Bury Your Dead by Louise Penny

This is the sixth in the Chief Inspector Gamache series but it’s the first I’ve read. I began with Bury Your Dead because the reviews were so great (The American Library Association named it the best mystery of 2010.) but now I wish I’d started with, Still Life, the first in the series as I plan to read them all. The series and the quality of the writing remind me of Elizabeth George’s Inspector Lynley series and they've won many of the same awards.

In addition to a rip-roaring mystery and great characters, this tale makes the city of Quebec a character and has me pining to visit there this winter (and I don’t ever pine to visit a northern city in the winter).  Penny depicts the unique history and beauty of the old walled city so beautifully that I can easily imagine myself sipping hot chocolate and eating croissants after a quick stroll.

Gamache is visiting his mentor in Quebec City to recover from an investigation that had dreadful consequences that are haunting him.  He visits the English Literary and Historical Society where a crazed historian goes in search of the remains of Samuel de Champlain, Quebec’s founder.  When a body is found in the Society’s basement the wide divide between the French and the English threatens to ignite the separatists. Meanwhile Gamache sends an aide to the village of Three Pines to take a second look at the circumstances behind a hermit’s murder. The book has three distinct story lines, the two murders and Gamache’s lament over his last case and Penny skillfully intertwines them to make the mystery a complex emotional ride.

Every character in this novel seems to leap from the page and bring to life the smoldering tensions in the city and in the seemingly peaceful village.  The book will also educate readers about the feelings behind the separatist movement in Quebec and on the history of Quebec’s founding.

Penny says her books are inspired by two lines from a W.H. Auden poem: Goodness existed, that was the new knowledge/his terror had to blow itself quite out to let him see it.  It’s rare that a novel shows us the inner terror that the characters suffer while reinforcing that goodness exists.  Inspector Armand Gamache fights terror both within himself and within Quebec and he does it by searching for the goodness that exists

Summing it Up:  Read this to fall in love with the characters, setting and language in this page-turning mystery.  Start with Bury Your Dead or with Still Life, the first in the series.  

Rating: 5 stars    Category: Fiction, Mysteries and Thrillers, Super Nutrition, Book Club

Publication date: September 28, 2010

Author’s Website: http://www.louisepenny.com/

Listen to an Audio Excerpt: http://us.macmillan.com/buryyourdead/LouisePenny

Reading Group Questions: http://media.us.macmillan.com/rggguides/9780312377045RGG.pdf

What Others are Saying:

Booklist: http://www.booklistonline.com/Bury-Your-Dead-Louise-Penny/pid=4227786

Kirkus Reviews: http://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/louise-penny/bury-your-dead/#review

Publisher’s Weekly:  http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-312-37704-5

The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides

Madeleine Hanna, who graduates from Brown University on the day The Marriage Plot begins, had “become an English major for the purest and dullest of reasons: because she loved to read.”  She adored Jane Austen, Edith Wharton, George Eliot, and Dickens.  Thus, classmate Mitchell Grammaticus is the perfect man for her.  He adores her, he’s smart and her parents find him as ideal as Mr. Darcy.  But Madeleine has fallen for the frightening Leonard Bankhead, a loner in her semiotics seminar. 

Semiotics, the theory and study of signs and symbols, is the glue that holds this novel together. “Going to college in the moneymaking eighties lacked a certain radicalism.  Semiotics was the first thing that smacked of revolution.  It drew a line; it created an elect; it was sophisticated and Continental…if scanning Wordsworth was making you feel dowdy and ink-stained, there was another option… You could sign up for Semiotics 211 and find out what everyone else was talking about. “

What everyone else was talking about was looking behind things for their real meaning and not dwelling on what people did or even on what was realistic. In that context Madeleine could easily fall for Leonard because of who he was while ignoring his bizarre behavior.  

Madeleine noted that “Reading a novel after reading semiotic theory was like jogging empty-handed after jogging with hand weights.”  Reading the second half of this novel after trudging through the weightiness and satire of the first few hundred pages is also like shedding a heavy burden.  The latter sections dealing with the love triangle composed of Madeleine, Leonard, and Mitchell are a soaring song compared to the funeral dirge of the novel’s beginnings. 

Mitchell’s struggles with his dream of serving the destitute and dying under Mother Teresa in Calcutta and his interest in Christian mysticism are both beautifully written and eminently readable.  Leonard’s descent into mental illness that seemed overdrawn early in the novel, realizes a perfect symmetry with Madeleine’s efforts to save him. The novel‘s ending is one of the best I’ve ever read – I just wish it might have been a more entertaining journey to reach it.

Summing it Up:  Read it to admire the writing and for the careful, Tolstoy-like manner in which the ending captures the wisdom contained throughout the novel.

Rating: 4 stars    Category: Fiction, Gourmet, Book Club

Publication date:  October 11, 2011

Author Interview: http://www.npr.org/2011/10/11/140949453/a-marriage-plot-full-of-intellectual-angst

Read an Excerpt: http://www.scribd.com/doc/66568654/The-Marriage-Plot-by-Jeffrey-Eugenides-EXCERPT

Reading Group Guide:  http://us.macmillan.com/BookCustomPage.aspx?isbn=9780374203054&m_type=8&utm_source=rgg-module&utm_medium=textlink&utm_campaign=rgg-internal#rgg

What Others are Saying:

Kirkus Reviews: http://www.kirkusreviews.com/blog/fiction/jeffrey-eugenides-marriage-plot/#continue_reading_post

New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/07/books/the-marriage-plot-by-jeffrey-eugenides-review.html?pagewanted=all

Publishers Weekly: http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-374-20305-4

The Windward Shore: A Winter on the Great Lakes by Jerry Dennis

Midway through this spectacular rendering, Jerry Dennis states, “If I could I would seed these pages with beach stones, maple leaves, blue jay feathers, Petoskey stones, cherry pits, and arrowheads.  Open the cover, and out would rush starlings and wood smoke and a cold wind off the lake.”  Dennis does seed the book’s pages with all he mentions and so much more.  Every time I opened the book, sights, smells, memories and new experiences rushed out to astonish me with their exacting suitability to the situations and places described.   I have long been a fan of Dennis’s books and am something of an evangelist for his The Living Great Lakes so I expected to love this book but nothing prepared me for the deep connection it forged with me – a connection so strong that I spent two weeks avoiding reading the last chapter so the book would never end. But end it did and with a commandment to “Go forth.”  I cannot imagine a more apt challenge and one that if they were among us that Thoreau and Aldo Leopold might have tossed.  Yes, this book does compare to Walden and to The Sand Country Almanac. Yet, it’s entirely accessible and would make a suitable holiday gift for a fisherman, a motorcyclist or a hunter as well as those who love natural history.

Just one more example: “Many go to nature looking for a cure, but they rarely find it. . . Water and woods, the night sky, the dawn chorus of songbirds, a loping coyote – such things are not a cure, but a salve. . . They replenish us after the gorings of daily life. They provide relief from rude clerks and petty coworkers, from the relentless goosestep of fashion, from the piling-on of responsibilities, from the burden of having constantly to maintain oneself, stay in shape, make progress, be good, be mature, be an example to one’s children, and never just coast because if you’re not moving forward, your moving backward.  In nature, temporarily, we can coast.  It’s the appeal of canoes and sailboats, of lawn chairs and tree houses and walks on the beach.  In nature we can catch our breath.”  I’m tempted to pepper this review entirely with quotes as I have sticky-note flags on almost every page.  I want to share them but even more I want you to open this book and feel the joy of holding the great lakes in your hand.

Jerry Dennis set out to present a true picture of the northern shores of Lake Michigan near where he lives and in the Upper Peninsula where he visited.  He focused on the area in winter when it’s most exposed.  He succeeded by painting a portrait of the land the coasts ignore, a place both remote and desolate yet within a few hours’ drive for millions of Midwesterners.

Read this book because it will make you slow down to appreciate the wonder of our lakes. Relish this book because the Glenn Wolff illustrations will transport you to the north woods.  Buy this book because in addition to the descriptive passages, Dennis explains everything from avian botulism to snow, bird song, geology and more so simply that the most scientifically ignorant will understand. Savor this book because, quite simply, it depicts “Creation, right before our eyes.”

Summing it Up:  Read this book for the meditations it offers, then allow it to penetrate so you appreciate the incredible gift the Great Lakes are to those of us lucky enough to be able to enjoy them.

Contact these stores for autographed copies: 

McLean & Eakin, Petoskey, MI, http://www.mcleanandeakin.com/book/9780472118168

Nicola’s Books, Ann Arbor, MI, http://www.nicolasbooks.com/book/9780472118168

Rating: 5 stars    Category: Non-fiction, Gourmet, Super Nutrition, Book Club

Publication date: September 24, 2011, The University of Michigan Press

Author’s Website: http://www.jerrydennis.net/index.html

Read an Excerpt: http://www.jerrydennis.net/uploads/5/9/5/5/5955195/dennis_up_through_intro.pdf

What Others are Saying:

"Our country is lucky to have Jerry Dennis. A conservationist with the soul of a poet whose beat is Wild Michigan, Dennis is a kindred spirit of Aldo Leopold and Sigurd Olson. The Windward Shore---his newest effort---is a beautifully written and elegiac memoir of outdoor discovery. Highly recommended!"
---Douglas Brinkley, author of The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America

Ann Arbor Observer: http://arborweb.com/articles/jerry_dennis_full_article.html

Northern Express: http://npaper-wehaa.com/northernexpress/2011/10/03/s1/#?article=1401709

Sierra Club: http://sierraclubgreatlakes.blogspot.com/2013/01/great-lakes-books-for-winter-reading.html

Once Upon a River by Bonnie Jo Campbell

If you’re a bettor, place your money on Once Upon a River for the National Book Award; it’s that good.  On the first page Bonnie Jo Campbell clearly defines Margo Crane as an intrepid heroine. “When Margo swam, she swallowed minnows alive and felt the Stark River move inside her.” Her grandfather taught her to fish and trap and he appreciated that she could sit without speaking for hours in the prow of his boat. “He called her Sprite or River Nymph.  Her cousins called her Nympho, though not usually within the old man’s hearing.”

Many are comparing Margo to Huck Finn and that’s accurate but Margo’s also an original defined by her actions yet resolute in remaining true to her convictions. Like her hero, Annie Oakley, she’s a great shooter and a survivor.  She lives “outside” both literally and figuratively – outside on the river and outside convention as a young girl on her own without a home or an education.  Her mother abandons her, her grandfather dies, and her uncle rapes her so when her father is killed in a vivid scene in which she uses her sharp-shooting skills to shoot off the top of her uncle’s penis, fifteen-year-old Margo feels compelled to escape to the aptly named Stark River outside Kalamazoo, Michigan,

Margo lives for the river and for shooting and preparing what she’s shot.  “She’d be fine after that initial cut, after she turned the deer from a dead creature into meat. It had come as a surprise that killing was the easy part.”  She's extraordinarily beautiful and is as attractive to males as the majestic deer she herself tracks. Her beauty makes her the ideal woman for many of the men she meets and even her absent mother sees her only as a vessel of her beauty and its ability to attract. Margo, though, learns to use her beauty and her skills to survive.  When she needs cash she shoots muskrats with a shot through the eyeball carefully embedding the bullet into the brain to save the fur so she’ll get top dollar for it.

As Margo navigates her boat down the river she hooks up with Brian whose food and cabin provide the essentials she needs and the sex that comforts her. Brian claims her, calls her Maggie and tries to make her the person he needs.  After his brother attacks her she moves across the river to a more upright gentleman: 28-year-old Michael, who has a real job, attends church and believes in doing the right thing. Michael calls her Margaret Louise and she lives comfortably with him until she does something so unconventional that she can no longer remain.

She next meets an Indian who never gives his name.  “He had come to her for help, and she had helped him.  She had fed him, and he had paid her for the food.  Sex with him had been like nothing she had known, but if he had stayed any longer, they might have hurt each other.” Margo appears to be the victim in her encounters but each person she meets teaches her skills she needs to survive.  

The novel portrays the consequences of living in a rough world when you have no protectors and become prey.  It shows that the costs of living free without the protection of family or state are so high that anyone desiring total freedom in this world is doomed to pay for its consequences.  Just when those consequences seem too dire, Margo meets Smoke who needs her as much as she needs him. Smoke and Margo accept each other as outsiders and Margo begins to grasp that survival may be more than just having food and shelter.  Campbell intricately balances her themes of freedom, community, consequences, and living with the “sins of the fathers,” while portraying the natural world and the humans inhabiting it with absolute precision.

This novel is a page-turner so it demands two readings to appreciate the author’s incisive language especially her descriptions of the river and the natural world.  I expect teenage girls to be reading and talking about Margo Crane for many years and I hope that school boards allow teachers to assign this book despite its depiction of a teenage girl who confuses sex for security.  Once Upon a River begs to be read alongside The Scarlet Letter and what I wouldn’t give to hear teenagers compare Margo Crane to Hester Prynne.

Summing it Up:  Read it first for the plucky heroine and her journey then return to it to savor the beautiful depictions of the natural world and the unforgettable characters.  Force your book club to choose it as you’ll want to discuss it the minute you put it down.

Rating: 5 stars    Category: Fiction, Gourmet, Book Club

Publication date: July, 2011

Author’s Website: http://www.bonniejocampbell.com/

Read an Excerpt: http://books.google.com/books?id=LgbCgcdKktUC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false

What Others are Saying:

Christian Science Monitor: http://www.csmonitor.com/Books/Book-Reviews/2011/0726/Once-Upon-a-River-by-Bonnie-Jo-Campbell

New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/24/books/review/once-upon-a-river-by-bonnie-jo-campbell-book-review.html?pagewanted=all

Publisher’s Weekly:  http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-393-07989-0

Washington Post: http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/books-once-upon-a-river-by-bonnie-jo-campbell/2011/06/27/gHQAv3xozH_story.htm

The Summer Book by Tove Jansson

When I decided to write a blog, I read over 250 book review blogs and resolved to leave my personal life out of my reviews after reading far too little about books and much too much about cats and grandchildren.  Having neither, I thought it’d be an easy resolution to keep but I’m breaking it because telling how profoundly The Summer Book touched me is impossible without explaining the turn my life took this spring.

After Heidi Durrow, whose book The Girl Who Fell From the Sky was my favorite book in 2010, recommended The Summer Book in a piece on NPR: http://www.npr.org/2011/03/21/133866201/three-books-to-rescue-nordic-lit-from-the-dark-side, I purchased it.  I had just begun it on April 12 when I got a phone call that my husband was in a hospital in Arlington, VA, after having a significant stroke while on a business trip.  As I packed to fly east, I tossed The Summer Book into my suitcase. A few nights later when I moved into a narrow chair bed next to my husband in the hospital, I began falling under its spell.  This novel comforted me and made me smile just when I most needed it.  This summer I’ve reread it in a happier time as my husband’s therapy leads him on the path to full recovery.  Once again it swept me away, made me laugh out loud, and helped me ponder its wisdom.

Six-year-old Sophia and her impervious grandmother portray a world awakening to life and nature on a miniscule island in the farthest reaches of the Gulf of Finland in the late 1960s. Sophia’s mother has died and her grandmother quietly guides her to conquer her grief and gain confidence in a series of simple events.  Any book about a girl as impish and unique as Pippi Longstocking, as bold and audacious as Tom Sawyer, and as insightfully witty as no one but herself would be enough to savor.  But when you add a distinctive archipelago that I long to visit and a grandmother who builds a replica of a Venetian palace out of bark and twigs while smoking and wryly commenting on outrageous situations, you have a classic that American audiences will love if they’ll just give it a try.  Told in a series of brief vignettes, the little treasure imparts sage philosophies that will appeal to those who enjoyed The Elegance of the Hedgehog as well as to those just wanting an enchanting story spare enough to allow room for imagination.

In a chapter that must be read aloud, Sophia, horrified by an earthworm she’s cut in half with a spade, learns that it’ll grow into two beings.  To grasp the concept, Sophia writes a book about the process of growing separately.  She dictates to her grandmother: “They realized that from now on life would be quite different, but they didn’t know how, that is, in what way.” Obviously that line spoke directly to my situation in the hospital but I now realize that, like everything else in this novel, it speaks to the entire human condition.

Our Book Club’s Discussion:

Over thirty people packed into the book store where our spirited book discussion began with the question: “Did The Summer Book comfort you or unsettle you?”  It comforted the majority but some found the sparse language and the uncertainty of the grandmother’s fate unsettling. Others noted that the spare language enhanced the setting. One grandmother commented that she loved that the grandmother wasn’t a “Hallmark grandma” but a real person. As we read various sections aloud, laughter ensued along with vigorous debate about the many themes. All concurred that the book was great for discussion and should be read aloud almost in its entirety. We pondered whether “city folks” could appreciate the portrayals of living in nature or whether they’d seem too foreign. One woman revealed that she planned to read it every summer to see which themes resonated at the time.

Summing it Up:  Make this your next book club selection and get ready for a dynamic discussion.  Read it to enjoy Sophia’s witticisms, to visit to an enchanting island, and to allow it to impart its wisdom however and whenever you need it.  This is truly the perfect summer book.

Rating: 5 stars    Category: Fiction, Grandma’s Pot Roast, Soul Food, Book Club

Publication date: 1972, NYRB Classics reissue in 2008

About the author: Tove Jansson was most famous for her comic strips and books about Moomintroll, a hippo-like character.  The Moomin family has spawned theme parks and an array of clothing and accessories in Finland and Japan where they rival Hello Kitty’s popularity.  Visit these sites to learn more about this unique author: http://www.moomin.com/tove/  and http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/tjansson.htm

What Others are Saying:

The Independent: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/the-summer-book-by-tove-jansson-540567.html

New York Review Books:  http://www.nybooks.com/books/imprints/classics/the-summer-book/

The Homecoming of Samuel Lake by Jenny Wingfield

Readers who love southern-fried characters suffering a heap of misery alongside precocious children who lead their elders into doing what’s right will devour this beach book.  Fannie Flagg and Dorothea Benton Frank aficionados will fly through the pages while enjoying the humor and the fact that the “good” people triumph.  I don’t happen to be one of those readers. I appreciate the author’s ability to describe the land cinematically. She’s a screenwriter who wrote The Man in the Moon and The Outsider and I like the dialogue that moves the book along but I wanted more fully developed characters.  Other than Swan Lake (yes, that truly is the name of the child protagonist – and no, the reason she got the moniker isn’t explained), a Huck Finn of a 1950s girl, the characters all seem to be cardboard caricatures of good or evil Southerners.

Samuel Lake, a preacher who’s lost his pulpit due to speaking the truth, moves to the farm where his wife’s family is grieving a loss that should cause them to question themselves but seems only to make them want to preserve the past. Daughter Swan finds Blade, a neighbor boy who needs her help, as she avoids Blade’s “Old Testament” evil father.  The sins of the fathers of both families hover over the action like a smothering fog that threatens an evil storm.   If you like action, this book has it with rape, suicide, wife beatings, adultery, murder and even kitten killing.

Summing it Up: Read this if you like good-old Southern charm, engaging children and evil characters who get what’s coming to them.  Skip it if you prefer more literary fiction.

Rating: 3 stars   

Category: Fiction, Grits and Pineapple Upside Down Cake

Publication date: July 12, 2011

Read an excerpt: http://www.randomhouse.com/book/196784/the-homecoming-of-samuel-lake-by-jenny-wingfield/9780385344081/#excerpt

What Others are Saying:

Kirkus Reviews: http://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/fiction/jenny-wingfield/homecoming-samuel-lake/
Publishers Weekly: http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-385-34408-1
USA Today: http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/reviews/2011-08-11-samuel-lake_n.htm

In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson

Erik Larson’s newest historical saga transports readers to 1933 Berlin, an almost too-familiar time and place that Larson makes compelling by introducing an American family’s view of Hitler’s rise to power.  Just as Larson’s Devil in the White City evoked the unreported evil surrounding 1890s Chicago, this account delves into a little known historical figure and his role in the unfolding drama leading to World War II. William Dodd was a quiet University of Chicago professor when Roosevelt appointed him ambassador to Hitler’s Germany, a position none of the usual ambassadorial suspects desired.

The unassuming Dodd took his wife, son and reckless daughter, Martha, with him to Berlin and Martha, an assistant literary editor of the Chicago Tribune, immediately ingratiated herself within Berlin society and with the burgeoning Nazi leadership. Her sexual liaisons and friendships offer a rare view of the increasing tensions as Americans and German Jews suffer brutal attacks without consequence. Martha’s naiveté and her father’s essential fair-minded approach afford readers a clear view of America’s isolationism and of the dilettante foreign service of the time. Larson also offers a clear, unvarnished portrait of American anti-Semitism and its ultimate cost.

The Dodds’ chatty correspondence with Carl Sandburg, Thornton Wilder and other historical figures was my favorite aspect of the book.  Larson also captured my interest with his discerning depiction of the cut-throat tactics some American diplomats used including compromising diplomatic pouches in order to undermine Dodd’s position.

Summing it Up:  Larson defines the term narrative nonfiction by offering simple stories of relationships that show rather than explain how Hitler and his band of miscreants assembled power so quickly.  Read this historical account of the rise of Nazi Germany for its insight into why the world failed to see what Hitler was doing.  Enjoy it for its almost gossip-column glimpses of Berlin society in 1933.

Rating: 4 stars   

Category: Nonfiction, Super Nutrition, Book Club

Publication date: May, 2011

Author website: http://eriklarsonbooks.com/

Reading Group Guide: http://www.litlovers.com/reading-guides/14-non-fiction/8375-in-the-garden-of-beasts-larson

Interview with NPR’s Terry Gross on Fresh Air: http://www.npr.org/2011/05/09/135922322/william-dodd-the-u-s-ambassador-in-hitlers-berlin

What Others are Saying:

Chicago Sun Times: http://www.suntimes.com/entertainment/books/5142857-421/review-in-the-garden-of-beasts-by-erik-larson.html

Kirkus Reviews:  http://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/non-fiction/erik-larson/garden-beasts/#review

New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/12/books/review/book-review-in-the-garden-of-beasts-by-erik-larson.html