Book Reviews & Lists

We cannot conceive of another’s reality, especially when we are young. Growing up in a safe household, I was insulated from the difficulties that some children, such as the author, encounter every day.  Breaking Night is an autobiographical account of Liz Murray, who was born into a severely dysfunctional family.  Her parents loved their daughters, but were consumed by an over-riding and consuming need for their drug-induced high.  Liz was so protective of her parent’s safety that as young as 5 years old she watched over them preparing their paraphernalia and made sure that they didn’t hurt themselves in their eventual euphoria.  The stress of this home life led to a life of school truancy and eventual homelessness at age 15.  Her gritty account of several years on the streets of New York led to her discovery of an alternative high school which made all of the difference in her young life.  She was able to pull herself together and begin the hard work of creating a stable life for herself and the family that remained. 
 
This book was very reminiscent of The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, not only in its basic theme of a child working through terrific difficulties,  but the forgiveness and love the child still holds for her damaged parents.

Adrianna Trigiani writes about her grandmothers in her latest, Don’t Sing at the Table.  Both of my grandmothers were similarly born near the turn of the century, and I found myself musing about my own grandmotherly memories while reading this book.  Their generation needed to know how to do all of the domestic chores and niceties that Martha Stewart is teaching our generation, such as canning, baking, knitting, making sausages, etc.  My Nana made bread every week and I especially remember when she pinched some of the dough off at breakfast to make fried cakes with brown sugar.  Don’t Sing is full of advice, admonitions and anecdotes from Viola, her no-nonsense businesswoman grandmother; and Lucy, her gentle seamstress grandmother.  Both lost their husbands at an early age and never remarried, but lived fulfilling and long lives delighting in their grandchildren.  Trigiani used some of their characteristics in her Big Stone Gap fiction series.  Some advise from the back cover; make your own living, leave your children your values not your stuff, be bold, be direct, be different.  Trigiani specifically wrote the book for her daughter Lucia, but its universal advice spans the years and generations.
 

Putnam native David Margolick has made a career of chronicling our nation’s historical records through the people who lived it.  A contributing editor of Vanity Fair, Margolick has written four books, including Strange Fruit: Billie Holiday, Café Society and an Early Cry for Civil Rights about Billie Holiday and Beyond Glory: Joe Louis vs. Max Schmeling.  Elizabeth and Hazel follows the lives of Elizabeth Eckford, one of the “Little Rock Nine”, and Hazel Bryan, who was photographed yelling racial slurs to Elizabeth on the fateful morning of September 4, 1957. Both girls were 15 years old and starting the year at Central High School in Little Rock.  The picture, which is deliberately placed on the front cover, evokes the sentiments which divided Little Rock when desegregation was mandated by Brown vs the Board of Education in 1954. Elizabeth walked alone before a crowd of children and adults who were not in favor of blacks and whites attending the same school.  Years later Hazel contacted Elizabeth to apologize, but the complications of race relations in their Southern society made the relationship difficult to sustain.  Margolick skillfully tells the stories of the two women with compassion and candor.

This book has been sitting on our shelf at the Putnam Library for the past 6 years and as many times as I have shelved it, I avoided reading it because it was so unlike anything Wally Lamb has ever written. Now I wished I had not judged the book by its cover. It was one of the most enlightening reads about people whose experiences in life were so different from my own. It was like visiting a foreign culture, but this one just happens to take place in our own backyard.
 
This collection of short stories was written by ten female inmates of the York Correctional Institute in Connecticut, through a writer’s workshop with the author Wally Lamb. As I read each story my eyes were opened, my heart broke at the atrocities that humans inflict on one another, but mostly it provoked my way of thinking. These testimonies were at time overwhelming to read, and except for the grace of God, I can honestly say that here is little that separates me from the women of York.
 
As I pass this book on to others, there is just one message…while most prisoners commit crimes that put them where they are, please remember, that’s not WHO they are. Many of them are wounded and damaged, and if they had been given the love, compassion and kindness that is every person’s right, perhaps their lives could have been changed.
 
Submitted by Patricia Jensen from the Putnam Public Library.

I admit it.  I’m a sucker for an intriguing book title.  This one pulled me in, even before I had read what the book was about.  Who is Henry House and why is his name alliterative?  Why is he irresistible?  A well-crafted first sentence pulls me in also. “By the time Henry House was four months old, a copy of his picture was being carried in the pocketbooks of seven different women, each of whom called him her son.”  It turns out that Henry House (as well as previous and succeeding “practice babies”) was an orphan who was used as a subject for a domestic arts child-rearing class.  He spent his first two years being cared for in shifts by a half-dozen practice mothers.  Henry learns how to make his mothers happy, but not to get too attached to any one of them.  This is a practice that follows him into his adult life, but not to his benefit.
 
Henry is a handsome, charismatic young man with a special talent for drawing that lands him animation jobs in the 1960s with Walt Disney and the Beatle’s Yellow Submarine movie.  The reader follows the history of the time with Henry, and agonizes over his inability to develop relationships with his adopted mother and other women. The author used the historical record of Cornell University’s “practice babies” to create a life that was influenced by Henry’s past, but not defined by it as he matured. Irresistible?
You’ll have to find that out for yourself!

This mystery novel is the first in a series by Atkinson. I had heard about it several times before I put a request in our interlibrary loan system to read it. The book doesn’t follow a typical mystery novel structure where a death occurs and the detective puts the clues together and solves the case. It feels more like a novel that has mysterious undertones.  Retired policeman Jackson Brody is at the center of three very disparate cases that do not seem to be related in any way.  Case #1:  Thirty years before the book began young Olivia Land went missing and was never seen again.  Her sisters enlist Brodie’s help after their father’s death to figure out what happened to their sister. Case #2: Theo’s daughter Laura was killed in an office shooting fifteen years before.  He calls upon Brodie to find the killer so that he can start to heal emotionally.  Case #3:  Michelle makes a fatal mistake and jeopardizes her infant’s life.  Where is she after all of these years?  Brodie follows up on the clues and finds that the cases are more entangled than he thought.  I liked the frank realism of Brodie’s thoughts, and was intrigued enough to order rest of the series, One Good Turn and When Will There Be Good News?  I love being able to read through a series, but when you’re done you have to wait another year for the next one!

    Once in a while a collection of short stories jumps out at me. Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-eyed Stranger initially pulled me in because I though it would be related to Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, (which it wasn't!) but it redeemed itself because every story was a little gem of its own. The settings were southern, exotic to this northerner, with a variety of ages and locales. Seven of the 14 stories were new for this volume and seven had been published before in other collections. I felt like these stories placed me in the middle of a tight-knit community and treated me like family.

Submitted by Priscilla Colwell, Putnam Public Library
Villager Papers, November 19, 2010

Anyone who has felt the pleasure of taking their own hot loaf out of the oven will understand the drive of the author of 52 Loaves: One Man's Relentless Pursuit of Truth,Meaning, and a Perfect Crust.
William Alexander tasted superb bread at a restaurant and endeavored to bake every week for a year to replicate it. Growing up with Wonderbread as a child, Alexander tinkered with the bread ingredients - four, water, yeast, heat, steam and different ovens. He went to the lengths of growing his own winter wheat, building a clay oven in the backyard and acting as a master baker at a French monastery. His recipes at the end of the book can start your own obsession! Lately, there have been a number of books written with the "do it for a year" theme, such as Julie and Julia by Julie Powell; Animal, Vegetable, Mracle by Barbara Kingsolver; Year of living biblically by A.J. Jacobs; and 365 Nights: A memoir of intimacy by Charla Muller. The process of discovery in a chronological year appeals to me. Excuse me, but I have to get to the kitchen. I can smell the bread now!

submitted by Priscilla Colwell, Putnam Public Library
Villager Papers, October 29, 2010