Category Archives: Book Chat

Stories I Only Tell My Friends – Rob Lowe

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I was more of a Robby Benson than a Rob Lowe fan back in the day. I guess they were sort of popular around the same time, give or take a few years. 0D9E8612-E728-46F5-8D69-9E382FBC38EFRob Lowe’s autobiography Stories I Only Tell My Friends, however, made for riveting reading, and the same can not be said for Robby Benson’s novel Who Stole the Funny.

Lowe was born in Charlottesville, Virginia in 1964. He moved with his mother and father to Dayton, Ohio when he was still an infant. His parents chose Dayton because it was “a bustling, growing city,”  home to many national companies. Lowe’s father was a lawyer; his mother gave up her job as a high school English teacher to stay home and raise her son. Four years later, Lowe’s brother, Chad, was born.

Lowe got an early start in the acting business in Dayton. A trip to see a production of Oliver!  turned out to be a “a transformational experience” for ten-year-old Lowe. A few weeks later,  he participated in a community theatre production of The Wizard of Oz. Lowe notes that his parents (well, his mom and step-father because by then his parents were divorced) would have had “no way of knowing how deeply affected I’d been, how electrified I was by the age-old connection of actors, material and audience…that was a club I wanted to belong to.”

Flash forward a few years and the family has moved to Malibu, California.

An entire book could (and should) be written about Malibu in 1976. In the bicentennial sunlight of that year, it was a place of rural beauty where people still rode to the local market on horseback and tied up to a hitching post in the parking lot. Long before every agent and studio president knocked down the beach shacks to build their mega mansions, Malibu was populated by a wonderful mix of normal working-class families, hippies, asshole surfers, drugged-out reclusive rock stars, and the odd actor or two.

It is during this period that Lowe begins to pursue acting in earnest, and also lands the role that will turn him into a household name.

Stories I Only Tell My Friends is an honest, self-deprecating look at fame and its rewards and consequences. It’s a who’s who of the times, which makes it especially fun to read if you are of the same vintage as Lowe…which I am. I loved reading about Lowe’s participation in The Outsiders. He’s candid about his career highs and lows, and about his prodigious romantic interludes (some clearly less to do with romance and more to do with sex – but look at the guy.) Lowe is aware that he’s a good-looking (great looking, really) man, but he never comes across as full of himself. He’s also honest about how he abused alcohol, a hard-earned perspective that comes from being twenty plus years sober.

This is a really dishy memoir – not a tell-all, exactly, but a Hollywood story about a decent guy who came-of-age in the public eye, and managed to keep his wits about him. He wrote it himself and it’s funny and witty and at times it almost seems as though Lowe can’t believe the ride he’s had either.

Great book.

The Vigilante Poets of Selwyn Academy – Kate Hattemer

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vigilanteEthan Andrezejczak attends Selwyn Academy, a fine arts high school in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He’s the narrator of Kate Hattemer’s debut YA novel The Vigilante Poets of Selwyn Academy. His life revolves around hanging with his friends Jackson, Elizabeth and the too-cool-for-their-friend-group, Luke, and teaching Jackson’s gerbil, Baconnaise circus tricks. Ethan pines for ballerina Maura and loathes Miki Frigging Reagler from afar. Maura and Miki are two of the stars of the reality show For Art’s Sake (FAS), which is filmed at Selwyn.

They’d chosen a school (our school) and they’d chosen contestants (not me). Every episode, they had some artistic challenge and someone got kicked off. The last person standing would be crowned America’s Best Teen Artist.

Ethan and his friends are convinced that For Art’s Sake is wrecking Selwyn. Luke is especially bent out of shape because the school’s literary arts magazine refuses to publish his commentary about the TV show. “It’s a review, but mostly it’s editorial,” he tells Ethan. “I tried to suppress my snideness. I may not have been totally successful.”

The fact that someone as cool as Luke is anti-FAS is a touchstone for Ethan. When he enters Ethan’s orbit in grade seven, Ethan describes him as

the most popular prepubescent on the planet. He was impossible to dislike. That’s not hyperbole: I tried. I have a strict policy of holding automatic grudges against people everyone likes. But Luke had a mouthful of braces and said “awesome” all the time, and he was totally genuine.

It’s Luke’s idea to roast FAS in a poem. He announces “We need to reclaim our society and values and culture.”

Conquistadors, they thundered in,
And dizzy, we succumbed to spin.
They’ve colonized our native land.
What once was vivid now is bland.
We sing and dance at their command.
 – The Contracantos

 

 

Luke’s ultimately betrayal is especially hard on Ethan, but it gives him the chance to take some chances and find his own voice.

The Vigilante Poets of Selwyn Academy plumbs the depths of poetry, friendship, loyalty, art, betrayal and growing up. These characters (and I am certainly including Baconnaise) are witty, intelligent and human. They are trying to figure it all out. They don’t always get it right, but Elizabeth asks Ethan if he thinks he’s “the only one who’s amazed and scared and freaked out by how complicated everyone is.”

This is a smart book. I highly recommend it.

The Hesitation Cut – Giles Blunt

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The Hesitation Cut is my first experience with Canadian writer Giles Blunt, who is 34AC2891-84BC-4F62-A5DA-5AAC7D6F7FEFperhaps most famous for his crime novels which feature Detective John Cardinal. (I have watched a couple of those novels brought to the small screen and have found them super intense; I can only imagine what the reading experience would be like.)

In this standalone, 30-year-old Brother William is living the cloistered life of a monk in Rochester, upstate New York. He’s been at Our Lady Of Peace for ten years, living a life punctuated by ritual. One of William’s jobs is to work in the monastery’s library and it is there he meets Lauren, a writer who has come to do research on Peter Abelard, the famous philosopher  from 12th century France, who had an ill-fated relationship with his student, Heloise.

Brother William is almost immediately smitten with Lauren. When he arrives at the library “it was like coming upon a small animal in the forest.” There is something about Lauren that draws William, like the moon pulls the water (if I can make such a clumsy comparison). He is helpless against its pull and when he notices “a scar across her wrist”, he’s done for. Lauren becomes William’s next calling. He decides she’s in trouble and he can save her.

So, he gives up his life, takes back his name (Peter, surely no coincidence) and heads to New York City. A lot of pieces click into place (his estranged brother has saved his share of the family estate, so suddenly a former monk without worldly possessions has disposable cash), he gets a job, and relatively easily in a city the size of NY, tracks Lauren down.  Although I am not sure I bought it, there’s an empty basement studio in the very same building where Lauren lives, and so Peter moves in and befriends her.

The thing about these two characters is that neither of them are even remotely likeable. While Peter pretends to be altruistic, Lauren makes no effort to hide the fact that she is damaged goods; in fact, in some ways, she seems to enjoy the wallowing.  To be fair, she tries to warn Peter:

”Peter, I have my work and nothing else. Nothing. I’m not what you think, or need, or want. I’m just a selfish bitch, you see.”

Peter almost takes this as a personal challenge. Lauren WILL love him.

Then, along comes Mick, Lauren’s former lover. He’s the proverbial bad boy, but he’s actually one of the most likeable characters in the whole book. His arrival on the scene throws Peter into a tailspin.

The Hesitation Cut was easy to read. I couldn’t put it down. Did I buy all the pieces chinking together? No. Did it matter? Probably not. Blunt has constructed a well-made play, peopled with mostly despicable characters. Whether you care about their fates won’t actually impact your enjoyment of their sad journeys.

The Little Paris Bookshop – Nina George

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F96E7CCB-2F2E-4033-A1CA-9F4483B1F637A friend once told me that I was the most romantic person they’d ever met. I don’t actually think that’s true. Or, if it used to be true, it’s not true anymore. I think I am cynical about romance now and it’s through that cynical lens I read Nina George’s much lauded novel The Little Paris Bookshop which made me cringe on so, so many levels.

Jean Perdu (and as I was pointing out some of the novel’s cringe-ier moments, my son said “Perdu means lost, mom”) is a “literary apothecary”. Basically, he can find the right book for what ails you. Geesh, I can do that out of my classroom library, but whatever. He lives in Paris and sells books out of a barge docked on the Seine.

One day, a new woman moves into his apartment building. She’s left her husband and has nothing, so the concierge of his building asks if he might have a table to loan her. He does; the problem is that this table is in a room that he blocked off with a wall of books twenty years ago. For reasons.

The delivery of the table sets off a whole chain of events. The woman, Catherine, finds a letter in the table and it is this letter (and Perdu’s sudden and unexpected feelings for Catherine) which set the novel’s main narrative in motion. Because suddenly Perdu knows what happened to Manon (simply called ———-, for the first part of the story because, clearly, it’s too painful for Perdu to even say her name), the LOVE of his life. She disappeared twenty years ago and for twenty years Perdu has been healing others with his books, but not healing himself. (INSERT EYEROLL)

When he gets his first erection of the last twenty years, Perdu has no choice but to RUN AWAY. He hops onto his barge, about to make a clean getaway when suddenly he is joined by Max Jordan, a wunderkind writer who is now suffering from crippling writer’s block. So, the two of them float down the Seine – Perdu in an effort to bury the past and Max just because.  Along the way, they pick up one more guy, Cuneo.

The Little Paris Bookshop is a road trip bromance sort of novel filled with pithy observations about the world and set-pieces designed to show these dudes as enlightened beings. The women in the novel are props. Everyone is thoughtful and forgiving and treacly.

I had high hopes for this book. Paris (which I visited for the first time in July 2018), books: what’s not to love? I thought.

Le sigh.

Tiger, Tiger – Margaux Fragoso

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Margaux Fragoso’s memoir Tiger, Tiger will probably make most readers 44A45046-AC95-4857-AB12-A10A60BD3D53uncomfortable. It’s the story of her sexual relationship with Peter, a man she met when she was seven and he was – wait for it – fifty-one.  In the preface, Fragoso tells readers

I started writing this book the summer after the death of Peter Curran, whom I met when I was seven and had a relationship with for fifteen years, right up until he committed suicide at the age of sixty-six.

Fragoso’s relationship with Peter began at a neighbourhood pool, in Union City, New Jersey. She is the only child of Louie, an immigrant from Puerto Rico, and Cassandra, her mentally ill mother. Life at home is volatile, and Fragoso, despite her youth, longs for a sense of family. When she sees one at the local pool, she is immediately drawn to them.

Their father had bowl-cut sandy-silver hair with sixties bangs like a Beatle. He had full lips, a long, pointy nose that might have looked unattractive on someone else, but not on him, and a strong pert chin. When he looked in my direction, I saw that his eyes were vigorously aquamarine.

It isn’t just Peter that Fragoso is drawn to. There are a couple young boys with him and a woman named Ines. When Peter calls to invite Fragoso and her mother over to visit, it’s the beginning of a time that seems magical at first (Peter’s house is filled with birds and turtles and iguanas), but soon morphs into something else entirely.

It’s hard to read Tiger, Tiger without wanting to scream. Like — where are the adults in this scenario. Even though we understand that Fragoso’s mother is unwell, it is still difficult to comprehend how she so willingly hands over the care of her daughter to a virtual stranger. The other adults in Fragoso’s life seem equally inattentive. Cassandra calls Ines “a dreamer.” Louie is angry most of the time and even when he questions the closeness he sees between Peter and his daughter, he doesn’t really act on it.

Peter is a master manipulator. At first he introduces Fragoso to games like “Danger Tiger”, “Mad Scientist” and “Mad Gardener”, but it doesn’t take long before he’s rewarding her with a “quick kiss on the lips” for finding jigsaw puzzle pieces or telling her that she’d make “a perfect wife.” Of course, he’s grooming her, but she doesn’t know it.

One of the fascinating things about Fragoso’s story is that this ‘relationship’ carried on for so long. At some points, it almost seems as though Fragoso is manipulating Peter, until you remember that he has had a hand in creating the person she’s become.

In her prologue, Fragoso writes:

…spending time with a pedophile can be like a drug high…and when it’s over, for people who’ve been through this, it’s like coming off heroin, and for years, they can’t stop chasing the ghost of how it felt

Tiger, Tiger is not an enjoyable read. It is, however, a brave book. I would like to think the experience of writing it was cathartic for Fragoso and that when she was done, she was able to turn a new, fresh page in her life. Somehow, though, I doubt that this is the case.

Diablerie – Walter Mosley

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5BFAE846-1C5C-4C6F-88E7-2D73D1804D5C
Yeah, so Diablerie was a weird one for me. I haven’t read anything else by acclaimed writer Walter Mosley and I am not sure that I will be rushing out to purchase any more of his work, but all that said, he can definitely write. This book, though, is just odd.

Ben Dibbuk is a successful computer programmer with a beautiful wife and a college-age daughter. He’s 47 and, on the surface at least, has it all together. What he doesn’t get from his wife, Mona, he gets from Svetlana, his 21-year-old Russian grad student girlfriend.

Then at the launch of a new magazine, Diablerie, his wife will be working on, Ben meets a woman, Star, who claims to have known him back in the day. When Ben claims he can’t remember who she is, she replies “Come on, Ben. You can’t forget me, us, that day…not something like that.”

Whatever this something is, it drives Ben batshit crazy trying to remember.  Star tells him that they “spent almost twenty-four hours living on whiskey and sex.”  As Ben tries to recall this former life, his current life starts to unravel.

Readers will have to decide for themselves whether you care about any of it. I didn’t, but I kept reading anyway.

Jar of Hearts – Jennifer Hillier

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So a few years back I read and hated Jennifer Hillier’s novel Creep  and so I am DDEC3EB9-C1E8-4BA6-A35F-B2150CAEAEBDactually a bit surprised that I even picked up Jar of Hearts. I guess I didn’t put two and two together before I forked over my money. I am happy to report that Hillier has redeemed herself a little in my eyes because Jar of Hearts wasn’t nearly as cringeworthy as Creep. In face, I liked it quite a bit until the end.

Georgina (Geo) Shaw’s perfect life (rich fiancé, six-figure career) comes crashing down around her when the mutilated body of her best friend Angela Wong is found fourteen years after she disappeared. For her part in the murder, Geo will spend five years in the Hazelwood Correctional Institute. Calvin James, her boyfriend at the time, is connected to three other murders and will likely serve consecutive life sentences. This is the first time Geo has seen him in a very long time and

When their eyes meet, a tingle goes through her. That goddamned tingle, even now, even after everything. From the first day they met to the last day she saw him, that tingle has never gone away. She’s never felt anything like it before, or since.

Who doesn’t love a bad boy, eh?

Jar of Hearts follows Geo through her stint in prison, where she’s savvy enough to make friends with the right people. When she is released, she returns to her childhood home. She’s not particularly welcome in Sweetbay (a suburb of Seattle), but she has no place else to go. She reconnects with her childhood friend, Kaiser Brody, who is now a cop. And then new bodies start to show up.

I liked this novel so, so much better than Creep. While not flawless, Geo was a likeable character. I understood her attraction to Calvin (who was not straight-up evil) especially at the beginning when she was only sixteen and living in Angela’s considerable shadow.  Hillier does a good job of capturing those heady teenage years when you make dumb choices and hurt the people you love. The flashbacks allow us to see what happened to Angela and why.

Some readers will likely like the novel’s ending twist. I wasn’t a big fan, but it didn’t ruin my overall enjoyment. Jar of Hearts was fun to read.

 

The Daughter – Jane Shemilt

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732E19BC-CA2D-4623-B4E1-EA31B053BDE9It’s probably every parent’s worst nightmare: your child just doesn’t come home one day. That’s the premise of Jane Shemilt’s debut The Daughter.

Jenny is a successful family doctor in Bristol. She’s married to Ted, also a physician. Together they parent twins, Ed and Theo, 17, and Naomi, 15.  Life is busy for the family, which means that sometimes things slip through the cracks. Pretty much every parent  can relate to that. Things are particularly hectic right now because Naomi is starring in her school’s production of  West Side Story, and she is always dashing off.

But on the night before the last performance, Naomi doesn’t come home. She doesn’t respond to her mother’s frantic phone calls. She’s not at the theatre or the place she’d told her mother she’d be. She’s not with her friends.

The Daughter is a page-turner, for sure, but it is also a meditation on modern marriage, parenting, and the fine balancing act of having a career and a family. Jenny is so convinced that she understands her daughter, her sons, her marriage, but it turns out there are cracks everywhere.  Jenny feels blindsided by her daughter’s disappearance and by the fissures which suddenly appear in her domestic life.

If I was asked, I would say she was happy, that Ted and I were as well. I would say we were all perfectly happy.

The novel’s narrative isn’t straight forward. We are given glimpses into Jenny’s life just before Naomi leaves, and then several months later when she has taken herself to Dorset, to the family’s cottage. In these passages, we see how Naomi’s disappearance has affected Jenny and those around her. It’s not that Jenny’s life has come to a complete standstill, but certain aspects of her life have been derailed. She has not given up all hope that Naomi will be found and her grief is palpable.

But it not only Jenny’s grief that drives the narrative. Her husband also suffers. “I look for her everywhere I go,” he tells Jenny months after Naomi’s disappearance. “Don’t give up,” he tells her. “Don’t ever give up. I still think we’ll find her.” Jenny’s sons also suffer under the horrible weight of this loss.

Shemilt handles all their grief and a plot that might have proved unwieldy with a great deal of finesse. I raced to the end, which was both heartbreaking and unexpected.

 

 

When We Collided – Emery Lord

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Vivi and Jonah, the narrators of Emery Lord’s YA novel When We Collided, are damaged collidedseventeen-year-olds, but that doesn’t mean that they’ve given up on living. Their singular voices will likely strike a nerve with many young readers.

Jonah lives in Verona Cove, a small coastal town in California. He’s smack in the middle of six kids and is often tasked with looking after his younger siblings because his older sister has been away at college and his brother is working. His father recently died and his mother can’t seem to get out of bed.

Vivi and her mother are summering in Verona Cove. They needed an escape and Vivi has already decided that she loves Verona Cove, but she “waited until the seventh day to commit.” When she meets Jonah and his youngest sister, Leah, 5, she’s immediately smitten. Vivi falls fast and hard for a lot of things. Listening to her is sort of like watching the ball in a pinball machine bing off all the obstacles. It’s tiring to try to keep up, but she is utterly charming and Jonah has never met anyone like her.

The girl looking down at us has white-blond hair, and her lips are the color of maraschino cherries. She doesn’t look like any girl in my school. She doesn’t look like any girl I’ve ever seen in real life.

Vivi and Jonah hit it off and before you can say “summer romance”, the two are inseparable. For Jonah, Vivi is like a breath of fresh air. She makes him feel special. She listens to him as he tries to navigate the loss of his father and his new situation at home. He doesn’t understand what is happening with his mother and he doesn’t know how to help her. Like his older siblings, he’s just trying to keep his head above water and keep “the littles” (the family name for the younger kids) healthy and whole.

Things seem to be going fine between the two, until they’re not…and they’re not because Vivi starts to act increasingly more bizarre. I think Lord does an exceptional job of tracking the course of Vivi’s mental illness – the erratic and increasingly manic behaviour that finally comes to a head.

Teenage romance has the potential to be a messy business, no question, and the stakes are high for Vivi and Jonah who realize they need each other and also realize that their relationship is problematic (for a variety of reasons.) I appreciate that Lord didn’t try to tidy things up for these two extremely likable characters. You’ll root for them. Your heart will break for them. Your life will be better for having known them.

 

Girl in Snow – Danya Kukafka

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5919CB39-1143-49E3-BCAE-98D1717F025EDanya Kukafka’s debut novel, Girl in Snow, earned copious praise from anybody who’s anybody in the book world and it’s easy to see why everyone was hyped up.

When they told him Lucinda Hayes was dead, Cameron thought of her shoulder blades and how they framed her naked spine, like a pair of static lungs.

Kukafka’s novel is a sort of mystery, but not in the traditional sense. Lucinda, a popular 15- year-old, is discovered  in the playground of the elementary school. She’s been murdered.  Lucinda’s death is certain in the incident that kicks the novel off, but it’s the three-person narrative that keeps its motor running.

First there’s Cameron, the boy who loved Lucinda from afar. Perhaps saying Cameron ‘loved’ her isn’t quite the right word. He watched her obsessively.  He drew her.  He feels like he knew her better than anyone, “The way her legs flew out when she ran…How her hair got frizzy at the front when she walked home from school in the heat….the way she squinted when she couldn’t see the board.”  When Lucinda’s body is found, Cameron is one of the first suspects because a classmate had once told a teacher that Cameron “was the sort of kid who would bring a gun to school.”

Then there’s Jade. When she hears the news of Lucinda’s death she says that “faking shock is easier than faking sadness.”  Jade lives with her mother and sister and I wouldn’t characterize her life as necessarily happy. She resented Lucinda, and so her classmate’s death inspires little more than antipathy.

Finally, there’s Russ, a local cop who used to be Cameron’s father’s partner before he did a runner, leaving his wife and son behind.  He feels protective towards Cameron and his feelings are further complicated by the feelings he had for Cameron’s father, Lee.  He is also suspicious of his wife, Ines’, ex-con brother, Ivan, who just happens to be the person who discovered Lucinda’s body.

It is through the lens of these characters that we see Lucinda. I wouldn’t say that Girl in Snow is a page-turner, but that’s because these are complicated people with complicated feelings and Kukafka cares about every word she writes. This is a book to be savoured and these are characters you won’t soon forget.