December 2020

 Ending the year with hope and optimism! Here's what we discussed:

The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek - Kim Michele Richardson

Fruit of the Drunken Tree - Ingrid Rojas Contreras

A Honeybee Heart has Five Openings - Helen Jukes

An American Sickness - Elisabeth Rosenthal

Let the People Pick the President - Jesse Wegman

N. Scott Momaday

Stormy Weather - Paulette Jiles

Enemy Women

Anxious People - Fredrik Backman

Shuggie Bain - Douglas Stuart 

Travels with Myself and Another - Martha Gelhorn

An Elegant Woman - Martha McPhee

Where'd You Go, Bernadette - Maria Semple

Always Cedar Point - H. John Hildebrandt

Janet Evanovich

White Fragility - Robin DiAngelo

Is this Anything? - Jerry Seinfeld

The Pull of the Stars - Emma Donoghue

The Glass Castle - Jeannette Walls

Hillbilly Elegy - J. D. Vance

How the Penguins Saved Veronica - Hazel Prior

From Mary Lou in Maryland (November and December):

Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin, An American Life (2003). This biography runs to nearly 500 pages, but it doesn’t seem lengthy because Franklin’s life is so entertaining, and because he was involved in so much of the early cultural and political development of the country. It is clear from this in-depth study of Franklin’s entire life that he was not the shallow individual of Poor Richard’s Almanac. He also was not the old “jovial lecher dabbling in statecraft in such plays as 1776.” He was firmly a man of the Enlightenment. He was of a practical rather than philosophical turn of mind, interested in the use that could be made of his scientific discoveries. The lightening rod is one example. He also was firmly anti-elitist with a staunch faith in the common sense of the “leather apron” artisan and merchant segment of the populace. He was more “democratic” than Jefferson or the other Founders. He was not a Puritan or a Calvinist but believed rather in “doing well by doing good.” He invented the self-help genre. He promoted religious tolerance and opposed autocratic authority. He was a fertile creator of civic organizations such as the volunteer fire brigade. He promoted education and founded the University of Pennsylvania. He was appointed one of two postal commissioner of the colonies and used his position to travel among settlements and promote unity. He saw a nation forming, well ahead of most of his contemporaries. The elderly Franklin was a cypher to many of his fellow-representatives at the Constitutional Convention, but their deliberations never would have succeeded without his astute contributions. Isaacson finds him “the most accomplished American of his age and the most influential in developing the type of society America would become.” If you read only one biography of a Founder, choose this one.

Ann Rinaldi, The Secret of Sarah Revere (1995). Yes, that Revere. The secret is the identity of the first person to fire a shot at Lexington in 1775 and start the American Revolution. Sarah is Paul’s daughter. Paul probably knows, by he won’t say. People keep asking 13-year-old Sarah, but she doesn’t know. They also ask her where her father is, or if he has been riding again. She is evasive. She won’t let them speak to her step-mother Rachel, who has recently given birth to Joshua. Perhaps Sarah learns the answer in the course of this novel, but the author leaves the question open. This is an interesting account of the Revere family in 1775 from the point of view of an adolescent girl. It’s very easy reading.

Michelle Obama, Becoming (2018). The fact that Michelle Obama is somewhat familiar to us from her time as First Lady in no way detracts from the interest of this memoir. She is a strong, intelligent, and introspective woman who did an excellent job of hiding her dislike of politics from the public in order to support her husband’s chosen career. She begins with her childhood and the family and experiences that shaped her identity. She tells us of her first impressions of Barack Obama and the adjustments each of them made over the years to accommodate their differences in personality and professional goals. She includes the funniest description of a marriage proposal you will ever read. Of course she describes the years in the White House and how she established her role and identity as First Lady. The descriptions of family life in the White House and the parenting of their two daughters is especially interesting. Aside from all these topics, the best aspect of this autobiography is the description of the process of forging one’s identity through the decisions and actions of daily life – becoming.

Paulette Jiles, Stormy Weather (2007). This novel is set in the East Texas oil fields in the 1930s. In the fall of 1937, gambler and oil roughneck Jack Stoddard dies in prison. His wife Elizabeth and their three daughters move to the deserted family farm and try to figure out how to survive in the Dustbowl depression. The older daughter gets a job that pays very little. The 18-year-old tomboy middle daughter Jeanine works hard to make the farmhouse livable and the garden productive. The youngster Bea is too young and dreamy to be very helpful. Then another series of calamities hits. Each of them responds differently. The novel’s suspense is based on the question of whether they will somehow survive. Jeanine is the most spirited and sensible one. The over-arching theme of the novel is the development of her courage and maturity. This novel is rich in time, place and character, including the character of a racehorse named Smokey Joe. 

Tana French, The Witch Elm (2018). I have enjoyed other novels by Tana French, but not this one. The main character is unappealing and the others are not much better. The plot is tortured and there are at least four endings to the murder mystery, each one less satisfactory than its predecessor. I never say this, but this book is not worth reading.

Brooks Mencher, Wailing Wood: A Yarn Woman Mystery (2015). This is a full-length novel with several plot lines, set in a northern California logging town. One plot involves a timber company seeking to harvest Northern California’s last virgin redwood forest. Another involves a hundred-year-old murder and a haunted wood. The third and dominant plot line is Yarn Woman Ruth M’s analysis of fabric, soil, and other factors to solve the old murder and her efforts to prevent a new one. Newspaperman Nat Fisher is the narrator and his friend San Francisco police detective William Chu also is involved in the investigation. The colorful Russian Mr. Kasparov, Ms. M’s guardian and chauffeur, also figures in the story, along with his vintage Rolls Royce. The county sheriff and the young woman who owns the local newspaper ae additional interesting characters. Ms. M’s para-normal sensitivities once gain assist her in solving the mysteries.

Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy (2014). In 1983 the author was a Harvard Law School student who took an internship with the Southern Prisoners Defense Committee, working with death row inmates. There he met Walter McMiIlian, a young black man who insisted he was innocent. Stevenson worked on this case for years, following a tangled trail of judicial incompetence, lies, racism, and conspiracies. The book follows Walter’s case as well as the trajectory of Stevenson’s career as they evolved over the years. He went on to found the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama. There he headed a variety of efforts to end such unjust sentencing practices as Life Without Parole for juvenile offenders. Many of the cases he won were the result of years of grueling investigative and legal efforts, weaving through the state and federal courts in many jurisdictions and sometimes reaching the Supreme Court. The pervasiveness of injustices perpetrated by these systems on poor and minority individuals is beyond appalling. The book demonstrates that ultimately the judicial system cannot attain the fundamental reforms that are needed until the public at large accepts responsibility for this effort.

Ann Patchett, The Dutch House (2019). The central relationship in this novel is between Danny Conroy and his older sister Maeve. Danny is the narrator. The story begins when Danny is about 8 and his sister is a teenager, living in the Dutch House with their father and two housekeepers. The story does not unfold chronologically. Instead it shifts between Danny’s experiences in the course of his life and his later reflections back on those experiences. It also follows his search for an explanation of their mother’s abandonment of them when Danny was 3. The Dutch House (“Dutch” because the original owners were Dutch of unpronounceable surname) figures prominently in the plot and the characters are revealed and developed in terms of their relationships to it. At the beginning of the novel, a woman named Andrea comes to visit Danny’s father Cyril and admire the house. Soon she marries Cyril and uses her two daughters to displace Danny and Maeve from favor in the home. The situation for Danny and Maeve deteriorates from this time forward. The complexities of the novel come from misunderstandings and miscommunications between the characters. Danny and many of the other characters suffer under expectations imposed by family members who fail to understand them. The major characters develop as they struggle to fulfill their true natures.

Lars Kepler, The Hypnotist (2009). This is the pen name for the Ahndoril husband and wife team who each have published independently as well. This is the first book in their series featuring Swedish police detective Joona Linna. Joona is a misfit -- Finnish, stubborn, unconventional, egotistical, and, as he insists to his doubting superiors, always right. Other main characters, including the hypnotist of the title, are similarly unusual, haunted by some secret in their pasts. The crimes are somewhat excessively gory. The plot is intricate and the main source of suspense is psychological. The novel is occasionally unpleasant to read and consistently hard to put down.
Lars Kepler, The Nightmare (2010). In this second novel of the series, Linna is battling his susceptibility to migraines as well as an international conspiracy of vicious criminals. Evil is a real force in the world of these novels. Violins and music figure heavily in this plot and in the lives of two brothers who are prominent characters. Once again, Joona Linna is determined to pursue investigation of a series of crimes that his superiors don’t believe occurred. He pursues a clue that everyone else believes is useless. As always, he is right, but he is also in great peril.