An Embarrassment of Riches

To Be, or Not to Be...Amish - by Ruth

A few summers ago, I went to visit some cousins who live in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania which is essentially THE place to be if you're Amish. I tried not to stare, but ultimately failed because everything about the Amish was so different from my experience and totally fascinating. We went to a horse auction run by the Amish, parked the minivan next to a horse-drawn wagon, passed horse and buggies and a sort of bicycle/scooter mashup that was one young man's mode of transportation, and shopped at Good's which is kind of like an Amish Wal-Mart. I finally got the inside scoop about these people when I recently read Growing Up Amish by Ira Wagler.

Ira now lives in Lancaster Co, PA, but was born into a large family in an Old Order Amish community in Aylmer, Ontario (who knew there were Amish in Canada? Obviously not me.). Wagler talks about the customs, rules and differences among Amish communities (they can be pretty wide) and what it was like for him growing up in several of them. We're let in on life at an Amish school, we go to an Amish wedding and church services, we see communities work well, and sometimes not so well, and we experience the pain and struggles of Amish youth who don't fit the mold. Wagler was one of those youth. He first left when he was a teenager, and then came back and left several more times before finally leaving for good. The writing is sometimes a bit overwrought, but the feeling of being let in on a secret was certainly worth it. 

English Villages on View - by Ruth I love English villages, or, at least, the idea of them: the thatched cottages, the gardens with their exotic-sounding veggies like courgette (zucchini) and Swedes (rutabaga), the endless cream teas, the common area called the green, and the often odd local vicar. Because I've never been to a single English village in all of my trips to Britain (I thought that Thirsk - the home of James Herriot's vet surgery - was, but it's actually considered a market town), most of what I believe about them comes from British television or books.  It could be that what I "know" about villages is not absolutely true, but it's been fun watching how they're portrayed.

My absolute favorite village television show is The Vicar of Dibley, starring the awesome Dawn French. Geraldine Granger, the cute, chubby new girl in town is also the village's first female vicar and at least one of the church council members is NOT pleased.  The cast is made up of some wonderfully eccentric characters including Owen, the randy farmer, Alice, the not-so-bright love interest of the not-so-bright son of the wealthiest man in town and Frank Pickle, the gay secretary who is overly meticulous in his minute-taking endeavors. Much of each episode consists of a council meeting in which serious matters are being considered in often hilarious discussions, although several of the episodes were so moving that I cried. The characters could easily be turned into caricatures, but they all have deeply human cores that are revealed throughout the course of the series and that make them all seem quite possible.

Two other series I've been watching recently are also set in villages or small towns. If you like cozy murder mysteries, try Midsomer Murders. This series has been going on so long that I'm surprised there is anyone left alive in the fictional Midsomer County! Clatterford is more of a town than a village, but you still get the village feel as this show revolves around the small group of people who make up the Clatterford Women's Guild.

The next time I go to England, I must visit a village and find out if everything I've seen on television is real!

Going Beach - by Ruth

When I was a child and my family headed out on Highway 26 toward the coast in our VW bus, we could always count on the delighted scream of my younger sister coming from the last row:  "Going beach!" Those memories of playing in the cold ocean in my Salt-Water Sandals, building castles and eating slightly sandy lunches on a blanket are some of the best I have. I still love the beach, whether it's in Oregon or elsewhere.

Apparently a lot of authors do too, as there are plenty of novels set in coastal locations. Elin Hilderbrand's books take place on Nantucket where she, herself, lives. In The Island, Birdie Cousins is immersed in planning her daughter's incredibly expensive and complicated wedding - until she gets a late night call from Chess saying she's broken it off with her fiance. Birdie decides that a summer trip to the old family home on Tuckernuck Island is just the thing to help Chess heal and Birdie reconnect with her daughter. Birdie's other daughter, Tate, and her sister, India, are soon folded into the plans and so begins a month of family time that includes old dramas and at least one new flame. Is happily ever after possible for the Cousins family?

In The Silver Boat by Luanne Rice, three sisters converge on Martha's Vineyard in order to clear out the family home after their mother's death. They lead less glamorous lives than the Cousins family, but I liked them better. Dar, the daughter who lives on Martha's Vineyard, doesn't really want to sell the house, but the other two see no viable alternatives. As the days go by, conflicts arise and a family secret is uncovered on a trip to Ireland. At the risk of a spoiler, you can count on happily ever after in this book.

If you aren't "going beach!" in real life this summer, at least try to get there in a novel.

Married in the Heights and the 'Burbs - by Ruth Marriage and long-term relationships can be challenging even when they're good, and keeping them alive and well can be tricky when something new is introduced. The something new in Peter Hedges's (author of What's Eating Gilbert Grape - who knew the movie was based on a book?) latest novel, The Heights, is Anna Brody, the gorgeous, wealthy mother who has just moved into the most exclusive house in Brooklyn Heights. Everyone is infatuated with Anna, but instead of hanging with all of the other rich moms, Anna attaches herself to Kate and Tim, parents of two small boys who live in decidedly less ritzy circumstances than the Range Rover-driving families in the Heights. What's the attraction? Kate thinks it's kind of cool, but also a little weird. Soon their world is turned a bit upside down when Kate, a stay at home mom, goes back to work, and Tim leaves his job as a teacher at a nearby private school to become the primary childcare provider. It turns out that Tim's quite good at it, and Anna begins to ask for more and more help with her small daughter, but is that really all she wants from him? Is there a marital train wreck in the offing? The world of The Heights is so not my milieu, but it was fascinating to catch a glimpse of the place and those who inhabit it.

As anyone who has ever watched Desperate Housewives knows, the suburbs are not always as tranquil as they might seem on the surface. In Uncoupling by Meg Wolitzer, a cool breeze is blowing through the New Jersey suburb of Stellar Plains, stirring up trouble between men and women. The women are the only ones who feel it and when they do, they go off men immediately. In marriages, the wives are done with sex; in teenage couples, the breakups are spectacular and nasty; and even the illicit affairs go off the rails. Oddly enough, at the same time this breeze is taking hold, the high school is doing a production of Lysistrata, the Ancient Greek play in which the women refuse to sleep with the men until the men end the Peloponnesian War. What is going on here? Will life ever get back to normal?

Marriage is hard work.  Let's hope that at least a few survive and thrive in our newer novels!

Literary Midlife Crises - by Ruth A lot of people go through a crisis of sorts when they hit their forties, but in literature - at least in the books that I've been reading lately - things seem to go wackily and spectacularly wrong when characters enter midlife. In The Widow's Season by Laura Brodie, Sarah's forty-three year old husband goes on a short kayaking trip one day and after a huge storm, never returns. His kayak turns up, but his body doesn't and most people assume that he drowned. Sarah doesn't have the closure she wants, but believes that her husband is dead. She believes, that is, until she sees him at the grocery store. She also sees him other places including the churchyard right after his memorial service. And then there's the sighting on Halloween night. Maybe David isn't dead? Maybe he's just had enough of his old life and wants a change. Brodie kept me guessing right up until the end.

I wasn't even going to mention Chronicles of a Midlife Crisis by Robyn Harding, but then I read some reviews on Good Reads and discovered that there weren't very many other people who felt the way I did about it: that the characters were a bunch of self-absorbed, loathsome, childish losers; not to mention that the story was something like a cross between a National Enquirer cover story and the movie Fatal Attraction. It starts out well enough with some humor about how Lucy should have known that her husband of sixteen years was cheating on her (he's wearing skinny-legged trousers and using wrinkle cream - hello!). The story is told in back-and-forth fashion between Lucy and Trent. The more I read, the more I absolutely hated the characters. Not only is Trent involved with a psycho, but then Lucy starts seeing a teen celebrity (although really he's twenty-seven and just playing a teenage character on television) who happens to be her daughter's biggest star crush. Drama and severe stupidity ensues. But as I noted earlier, there were plenty of people on Good Reads who enjoyed it. One of the good things about reading midlife crisis fiction is that you can be pretty sure that your own drama will probably never be as bad!

Sinister Stories from Childhood - by Ruth When I was a kid, I loved creepy stories: the grimmer of the Brothers Grimm fairy-tales, books of ghosts and hauntings and anything that had a mystery with history. I spent a fair amount of time on visits to Grandma's big, old house back east trying to live in those stories: running up the (long gone) servants' back staircase, scouting around the gigantic attic and searching for secret doors and hidden passages ala Nancy Drew. It would have been so cool to visit the places where some of my favorite stories originated, but my grandmother's house, fascinating though it was, was not one of them. The characters in two novels for adults I read recently were luckier.  

In Carol Goodman's Arcadia Falls, Meg Rosenthal has just snagged a teaching job at Arcadia School, an art institute for high-schoolers in upstate New York.  The school was founded in the first half of the twentieth century by several women who wrote and illustrated a haunting tale entitled "The Changeling Girl", one that Meg read to her child and one whose origins she is now researching. Being the good gothic novel that it is, secrets abound, a death occurs, the past impinges upon the present, and there is, of course, a romantic element.

The Distant Hours, Kate Morton's latest, takes place during WWII and in 1992. Driving back from a business trip, Edith comes across Milderhurst Castle, the place where the author of her favorite childhood story, "The True History of the Mud Man", lived and, coincidentally, the place where Edith's mother was evacuated to during WWII.  Now it's occupied by the author's three spinster daughters, all well beyond seventy years of age. Edith is dying to find out more about the family and her mother's stay there, but Mum isn't talking and something's being hushed up. Secrets, death, romance yada yada yada and 500 plus pages later, we know the whole story including the true "True History of the Mud Man." So pull your chair close to the fire, get your goth on, and read some slightly sinister stories the are definitely for adults during these cold and rainy March nights.

The Scottish Mystery - by Ruth Last spring, I finally got to visit Scotland, Land of the Tartan and black slugs, which I dubbed the MacSlug. Part of that trip included a 73 mile trek on The Great Glen Way, one of the many long-distance paths in Britain. Most of the walk was through or alongside beautiful scenery including placid lochs, rolling pastures filled with cute little lambs and a few shaggy Highland cows, and forests (although I was shocked to see some pretty darn ugly clear-cuts as well). Shortly after coming home, a mystery passed my desk entitled A Small Death in the Great Glen.  I knew I had to read it, and although I couldn't figure out if the fictional village was based on one that I had passed through, I was pleased to revisit the landscape if only in literature. The small death is that of a young boy who has been found in a canal (the Caledonian Canal that along which I had walked miles?). Turns out that he had been murdered and dumped in the water. Who would do such a thing? Several young girls might know, but they're not telling. Employees of the local newspaper are the amateur detectives in this debut novel and they're a pretty interesting bunch. I'm looking forward to the second in this series. I just polished off another new debut mystery from Scotland, this time set in 1860s Edinburgh. In The Unbelievers, our middle-aged detective, Inspector Allardyce, is trying to figure out who has bumped off the Duke of Dornach. What was, at first, a missing persons case, turns into a murder investigation when the Duke is found shot. We travel with Allardyce through the dirty underbelly of Victorian Edinburgh society and politics as we visit the Duke's questionable haunts and hope that we get to the murderer before he or she strikes again. If you're still hankering for Scotland after these two, read Raven Black by Ann Cleeves, set in the Shetland Islands. But don't blame me if you feel the need for a shot of whiskey after all this death!

Don't Worry, Be Happy - by Ruth Every so often over the course of my life, I've pondered my happiness. Sometimes (during most of graduate school), I was decidedly NOT happy. Other times (say, when I'm hanging out at my favorite place at the beach reading or crafting), I feel quite peachy. Gretchen Rubin asked herself whether she was happy and came up with something like "Yes, but I could be happier." That question (and answer) began a year long quest to create more happiness in her life. It's not the totally self-indulgent project that it initially seems to be; she realized that if she were happier, the people around her (like her husband and kids) would also be happier. She designed a project for each month of the year starting with decluttering her apartment in January. Other endeavors included eating less "fake food", writing a novel in one month, and tackling nagging tasks. To find out if she did, indeed, get happy, read The Happiness Project.

Unlike Gretchen, who made a conscious choice to be happier, Dominique Browning's shift toward happiness was forced upon her when House & Garden, the magazine for which she was the editor, folded. Fortunately she had resources, unlike so many Americans who have lost their jobs and are up Unemployment Creek without a paddle. Dominique basically slowed life down - sold her big house in New York and moved to a smaller one in Rhode Island where she lived in her pajamas, gardened, swam and, apparently, finally got over her decade-long, on-again, off-again relationship with a man whom she dubbed Stroller. She was going to call him Walker, "as that's what he did best: walked away", but apparently he objected. She relates her year in Slow Love.

Now don't you wish you had a whole year of freedom (with financial resources) to get all happy and content?

Bill Nighy Rocks my DVD world - by Ruth After two months of reading exclusively teen books for a training I was presenting, I finally took a well-deserved rest and fired up the dvd player. The only DVD I had at home was The Girl in the Café starring Bill Nighy and Kelly Macdonald, and I was reminded again of what a fab actor Bill is. There's just something about him that appeals. Maybe it's his slightly disheveled look, his subtle wit, or the way he quirks his head every so often, but all of it is fantastically engaging. In Girl, he plays an overworked civil servant working on papers for an upcoming G8 summit in Iceland. On a short, but well-deserved tea break, he sits down across from a young woman and starts a halting conversation. They end up going to Reykjavik together and interesting things happen. State of Play is a gripping mini-series in which Nighy plays an important role. Politics and murder intersect, and Nighy's character is a newspaper editor overseeing several journalists who are covering the story. I wanted to watch episode after episode, but sleep necessitated a multiple-day viewing. I haven't seen everything Nighy's been in, but I've enjoyed everything I've seen.

The English Character - by Ruth I've been accused of being obsessed with England. I don't think that's entirely true because If it were, I would probably eat beans on toast for breakfast, and that's a dietary choice I just can't fathom. I will, however, read pretty much any book that's set in Britain as long as it's not too gory. Historical, mystery, contemporary, whatever - I'll read it if the place is across the pond, and I just finished two that I absolutely loved. Remarkable Creatures by Tracy Chevalier tells the story of two women living in the seaside town of Lyme Regis in the early 1800s. One is Mary Anning, a young, uneducated girl who is a whiz at finding fossils which are called "curies" or curiosities by the locals. The other is Elizabeth Philpot, a spinster from London who is living in somewhat reduced circumstances with two of her three sisters. She is also fascinated by curies and sets out to gather her own collection that focuses on fossil fish. Tossed into the mix are characters who are also based on real people (both Mary and Elizabeth actually lived in Lyme, and Mary did discover the skeletons of several species) including members of the religious and scientific communities who debated the meaning of fossils and how they related to God's creation and intent. Extinction was a radical concept then, and many people could not accept the fact that something that once lived could no longer exist. Chevalier's research is extensive and she uses that to good effect, recreating Lyme and the time period and making those involved in the discovery and collecting of fossils, including the icthyosaur and plesiosaur, come alive.

Anyone who has read a Miss Marple novel by Agatha Christie knows that underneath the roses and quaint cottages, the English village is not always serene. Major Pettigrew's Last Stand by Helen Simonson examines the pettiness, racism and greed that exists in one village, and frames them in a romance between an elderly major and the local, lovely shopkeeper, Mrs. Ali. Mrs. Ali was born in England but her ancestry is Pakistani and so she is looked upon with some suspicion and is not fully accepted into Edgecomb St. Mary's society. I loved Major Pettigrew's Last Stand for lots of reasons, but I especially liked it because it follows the traditional romance form and, like the very best romance novels, also provides a thoughtful story of substance.

If you, too, have ever been called "obsessively Anglophilic", just go with it and enjoy these novels.

Getting Graphic - by Ruth I must confess that I loathe manga. I think the characters' huge eyes are disturbing, and I find most of the plots mystifying at best and insipid at worst. Even though I've had a number of people explain the appeal, I still don't find them appealing. I'm sure the problem is with me since millions of other people seem to enjoy manga.  I do, however, occasionally enjoy a good graphic novel and I've read three this past week that hit the spot. You can find all of them in library's teen collection.

I was recently in Amsterdam, and when I got back, I read A Family Secret, a graphic novel that is set in that city during World War II. The story is about two girls - one Dutch and the other a Jewish German who left Germany with her family to escape the Nazis.  The Dutch family members represent a variety of Dutch people's positions during the war:  one brother joins the Resistance; another joins the army and fights in Russia with the Germans; the father is a policeman who finds no other choice than to keep doing his job even when the Nazis require him to do things his family would rather he didn't; and the girl and mother are sickened by what's happening in their city.  The story was compelling and the twist at the end was satisfying.  I'm looking forward to reading the companion book, The Search.

Oregon is the home of the most recent gold medalist in fencing, and so I decided to read a bit more about the sport when I saw Foiled by Jane Yolen on the shelf. Aliera is a loner at school who is awesome at fencing. She basically goes from high school to fencing lessons to home, and then does it all over the next day. She doesn't need anyone, and the other students certainly don't seem to need her. But then the new school year starts and a gorgeous new boy ends up being her lab partner. What to do? Her fencing instructor has always said she needs to protect her heart, but that's now proving to be difficult. I thought this was going to be a straightforward romance, but it turned out to be something a little different.  

Another sort of different story is Prime Baby by Gene Luen Yang. Many of us who have siblings have wondered at one time or another if our brothers and sisters might have come from outer space. When Thaddeus's young sister begins making noises, all of which come out in prime numbers (eg. "ga ga ga" and "ga ga ga ga ga"), he thinks his sister might be an alien. Everybody thinks he's crazy, but then something happens that surprises everyone BUT Thaddeus. I liked the sassy, sarky kid - he's got brains, imagination and, in the end, heart.

Buried Secrets - by Ruth

Many mystery novels feature figurative and sometimes literal skeletons in the closet, but there are a number of titles where the skeletons are out of the closet and into the ground. The Crossing Places is one of those, and it's a good mystery in a brand new series by Elly Griffiths. Ruth Galloway is a late thirty-something, overweight archaeology professor teaching at a new university in the county of Norfolk, England. When the bones of a young girl show up in the salt-marsh close to her home, DCI Harry Nelson asks for her help in figuring out how old they are. Turns out, they belong to an Iron Age girl, but it's not long before a much more recent skeleton appears. Are these the bones of the girl who went missing a decade ago?  Nelson's desperate to solve that mystery and help the parents get on with their lives. The ending is a bit melodramatic, but I liked the book and especially the atmospheric setting and unusual character of Ruth. I'm looking forward to The Janus Stone, the second in the series coming out in the fall of 2010. For two other mysteries with forensic anthropological and archaeological bents, read Haunted Ground by Erin Hart and Old Bones by Aaron Elkins, one of my favorite mysteries ever.

Lawyers and Solicitors and Barristers, Oh My! - by Ruth All of my siblings are attorneys which means that the conversation at family gatherings can be a bit contentious and peppered with legalese. This talk, coupled with the law classes I took as an undergraduate in political science, has at least given me a decent grounding in the American legal system. Most everything I know about the English judicial system, however, has come from mystery novels and television.  A patron recently introduced me to a great but, alas, short mystery series starring some young London legal eagles and an Oxford professor. I am sometimes baffled by all of the lawyerly terminology, but that hasn't prevented me from enjoying the banter that goes on amongst the five principal players including Cantrip who has an "inferior" education (Cambridge rather than Oxford) and Julia, who gets her knickers in a twist on a fairly regular basis. The Shortest Way to Hades finds them investigating the death of a young woman who has turned greedy and demanded 100,000 pounds in exchange for her signature on a document that will allow an heiress to avoid massive taxes on a multiple million pound inheritance. Was the girl pushed over the balcony or was it suicide?  As Hilary Tamar (the Oxford professor) points out, if it was murder, then the wrong girl died. For more judicial antics, try the Rumpole of the Bailey series by John Mortimer. While not the first in the series, Rumpole and the Penge Bungalow Murders provides the back-story on Horace Rumpole's early years. For a wonderful television show about an English law firm and some courtroom drama, watch Kavanagh Q.C. starring the fabulous John Thaw. Any other great stuff out there to amuse me while also increasing my knowledge of law in Great Britain?

New Year's Reading Resolutions: More Murder! - by Ruth 2009 was not a banner year for me, reading-wise. I didn't even average one book a week and I didn't really enjoy a majority of the forty-five that I did read. This year I've made the following reading resolutions:

1.  Read more.
2.  Read more of what I like.
3.  Read new (to me) authors and series.

To make sure I got in the spirit of things early (and to maybe actually keep my resolutions), I've started out with a bang. One of my favorite genres is British mystery, and I've read three in the past 15 days. I was looking forward to The Various Haunts of Men by Susan Hill not only because I liked the dark and brooding cover (yes, I DO judge a book in part by it's cover), but it is the first in what looked like a character-driven mystery series.  I was hoping that it might be a good read-alike for Elizabeth George fans. Oddly, DCI Simon Serrailler, the detective after which the series is named, isn't featured much in the first book; rather it's Freya Graffham, a detective in his department, who takes the lead in trying to solve a series of disappearances in the fictional English cathedral town of Lafferton. There are many, many characters to keep track of, and if I hadn't just gulped it down in a few days, I might have had some trouble keeping all the threads straight. On the whole, it was a satisfying mystery (although I'm a bit peeved at the author for one particular part which I'll not mention here to avoid spoiling the plot) and I plan to read the other three books in the series later this year.  

I generally like to read mystery series in order, but I made an exception for Dark Mirror, the latest Brock and Kolla police procedural by Barry Maitland, because it's about murder in the library - how very Clue™-ish!  A beautiful young woman who looks much like the Pre-Raphaelite women she is studying, is poisoned with arsenic and keels over in the London Library. Per usual, plenty of suspects appear, all with good reasons for wanting her dead. I really enjoyed this book with the exception of the way the librarians at various libraries in London seemed to hand over patrons' reading records willy-nilly! If you like to read mysteries in order, the first in this series is The Marx Sisters.  I plan to now go back to the beginning and read from there.

The third in my January mystery triumvirate is Fear of Drowning by Peter Turnbull, the first title in the Chief Inspector Hennessey series. Hennessey is with the North Yorkshire Police, and as I've been to York several times, it was fun to recognize some of the places mentioned. The banter between Hennessey and his sergeant, Yellich, is witty, but other than that, I wasn't all that keen on this mystery. Maybe it was because all of the other characters in the book, including the victims, were not very likeable.  I think fans of British police procedurals will like it, but I'm not sure yet whether I'll go any further with the series.

So far, I am well on my way to achieving my reading goals for 2010, but if anyone has good suggestions for what I should read in this genre, please let me know!

My Brother Sam is SO Dead - by Ruth

Sometimes there are classics to be read over and over, and sometimes there are older books from which we just need to move on. Now, I'm not saying that Johnny Tremain is a bad book or that, to quote my favorite teen literature blog, Reading Rants, "My Brother Sam is SO Dead", but there are newer books that are just as, if not more, engaging, well-written and informative about a bygone era. I've been reading about the Revolutionary War lately and have found some quite good, newish fiction for teens on the topic.

The thing I love about historical fiction is that authors can take some pretty bare facts and weave a story that helps us imagine what it might have been like to live in a time long past. Something *is* known about Deborah Sampson because she wrote an autobiographical piece entitled "The Female Review" and went around the nation in her later years dressed as a soldier telling audiences about her time in disguise. In Soldier's Secret, Sheila Solomon Klass takes the bones of Deborah's existence and brings her to life, imagining the creation and maintenance of her alter ego, Robert Shurtliff, as she lived among and fought with the men in the Continental Army.

Nathan Hale spoke one of the most famous lines in Revolutionary War history, but other than that, I knew virtually nothing about him. In Spy!, Anna Myers tells Hale's story from both Hale's point of view and that of Jonah, a fictional student of Nathan's, bringing the people of war-time Connecticut to life and telling us more about the young man who said "I only regret that I have but one life to give my country." Check out these other recent young adult novels for more perspectives on the Revolutionary War: Chains: Seeds of America by Laurie Halse Anderson and The Pox Party by M.T. Anderson.  For an entertaining and helpful list of more historical fiction for teens, see Reading Rants' list, Historical Fiction for Hipsters: Stories from the past that won’t make you snore!