Voice of America, by E. C. Osondu (Nigerian) offer insight into how people deal with loss and change and how they survive (and with any luck, thrive) in new situations.

Drifting House covers new territory for me. It’s a collection of short stories that describe the experience of emigrating from Korea to the U.S., or in some stories, the experience of escaping from North Korea to South Korea or to China. These are not happy tales (especially the North Korean ones, as you would imagine) and even in the stories where people move from South Korea to relatively secure situations in California, the characters experience little optimism or renewal. Lee’s writing is precise and crystal clear, but also icy cold. Her characters remain opaque and I did not connect to any of them.

This is a slim volume, easily digested in small doses. I do think it does a good job adding another piece to the puzzle that is the American immigrant experience. Not everyone is as happy to be here as we might think, even if what they left behind wasn’t so hot either.

(Book 12, 2012)

The Book Club Cookbook by Judy Gelman and Vicki Levy Krupp

I love to read about food in fiction. Apparently so do other people, and some people even try to cook the food that they read about: witness the successful blog Inn at the Crossroads that recreates recipes from the George R. R. Martin fantasy series a Song of Ice and Fire, and whose bloggers are now published cookbook authors with the release of A Feast of Ice and Fire, coming out in April from Random House.

Most readers don’t want to take it as far as all that, so for them The Book Club Cookbook should do just fine. Gelman and Krupp came up with a list of about 100 books that are popular with book clubs. For each book they provide a few recipes. In some cases the recipes are for dishes that are central to the plot of the book itself, such as a recipe for potato peel pie* from The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows. In other cases they are for dishes that are not specifically mentioned in the book, but which might typically be eaten by the characters, such as the recipe for Irish brown soda bread that goes with the chapter about Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt. For some popular titles the book’s author provides a recipe for a food that he or she ate while writing the book, such as Rebecca Skloot’s recipe for chicken diablo. The cookbook includes over one hundred books and close to 300 recipes. I used the revised 2nd edition which is recently out, and which has been updated to include some books that are newly popular with book clubs (and which was kindly sent to me as a free review copy).

I thought it would be good to sample a few of the recipes before writing this blog post. I chose recipes from books that I had read and enjoyed. Yesterday I made Greek rice pudding, inspired by Desdemona’s rice pudding from Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides. Desdemona’s recipe uses short grain rice and the pudding is cooked on the stove top like a custard sauce. It was really delicious but much runnier than my usual rice pudding, which starts with cooked rice and is baked in the oven. Tonight’s dinner was Sister Mary Joseph Praise’s Cari de Dal from Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese. This is a curry of yellow split peas, spices, and vegetables, based on a traditional dish from Djibouti. It was also delicious but beware, the recipe makes enough to feed every patient at Missing Hospital in Addis Ababa.

*In fact, the cookbook includes two recipes for potato peel pie. The first one is authentic to the book and is something the starving protagonists would have eaten during the war—it contains potatoes and beets and not much else, and tastes, according to Annie Barrows, really awful. There is also a second potato peel pie recipe featuring lots of butter, cream, and cheese along with the potatoes, and which sounds wonderful. I might make that next.

(Book 8, 2012)

The Old Romantic by Louise Dean

I often complain about books where I dislike all the characters. Sometimes I can’t even finish them. When I first met the characters in The Old Romantic I hated them all, but I pushed on and I am very glad that I did so. Dean gives us a family whose members are, at first impression, prickly, ill mannered, self-absorbed, shallow, bitter, hostile, and rude, and she makes us love them! What skill! And it’s a lot of fun to read, once you get going.

Ken, the patriarch and head curmudgeon of this family, has decided that his demise is near and desires to reconcile with his estranged children and ex-wife before his death. His first attempts are not terribly auspicious; after 20 years of no contact he takes to calling his son Nick and screaming abuse at him over the telephone. Nick has carved out an upscale life as a solicitor and wants nothing to do with his brutish working class father, but Nick’s brother Dave (the people-pleasing younger sibling) manages to arrange a luncheon that brings everyone together and starts the reunion ball rolling. We soon discover that underneath his crotchety exterior Ken is just a lonely old man who needs to know that his life was not a failure. He is, of course, the old romantic of the title. His sweetness shines through, despite his best efforts to prevent that. Over time Dave, Nick, and their mother Pearl eventually reconnect, let down their guard, and make their peace with Ken and with one another. Secondary characters such as Nick’s girlfriend Astrid, and Dave’s teenage children are as well-defined as the main characters. Dean can generate a reader’s distaste or sympathy with a few choice words.

 This is a very English book, saturated with dark sardonic English humor. Class differences are a recurring theme—much of the family’s initial stress stemmed from Nick’s ascent to Oxford, Dave’s failure to follow him, and Ken’s disgust with Nick’s aspirations. I am certain I missed some of the more subtle class allusions, and readers who aren’t familiar with contemporary British culture might miss more. On the other hand, the theme of an old man facing death is pretty universal, no?

(Book 7, 2012)

My Dear I Wanted to Tell You by Louisa Young

This book starts out so gently: it’s the story of Riley, a sensitive working class boy in pre-WWI London, taken in by an aristocratic (but non-conformist) family, educated beyond his station, treated with kindness and encouragement, until he embarks on a “thing” with the family’s daughter Nadine, at which point he is banished; turns out they are only so liberal after all. This part of the story fills the first third of the book, and you’d be forgiven for thinking the rest of the book would concern itself with the sweetness of the young couple’s triumph over class-based adversity.

Well guess again. Riley, in a fit of pique, joins the army and is quickly shunted off to the trenches of World War I--we all know what happened there. And Young doesn’t spare us any details. In the turn of a page the book transforms from a pleasing love story into one of the most brutal war stories I’ve ever read. We watch Riley change from a green boy to a ravaged bitter man who endures horrific battles and eventually winds up with a gruesome injury. Young doesn’t spare Nadine either. To spite her parents, Nadine joins the VAD and suffers her own form of hell as she is sent to the front as a battlefield nurse.

Both Nadine and Riley (and several other secondary characters) are suffering from serious cases of PTSD by the end of the book, and I thought I might be too. I haven’t cried this much while reading a book in a long time. It’s horribly sad and beautifully written and a really great read, if you have the stomach for it. I loved it.

(Book 29, 2011)

State of Wonder by Ann Patchett

I can’t believe I haven’t written about this yet. I read it over a month ago. I think I have been saving it up as a treat because I loved it so much. Ann Patchett (Run, blogged about here) is a great writer who can manage a complicated story with the right mixture of action and explication, create sympathetic, compelling characters, and explore unknown territory with vigor and excitement.

State of Wonder describes a Heart of Darkness type journey, with the Amazon standing in for the Congo and a renegade doctor, Annick Swenson, as Kurtz. Charles Marlow is transformed into Marina Singh, a pharmaceutical researcher sent by her employer in Minnesota to Swenson’s research station in Brazil. Marina is charged with discovering the answers to several mysteries, including what happened to Anders Eckman, the man originally sent to find Dr. Swenson, and what, exactly, is taking Dr. Swenson so long to finish her promised research. What is she up to out there in the jungle? And why is she so reluctant to communicate with her sponsors? The answers to some of these questions provide unanticipated plot developments that kept me reading late into the night.

Marina, unprepared and alone, must navigate a complex web of social and environmental obstacles to find Swenson and figure out what’s going on. Some of these obstacles include a complicated past history with Swenson, who was a former teacher of Marina’s; Swenson’s recalcitrant gatekeepers (a hippy dippy Australian couple); a journey up the Amazon river; and crushing heat, insects, snakes, native tribe members with poisoned arrows, and psychedelic mushrooms. I really enjoyed the tension and sense of adventure that this book offers. It’s a great combination of relationship story and action novel.

(Book 23, 2011)

The Orphan Sister by Gwendolen Gross

This book is about three sisters in New Jersey and their parents. No, not really. This book is really about how you can be isolated and disconnected even while surrounded by people, how you can be the same as everyone else but be so different, how you can think you know everything but really know nothing, or, think you know nothing but really know everything.

The orphan sister is Clementine. Born as one of a set of triplets, her sisters are identical but she is fraternal. The three sisters share a strong bond, but the connection between the twins far outweighs anything they share with Clementine. Clementine’s parents’ relationship is also impenetrable to Clementine; it’s based mostly on lies and mutual avoidance of reality, and the dissolution of their marriage provides some of the only action in the book.

Clementine is the odd girl out, in so many ways, and Gross explores all of them. She writes beautifully of Clementine’s loneliness and confusion about where she fits and how she should live her life. Sometimes I wished that more things would happen in this book, but mostly I liked hanging around inside Clementine’s head as she explores her inner landscape and makes her own map of where she belongs.

(Book 21, 2011)