The Distant Hours by Kate Morton

Imagine a letter carrier's bag has been lost in an attic somewhere for fifty years and in it are letters never delivered. These days, it's likely that most of that would be junk mail or bills, but in 1942 when this particular bag was misplaced,back when people still wrote letters, the contents were much more personal. This is the beginning of The Distant Hours by Kate Morton. When Edie's mother is the recipient of one of these lost letters, and when Edie sees her mother's reaction, it sends Edie to uncover the truth of her mother's past.

What an intriguing premise, isn't it? That is precisely what drew me to this book. Unfortunately for me, it was a very long, slow read that alternated narrators and timelines in an almost jarring manner. When the letter leads Edie to a castle in the countryside, we meet the three elderly sisters who live there and we listen as their secrets are slowly, SLOWLY, teased out of them. This book was beautifully written, but perhaps I wasn't in the right frame of mind to have the patience for it. This was just one of those books that would sit on my bedside table and would not call out to me. Once the story began to reveal itself, I was more drawn in, but I was nearly three-quarters of the way through it before I felt any pull to read it. Normally, I would have walked away much sooner, but so many people speak so highly of Ms. Morton's work that I really wanted to like it and so I continued. And, while it seemed to be taking forever, I really did want to know about the grand mystery at the heart of the story.

I won't say I don't recommend this book, but I think it would be wise to save it for a time that you can give it your full attention. Oh, and I think the fall or winter would be a better season to read it. Some books just seem to require colder, wetter weather and to me, this is one. If I've totally gotten this wrong, I'd love to hear what I missed. I'm always happy to hear your opinions!

A Signing Event with Deborah Harkness

I had the BEST TIME last night! As much as I love books and the authors who write them, I have never been to a book signing event and last night I was able to rectify that. Deborah Harkness, the author of the All Souls Trilogy came to the Barnes and Noble in the town where I live. I have been so excited for months waiting for today, but I had begun to worry that it might not live up to my expectations. Luckily for me, it did. Last week, I stopped in at B&N to get a wristband for the event so when I showed up tonight I had a reserved seat in the third row. I arrived about forty-five minutes early anyway and it was wonderful chatting with the people around me. I met a few members of a very active All Souls Discussion Group from Facebook and the woman sitting next to me was just lovely. We had a great time getting to know one another. Her name is Kristen and she is about to launch her own book blog which I cannot wait to read. She also told me about an amazing-sounding day camp in Austin called Camp Half-Blood run by Book People, the largest independent bookstore in Texas. We talked about how much we love books and how, when we meet new people, we always try to pick out the "book nerds" like us. Needless to say, this was a book nerd- infested event and we loved it!

While we waited for Ms. Harkness to arrive, the B&N employees kept us well entertained and even gave away a few prizes. The young woman who appeared to be in charge of the event even hand-crafted these fun little necklaces, one of which I was so excited to win. How cool is that?!

When Ms. Harkness joined us, a whisper immediately swept over the crowd to alert us all that "She's here!" and "Look! It's her!" After a little trouble with the microphone, of which she very amiably joked, she launched right in by asking if any one of us had not yet completed reading The Book of Life, the book she was currently promoting. A few people raised their hands and Ms. Harkness was considerate enough of them to ask the rest of us to carefully meter our questions during the Q&A portion of the evening to avoid the lion's share of the spoilers. I was a little worried about how this might hamper the discussion, but she handled it seamlessly. She then read two sections from the early part of the book and gave us further information about them. One of my favorite things I learned tonight was that Ashmole 782 is an actual manuscript that belongs to the Bodleian Library in Oxford and that it is, in fact, missing. She told us of how, in 1982 while there on a research trip she had attempted to call Ashmole 782 for her historical research at the time, but the slip returned to her informing her that the manuscript was missing. She even joked about how greatly the calls for it have increased over the last few years.

I was also lucky enough to be one of the six people chosen to ask a question. I asked about how difficult it is to allow a character in a book to die and if she had made that decision or if she had always know it must happen that way. She told of how she had been watching so much of the news at the time about all the service men and women in Iraq and Afghanistan who were being killed and how she knew that not everyone can survive a war. She said she knew it had to be one of two characters that would die, but each time she attempted to write it one way, that character would not be killed. I love the way she discussed each of her characters as if they each have their own will. I was also rather pleased that she ended her answer by saying it was a good question - and then I realized she said that to everyone and that it was very nice of her and I'll hold on to my tiny bit of praise anyway.

She ended with telling us about how she is in the development stage of bringing the All Souls Trilogy to BBC in a miniseries and we were all very happy to hear that those plans are still moving forward. She also said that she has much yet to write and compared the stories in her head to wriggling puppies- she gets hold of one and it gets away from her- but she assured us that she would begin her next project soon. I cannot wait to read what she writes next. I envy all her students at USC and I can't help but imagine myself in one of her lecture halls.

It was a fantastic evening and I'm so glad I was able to attend. I loved meeting other book nerds like myself and hearing them speak as passionately about books as I do. Thank you to Barnes & Noble for hosting and a very special thank you to Ms. Harkness for putting us on her tour schedule. It was wonderful.

Every Last Word by Tamara Ireland Stone

Samantha is the envy of most of her junior class. She's pretty and she's part of The Crazy Eights, the most popular group of girls in the school. From the outside, everything looks perfect, but what the rest of the class and even her best friends don't know is the silent struggles in Samantha's mind that are threatening to take her under. In Every Last Word by Tamara Ireland Stone, Samantha has OCD, but unlike the compulsive hand washing that most people envision, Samantha's obsessions are mostly unseen; the dark thoughts she has are frightening and she can't turn them off. She fights everyday to stay in control and to make sure the friends she has had since pre-school never know, especially because even a new hair style they don't like can lead to severe criticism. When she asks them to start calling her Sam, they make it plain that is completely unacceptable. Her therapist has encouraged her to find new friends, but stepping outside of the Crazy Eights would be truly crazy. When she meets Caroline, however, she feels she may have found someone really special.

Caroline understands her and Sam isn't afraid to be herself. When Caroline offers to introduce her to something that may change her life, Sam is intrigued. Caroline takes her to Poet's Corner, a hidden room where a secret poetry club meets during lunch. Sam has never written poetry before, but once she begins, it pours out of her. The friends she meets there and the things she learns about herself really do change her life.

I genuinely loved this book. A girl in high school who is afraid not to fit in with the popular girls sounds like the worn out premise of thousands of mediocre YA books, but Stone does much, much more with this one. We are introduced to the terrifying nature of Sam's disorder from the very first chapter and it becomes clear to the reader that this book has something special. When Sam's mother tries to help talk her away from the thought that currently has her in it's grips, she offers this:

"How many thoughts does the brain automatically deliver in a single day?" Mom moves on to facts to help me center myself.

"Seventy thousand," I whisper as tears splash onto my jeans.

"That's right. Do you act on seventy thousand thoughts a day?"

 I shake my head.

"Of course you don't. This thought was one in seventy thousand. It's not special."

"It's not special."

Then she reminds her:

"Whatever you're thinking, it's okay. It doesn't mean anything about you. Got it?"

This struggle is heartbreaking to watch, but it is wonderfully handled.

I enjoyed watching Sam as she discovers a new side of herself within Poet's Corner. It is an interesting thing to consider how we allow ourselves to be pigeon-holed in high school, either by our friends or simply by our limited experiences. If Sam had never pushed herself to try writing, she may never have discovered one of her greatest gifts. I also enjoyed watching as she realizes that the person she once was isn't who she wants to be any longer. The topic of toxic friendships is one I think most of us who have survived middle school and high school can understand. Unfortunately, these types of relationships can even develop in adulthood when we believe we have outgrown them. The actors may be different, but the themes remain the same and reading about a young woman moving on can be inspirational for readers for any age. 

Finally, one of my favorite aspects of this book was all the poetry that the characters shared in Poet's Corner.  I have never considered myself a fan of poetry, but the pieces in Every Last Word are wonderful. I would love to share some of it here with you, but the context is so important that I really just want you to read the book yourself and soak it all in as it comes. 

One last note about this book: With mental illness such a significant part of this book, the author took great care in her Author's Note at the end to explain all the research she did to be sure to characterize this type of OCD correctly. She also makes it very clear that Sam's treatment is overseen by a qualified therapist and her parents and that any of Sam's improvements are due to her continued treatment. She also provides resources for readers that know someone who is or are themselves experiencing any mental health concerns and strongly encourages them to seek help. Mental illness is real and can be fatal. I will share the resources found in the book here. Please use them if this is something you need. I want all of my SmartGirls to be cared for and as healthy as possible.

http://sfbacct.com/

http://teenmentalhealth.org/

http://beyondocd.org/just-for-teens

https://www.afsp.org/ 

Landline by Rainbow Rowell

Landline is written by the author of eleanore & park, Rainbow Rowell and it came highly recommended by several of the book blogs that I follow. It was also the choice of the online book club I've joined. I was shocked to see it on the shelf at the library and I snatched it up as quick as I could while looking over my shoulder ready to fight someone for it if necessary.

Landline features thirty-seven-year-old Georgie McCool (how great is that character name?), wife of Neal and mother to Alice, 7, and Noomie, 4. She is also a writer on a very successful sitcom and is just about to have the most important meeting of her career. Unfortunately, this meeting means she must cancel the trip to visit Neal's family in Omaha for Christmas. Neal is shocked when she announces this the night before they are set to leave, but not nearly as surprised as Georgie is when Neal decides he and their daughters will simply go without her. Hurt and worried that her marriage is failing, Georgie spends the next evening at her mother's house. When she attempts to call Neal from the old, yellow landline phone she had as a teenager (her cell phone is on the fritz), they have a very confusing conversation. It takes her a few days to understand, but Georgie has somehow found a connection to the Neal she knew just before they were married. Georgie in the present is able to talk with Neal of the past. Can she use this connection to fix her marriage even before the problems begin? Should she?

I really liked this book. It was an extremely quick read for me- I started on Sunday and finished Monday evening. We are able to hear about Georgie's current life as well as watch her courtship with Neal via flashbacks. This book is a conversation about what marriage really is. When Hollywood ends the story with "And they all lived happily ever after...", we all know there is more to the story. Or at least we say we do. Some of what Hollywood has done to make real life difficult, beyond all the impossible to achieve standards of beauty, is to tell us that if our lives, our marriages aren't straight off the screen of a romantic comedy we must be doing something wrong. Those grand gestures are lovely, but typically only sustainable for the two-hour run time of the film. Real life, real marriages, involve negotiating household chores, coming home from work tired to kids that need attention and leaving very little time for romance with one's spouse, trying to fit everything in while remembering who and what is most important. In Landline, we watch as Georgie realizes that she has let her marriage flounder a bit and we also get to see her remember all the things that made her fall in love with Neal in the first place.

Neal didn't take Georgie's breath away. Maybe the opposite. But that was okay- that was really good, actually, to be near someone who filled your lungs with air.

I adore that this book highlights the value of what is real rather that just what sounds the most romantic.

"Nobody's lives just fit together," Neal said. "Fitting together is something you work at. It's something you make happen- because you love each other."

And Georgie's marriage is important to her. She loves Neal, but she knows things have gone wrong.

When Georgie thought about divorce now, she imagined lying side by side with Neal on two operating tables while a team of doctors tried to unthread their vascular systems.

Of course, another thing that Hollywood doesn't usually get right is that having a family complicates things, but it adds so much as well.

Kids took a fathomless amount of time and energy....And they took it first.

...When Georgie and Neal were smiling at each other, it was almost always over Alice and Noomie's heads.

Having kids sent a tornado through your marriage, then made you happy for the devastation. Even if you could rebuild everything just the way it was before, you'd never want to.

This book was also really funny, but that should come as no surprise to anyone who has read Rainbow Rowell. I love the bit when Georgie is bra shopping and wishes she had a landline to her own younger self so she could tell her how lovely she was. And if Rowell didn't have my heart before, she certainly earned it with the references to Doctor Who, Harry Potter and A Wrinkle in Time. 

This was a great, quick, fun read; it would be perfect for the upcoming vacation season. However, there was also plenty of meat to it. I expect it would lead to some very interesting book club discussions. I know there are a lot of quotes in this post, but I just couldn't do without any of them. I hope you'll pick up a copy of Landline and I'd love to hear what you think about it. 

Survival Strategies of the Almost Brave by Jen White

In Survival Strategies of the Almost Brave by Jen White, Liberty is trying desperately to care for her eight-year-old sister, Billie. Liberty herself is only twelve and it has been a very difficult few months. When Billie and Liberty's mom dies suddenly, they don't know what they will do. When the father they haven't seen or heard from for years shows up with his camper and the promise of adventure, they hope that everything will work out as they had always dreamed. Unfortunately, their need for bravery is not done yet. When the two girls are left alone at a dilapidated old gas station in the middle of nowhere, Liberty is determined to get them safely back home. Her avid interest in animal behavior inspires her to adopt the survival strategies of all the different species she has studied.

Survival, and avoiding anyone she thinks might try to hurt or separate the two girls, becomes more adventure than they had planned. Secretly stowing away in two different vehicles, sleeping in lounge chairs at a hotel pool, running from the bullying older brother of a boy who tries to help them, rats... these things all keep the girls on their toes. Along the way, they cross paths with so many different characters, most of whom are assigned interesting descriptive names by Liberty: Star Wars Kid, Tattoo Guy, Pirate Doctor, Lavender Lady, Caterpillare Eyebrows, Apron Lady, Gray Guy. These are the things that help the reader remember that Liberty is only twelve-years-old and doing her best in an impossible situation.

This book stressed me out. I was so worried about what would happen to these poor little girls. The anxiety and pressure that Liberty felt was well translated to the reader. Even before her mother dies, Liberty is too aware of their family situation and their financial struggles. The sense of responsibility she feels toward her sister is really too much for a child, but perhaps the value of this is in relating that not all children live idyllic lives. On television and in movies, everything may appear to work out easily for the characters and maybe a book like this is necessary for children to understand that everyone doesn't have it better than they do. In that respect, it was successful.

The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins

How often do we look at strangers and make judgments about their lives? Maybe we see someone often enough to have a short narrative about them- the cashier in the grocery store we see every week or person on the next treadmill at the gym. In The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins, Rachel does that every day during her morning and evening commute about a couple she sees out the window as the train passes their home. She imagines their names, their occupations, she even imagines their conversations. Of course, this couple has the idyllic life that Rachel herself wishes she had, at least they do in Rachel's imagination. Rachel has had a hard few years and that has led her to alcoholism. She has precious little to look forward to in her day; viewing this couple and their happiness may just be it. When the woman goes missing, Rachel feels personally invested in the investigation. She has come to think of these people as her friends and she is worried about the missing woman.

In this book, we also meet Anna and Megan. One of them is the missing woman and the other is the person Rachel blames for ruining her life. These three women are all a mess, train-wrecks if you will. And perhaps that is part of what makes this book so readable. These women are deeply flawed and the reader can't help but find out what happens to them. These women take turns narrating the story so we are allowed into each of their heads for a time. We learn what they feel, their motives and their regrets. The only complaint I have is that in addition to switching narrators, the timeline also switches back and forth. In the beginning it was difficult for me to keep up with when we were reading.

This book has been widely compared to Gone Girl, but I think that is a faulty comparison. This is a women-centered thriller in which a woman has gone missing. I feel the similarities end there. Just as a few years ago, so many books were called "the next Twilight", this seems to me to be the work of lazy marketing hoping to capitalize on a previous bestseller. This book was compelling, the mystery had me guessing for nearly the entire book. I really didn't see where it was leading until the author finally began to tip her hand near the end. I don't read a lot of thrillers, but this one I enjoyed. If this is a favorite genre of yours, I think you would really like it. Let me know what you think!

Walking on Trampolines by Francis Whiting

A young woman wakes up in bed with a man she has loved since they were teenagers. It is the morning after the wedding. He was the groom, but she was not the bride. So begins Walking on Trampolines by Frances Whiting. This sounded like the beginning of exactly the kind of book that would hold no interest for me. I don't typically like "chick lit", or perhaps it is more accurate to say that I don't like typical chick lit and I really thought that was what this was going to be, two women fighting over some guy that was likely going to turn out to not be worth it. I am so, SO glad I did not give up and toss it aside. I have no problem not finishing a book I am not enjoying, but I feel like I owe it a decent effort and this time that effort was well rewarded.

Tallulah is that young woman and, to her credit, she knows she has made the biggest mistake of her life. The narrative moves around in time and we are allowed to see all the events that led up to this mistake alongside the way she is dealing with it. Tallulah, or Lulu as most people call her, had a best friend named Annabelle who came from a family of famous artists. When Annabelle moves to town, she immediately latches on to Lulu and they become fast friends, even inventing new words together (bordinary: something that is both boring and ordinary; tediocre: both tedious and mediocre; varf: vomit and barf...you get the idea). As they reach adulthood, their relationship falls apart, then back together, apart and together. When I started this book, I thought the whole thing was going to be about Lulu and Annabelle and I was disappointed with the flatness of the story, but as I kept reading, it deepened and deepened, introducing character after character that made the book so much better.

First there were Lulu's parents, whom she addresses as Harry and Rose. Harry is a wonderful father and husband who has cared for his family and always stood by Rose as she has struggled with mental illness all her life. Then we meet Lulu's other life-long friends, Simone and Stella who couldn't be more different from one another and yet are permanently bonded. We meet Annabelle's parents, Frank and Annie. You can't help but adore Frank; and Annie, while deeply flawed, is better than we initially realize. And perhaps my favorite character in the book is Duncan, Lulu's boss. He is terrible and wonderful all in the same breath. Their friendship is probably the very best part of this book. One of my favorite things about reading, actually my very favorite thing, is all the wonderful people I meet in the pages of books. I come to love complete strangers as if they were family and true friends. Duncan is one of these. I am so glad we met.

This book made me laugh and laugh, and it also made me cry. Just looking back at several of the sections that I marked make me start to cry all over again. I loved the word combinations that Lulu and Annabelle created. I loved the richness of the each of the characters. At the end of the book there is an interview with the author and in it she says that she worried that the story, set in Australia, might not translate well to American audiences. And then she says this:

But I came really quickly to the conclusion that its themes are universal, the agony and ecstasy of first love, the intensity of female friendships, the awkwardness of the teen years, the stigma of mental illness, the family ties that bind, the way laughter can dissipate our fears. I think everyone knows of these things and feelings, no matter what side of the globe we live on.

That is exactly what I loved about this book.  This is one I will be rereading. I hope you'll read it as well. This would be an excellent book club choice for all the many discussions it is certain to spark. And I'd love to discuss it with you.