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.

The Shift: 7 Powerful Mindset Changes for Lasting Weight Loss

As a lifetime member of WW (previously Weight Watchers) who got serious about returning to my goal weight last year, I'd gotten several WW emails about The Shift and went to a virtual book signing online to hear more about it.

Gary Foster, PhD is the Chief Scientific Officer at WW. (He also happened to get part of his education at the University of Pennsylvania, my alma mater.) He's been studying weight-related issues for the entirety of his professional career.

This is not your typical diet book. It's not about what to eat or not eat. Well, maybe it is since I do recall Dr. Foster writing (and I'm paraphrasing here) if you want the cheese, you should eat the cheese. Which kind of sums up the point of the book. It's not about what you eat or when you eat it. It's making mindful eating a part of your regular life. It's not at all about being good or being bad. It's about being mindful.

Because of how long I've been on WW (many, many years) and how much reading I've done in the past, there was nothing at all earth shattering written here. But Dr. Foster has a nice conversational tone and includes personal anecdotes from others who struggle with their weight.

I started reading this book while on Christmas vacation. It definitely did make me feel better about the choices that I'd been making over the few days before I started reading. And I am positive that reading this helped me get 100% back on track with my eating as soon as I woke up the morning after we arrived back home. (Why my body craves either pizza or a grilled cheese after arriving home from a longer trip is beyond me. I came home, ate my grilled cheese, went to bed and was back on track the following morning. Easily. Because even though I hadn't yet finished the book, I had started my shift in mindset. That was vacation. I was faced with foods that I'm not faced with at home. I didn't want to feel deprived while away celebrating. However, I made mindful choices. I was selective about what I ate and didn't eat it all. I was extremely mindful of what went in my mouth. I felt good about my choices.

The Shift was a reminder that I need to be kind to myself, I need to be grateful for even small things. I need to focus on positive behaviors and positive changes. And most of all, a bad day doesn't make me a failure.

I'm glad I was able to get The Shift from the library. I figured I'd read it and if I felt it was a book that I'd turn to time and again that I'd buy a copy. For me, it's not that kind of book. I luckily got the book at the absolutely perfect time for me. I was out of my routine, in celebratory mode. I'm not sure if the book would have resonated quite so much with me had I read it when I was still pretty much locked-down during my first few months back on the program during winter/early spring 2021.

If you need an extra little something to help you shift your thinking, I would highly recommend The Shift.

Divorce is not for the faint-hearted

Rather than writing my random thoughts as part of my review of Every Other Weekend, I decided to put them in an entry of their own. I've pulled some passages of the book and then will share what the particular passage reminded me of from my own divorce. This is bound to be a very long blog entry, not really book-related. However, through my own writing, you'll have the opportunity to get to know me better.

In the driveway, note the brand-new Chevy van. On family trips, scuttle like a bug to get a swivel sweat. Yell "Shotgun," punch someone in the arm, cry to Mom if you have to - whatever it takes. If you're not swivelin', you're snivelin', 'cause the back seat reeks of sweat and swarms with ants when summer rolls around. They sneak up the tailpipe and find their way in, a little button of black squirm where someone spilt Hi-C from a can.

I don't think my memory here has anything to do with divorce. It has more to do with being a mother of three children, driving a minivan. We didn't have swivel seats in our middle row, but we did have captain's seats rather than a bench in our middle row. When I purchased my Toyota Previa in 1991, captain's seats were a big deal. Most minivans still had middle row benches. 

Once the kids were all out of their car safety seats (which happened a lot earlier in the 90s than it does today), it became a fight to sit "shotgun," in the front seat next to Mom. There'd be running for the car. The punching was also a thing. And I thought my family was unique. Ha!

The summer after my divorce, the kids and I were driving from our house in New Jersey to my parents' beach club in New York. On a good day, the drive took a little over an hour. If I'm recalling correctly, on this particular day, the traffic gods were on our side and we hadn't sat in any traffic at all. My youngest was sitting in the captain's seat on the passenger side of the middle row. I can't remember who was sitting next to her and who was sitting in the third row. About 5 minutes away from the beach club, I hear her say, "I have a stomach ache. I have to go to the bathroom." My response was, "Hold it in. We'll be there in a few minutes." She had a can of Yoo Hoo with her when we left our house. I had no idea how much she had or had not consumed. I then hear what sounds like her pouring the Yoo Hoo out of the can onto the floor of the car. That's what the other two kids heard as well. I'm not sure which one of us realized that she'd vomited all over herself, all over the seat.

Maybe this is a divorce story. My ex-husband wasn't helpful in nearly all ways, but until that point, he'd cleaned up a much larger share of the vomit that had come out of the mouths of our children. Someone else's vomit made me want to vomit. It made me feel like vomiting. Who was going to clean this up? Me, of course!

We get to the beach club, I get the kids up to my parents' cabana, and I did my share of whining about having to quickly get back down to the parking lot to clean up the vomit in the car before the temperature got too warm and the stench got too intense. Several of my mom's friends gathered together to get me supplied with rags, buckets, water, cleaning products. I left the kids with my mom and returned to the car.  I scrubbed, I rinsed, I disinfected. And that day, I left my car unlocked in the parking lot of the beach club with the door near what came to be known as "the vomit seat" wide open. 

Yes, "the vomit seat." Didn't the kids we carpooled around town ever wonder why none of my kids would seat in the middle passenger-side captain's seat? A year or so the Toyota was replaced with another minivan, this time a Plymouth, and "the vomit seat" was relegated to the memory books for me and all three kids.

And then Dad would show up, every other weekend and one night a week, looking like someone had blown him up and had left a weird, featureless man in his place. On Wednesdays, he'd take them to McDonald's and they'd eat in silence, and every other Friday he'd pick them up for the weekends at his house. They were long weekends, dull and quiet in a sad, sort of lonely way.

I can't really speak for my kids. I have lots of details about the time they spent with their father when they were kids. But the memory that this passage sparked has to do with how quickly the kids got thru their dinners out with their father on their Wednesday nights. Neither my former husband nor myself were fans of fast food. So he took the kids to actual sit-down restaurants. When I'd take the kids out to dinner, we'd enjoy our time together without me having to fret over cooking a meal that invariably someone wouldn't eat and when dinner was over, we'd get up from the table and go home. I didn't have to clean up and I didn't have to nag them for help. The four of us liked eating out together and it wasn't a rushed affair. Wednesday evenings, their father, who'd driven however long from somewhere in New York City to our house in suburban New Jersey, would be sitting in his car on the street, reading a newspaper until the kids were all home and ready to go out to dinner. They'd pull out of the driveway and seriously, maybe 25 minutes later, the kids would be ringing the bell. Dinner done. Really? He spent at least 4 times as long driving in the car as he did with the kids. Why?

Turns out, Dad does know his way here. Except that when he shows up now, he doesn't even come to the door. He just sits in the car, staring straight ahead, honking.

Again, our stories aren't even close. But they are certainly parallel. And this passage sparks two different and distinct memories. My kids and I remained in our family home after the divorce. So their dad knew his way to the house. (In the book, Nenny, her mother and her brothers move to an apartment with their mother's friend and then quickly moved into a house with their mother's new husband and his two kids.)

First memory. He's sitting in a car. I can't remember if this was in the early days when he still had his own car or later on, after his car had been stolen, and he'd show up in a different rental car each time. He'd be sitting in the car, head facing forward, with a newspaper pulled up right in front of his eyes, but positioned so that it blocked his view of the house or of me. Did he honk the horn? I can't remember for certain. But as soon as the first kid approached the car, he'd put down his newspaper, get out of the car and start screaming at the other two kids, "Let's get out of this dump." Remember, this was the house he and I bought together with the intention of raising our children there together. This happened for years. Whether it was picking up the kids for a weekend or picking them up for a "quick bite." "Quick bite," an expression he used all the time, being taken far too literally. "Let's get out to this dump." This happened all the time. I was the Girl Scout cookie mom. I had moms in the driveway picking up their cookie orders. And the father of my children is standing in the street yelling, "Let's get out of this dump." Another standing joke with the kids going forward.

Second memory. He might know the way to the house. But a while after his car got stolen, he claimed that he wasn't able to secure a rental car for Sunday evenings in order to drive the kids home. He'd send them home with a "car and driver." Eventually, a "car and driver" often showed up on Fridays for the pick-ups. Anyway, the current memory is about the time that the driver was unable to read the handwritten directions that my ex-husband had given him to be able to get them home. This was in the mid-90s, years before GPS was a thing for ordinary drivers. Of course the driver didn't realize he couldn't read the handwritten directions until he and the kids were crossing the George Washington Bridge. As soon as my middle child realized that they were "lost," she started to cry. Eventually, two or three of them were able to somehow, miraculously, direct the driver back to our house. After that, whenever we'd drive from New York City to our house, I'd throw out the question, "Okay, which way to I head now?" making sure that they'd recognize landmarks and would be comfortable finding their way home.

Little Nenny has always been a nervous nelly. She was born with a natural predilection for alarm. Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong. This simple irrationality governs her whole life - top to bottom, inside and out.

This describes my youngest. She had broken her leg as a toddler and as such, required much more personal space than most kids need. She was afraid of people getting physically too close. She was afraid of being alone at night. She'd "sleepwalk" down the stairs and lie down on the kitchen floor outside my office, without me even knowing she'd come downstairs. That led to me having all three kids sleep in the same bedroom for probably close to a year. It took many more years for her to be able to sleep in her own bedroom, alone. She was afraid of storms. She was afraid of getting lost. She was afraid of animals. (In the midst of writing up this post, she reminded me that she was afraid of our cat as a child. Our cat. That lived in our house with us.) Once when we had a chipmunk loose in our house, she locked herself in her bedroom for about 15 hours with a towel blocking the bottom of the door. Didn't she have to go to the bathroom? She was afraid of terrorists. But more on that later.

Having divorced parents is like living in one of those claw machines at the pizza parlor: you're just hanging around, minding your own business, and then every other weekend you get plucked up and flung somewhere else. Except it's less fun than the pizza place. It's not like Nenny ever thinks Yippee, a weekend at Dad's.

"Just everyone sit down," Dad finally says, and they sit at the picnic table. He irritably hands out the food and they start to eat. Denny's burger is smeared with ketchup and she practically gags, but she knows better than to complain.

Oh boy! My oldest hated ketchup. I wish he'd known better, most of the time, than to complain. The tears.

Even though Mom's pissed, she lets Nenny come along and softens halfway through the drive. She's like that: prone to rage and then settle guilt for exposing the kids to her wrath.

Isn't this a normal mom thing? Or is it exclusive to divorced moms? Didn't we have a certain level of guilt to overcome, just because we were divorced?

"You ever been to a laundromat before?" she asks. 
"I don't think so," Nenny says.
...
Mom smiles. "Boy, are you spoiled!" She looks at Nenny playfully, but Nenny just looks back. She sure doesn't feel spoiled. Spoiled is a new Barbie every week and trips to the skating rink.

At the end of October a new quiet descends upon the house like nothing Nenny's heard before. Though she doesn't know it yet, it's the silent assault of approaching death. Gramma B's been declining for months. That's what they say, "a steady decline," as though she's slowly crawling down a hill.

The memory associated with this is not good. This was in 2004. Both my ex-husband and I were in relationships. He was engaged to be married. For what seemed like a really long period of time, whenever my ex-husband needed an excuse for not showing up for something or not being able to spend time with the kids, he'd bring his future wife's sick mother into play. One Friday he called to say that he couldn't pick up the kids until Saturday because his girlfriend's mother was really, really sick, on death's doorstep, and he promised his girlfriend that he'd spend the evening with the two of them. I had plans for the weekend that involved leaving town. I stuck around longer and made overnight plans for the kids. Death's doorstep? The father of my significant other had recently passed away. I understood death's doorstep. 

On Sunday, once the kids were home, I learned that my ex-husband's future wife's elderly but not too sick mother wanted to go out to dinner. She wasn't on death's doorstep at all. She was old. She wanted a restaurant meal. I was hurt by the insensitivity of him using a death's doorstep excuse. And hey, could he have not lied? Oh wait. I guess not.

"Get under your desks!" Sister Timothy shouts and peers through the blinds. "Oh no, it's the Russians! Dear God, dear God, dear God!" She crosses herself like crossing's the only thing left.
...
Mikhail Gorbachev comes into the room. The Mikhail Gorbachev.

What's my recollection here?  My youngest was a fifth grader on September 11, 2001. Like Nenny, she was a fearful child. I wish I could remember if she was afraid of Saddam Hussein in the days before 9/11 or the days after. Not only was she afraid of Saddam Hussein, she was sure that he was a regular at our Starbucks! She insisted she'd see him there. I later learned that the guy she identified as Saddam Hussein was an artist who spent an awful lot of time at our Starbucks. He looked nothing like Saddam Hussein. And she could never really explain to me why she thought that's who this fellow really was. We (everyone but my youngest) joked around about it. But she was totally serious. 

Denny's on the Baby-Sitters Club #5 again, Dawn and the Impossible Three, because she forgot the newest one at Dad's. That's another thing about divorce: you pack things and forget things and lose things all the time. There's a trail of your stuff like crumbs wherever you go.

I don't remember too much of that going on with my kids and their dad's house. Mostly because they brought everything back and forth each time they went for the weekend. I found out after they'd spent many weekends there that he didn't have tooth paste or shampoo for them. He expected them to bring those things along with them. As if it was a hotel. Yet, he insisted that his apartment in New York was their "real home."

But she doesn't get up right away. She clutches her book and hugs her knees and sits for a minute on the midway stairs. She knows what it's like to anticipate something, then to have your hope shrivel like a deflating balloon. Every time she goes to Dad's she expects something will have changed, that maybe this time he'll ask how she is, if she's happy, if anything's wrong, but he never does. He's so whacked and floating in his own world of grades and naps and dumb historical facts. The house could be on fire and he'd just sit there, with his cup of coffee and his stack of papers and his pile of red pens.

Then again, he'd always show up. He's never not shown up. That's a different kind of disappointment entirely.

I believe this describes my children's situation. He always showed up when he said he'd show up. That doesn't mean he didn't back out of weekends or dinners with advanced warning. He did that all the time. But we always knew in advance.

As kids, I know all three of them wished that something would change. That somehow the dad that picked them up would be a warmer, "daddier" like dad than the one they really had.  And that was the source of their biggest disappointment. They're adults, and I'm not 100% sure that the disappointment each time they see him isn't totally gone.

Every year the fourth graders at school research a California mission and build a model out of sticks or sugar cubes, and every year it's always the same - tiny Indians in the mission gardens, raking soil or planting seeds or forming bricks, or else praying with some priest in a courtyard somewhere, the feeling one of peaceful camaraderie, of a fair and equitable exchange, and every year, walking through the cafeteria where the models are on display, Nenny thinks, Yeah, right. Everyone knows the Indians were slaves.

Next year, she thinks, when I'm in fourth grade, my model's gonna tell the truth, and pictures sugar cubes specked with painted blood and little figure faces twisted with rage.

Mexican houses! That was the project that my kids had to do in first grade. The dreaded Mexican house project. I was still married when my oldest was in first grade. His father and I had just returned from a quick getaway to Cancun where I'd seen actual Mexican houses. I guided him in his construction of his house. I had him do all the work. I don't think they got actual grades on their Mexican houses, but had they, he would have gotten a D-. His teacher told me that his house didn't look at all like how she'd described the houses to the children. So was THAT the project? That was never made clear. Not to the first graders and not to their parents. His house looked just like what I'd just seen in Mexico! Not to mention that he was "sloppily" done. Well, yes! He was 6 years old and I wasn't doing the project for him. His Mexican house fell apart on the day that he carried it home from school. I don't think I realized how many parents did the projects for the kids so those kids showed up with very well-constructed Mexican houses!

Take two. My middle child is assigned the Mexican house project. I knew better this time. "What did Mrs. Hayes say that your Mexican house needs to look like?" I didn't talk about any real Mexican houses I'd seen before or how her older brother's Mexican house was not well-received. She described the house that her teacher had described to her. And that's how her house was constructed. By her. That's when I learned that many of those over-achieving parents built the houses that their children brought in. You should have seen the house the child of the architect brought in! Well, you can imagine!

Take three. My youngest makes it to first grade. She has the same first grade teacher as her older siblings. The entire summer between kindergarten and first grade, I'm dreading the stupid Mexican house project. The school year rolls along and my dread grows. But no mention of the Mexican house. Ever. June comes. First grade is over. No Mexican house. Hooray! It wasn't until about 3 years later when I'd begun my full-time teaching career that I learned why their was no Mexican house project. Apparently the year that my youngest was in first grade, there was a new, young first grade teacher at their school. She thought the Mexican house project was ridiculous. And she made it go away. I owe great thanks to that wonderful teacher who impacted the lives of both my child and me, for the better, without us really ever having any direct contact with her.

That's the extent of my text-to-self connections from Every Other Weekend by Zulema Renee Summerfield. I have tons more anecdotes. Maybe someday I'll write a book.

Brooklyn on my mind

I restarted Les Miserables and I wasn't going to pick up another book until I was finished. Until... Halsey Street by Naima Coster showed up in the December Amazon First Reads selection. I wondered, did Halsey Street refer to the street in Brooklyn? I quickly went to read the description.

"A modern-day story of family, loss, and renewal, Halsey Street captures the deeply human need to belong—not only to a place but to one another.

Penelope Grand has scrapped her failed career as an artist in Pittsburgh and moved back to Brooklyn to keep an eye on her ailing father. She’s accepted that her future won’t be what she’d dreamed, but now, as gentrification has completely reshaped her old neighborhood, even her past is unrecognizable. Old haunts have been razed, and wealthy white strangers have replaced every familiar face in Bed-Stuy."

Brooklyn is in the front of my mind lately as I prepare to sell my family home. The home that has been in my family since sometime in 1935. Just from the description, I was drawn in by connections to my own personal life. I (temporarily) moved back to Brooklyn when my father became ill. And the Brooklyn I returned to was not the Brooklyn that I'd left over 35 years ago. (And maybe it's not everyone... but do most people not get the future that they've dreamed of?)

I immediately downloaded the book, scrapped reading Les Miz for the second time and started reading Halsey Street.

I've never actually been on Halsey Street although for some reason that name is etched in my mind. Did I ever know anyone that lived on Halsey Street? I'm not really sure. It's in a neighborhood that I wouldn't have dared visiting alone as a kid growing up in Brooklyn (although I do think a friend's mother took me to that neighborhood more than once or twice). Now, it's just another neighborhood where the folks who have been living there a long time are being priced out of and forced to move. Just like many other neighborhoods in Brooklyn and other urban centers. Adult children of my friends are living there. Most likely, I couldn't afford to live there. So there!

That's a part of the story of Halsey Street.

There's lots of darkness and very little light in the debut novel. My initially reaction was to give it three stars on goodreads.com because of how dark it can tend to be. (It became a little bit difficult to read at some of those points.) I wondered if anyone I knew would enjoy this book. But is that a reason for me to give a book 3 stars when in my gut I felt it deserved 4? I went in and changed my rating this morning.

Rather than give you a straight out review, I'm going to comment on some of the lines in the book that really spoke to me.

The houses where I grew up in California are hardly ever this beautiful. The designs are so garish and cold. But there's so much history in these brownstones. It must have been a magical place to grow up.

My family house which was built in 1910 has so many interesting features. They sure don't build houses like that anymore. I'm sure the people who are buying our house are going to make major changes. Will they destroy the character? They can't touch the history, can they? And about that history. We're not talking about just my history, but my grandparents' history, moving there as young parents. The history of my mom and her sister, growing up in that house. My parents' history. Taking over the house as newlyweds and then inheriting the house when my grandmother died. The childhood history of my brother and me. Was he as anxious to leave Brooklyn as I was? And of course the history of my kids, most especially my son who lived in the house as an adult  for over 2 years.

Was it a magical place to grow up? I know that Penelope doesn't believe Bed-Stuy was magical when she grew up. It's only now as an adult that I can see some of the magic in my upbringing. I compare it to where I raised my children, in suburban New Jersey. But I think about how my upbringing, if more magical, was only more magical because of the time period when I grew up and not because of the location.

Penelope gathered her new set of keys from the floor and left to see her father. The house was just a few blocks over, and Penelope wanted to see if the other streets were as quaint as Greene and Bedford. Ralph had narrated the changes in the neighborhood to her over the phone, five years' worth of losses. His store wasn't the only one that had closed. Lionel Sheckley wasn't the only friend who had died. Almost everyone was gone, he said. He hardly recognized Bed-Stuy.

 

Each time I return to Brooklyn, I need to go for a walk in the neighborhood. I carefully study which streets seem well-kempt, which don't. (I seriously think the homeowners on our block in Midwood took a pact to not upgrade the outsides of their houses. Compared to other streets where bricks have been repointed, vinyl siding has been replaced with some other face. Gardens are not just well-tended but beautifully appointed.

I try to remember what's been changed. On my last visit "home" I was struck by what the schoolyard at the end of my block looked like. It looks like a park. I spent so many years playing on the concrete and dry dirt in the schoolyard. We used it as a park, although it was never park-like! I also walked around the block to examine the construction of new homes taking place behind us. Is that what is going to happen to our house?

And what about the neighbors? I'm fortunate to have many of my old neighbors as friends on Facebook. We're getting reacquainted as adults but take time to remember the "magical" place where we grew up. I'm hard pressed to think of any of my neighborhood friends from growing up that still live in the neighborhood. Or even Brooklyn. Or even NYC. By the time my parents died in 2014, almost everyone they had been friendly with had died. I guess that's a common story.

And she'd thought herself fortunate, compared to her classmates in Bed-Stuy; for the first time, at RISD, Penelope wondered whether she had been poor. She quickly realized she hadn't been, although her mother had, and her father, when they were children.

My experience wasn't quite as extreme as Penelope's. Growing up, I thought we might be rich. We traveled to Miami regularly, took a road trip most summers, and from time to time we'd go somewhere like the Bahamas and California and stay in a hotel. We belonged to a beach club. That's more than many of my classmates did. It wasn't until I got to college and met some real rich people that I realized we fell somewhere in the middle class. My parents' upbringings had been very different from my own. In some ways richer, in many ways more deprived.

They found a table by the window in a cafe on Nostrand Avenue. It was a new restaurant with yellow curtains...

Cafe? Nostrand Avenue? That doesn't really compute. I'm constantly surprised by what previously unimagined businesses have cropped up on what street. In my Brooklyn. In the parts of Brooklyn I didn't dare go to as a teen.

"Revitalization. They're revitalizing the neighborhood." He made big swoops with his fingers, quotation marks around the word revitalize.

"It's still Brooklyn, Pop."

"Maybe on the surface. But what about inside, hmm?" Ralph gestured over his shoulder at the rest of the restaurant. Most of the other customers were talking over their lunches, nearly all of them white. They weren't the majority outside on Nostrand but they were in here, congregated around the little tables.

That's Brooklyn!

Penelope felt a charge in her fingertips, her cheeks. "Is that what you see?"

"Penelope, I get it, people have all kinds of romantic attachments to where they grew up, but that's life in this city. You lose everything you love here."

"What have you lost? What has Marcus?"

"At least, the three of us in this room can all benefit from the changes-"

But can everyone benefit from the changes? My neighborhood has changed. I don't remember how long it's been since we haven't fit in. Is there hope, possibilities, for us there? There are now two Starbucks within walking distance, but on the outskirts. It's still not a Starbucks kind of neighborhood. That sounds so shallow. I don't mean it to. We need to keep reminding us that the Brooklyn that we're finally "leaving" isn't the Brooklyn where we grew up. That brings up another internal conflict for another day.

She felt sad not that she had lost something but rather that her mother had - Ramona had loved her life, her pipe and her blue casita and her mountain. Mirella was sorry the old woman wouldn't live any more of the days she had loved so much. She was sorry for Penelope, too, afraid she would be unable to stop crying, the way Mirella had been after her father died. She had cried every day for a year, and then only once in a while, abruptly and for no reason at all, at times that seemed to have nothing to do with her father. And then Mirella learned to put away her sadness, to store it in her body, somewhere out of the way, higher than her stomach, below her throat.

This spoke to me simply because I'm selling the house because my parents have died. In some ways the sale of the house is more difficult than the death of my parents. It's just so much more FINAL. As we age, we kind of assume that our parents will die before we do. That's the natural order. But when you've had a family home, you never stop to consider that once both your parents are gone, the family home will most likely be gone, too. Especially if it's in a changed neighborhood. A neighborhood where you no longer feel you have a place.

If you've stuck with me so far, this last quote is very meaningful to me. It made me smile and get teary-eyed, both at the same time. The final line I'm going to share with you is reminiscent of what my mother said to me nearly every single day when I spoke to her on the phone.

Ralph laughed when Penelope called, asked her about Pittsburgh, and promised her he was "fine, just fine."

That was my mother's exact line. Exactly. Parents lie.

Thank you for reading to the end of this very long post. A few weeks ago, I wrote a post telling you that I felt like writing rather than reading. Reading this book has allowed me to do a little bit of the writing I've been itching to do. Just a little bit. And I was reading at the same time.

Now... back to Les Miserables. I think.

From Sand and Ash

I have so much to say about From Sand and Ash, a historical fiction novel by Amy Harmon. Where to begin?

This novel was first suggested as a title for our Jewish book club, way back at the beginning of the book club. As soon as I heard that it was a Holocaust novel I said no. I did not want our Jewish book club to read one Holocaust novel after another. I didn't want us to be that kind of club. I wanted to find other types of novels that had some connection to either Judaism or Israel. Of course, remembrance of the Holocaust has some impact on American Judaism so two of the books we've read have been peripherally related to the Holocaust without being stories of the Holocaust.

Then I realized that our next book club meeting would be in April, the week of our synagogue's Holocaust Remembrance Day observance. We're trying to get new people to attend our book club. Why not pick a Holocaust novel and promote our Holocaust program and our book club together? Since one member so highly recommended this novel (and she hasn't been thrilled with most of the books we've been discussing), we decided to go with it.

Now that I've finished it nearly months prior to our discussion, I should probably write some notes so I can remember the things I want to talk about. I'm torn between wanting to do that here - or just getting to the review. As I've got a desk full of other projects I need to get to work on, I think I'll just go with the review.

At the simplest level, From Sand and Ash is about star-crossed lovers, Eva and Angelo. Eva is an Italian Jew and Angelo is an Italian-American, destined to be a priest. After Angelo's mother dies in childbirth, his father sends him to Florence to live with his grandparents who happen to be household employees of Eva's father. The two, from early times together, have trouble defining their relationship. They're being raised in the same household so they feel like siblings in one way. But maybe the relationship is closer to being cousins. Readers know that there might be more to it.

War comes to Italy. The Germans take control. And racial laws are put into place restricting what Jews can and can't do. It greatly impacts the lives of Eva, Angelo, and their families. Angelo's calling to become a priest is greater than his pull to create a life with Eva. He heads off to Rome and Eva stays behind in Florence.

Eventually, Angelo deems it no longer safe for Eva to stay in Florence so he brings her to Rome and hides her in a convent. This is where the meat of the story is. I knew that Italians (and the Catholic Church), more than people from any other European country, did a lot to hide their Jews. This novel gives a full taste of how that was done. Eva doesn't want to simply be hidden. She wants to help while she is waiting out the war.

Harmon's language creates quite the picture of what life must have been like in Italy with the Gestapo in charge. Eva and Angelo are fully developed characters who maintain their humanity as the world around them is falling to pieces. I'd highly recommend this novel.

There is so much that can be discussed about this book and I look forward to the discussion.

The Dressmakers of Prospect Heights.

I liked Kitty Zeldis' latest historical fiction novel, The Dressmakers of Prospect Heights, but I only liked it. It was set in Brooklyn! I should have loved it!

I went back to see what type of rating I'd given to the first Kitty Zeldis novel I'd read, Not Our Kind, to see if I'd felt similarly. I did. But not for the same reasons.

I can't think of a concise way to describe what this novel is about. Bea is an "older" woman who has had to start over in life several times. First in New Orleans after she needs to leave Russia when things got tough for the Jews there. Then from New Orleans when her business is no longer practical. And then from Brooklyn, when all the secrets she has kept over the years start to unravel.

Bea moves north to Brooklyn with Alice, an orphan whom she'd taken in back in New Orleans. The two open an unique dress shop in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn. (Hence the title of the book.)

Catherine is a woman living down the street from the dress shop. She's happily married and longing to have a baby.

The lives of the three women intersect and that's when the secrets start to be revealed.

What I enjoyed most about this book were the references to locations that I'm familiar with in Brooklyn and Manhattan. I loved reading about Alice and Bea's creative approach to designing dresses. What I didn't love was the character development. That combined with the way conflicts were addressed and resolved left me wanting for more.

I'm also not sure what relevance there was to Bea being Jewish. It was an integral part of the beginning of the story, it was brought up once or twice towards the middle of the book, but then never addressed. She could have been a displaced immigrant from anywhere.

Not a bad book, but nothing I'd strongly recommend. 

A little bit of this and a little bit of that

I have been remiss in not posting while reading A Breath of Snow and Ashes (Outlander #6) by Diana Gabaldon. It seems like I started the book months ago, then had the problems with Overdrive, then while I was waiting for the e-book to become available again, I had book club books to read. But finally had a good long reading session yesterday and finished Book #6.

You may or may not recall that after Book #5, I felt as though I was at a good point in the series to take a break and get some other reading done. I kind of knew what might happen next, just not what it might mean. Well, after the conclusion of Book #6, I immediately went in search of Book #7. I really, really, really want to know what happens next! I'm not at a good breaking point at all!

I can't really tell you what the book is about since I can't really recall where book #6 started. The bulk of the book was about the days leading up to the American Revolution. What was especially interesting to me is that most of the American Revolution history that I already knew was related to New York, New Jersey or Pennsylvania. I'll even admit that I never really gave much a thought to what was going on in North Carolina before or during the early days of our country. (In my little teeny mind, prior to reading this book, North Carolina didn't become a player until the days leading up to the Civil War. Have I mentioned that I love a book where I learn something new?)

I also won't tell you what happens at the end of the book, the type of cliffhanger I'm now left with. That would be a spoiler and I'm determined not to include spoilers when reviewing or writing about books. Suffice to say, it's a major cliffhanger and I can't wait to see what comes next. I'm #3 on a waitlist for the e-book.

That should give me a little time to get some other reading done while I wait.



Who I recommend this book to? Anyone who is hooked on the Outlander series!

Last night I started the January Books & Beer Club pick - The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien, another classic that I've never read. Fantasy is not my cup of tea so I wasn't even sure if I would take the time to read this one. So far, it's not quite what I expected. I'm not sure what I expected. And it's a much quicker read than I imagined it would be. Stay tuned for my review.

Playing catch-up

I really, really, really need to play catch-up here. I can't believe I've read so many books since I last posted a review! I've read some really good books in that time - as well as a few duds. I read 7 books during the 7 weeks I was away from home (first for my daughter's wedding, then on a celebratory trip to Italy), finished another 11 through the end of 2023. I've already finished 10 books in 2024, with 4 more (yes, crazy) in the works.

You know how it's so overwhelming to catch up once you kind of lose the habit of getting things done. After 7 weeks away, I had a crazy time getting back into the swing of being home. (And wasn't home long due to an out-of-town family emergency less than 2 weeks after my return.) Writing book reviews was near the bottom of my list of things to get done. (But yes, seriously, it was - and is still - on my list. I guess I'll get to tick it off today. Yay!

I don't want to not share the books I've read here so I'm going to list them with the stars I gave them on Goodreads. I'm hoping to write at least one or two lines with my thoughts on each title. Yes, for all 28 books!

1. The Breakaway by Jennifer Weiner ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ I really enjoyed this one about a young women learning so much about herself as a leader on a bike trip with some unexpected group members.

2. Recipe for Second Chances by Ali Rosen ⭐️⭐️⭐️ I read this in the days leading up to our departure for Italy because it took place in Italy. It was just okay.

3. The Villa Girls by Nicky Pellegrino ⭐️⭐️⭐️ Another just okay read for me. This novel told a story that came before The Italian Wedding (not sure the order of the books being published). The story was okay. What I did love were the bits of the story that took place in Italy. As usual, Nicky Pellegrino does a great job at evoking the location.

4. City People by Elizabeth Topp ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Seriously, until I looked at the synopsis of this novel, I couldn't remember what it was about. Having said that, it was a good read about a band of mothers experiencing the loss of one of their own. I was able to connect to this story on many levels even though my days of being a mom of young kids is way in the past.

5. Tom Lake by Ann Patchett ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ This book seems to have such mixed reviews. People either loved it or hated it. I loved Tom Lake, perhaps it was because I was really able to connect to this story. It's set during the early days of COVID which holds appeal to me and Lara's adult daughters have come home to quarantine. The daughters pass the time by listening to their mom share some stories from her younger life. One of Lara's defining moments in life was starring in the play Our Town. I saw my daughter in a minor role in that play years ago so I had that connection, too. This was a warm, comfortable read.

6. Woke Up Like This by Amy Lea ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ I believe this was a free Amazon Prime First Read. Time travel. Two teens time travel to their 30s. I really enjoyed this one.

7. When We Were Enemies by Emily Bleeker ⭐️⭐️⭐️ This is one I really expected to love. It's about a young woman in 1943 Indiana working as a translator at a nearby Italian POW camp. It was simply okay.

8. Never Meant to Meet You by Alli Frank ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ This was another free Amazon Prime First Read that I did not expect to really like, but I did. It was a light enough story but one with a lot of substance about marriage, race, and religion. Plus one of the main characters was a kindergarten teacher. 

9. Paper Doll Lina by Robyn Lucas ⭐️⭐️⭐️ Another free Amazon Prime First Read, this one about a woman who has really lost herself in her marriage. It had promise, was enjoyable enough to read, but just okay.

10. Enough by Cassidy Hutchinson ⭐️⭐️⭐️ I listened to Cassidy Hutchinson read the book. I guess I was hoping to learn a little bit more than I did. Since so much of the story is already out there, I learned a few things and was reminded of just how awful the end of the last presidency and January 6th was. Not that I need a lot of reminders.

11. Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth by Noa Tishby ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ I had started to read this highly recommended book before our family emergency. My son and I both flew across the country and were both reading Israel and boy did we have a lot to talk about. I learned many new things, I was reminded of many things I'd learned over the years, and I feel a bit better informed about what's going on in the Middle East right now. Whenever I read anything about Israel, I always wonder how accurate the information is. This seems accurate and I understand that Noa Tishby is a Zionist, but it didn't seem to me like she had some hidden agenda. Reading this reaffirmed most of what I'd already believed. There are no easy answers.

12. The Authenticity Project by Clare Pooley ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ The author of this one was the same author as Iona Iverson's Rules for Commuting. There were lots of similarities across the two books, although the premise of each plot was quite different. In The Authenticity Project, Julian Jessop, an older, lonely artist writes the true story about his life and leaves it in a cafe, suggesting that others do the same. Write their truths and pass it along. Six strangers are brought together and form unexpected friendships. I preferred Iona Iverson but this was a pleasant read, too.

13. The Apology Project by Jeanette Escudero ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ I had to look at the synopsis of this one to remember the plot of this one. It's about a woman who gets fired when she's not willing to compromise her principles for a big case at her law firm. What next? While she attempts to figure that out, she is encouraged to apologize to people from her past (some who meant something to her, others that really didn't). That became her project. It was "fun" following along.

14. Only the Beautiful by Susan Meissner ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Susan Meissner always writes an interesting novel that isn't quite the kind of historical fiction where you learn a lot about the time period but which is set in a time period that makes the story especially meaningful. In this case, a key character was living through World War II in Austria. The main character, however, was a young woman whose parents worked on a vineyard when they were killed in an accident. The owners of the vineyard agree to care for her until she legally becomes an adult. She becomes pregnant and things fall apart for her after that. 

15. Our Town: A Play in Three Acts by Thornton Wilder ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ After reading Tom Lake, I decided to reread Our Town. Apparently, I wasn't the only person who had the same thought because there was quite a long waitlist to get the play. This is Thornton Wilder's most frequently performed play.

16. One Summer in Savannah by Torah Shelton Harris ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Sara Lancaster has left her home in Savannah, Georgia to protect her daughter, Alana who was born as the result of a rape. When her father becomes ill, she returns to Savannah and has to deal with the ghosts of the past. It's a bittersweet novel about motherhood and moving forward after something terrible. I loved the character of Alana who is exceptionally smart.

17. Shanda: A Memoir of Shame and Secrecy by Letty Cottin Pogrebin ⭐️⭐️⭐️ This memoir was recommended to me by several people. They were all slightly older than I am, and I wonder if that's what made me think this was just okay and not great. This memoir focuses on the secrets that Pogrebin and her family kept because the truth was "a shanda" or a shame or a disgrace (in Yiddish). I was able to identify some of the shandas in the life of family members.

18. The Last Thing He Told Me by Laura Dave ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ I listened to this audiobook with my husband on a long car ride and it was perfect. An engaging story that we could both enjoy and the length of the audiobook matched the hours in day one of our road trip spent in the car. Hannah's husband has disappeared. She and her stepdaughter, Bailey, who don't have the greatest relationship, come together to figure out what could have possibly happened to Owen, husband and dad.

19. Looking for Alaska by John Green ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ After finishing one audiobook on day one of our road trip, I knew I wanted to find another "short" audiobook to listen to on day two of the trip. Looking for Alaska has been on my list of banned books to read and it was the perfect length. It's a coming of age story that takes place at a boarding school. At the end of the story (which coincided with us leaving the highway and just having the local roads to get us home - further than you'd think unless you, too, live in a rural area - my husband and I looked at each other and said, "How important is a book like this for a kid experiencing even a part of what was experienced by the characters in this novel. How wrong that a book like this is banned!"

20. The Surgeon's Daughter by Audrey Blake ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ My first finish for 2024 is the sequel to The Girl in His Shadow which I read as part of a Big Library Read in June 2022. While I gave both novels 4 stars, I much preferred The Girl in His Shadow to The Surgeon's Daughter. Both novels made me really think about what it would have been like to be a women with a brain and with some amibition in the 19th century. (I liked that Nora attended med school in Italy, of course!)

21. Must Love Flowers by Debbie Macomber ⭐️⭐️⭐️ We came home from our road trip to NY and my husband had COVID. Because I'm a strong believer in public health, that meant that I isolated unless I really needed to get out and do something (always wearing a well-fitted, high quality mask). It meant I had a lot of time for reading. I decided I wanted something light so looked for something new by Debbie Macomber. It fit the bill perfectly. It was a story about a young woman and an older woman coming together for convenience and helping each other move on to the next stages of their lives.

22. The Air Raid Book Club by Annie Lyons ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ This novel by the same author as The Brilliant Life of Eudora Honeysett took a different spin on the kindertransport program during WWII. Hedy is a refugee from Germany. She's an older teen who goes to England unhappy to be parted from her parents and brother. She's taken in by Gertie is contemplating selling the bookstore that she owned with her recently deceased husband. The book club was really a very minor part of the novel. I think if there had been a little bit more focus on the book club, this could have been a 5-⭐️ read for me.

23. The Little Liar by Mitch Albom ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Lots of chatter about The Little Liar on many of the book websites and Facebook groups that I follow. "Truth" is the narrator of the story which at times felt a little contrived, but it worked. The main character of the story, Nico, is 11-years old when the story begins. He never lies. Ever. Until... the Nazis invade Salonika, Greece to deport the Jews.That's when lying becomes a method of self-preservation and eventually redemption. I'd previously had no knowledge of the vibrant Jewish community in Salonika (Thessalonika) prior to reading this book. 

24. The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Here's another novel by the author of Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. A.J. Fikry owns a book store that he'd started with his recently deceased wife. (Didn't I just write something similar for The Air Raid Book Club??) A.J. is still a young man, but he becomes a recluse and has difficulty figuring out what might be next for him. He becomes a recluse. Then he finds a package left behind at the bookstore which sets about a whole new life for A.J. and those in his rather limited circle.

25. The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride ⭐️⭐️⭐️ The premise of this story is that a skeleton is found in Pennsylvania in the neighborhood of Chicken Hill where years ago Jews and African Americans lived side-by-side. Chona runs the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store that was started by her father. The story was interesting, but it dragged on in many parts and I often had a hard time following things as there were so many characters who, to me, weren't all that distinct. Lots of readers have loved this one but it kind of fell flat with me.

26. Nora Goes Off Script by Annabel Monaghan ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ I loved this book, most probably because I also love Hallmark movies. Nora writes screen plays for The Romance Channel (I see you, Hallmark!) and when she writes something more substantial, more or less the story of her marriage falling apart, it gets picked up to be a major motion picture. Then Nora is living in her own Hallmark movie. If you love Hallmark movies, you'll love this book.

27. Tales From The Cafe: A Novel by Toshikazu Kawaguchi ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ This is book 2 in the Before the Coffee Gets Cold series. Visitors to a small cafe in Tokyo are able to time travel, but there are several rules they must obey. And they must finish their coffee before it gets cold. In this installment, 4 patrons get to time travel to come to terms with the past and move on to the future. I think I liked the creativity of the first book a little better, but this was enjoyable, too. And I plan to read the next two books in the series as well.

28. No Visible Bruises: What We Don't Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us ⭐️⭐️⭐️ I only read this because this was a title my community book club selected. It was a difficult book to read because the subject matter is so difficult. I wish it touched upon spousal abuse in wealthier couples because I have a friend who experienced that and I was hoping I'd getting some insight into her experiences. As tough as it was to get through the book, we did have a great book club discussion.

29. Unorthodox Love by Heidi Sherlock ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Penina is an Orthodox Jewish woman who longs for love and marriage but is not what any Orthodox man would want as she is unable to have babies. At 29, Penina's life is all about going to work and then doing for others in her free time. She's the family fixer and she volunteers at a NICU at a local hospital. Life becomes more interesting when she's set up with a gay Orthodox Jew who would like a fake marriage to please his mother before she dies... and her boss takes a medical leave and his son comes in to run the show. Penina has a smart mouth which I enjoyed. A very pleasant book to read, especially after No Visible Bruises.

And now I'm caught up! Whew! I'm listening to two books and reading two e-books. Hoping to review each book as I finish it.

Sima's Undergarments for Women

There's a kind of random story about Sima's Undergarments for Women. For years, I'd been hearing about how great our library's biggest fundraiser each year, the library book fair, is. If you get there early, there are great books available at reasonable prices. If you go later into the book fair,  you can fill a bag with books for just $5. I'm really a library kind of person so I was torn. Did I really want to buy any books? Did I want to support the library? Wanting to support the library won out. I showed up with bag and browsed the mostly picked off selections. I didn't find any books that I really wanted to read, imagining those got scooped up the first day. However, I found a few books that I wouldn't mind reading and then kept on browsing in an attempt to fill my bag. I'm not sure what attracted me to Sima's Undergarments for Women. Not a book I'd ever heard of. I was unfamiliar with the author. I must have scanned the back of the book and read the blurb, saw that it took place in Brooklyn, my hometown, and took it home. Now, remember that I live in rural central Florida. Kind of random that this book was at our library book fair.

The bag of books sat around for almost a year! Then, the photography prompt for one of my daily photo groups on Facebook was books or stack or something like that. I headed towards the book fair bag. (This is when I picked up Letters for Emily, part of this same book fair haul. I also took out The Violin of Auschwitz and Sima's Undergarments for Women.) I read Letters for Emily and The Violin of Auschwitz almost immediately. But for some reason, Sima just sat on the table in the family. And sat. And sat. Until the other day.

I added Sima to my goodreads that night. The next morning, I got a message from a Brooklyn friend of mine. Did I realize that the author, Ilana Stanger-Ross, was a graduate of the same high school that I graduated from? Nope. I had no idea. Then I wondered, will this make me enjoy the novel more? Since my mother identified so much with our high school (she graduated from the same high school, too), if anything, it made me think of my mom. And that's always good.

Sima is a 60-something secular Jew living in Borough Park, Brooklyn, the neighborhood where she'd grown up. She runs a lingerie store out of her basement (which is a thing in Borough Park). In walks Timna, a beautiful Israeli, who just happens to need a job that Sima happens to have open. Once Timna is in Sima's life, it really stirs up memories of when Sima first found out that she and her husband, Lev, weren't going to have children and all the feelings associated with that.

I don't often read novels about 60-somethings in Brooklyn so I felt the connection. I enjoyed Stanger-Ross' writing style and enjoyed the book.

Fantasy is not my genre

It seems as though the members of Books and Beer Club are of two different minds. There are several that love both fantasy and fiction. Not only do they get outraged (well, not really outraged, but you'll see where I'm going with this) when we talk about substituting something else, but they get offended that some, not including me, can't differentiate between science fiction and fantasy. There are those of us, including me, who would be fine skipping both genres. 

July is science fiction month, but we read 1984 back in March when showed up on a "best fantasy for a book club" list. 1984 is considered to be science fiction by purists. Those in the "we love fantasy and science fiction" suggested we read fantasy for July. After much discussion, On A Pale Horse by Piers Anthony was selected. Piers Anthony happens to be a local author and there was some talk about asking him to attend our July meeting. I kind of hope he doesn't show up.

I'll remind you once again that I typically don't like fantasy much. I really didn't like this one. The premise is clever. A guy, Zane, seriously contemplating suicide ends up shooting and killing "Death" instead of himself. As such, he becomes the new "Death," the figure responsible for plucking the souls from those who are a balance between good and evil. Whose final destination, Heaven or Hell, is not clearly indicated. Zane is a compassionate death. I wish the message being presented was more clearcut.

The details of the story is where it totally lost me. Zane's "life after life" is manipulated by a magician and by other the other "Incarnations" (War, Fate, Time and Nature). It's how he was selected to be the new "Death." It's how he meets Luna who becomes the love of his life. It's how he ends up in a conflict with Satan. I didn't care about any of this. I didn't like how most of the female characters were objectified. I plodded thru the novel and was thrilled when I got to the end. It just isn't my kind of novel.

I then proceeded to read the Author's Note. I thought it would provide some insight into Anthony's thought process. It served to make me like Piers Anthony, the person, less than I already did after suffering through this novel.

Reviewers on goodreads.com either love the book or hate the book. It's got a 4+ star rating so more love it than hate it. I'm not sure who the target audience is. I'm curious to see what others in the book club think. My guess is that the fantasy lovers will have loved it while everyone else might share something close to my views.

Update: I was in the minority at the book club of those who didn't like the book. The other two people who didn't like the book didn't like the way God and religion was portrayed. The novel included flying carpets and teleportation and a horse that could transform into a limousine and into a flying machine. God and religion was just as fantastical to me as anything else. And that was okay.

Some felt Anthony was trying to set forth a message. Others thought it was meant to be pure fun. Fun? Hmmm.

What I found most interesting was the response of women who have careers in hospice. The way they connected with Death and his manner of treating "his clients" compassionately really resonates with me. It didn't make me like the novel any better. But it does give me a better appreciation about what other readers can take away from reading the book.

I finally finished Beloved (with update after Books & Beer Club discussion)

Yes, I finally finished Toni Morrison's Pulitzer Prize winning novel, Beloved. Yes, I did say finally. I didn't love Beloved. I certainly didn't hate it. Who knows. Maybe I did. I found it an extremely difficult book to read, in so many different ways.

In case you have no idea what Beloved is about.... I had no idea what it was about even though I've seen it on so many lists of books a serious reader needs to read... it's a story that takes place in Ohio and bounces around the years leading up to the Civil War and then maybe 10 years after. It's the story of Sethe, a runaway slave, who is the mother of 4 children. There's her 18-year old daughter named Denver who lives with her. She had two older sons who left home and she has no idea where they are. The fourth one, a girl slightly older than Denver, died (no spoiler, we learn this pretty early in the story). Sethe didn't have enough money for the inscription on the girl's gravestone. She had just enough to get "Beloved" engraved on the stone.

Unlike most slaves, Sethe's last owners at Sweet Home were kind. They allowed her to "marry" a fellow slave, Halle. As is rare with slaves, all 4 of her children had the same father. Her owner never had his way with her. The slaves that were the property of the Garners were treated pretty fairly or as fairly as slaves might be treated. Halle was able to work outside and buy his mother's freedom for her. Until Mr. Garner died and Mrs. Garner sends for a relative referred to as "schoolteacher" to run the place and who is the complete opposite of kind. The slaves talk about running away, they make a plan. In the end, Sethe sends her three children alone with someone to her mother-in-law in Ohio. She follows shortly behind, giving birth to Denver with the assistance of a white woman while she is in the process of escaping. That's probably enough of a recap of the story without giving too much away.

I still haven't reviewed Beloved on goodreads.com. I have no idea how many stars I feel that it might deserve. I have, however, read through many of the reviews online since finishing yesterday. Based on reviews, Beloved is the type of book that people either love or hate. It's got a lot of 5-star reviews and a lot of 1-star reviews. I honestly don't know how I felt about the book.

Things I do know:

• The picture painted of slavery and of being a free black in the north is probably one of the most horrific that I've ever read. And I've read a lot of books about slavery and the time leading up to and after the Civil War. This was gut wrenching, stomach churning and frightful beyond words. I'm surprised I didn't have nightmares.
• Toni Morrison might be this amazing writer but I found her writing very slow to get through. Especially once the story went from being a narrative to a collection of words (stream of conscience??) somewhere in the middle of the book. The narrative was difficult to follow and I found myself reading the same words over an over. When it was no longer a narrative, I just kind of flew through that section since what was the point in struggling over what Morrison was trying to tell me? Then it goes back to being narrative. Maybe I got used to her writing. Or I figured out a way to make sense with it. I finished that chapter more quickly than the first two.
• Because of the previous two points, no matter how much time I had to read on a given day, I couldn't read more than a few pages. The atrociousness of the tale combined with the difficult language (not the individual words but rather the way Morrison strings words together in sentences and paragraphs) made it a book that I couldn't lose myself in.
• I don't like books that are over 300 pages long and only have three chapters. I felt like there were no ending points, no obvious places where it made sense to take a break.
• I kind of lost track of who some of the peripheral characters were. 
• I was confused about whether a few characters were white or black. Ordinarily that wouldn't make a difference but in a book about a runaway slave and free blacks, I think it probably was more important than in most other stories.
• I know that the book club discussion about the novel will be a good one. We'll be able to talk about the characters, the plot, the "fantasy" aspect of the storyline and about Toni Morrison's way with words.
• In a ridiculous way, even though I can never get back the time I devoted to reading Beloved, I can now proudly say that I read it. (Remember, it's on a lot of those lists of books that any serious reader should read before she or he dies.)

This will probably be one of the books where I feel the need to come back and share with you how our book club discussion goes.

Update: I was one of only two people at Books & Beer Club last week that didn't love Beloved. The other woman who didn't love it likes to read happier things. She didn't like Everything that Rises Must Converge, the collection of Flannery O'Connor short stories that we read last month. And I loved that. One woman said she sat down and read the book in one sitting. I truly can't imagine.

The book club discussion was, as I expected, a good one. One of our members came with lots of information about Toni Morrison which was very interesting. We spoke about the book longer than we do with most books. Did it give me a better appreciation for the book? Not exactly. It made me realize that I did appreciate the strength and power of Toni Morrison's words. By not loving it, I didn't appreciate it any less than those who did love the book. I still believe, though, that this is a book best read when you know you'll have someone to discuss it with.

Discussing Barkskins was all that I hoped for and more

Over the summer, many members in my community book club poured through Annie Proulx’s latest epic novel, Barkskins in preparation for the September book club discussion. That meeting never happened due to Hurricane Irene blowing through town. I was disappointed truly disappointed. As I mentioned in my initial review, Barkskins is a book that needs to be talked about so not discussing was out of the question. As leader of the book club, I made an executive decision for the title to be shifted to February’s meeting. I figured it gave those who hadn't yet finished the book the opportunity to do so. And since the specific characters in the book weren't of super importance, I figured that those who read it would remember enough for us to have a good discussion. This book club meeting exceeded my expectations. Normally, not everyone who attends book club meetings finishes the book. But all 15 at this meeting finished the book. Not only that, everyone either liked or loved the book. Barkskins is about the history of the logging industry, concentrating in but not limited to northeast Maine and southeast Canada. It’s not a typical Proulx novel. This one took 15 years of research and planning and then five years to write. The forests and the trees are much more the main characters of this multi-generational saga than the family members themselves. Some readers knew more about forests than others, but all agreed they learned quite a bit from reading the book. Several members shared family connections to Native Americans, logging and French Canadians which enriched the conversation.  Because of the length of the book, it was interesting to note that those reading the print book had a significantly different reading experience than those reading the e-book. Those reading the print book had a better sense of how much of this very long book they had left to read. They were able to portion out how much to read in a given sitting. They also seemed to reference the family trees at the back of the book more frequently. (Did I not even realize there were family trees at the back of the book? Or were they not in the e-book edition that I read?) The group's identification of themes in the book that were discussed included the environment, degradation of natural resources, mix of races, growth of mega family businesses and greed. A whole lot of other social issues were thrown in, most likely to reflect the world as seen by Annie Proulx. Issues like alcoholism and homosexuality. Bloodlines versus adoption and how they impact family lines. Throughout the book, the language was reflective of the time period that Proulx was writing about. That meant that the language early on in the book was more difficult to understand than towards the end of the book. But many in the club agreed that they preferred the family stories with well-developed characters in the first half of the book to the second half of the book where the characters moved the story forward but we didn't get to really know them. Some important points brought up by different participants: The need to remember that we, in 2018, have a lot more information at our finger tips than people during the past 300 years had. People moved far away from where they started with “relative ease.” The assumption was that they were moving towards opportunity and success for their families where that possibility didn’t exist before The needs for wood were quite different in the late 17th century, 18th century, 19th century and early parts of the 20th century than they have been recently.  Most people who moved from a place try to create something familiar in their new homes. Europeans came to North American and developed towards the goal of making it like where they came from. The deforestation of many parts of Europe happened here so the fact that trees were falling in increasingly amounts was no surprise or concern. The book ends in kind of rushed manner. It left most in the group with a lot of questions. “What happens next?” seemed to be a common one. I suppose only time will tell. How did the book club members feel about recommending this to others? Everyone would recommend it to some but not to all of their reader friends. Unanimously, though, the book club agreed that this was a marvelous book club book and they’d recommend it to any book club to read. Click here if you'd like to read my original review of the Barkskins.