Book Review (or why the guests were uninvited...

Wow. I’m not even sure what to say about this book. I vascillated between hating it and being extremely amused by it. I can’t say I ever loved it.

I generally am very clear on how I feel about the characters in a book. Sometimes I am disgruntled to find that I don’t like a character that I think the author wants me to like. Except for Emerald, and perhaps Patience and Ernest, and of course Smudge, I heartily disliked the characters most of the time, but liked them on and off. But my suspicion is that this is exactly what the author wants me to feel.

Though the social mores of the main characters were disturbing (i.e. ignoring the train survivors in lieu of preparing for the party), I could understand (if not forgive) because of my love of Downton Abbey. The classes were the classes in post-Victoria n England, and these characters could not be any different, even though they were actually quite penniless.

I found the author’s writing style quite charming and quirky. The plot was bizarre, but funny – almost like a play. In fact, I could see making this into a play. The story of Smudge and the pony was hilarious. In fact, the intermingling of everything that was happening as the night ensued was really funny, and I could have actually whole-heartedly loved this book if it hadn’t been for the whole ghost thing that seemed to come out of nowhere and then be dismissed fairly off-handedly.

Charles was utterly despicable, but apparently quite charming and charismatic. I was initially morally affronted during the parlor game in which guests were to name something unique about one of the others, and I began squirming when it seemed to turn mean. How could they do this, I wondered. All of the sudden, a memory came crawling into my mind – something not even my two sisters know about and will be horrified to read.

When I was in junior high school, I went to the birthday party of one of my school friends, whose mother had a hair salon in their basement. Not surprisingly, BOYS crashed the party. Nothing good comes of an unsupervised gathering of junior high girls and boys. At some point, the boys decided it would be hilarious to write something on one of the girls’ foreheads using nail polish. Yours truly was the one selected. Now, most assuredly, some little voice in my head told me this was not a good idea; nevertheless, in an unending pursuit of popularity, I agreed to it. I was blindfolded, and one of the boys proceeded to use nail polish to write on my forehead. Upon removing the blindfold, I discovered the boy had hilariously written F*** on my face. Now whether nail polish remover was unavailable or we just didn’t think about it, the way we removed the polish was by using a brillo pad to scrape off the top layer of my skin, leaving a bright red mark across the top of my face.

The reason this memory came back is that it reminded me just how easily human nature allows us to do something that is profoundly wrong just to be accepted by others. That is what I saw happening during that parlor game. The guests all knew it was wrong, and yet they kept playing and, in fact, became quite mean. Interesting.

Once it was disclosed that Charles was a ghost, I realized that the others were ghosts as well, so the ending didn’t really come as a surprise.

I would definitely NOT recommend this book to others, though, as I said, I found the author’s writing to be quite funny, and the story to be really clever at times. Still, it says a lot that the best thing I can say about this book is that it was blessedly short.

Happy 2013

As a result of some serious family events that took place at the end of 2012, Ethereal Reader sort of fell by the wayside. I had hoped that we could do as we did last year and read and report on a Christmas novel (or two) of your choice. Didn't happen.

But 2013 is a new year, and a new start for Ethereal Reader. Here are your three choices for our next book discussion:

The Uninvited Guests, by Sadie Jones
Fallen Skies, by Philippa Gregory
The Shell Seekers, by Rosamund Pilcher

You have until this Monday, January 14, to vote by emailing me at kzmclain@comcast.net.

I Spy

Sorry that I'm late in posting this review. I sort of lost track of time.

I recently read Winter of the World, a very long and detailed account of World War II written as a novel by Ken Follett. It was an extremely good book, but quite dark and detailed in its examination of this yucky war.

But because of my recent reading of this novel, I was somewhat apprehensive about reading Mr. Churchill’s Secretary, though I was intrigued by its description, and the fact that it was the first in a series. My apprehension was proven unnecessary.

Mr. Churchill’s Secretary isn’t a comedy; however, it is a novel about one of the more interesting facets of the war, and told through fairly light-hearted characters. I had read and heard before about the fact that spies abounded during WWII, and in fact there were posters posted during this period reminding people that any Tom, Dick, or Harriet could be a spy. But this was sort of an easier demonstration of this phenomenon.

Jen texted me one night and said, “I like this book. There are spies EVERYWHERE.” And so it was. I found myself trying to figure out who was the spy and who wasn’t. I was convinced throughout that John was going to end up being the spy, and was relieved when that wasn’t so. I also suspected Chuck and the twins. Must say I never suspected Paige.

I thought this book definitely had first-bookitis. Some of the plot themes were kind of predictable. For example, the three friends – Paige, Sarah, and Maggie – were blonde, brunette, and redhead – kind of like a Barbie Doll collection. Still, I gave Macneal the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps she was going for cheesy, sort of like a Dashiell Hammett mystery. She even featured martinis prominently in the book. And I loved all of her descriptions of clothes and hairstyles. It gave me a strong sense of time and place.

But, I found it confusing that Maggie got her job as Churchill’s secretary because Mrs. Tinsley got sick. Then, Mrs. Tinsley never came back?????? She was mentioned at the end of the book, but why didn’t she get her job back as his secretary?

I liked the presentation of Maggie as an independent-thinking woman who was ahead of the game when it came to women’s liberation.

  

It was somewhat unbelieveable to me that Maggie’s family and friends kept the fact that her father was alive a secret for so long. Why? Reality suspension I guess.

I also really liked the use of real characters mixed with fictional characters. I of course liked Churchill, but I also enjoyed the references to some of our most highly-respected people and their acceptance of Nazism, at least initially (e.g., Joe Kennedy). It’s interesting to note that there are two sides to most stories. While there is nothing good to say about the Nazis as they played out, it is interesting to be reminded about the economic conditions that made Hitler even remotely make sense to anyone.

Finally, I think it gave a good perspective about what war looks like from different perspectives. The Irish characters were only concerned about Ireland, and so they supported the Nazis as a way of getting to the British, for example. War stinks, but everyone has a different perspective about it. Still, I can’t imagine living the way people had to during the war, never knowing when the bombs were going to drop.

A good read overall.

Fall Book Selections

I am offering three book choices for our Fall (pre-Christmas) book:

In Need of a Good Wife, by Kelly O'Connor McNees
Violets of March, by Sarah Jio
Mr. Churchill's Secretary, by Susan Elia MacNeal

Email your vote to kzmclain@comcast.net by Friday, November 3.

Family Love ala Brothers K

The next time I read a 600-some page book, it better have been written by Tolstoy.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t hate long books. In fact, there is something wholly satisfying about sitting down with a good epic novel that has a lot of pages.  I enjoyed reading, for example, Fall of Giants, by Ken Follett.

Understand also that I didn’t hate this book. In fact, at times I totally loved this book. I just don’t think it needed to be 689 pages long. I started out absolutely enchanted; I ended up skimming some of the last chapters (or whatever you would call them) and being totally and entirely annoyed at all of the characters at some time or another.

Well, I don’t think that’s exactly true. I loved the father all the way through the book. I loved his devotion to his children, and his willingness to take on his rather difficult wife at times if he felt that they were being treated unfairly by her.

The first part of the book, as I said before, enthralled me. I loved the entire scene where the narrator and Papa are watching the game. I really enjoyed the sort of stream of consciousness from the narrator, who is fairly young at this point. Through his thought process, you learn about the characters. I thought that was a clever way for the author to help us to learn about the family. And the language was so dead on. The author NAILED the way a 10- or 12-year-old speaks. For example, take this excerpt when he is talking about how much he dislikes Roger Maris because of his boring style of play: I usually like watching home runs, but there is something about Roger Maris that makes even his homers boring ……Everett says he’s from Mars, which is why he’s named Maris, so maybe it’s a racial thing. Whatever it is, it worries me a little, because one of the things Jesus used to say was to love everybody the same whether they’re geeks, Yanks, Wops, Micks, Meredith Starrs or what have you, and when I look at Roger Maris I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to pull it off. I loved those lines because it displays the way a kid’s mind works, particularly a kid’s confusion about Christianity, so accurately.

I liked the succinct way that the author would get a point across – e.g. “yak butter” (remember that Mama was the first one to talk about yak butter when she was convinced she had experienced another life as a Tibetan) became synonymous with odd things that make total sense once you look at it.  Likewise, the disabled girl (Vera) who talked with a strong lisp because of a cleft palate, became the poster child for doing the right thing even if you felt uncomfortable doing it.

Surprisingly, I enjoyed all of the baseball scenes, and I’m not even a baseball fan. But I do love to see people (real or fictitious) who just love what they do, and I think that baseball often replicates life. Ups, downs, ins and outs.

Real life families are not like the families we saw on television in the 1960s. Instead, we often experience a variety of feelings about our family members at different times. The brothers and sisters in this book were extremely different from one another, and could be annoying or wonderful, depending on the situation. But they were all loyal to one another, no matter what. Oddly, even Mama was loyal, though she was often distracted by her unrelenting alliance to her religion.

The story of Irwin was very sad. There were a number of sad situations in this book, but that was, to me, the saddest. Yet, his story ended in a positive way. In fact, the book ended positively (except, of course, for the death of Papa). And again, I thought the ending was realistic. Not perfect results for everyone, just as in real life, but general happiness and love, which is what I think this book was all about.

Still, I think it could have been done in fewer pages!

End of the Summer Book Choices

The following book ideas are from Andrea Dunne, who posts comments as "Anonymous."

Paris in Love: A Memoir, by Eloisa James
Brothers K, by David James Duncan
Clara and Mr. Tiffany, by Susan Vreeland
City of Thieves, by David Benioff
Good Omens, by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett

A couple of these books, most notably Brothers K, are particularly long. If a lengthy book is chosen, the length of time to read will be increased. So don't let length deter you from making the choice.

Please email your choice to kzmclain@comcast.net by Tuesday, July 31.

Thanks Andrea for your great choices.

The Doc is In...

Doc, by Mary Doria Russell, got my vote for this month’s book choice.  But, once I began to read it, I thought I might have made a mistake.  After about 20 pages, I checked to make sure it was fiction, because it was reading like a not-very-engaging biography.  I was afraid I wouldn’t finish it in time.  It’s never a good sign when I check to see how many pages I have left in a book!

But, I ended up enjoying it quite a bit. First of all, some little things made it readable.  I thought the chapter names were clever, although I don’t know what most of them mean in card-playing lingo, so if they were supposed to convey something, that didn’t work for me.  But, I always like it when authors name their chapters.  I also liked that she listed the characters at the beginning, and especially that she identified the few characters who weren’t real.  I love historical fiction, but I do like to know which characters and events are made up.

Mostly, I liked the rather unusual way she portrayed all these infamous characters.  Wyatt’s bad teeth had a profound effect on his personality, and I loved that Doc took care of that problem for him.  It’s such a mundane and ordinary dilemma for the larger-than-life characters.  In fact, I liked Doc the best when he was being a dentist.  He seemed committed to his profession as a way of helping people, not making money.  In fact, as Kate often pointed out, his dental work didn’t come close to making a living for them.  It made me feel sad for him that his health forced him to live in a place where he wasn’t likely to be able to practice the profession he loved.  Toward the end, his health was so frail that he couldn’t have practiced the profession in any case.

And Kate…quite an unlikeable character for me.  She had some issues for sure.  She was a different and unpleasant person when she was drunk, which was a lot of the time.  I had no problem with her being a prostitute; women in those days truly didn’t have many options.  But, she was nasty to Doc and just about everyone else.  On the other hand, she was there for Doc in his darkest hours, so I have to give her credit for that.

One thing that disappointed me was that Russell never showed the reader the shoot-out at the OK Corral.  I guess I was supposed to remember what happened there, but I don’t.  Since she referred to it throughout the novel, I assumed we’d experience it, and I wish she had put it in.  Now I feel like I have to do a little research and find out what happened.

Finally, I have to talk about the author’s digressions, two of which stood out to me.  At one point, she said that had James not talked Kate into going back to Doc, then everything would have turned out differently.  Doc would have married Belle, they would have been happy with many children, and even Belle’s parents would have fallen back in love because they were grandparents.  Wow!   That seems a bit extreme.

But, I loved the section where she described Fr. Alexander’s experience with the Indians, when he was taking the place of the beloved Fr. Paul.  Fr. Alex realizes that he’s sort of like Titus was to St. Paul—always second best because the man he was replacing was so loved and respected.  Once he found his peace with that, he was a better missionary to the Indians.  Random, but I liked it.

What did you like about the book?  Did any characters or events surprise you?  What do you think of Mary Russell as a story-teller?