Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil

It's not like Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt wasn't on my radar for the past however many years. I've heard people talk about it in glowing terms. People have even gone as far as telling me that they were pretty sure this is a book I'd enjoy. But until Books & Beer selected it for our monthly read, I was never inclined to pick it up. Not even prior to my first trip to Savannah as an adult, 8 years ago.

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil is a love story about Savannah. Yes, it's a true crime story. Yes, it's history. Yes, it's full of the quirky characters found in Savannah. But it's also a love story about the love that the people of Savannah have for their city. If only I could hop in the car and drive up to Savannah right now. That's how much I want to see this city I've just spent the last few days reading about.

John Berendt is a writer from New York who traveled to Savannah, fell in love, and spent a good part of the next 8 or 9 years there. He took some liberties with the story line and the timing, and I wonder how much liberty he took with the dialogues in the book. That's neither here nor there. This is non-fiction that reads like fiction. It's told in first person so it's Berendt's account. It flows well and the characters you meet along the way.

At the heart, this is a story about a murder and the subsequent murder trials. A murder is committed in one of the majestic mansions of historical Savannah. But the framing of the trials, getting the reader acquainted with the heart of Savannah, covers many more pages and it was that which I loved reading.

Okay... so when will it be safe to take a trip to Savannah? (Writing this in the midst of a global pandemic.) The book club felt that it would be great to take a trip to Savannah as a club to go on the Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil walking tour. Oh, how I would love to do that! But I think many in the club will be prepared to do that long before I'm ready.

Even though I've read that the book is way better than the movie (no surprise there), I think I'm going to have to rent the movie one night this week.

The Violin of Auschwitz

I'd picked up The Violin of Auschwitz by Maria Angels Anglada at the last library book sale that I attended. I'd posted a photo of the stack of books I'd gotten from the sale on Facebook last week. (That's what prompted me to read Letters For Emily.) One of my Facebook friends say this book in the stack and asked if she could borrow it. I decided I'd read it first to know whether I'd want it back to put in the library at my rental property or if she could pass it along to someone else. It's a very slim volume and I figured I could read it in an afternoon.

This is a story within a story. A violin player hears a Polish woman playing violin, gets to know her and becomes curious about the history of her violin. As they part, she hands him a  story is about the violin which she had only told him had been built by her uncle. The real story is about Daniel, a prisoner at a camp in Auschwitz. When asked his profession, he said he was a carpenter rather than the violin maker he actually was. His true vocation came out when he observed a violinist playing poorly and realized it was a problem with the instrument and not the museum. He couldn't help himself from letting the Germans know that it was the violin and that he could fix it. He was given until the following morning.

Once that violin was repaired, he was asked to make a high quality violin. His life at the camp was then divided in 3. His mornings in the shop, mostly alone, working on the violin. His afternoons in the factory manufacturing military equipment. And the nighttimes in the barracks with his fellow prisoners. He feels his humanity in the barracks when he realizes that he hasn't lost the ability to feel for his fellow bunkmates. I found the real humanity was his working on the violin.

After I finished this slim volume, I did some research and learned that Anglada's story was based on a true story. I read the book in English and I'm wondering if it lost something in translation as the narrative did not flow smoothly. But for the time I needed to invest to read it, I'm very glad I did.

Letters for Emily

I'm a sucker for an epistolary novel, and that's what made me grab Camron Wright's novel, Letters for Emily from a recent library sale. I went on the final day of the library sale when you can fill a grocery bag with all the books you can for just $5. I selected a few books that I'd heard of and wanted to read, planning to read them first and then bring them to the beach condo that we rent out for our guests to read. I then promptly forgot about the bag of books.

Until yesterday. I needed to photograph a stack of something for one of my daily photo challenges and thought that those long forgotten books would stack up nicely.

Yesterday was the 67th day in the house due to covid-19 and I was feeling a bit restless. So after I photographed the books, I picked up this slim novel, thumbed thru it, and decided to sit down and start it. A few hours later, I had finished the entire novel.

It's a very sweet book. A grumpy old man dealing with dementia clearly loves his favorite grandchild, Emily. It's also important for him that his family remember him as his better self, the one he was before he got sick. So each day, during his lucid moments, Harry works on a book for Emily.

After his death, Emily's mom finds three copies of a handmade book of poems created especially for 7-year old Emily. She keeps one copy for Emily, gives another to her estranged husband, Bob, who is Harry's son. The third copy goes to Bob's sister, Michelle. Each poem in the book holds the clue to being able to open a file on Harry's computer where there is a letter written to Emily. Each letter is meant to give Emily a life lesson. It's clear that each letter is meant to teach a lesson to all the members of Harry's family.

The novel, which is based on letters that Harry Wright wrote for his grandchild, is very creatively written. And the lessons are ones that are valuable to anyone. It was a fluke that I found this novel and that I read it. But for a nice, sweet, inspiring novel, I would highly recommend this.

The Grace Kelly Dress

This doesn't happen often. It's not often that I really enjoy reading a book but don't especially like the book. That was the case with The Grace Kelly Dress by Brenda Janowitz. I really expected to love this book since it got such positive reviews in Renee's Reading Club on Facebook.

The Grace Kelly Dress is a novel about young women finding their true selves. Rose is a seamstress in Paris in 1958 and is creating a dream wedding dress inspired by Grace Kelly's wedding dress at a prestigious salon for a well-to-do client. Joanie is Rose's daughter. She's a young bride-to-be in New York City in 1982. In 2020, Joanie's daughter, Rocky, is preparing to be married - but doesn't want to wear "the dress."

The chapters which alternated among the three women were expertly crafted and they made you want to keep on reading. That's the part I loved. Both Joanie and Rocky struggled with the relationship with her mother.

What didn't I like? I didn't particularly like any of the female characters. Additionally, the story didn't go deep enough. We understood the importance of the dress to Rose, but that didn't translate to us understanding why it was so important for Joanie or Rocky to wear the dress. I went to college a few years before Joanie did and when I was reading about her college experience, I felt like I was reading about someone who had gone to college in the 1950s. Not in 1982 in New York City. That just didn't ring true. Also, there was so much focus on Rocky living in Brooklyn and not wanting to leave Brooklyn. Where she chose to live seemed important, but why? There were also some little plot twists which were never truly resolved and at the end of the novel felt pretty extraneous.

If you want a quick, easy book to read about a wedding dress, this might be for you. But I can't heartily recommend this.

Not Our Kind

I first read about the Kitty Zeldis historical fiction novel, Not Our Kind, through an email from the Jewish Book Council. I got on that mailing list to get suggestions for books to read with my synagogue book club. Then it showed up in a list of Jewish fiction in Renee's Reading Club, a group I belong to on Facebook. Before I took it out of the library, I checked reviews on goodreads. The first review I read described this as a book about the post-WWII years in Brooklyn, NY.

Certainly not the book's fault, but the setting is Manhattan and NOT Brooklyn. That wouldn't matter to most people, but I thought I could get some insight into what my mom's teenage years growing up in Brooklyn might have been like. (As an aside, there was a little something that irked me while reading the book. Patricia is taking a taxi home from the west side of Manhattan and the author says she's traveling uptown when in actuality she's traveling crosstown. I'm sort of annoying that way.)

This book starts out when Eleanor has quit her job as a teacher in an elite private school. She's been dumped by her love interest, a fellow teacher, and she's had an altercation with a student. She's in a taxi heading towards an interview when her taxi is in accident with another taxi. The passenger in the other is Patricia. Eleanor is a little bit banged up so Patricia takes her home with her. Eleanor meets Patricia's daughter, Margaux, and the two form an immediate connection. Margaux is a survivor of polio who has been educated at home since her recovery. She doesn't get along with her current tutor. To make a long story short, Protestant Patricia hires Jewish Eleanor to be Margaux's tutor in spite of the objections of her husband, Wynn.

Wynn isn't the only one who is unhappy about Eleanor's new job. Eleanor's mother, Irina, is equally displeased. She warns Eleanor that the Bellamys are "not our kind." This becomes more apparent when Eleanor accompanies the family to their summer home in Connecticut to continue tutoring Margaux. I expected there to be a little bit more of Eleanor feeling on the outside because of being Jewish. It was the premise of the story, but it wasn't the main part of the story. At least not to me.

The story really focuses on the changes that this fateful meeting set up for both Eleanor and Patricia.

I would have given this novel 3.5 stars on goodreads, but I rounded it up to 4 stars since it was a perfect book for me to be reading at this time. I loved watching the way that both Patricia and Eleanor grew as the novel progressed. I loved that in the end, Patricia's desire to set a good example for Margaux led her to act the way she did.

It was a quick easy read and while it wasn't earth-shattering, I enjoyed it a lot.

Florida

It's always a challenge to read a book of short stories for a book club discussion since each reader takes away something completely different from each individual story. Some book club members might remember one story better, others may have their own that they want to discuss. That's what happens when you read a book shortly before a book club meeting. But when you read a book of short stories not knowing when it will be discussed? That could be just crazy!

I think that the interesting discussion of Lauren Groff's collection called Florida would be to simply discuss the collection overall without even going into specifics of the stories.

Here's the blurb I read when I decided to vote for this choice for our community book club:

The stories in this collection span characters, towns, decades, even centuries, but Florida—its landscape, climate, history, and state of mind—becomes its gravitational center: an energy, a mood, as much as a place of residence. Groff transports the reader, then jolts us alert with a crackle of wit, a wave of sadness, a flash of cruelty, as she writes about loneliness, rage, family, and the passage of time. With shocking accuracy and effect, she pinpoints the moments and decisions and connections behind human pleasure and pain, hope and despair, love and fury—the moments that make us alive. 

After finishing the entire book, I feel like I was deceived a little bit. In some of the stories, the only connection to Florida was that the protagonist of that particular story was from Florida. And in only one of those cases did a character, and not the main character at all, say that she was not going to return to Florida. I definitely did enjoy the stories that gave the full flavor of Florida much more than the ones that did not.

What the blurb should have said was something about how this collection of stories spans women and issues specific to women. Marriage, being a mother, being a daughter, being a son (in relation to having a mother), being a friend, family, homelessness. That was more the common theme of this collection than "Florida" in whatever way you want to consider it.

It would be interesting to discuss why very few of the characters were given names. It would be interesting to discuss Groff's writing style which is both sparse and wordy - at the same time. As much as giving this book a sideways thumb for the reading experience, I think it could be a very interesting book to discuss.

The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street

It's not often that I read a book where I can't stand the main character but I still really enjoy the book. Susan Jane Gilman's The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street was exactly that sort of novel.

Young immigrant Malka Treynovsky arrives in the US with her parents and her sisters in 1913. They family had planned to emigrate from Russia to South Africa to be with family. But when awaiting departure in Hamburg, Malka's mother and sister get conjunctivitis and are quarantined and Malka spends time with her father both inside their refugee camp and in the city. They are teased by some of the other emigrants about going to Africa instead of America, the land where the streets are paved with gold. After catching a few minutes of a movie in Hamburg, Malka has dreams of being a movie star. Malka's father trades in their tickets for South Africa for tickets to New York. When Malka's mother learns of his deceit, she is furious.

The reality of the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the early 1900s was nothing like what Malka or her father dreamed of. The father spends less and less time at home in the tenement. Left behind, Malka's mother is hard at work and puts her daughters to work. Including Malka and her sister, Flora, who are still very young. Malka and Flora find a way to get paid for singing - and then for stopping to sing. They also run errands for the neighbors.

During one of their work outings, Malka is hit by a cart driven by an Italian immigrant selling ices. Eventually, the ices man takes Malka in. She transforms herself to Lillian Dinello and learns the ices and ice cream business from the inside. All along, I felt sorry for Malka - and then Lillian - but she was never likable.  (The father, who has a very minor part of the story is even more unlikable! )Lillian is nothing if not resourceful and when hard times come to her and her new husband, Bert, the pair falls back on what Lillian knows - ice cream. That's when the rags to riches part of the story takes place. And if a poor struggling motherless Malka/Lillian was unlikable, a rich Lillian is even easier to dislike.

I tend to like stories about the immigrant experience. The reader is given a taste of both Jewish immigration and Italian immigration. In this book, the story was chockfull of historical references which I loved. Sometimes the historical references felt like they were pulled out of history book rather then blending in with the narrative of the novel. But for me, this worked. I loved learning about the history of soft serve ice cream. As a little grow in Brooklyn, going to Carvel was one of my favorite things to do in the summer. Even as an adult, I still love going to Carvel for soft serve. It brings back good memories of childhood. my cousin, my parents... with ice cream to boot!