Faithful by Alice Hoffman - 2016 - 288 Pages

 

Faithful by Alice Hoffman - 2016 - 288 Pages

Alice Hoffman works I have so far read:

The Marriage of Opposites- 2015

"Everything My Mother Taught Me" - 2016

"The Book Store Sisters" -2022

The Foretelling - 2006

"Conjure" - 2014

Aquamarine- 2001

The Ice Queen - 2006

Property Of -1977

Skylight- 2007

The Invisible Hour 2023

Rules of Magic- 2017

Practical Magic - 1997

Faithful- 2016

" From the New York Times bestselling author of The Marriage of Opposites and The Dovekeepers comes a soul-searching story about a young woman struggling to redefine herself and the power of love, family, and fate.

Growing up on Long Island, Shelby Richmond is an ordinary girl until one night an extraordinary tragedy changes her fate. Her best friend’s future is destroyed in an accident, while Shelby walks away with the burden of guilt.

What happens when a life is turned inside out? When love is something so distant it may as well be a star in the sky? Faithful is the story of a survivor, filled with emotion—from dark suffering to true happiness—a moving portrait of a young woman finding her way in the modern world. A fan of Chinese food, dogs, bookstores, and men she should stay away from, Shelby has to fight her way back to her own future. In New York City she finds a circle of lost and found souls—including an angel who’s been watching over her ever since that fateful icy night.

Here is a character you will fall in love with, so believable and real and endearing, that she captures both the ache of loneliness and the joy of finding yourself at last. For anyone who’s ever been a hurt teenager, for every mother of a daughter who has lost her way, Faithful is a roadmap.

Alice Hoffman’s “trademark alchemy” (USA TODAY) and her ability to write about the “delicate balance between the everyday world and the extraordinary” (WBUR) make this an unforgettable story. With beautifully crafted prose, Alice Hoffman spins hope from heartbreak in this profoundly moving novel." From Simon and Schuster

The Bookish Libra has a marvelous review 

I love the work of Alice Hoffman and hope to eventually read all of her works.  

As I read Faithful I did so from my perspective as the father of three daughters in their 20s.  I could not but think how negatively I would have reacted to two of the three men Shelby was involved with. In one case of an ex-convict covered with tattoos I would have been totally wrong,  

Shelby has a hard time bonding with people.  Her shaved head does not help.  She steals dogs and a cat and provides them with a loving home.  

We follow Shelby as she evolves into a less inward bound person.  I found the ending very gratifying after much previous pain for Shelby.  There are lots of interesting side encounters throughout Faithful.

Alice Hoffman is the author of more than thirty works of fiction, including Magic Lessons: The Prequel to Practical Magic, The World That We Knew, The Rules of Magic, The Marriage of Opposites, Practical Magic, The Book of Magic, The Red Garden, the Oprah’s Book Club selection Here on Earth, The Museum of Extraordinary Things, and The Dovekeepers. She lives near Boston.

School for Love by Olivia Manning. - 1951- Introduction by Jane Smiley 2009

School for Love by Olivia Manning - 1951

OLIVIA MANNING (1908–1980) was born in Portsmouth, England, and spent much of her childhood in Northern Ireland. Her father, Oliver, was a penniless British sailor who rose to become a naval commander, and her mother, Olivia, had a prosperous Anglo-Irish background. Manning trained as a painter at the Portsmouth School of Art, then moved to London and turned to writing. She published her first novel under her own name in 1938 (she had published several potboilers in a local paper under the name Jacob Morrow while a teenager). The next year she married R. D. “Reggie” Smith, and the couple moved to Romania, where Smith was employed by the British Council. In World War II, the couple fled before the Nazi advance, first to Greece and then to Jerusalem, where they lived until the end of the war. Manning wrote several novels during the 1950s, but her first real success as a novelist was The Great Fortune (1960), the first of six books concerning Guy and Harriet Pringle, whose wartime experiences and troubled marriage echoed that of the diffident Manning and her gregarious husband. In the 1980s these novels were collected in two volumes, The Balkan Trilogy (available as an NYRB Classic) and The Levant Trilogy, known collectively as The Fortunes of War. In addition to her novels, Manning wrote essays and criticism, history, a screenplay, and a book about Burmese and Siamese cats. She was made Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1976, and died four years later." From The New York Review of Books. Publisher of School for Love 

School for Love is a very powerful exquisitely rendered work of art. It also has by far the best portrayal of a Siamese Cat in a literary work ever. (Sadly I cannot find her book on Burmese and Siamese cats on Amazon.)

This novel centers on Felix, a British boy whose mother has just died. Felix and his mother lived in Baghdad back when Iraq was a British colony, so Felix, whose father is also deceased, has to make a long journey home by ship at a time when berths on ships are reserved for service members, diplomats, and others who are directly working to bring the second world war to a close. He has a sort-of aunt in Jerusalem named Miss Bohun, and she offers to take him in while he waits for a place on the ship. Miss Bohun was an orphan herself and was taken in by Felix’s paternal grandparents, so she grew up with Felix’s father, as a foster-sibling. Felix has never met Miss Bohun before, but he has heard his mother grumbling about her. Felix who seems about thirteen, is first and foremost a lonely, grieving child who desperately needs love. One might think that Miss Bohun, an orphan herself, would be sympathetic to Felix’s feelings, but you would be wrong.


There is a lot of drama involving the other casts in the house.


It soon becomes clear – to the reader at least – that Miss Bohun is a manipulative monster, a rather absurd and disillusioned creature who considers herself a paragon of virtue when in fact she is anything but. She appears to have taken over the running of the house from its former occupant, the Polish refugee, Frau Leszno. Having been relegated to the position of Miss Bohun’s cook/housekeeper, Frau Leszno is currently residing in the servants’ quarters, a reversal of fortunes she deeply resents. In this scene, Miss Bohun tells Felix how she came to live at the house, clearly implying that she was doing Frau Leszno a huge favour by taking control of the situation. Or, if one looks at it another way, Miss Bohun saw an opportunity for personal gain which she seized without a moment’s hesitation. Felix falls in love with Faro, the resident Siamese cat.


You can decide for yourself if Miss Bohun knocks a pregnant war widow boarding in the house down the stairs, causing her a miscarriage, because of jealousy over others in the house liking her.


The close of School of Love really an amazing partially happy ending.


"Read today, it seems a work of uncanny prescience. The grave concerns of our own age—religious fanaticism, passionate competing territorial claims—are here in embryo, set into the precisely rendered, everyday texture of an era that has vanished. The alien British feel that Du Bois complained of in 1956 was not, in fact, cultural—it is a characteristic of Manning’s unique vision and style, her cool way of dissecting her world and her experience, in which even the most pitiable or terrifying circumstances are worthy of interested and detailed scrutiny." From Jane Smiley's introduction

The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride - 2023- 512 Pages

 

The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride - 2023- 512 Pages

YouTube has numerous very well done videos focusing on this book.

I was totally drawn into the lives of the characters in The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store from the intriguing open to the beautiful close.

"From James McBride, author of the bestselling Oprah’s Book Club pick Deacon King Kong and the National Book Award–winning The Good Lord Bird, a novel about small-town secrets and the people who keep them

In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new development, the last thing they expected to find was a skeleton at the bottom of a well. Who the skeleton was and how it got there were two of the long-held secrets kept by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighborhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side and shared ambitions and sorrows. Chicken Hill was where Moshe and Chona Ludlow lived when Moshe integrated his theater and where Chona ran the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store. When the state came looking for a deaf boy to institutionalize him, it was Chona and Nate Timblin, the Black janitor at Moshe’s theater and the unofficial leader of the Black community on Chicken Hill, who worked together to keep the boy safe.

As these characters’ stories overlap and deepen, it becomes clear how much the people who live on the margins of white, Christian America struggle and what they must do to survive. When the truth is finally revealed about what happened on Chicken Hill and the part the town’s white establishment played in it, McBride shows us that even in dark times, it is love and community—heaven and earth—that sustain us.

Bringing his masterly storytelling skills and his deep faith in humanity to The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, James McBride has written a novel as compassionate as Deacon King Kong and as inventive as The Good Lord Bird." From the publisher 

Pottstown, Pennslyvania in the 1930s is a very diverse divided community with African Americans who still look on South Carolina or Georgia as home, immigrants from Jewish communities in Europe and white people who pretend their ancestors came over on the Mayflower.  I really appreciated how McBride showed us the difference between various Jewish immigrant communities, from Romanians, Hungarian,  Russian to the want to be a "real white person" arrogant Germans.  Many of the white people look down on African Americans and are not crazy for immigrants.

At points the novel is heartbreaking,  at other times (especially during the concerts) it is tremendous fun and the ending is so beautiful and moving. 

James McBride is the author of the New York Times–bestselling Oprah’s Book Club selection Deacon King Kong, the National Book Award–winning The Good Lord Bird, the American classic The Color of Water, the novels Song Yet Sung and Miracle at St. Anna, the story collection Five-Carat Soul, and Kill ’Em and Leave, a biography of James Brown. The recipient of a National Humanities Medal and an accomplished musician, McBride is also a distinguished writer in residence at New York University.

I hope to read all of his novels and his memoir.

Olivia Manning: A Woman at War –2013 - by Deirdre David

 

Olivia Manning: A Woman at War by Deirdre David- 2013

Olivia Manning 

Born: March 2, 1908, Portsmouth, United Kingdom

Died: July 23, 1980 (age 72 years), Isle of Wight, United Kingdom

Partner: R. D. Smith (1939–)

Notable works: Fortunes of War Trilogy and The Levant Trilogy 

"Olivia Manning: A Woman at War is the first literary biography of the twentieth-century novelist Olivia Manning. It tells the story of a writer whose life and work were shaped by her own fierce ambition, and, like many of her generation, the events and aftermath of the Second World War. From the time she left Portsmouth for London in the mid-1930s determined to become a famous writer, through her wartime years in the Balkans and the Middle East, and until her death in London in 1980, Olivia Manning was a dedicated and hard-working author. Married to a British Council lecturer stationed in Bucharest, Olivia Manning arrived in Romania on the 3rd September 1939, the fateful day when Allied forces declared war on Germany. For the duration of World War Two, she kept one step ahead of invading German forces as she and her husband fled Romania for Greece, and then Greece for the Middle East, where they stayed until the end of the war. These tumultuous wartime years are the subject of her best-known and most transparently autobiographical novels, The Balkan Trilogy and The Levant Trilogy.

Olivia Manning refused to be labelled a 'feminist,' but her novels depict with cutting insight and sardonic wit the marginal position of women striving for independent identity in arenas frequently controlled by men, whether on the frontlines of war or in the publishing world of the 1950s. However, she did not just write about World War Two and women's lives. Amongst other things, Manning published fiction about making do in Britain's post-war Age of Austerity, about desecration of the environment through uncontrolled development, and about the painful adjustment to post-war British life for young men. As the author of thirteen published novels, two volumes of short stories, several works of non-fiction, and a regular reviewer of contemporary fiction, she was a visible presence on the British literary scene throughout her life and her work provides a detailed insight into the period.

Grounded in thorough research and enriched by discussion of previously unexamined manuscripts and letters, Olivia Manning: A Woman at War is a timely study of Olivia Manning's remarkable life. Deirdre David integrates incisive critical analysis of Manning's writing with extensive discussion of the historical contexts of her fiction." From Oxford University Press 

Olivia Manning: Writer and War introduced me to an Writer I should have long ago read. Manning was friends or at least acquainted with many well known literary figures. She was very close to the poet Stevie Smith. Her novels deal extensively on marriages. Her own was problematic but shaped her life. She was totally into the reading life from her childhood on. David showed what Manning's life was like during World War Two and in the highly rationed days in post War London. Manning was seen by some as a "difficult" person, judgemental and superior. She had numerous sexual partners as did her husband. She became pregnant at 36 but the child died in her uterus at seven months but she has to carry it until it was delivered at nine months. She never emotionally recovered from this.

Deirdre David is Professor of English Emerita at Temple University. She has been a member of the faculty at Smith College, the University of Maryland, and Temple University. At Temple she was chair of the department for five years and, throughout her teaching career, has offered undergraduate and graduate classes in Victorian Literature, the History of the British Novel, Postcolonial Literature, and British Literature Since 1945.

Professor David is the author of Fictions of Resolution in Three Victorian Novels (1981), Intellectual Women and Victorian Patriarchy (1987), Rule Britannia: Women, Empire, and Victorian Writing (1995), and Fanny Kemble: A Performed Life (2007).  She is also the editor of the Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel (2001) and co-editor (with Eileen Gillooly) of Contemporary Dickens (Ohio State University Press, 

"Hinterland" - A Short Story by Carol Shields- 20 Pages - included in The Short Stories of Carol Shields- 2004

 Buriedinprint.com 

This year, Buried in Print, a marvelous blog I have followed for over ten years,is doing a read through of the short stories of Carol Shields. I hope to participate fully in this event.

The more I read in the stories of Carol Shields the more grateful I am to Buried in Print for turning me on to her work. There are sixty some stories in the collection,it is my hope to read and post on them all in 2024.

"Hinterland" is the 30th short story by Carol Shields upon which I have posted.  The story centers on a middles aged married couple with two grown daughters.  One of the daughters has recently moved back home after a fight with her husband.  

"EVERYONE SEEMS TO HAVE STAYED PUT this year except Meg and Roy Sloan of Milwaukee, Wisconsin...Although both Meg and Roy are patriotic in a vague and non-rhetorical way, and good mature citizens who pay their taxes and vote and hold opinions on gun legislation and abortion, they’ve chosen this year to ignore the exhortation of their president to stay home and see America first. The Grand Canyon can wait, Roy says in the sociable weekend voice he more and more distrusts. The Black Hills can wait. And the Everglades. And Chesapeake Bay..."

They have decided to spend three weeks in Paris. 

"Over the years, in the seasonal rounds of business and pleasure and special anniversaries, Meg and Roy Sloan have set foot on most of the continents of the world: Asia, Australia, South America—and, of course, Europe. They have, in fact, been to Paris on two previous occasions...And now, in the autumn of 1986, an uneasy, untrustful time in the world’s history, the Sloans have returned. “But why?” quite a number of their friends said. “Why Paris, of all places!” .

Shields packs so much into twenty pages, a terrorist scare at a museum, exploring shops, dining, and an account of the dynamics of a marriage.

Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs - by Camilla Townsend- 2019 - 320 Pages

Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs - by Camilla Townsend- 2019 - 320 Pages 

The commonly accepted view of preconquest Aztec culture is that of a savage society in which thousands of people had their hearts cut out by priests in order to appease their Gods. Montezuma is depicted as a coward. In her amazing book Professor Townsend uses her knowledge of indigenous languages to give us a much more nuanced view.

"In November 1519, Hernando Cortés walked along a causeway leading to the capital of the Aztec kingdom and came face to face with Moctezuma. That story--and the story of what happened afterwards--has been told many times, but always following the narrative offered by the Spaniards. After all, we have been taught, it was the Europeans who held the pens. But the Native Americans were intrigued by the Roman alphabet and, unbeknownst to the newcomers, they used it to write detailed histories in their own language of Nahuatl. Until recently, these sources remained obscure, only partially translated, and rarely consulted by scholars.

For the first time, in Fifth Sun, the history of the Aztecs is offered in all its complexity based solely on the texts written by the indigenous people themselves. Camilla Townsend presents an accessible and humanized depiction of these native Mexicans, rather than seeing them as the exotic, bloody figures of European stereotypes. The conquest, in this work, is neither an apocalyptic moment, nor an origin story launching Mexicans into existence. The Mexica people had a history of their own long before the Europeans arrived and did not simply capitulate to Spanish culture and colonization. Instead, they realigned their political allegiances, accommodated new obligations, adopted new technologies, and endured.

This engaging revisionist history of the Aztecs, told through their own words, explores the experience of a once-powerful people facing the trauma of conquest and finding ways to survive, offering an empathetic interpretation for experts and non-specialists." From Oxford University Press

I was very moved by Townsend's reinterpretation of views La Malinche as a traitor to her own people, criticizing her collaboration with the Spanish conquistadors. She is seen as complicit in the downfall of the Aztec Empire, facilitating the invasion and subjugation of her own culture. As Townsend says Malinche had no ties to the Aztecs, the enemy of her people who she had every reason to hate. Townsend goes into details about the lives of women as well as the role of marriage among royalty.

If you have any interest in Meso-American history, this is a book for you.

Coming to My Senses: The Making of a Counterculture Cook by Alice Waters - 2017- 320 Pages

 

Coming to My Senses: The Making of a Counterculture Cook by Alice Waters - 2017 - 320 Pages

This week's menu at Chez Panisse

YouTube has a number of videos on Alice Waters and her restaurant Chez Panisse.

"New York Times bestselling and critically acclaimed memoir from cultural icon and culinary standard bearer Alice Waters recalls the circuitous road and tumultuous times leading to the opening of what is arguably America's most influential restaurant.

 

When Alice Waters opened the doors of her "little French restaurant" in Berkeley, California in 1971 at the age of 27, no one ever anticipated the indelible mark it would leave on the culinary landscape—Alice least of all. Fueled in equal parts by naiveté and a relentless pursuit of beauty and pure flavor, she turned her passion project into an iconic institution that redefined American cuisine for generations of chefs and food lovers. In Coming to My Senses Alice retraces the events that led her to 1517 Shattuck Avenue and the tumultuous times that emboldened her to find her own voice as a cook when the prevailing food culture was embracing convenience and uniformity.  Moving from a repressive suburban upbringing to Berkeley in 1964 at the height of the Free Speech Movement and campus unrest, she was drawn into a bohemian circle of charismatic figures whose views on design, politics, film, and food would ultimately inform the unique culture on which Chez Panisse was founded. Dotted with stories, recipes, photographs, and letters, Coming to My Senses is at once deeply personal and modestly understated, a quietly revealing look at one woman's evolution from a rebellious yet impressionable follower to a respected activist who effects social and political change on a global level through the common bond of food." From the publisher 

I highly recommend Coming to My Senses: The Making of a Counterculture Cook by Alice Waters.  It is numerous things combined,  a  memoir of growing up in middle class America in the 1950s and 60, a marvelous account of the counter cultural anti-Vietnam war era, her transformational time in Paris, her several romances and of course her love of food culminating in the opening of her restaurant in 1971.  

"Alice Waters (born April 28, 1944, Chatham, New Jersey, U.S.) is an American restaurateur, chef, and food activist who was a leading proponent of the “slow food” movement, which billed itself as the healthy antithesis to fast food.

Waters studied French culture at the University of California, Berkeley, receiving a bachelor’s degree in 1967. She participated in the 1960s Free Speech Movement, and the idealism that was then prevalent at Berkeley was reflected in her ideology throughout her career. She studied abroad for a time in France, and it was there that her love of farm-to-plate dining took hold. Following graduation, Waters spent a year studying at the International Montessori School in London before returning to California to teach.

In the 1970s the United States was still years away from the “foodie revolution,” which by 2009 had brought farmers’ markets and organic foods to a larger audience. Waters’s prescient passion for whole, unprocessed foods inspired her and her friend Lindsey Shere to found a market-inspired restaurant in Berkeley, California, despite having little capital and no experience as restaurateurs. When Chez Panisse opened in 1971, it was with a relatively untrained staff, a set fixed-price menu that changed daily, and an uncompromising dedication to a vision that seemed to many untenable: Waters wanted to create meals that used only locally grown seasonal ingredients, and she wanted to forge relationships with the producers and suppliers of these items. 

The advocacy venture for which she became best known was the Edible Schoolyard, originally established in 1995. Waters began the program by planting a garden in the yard of Berkeley’s Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School. A cooking classroom was installed a few years later, and by 2009 the Edible Schoolyard was a thriving educational tool, though not a source of lunchroom produce. The program expanded to include affiliates in other cities, including New Orleans and Los Angeles. From the Edible Schoolyard grew Waters’s new cause, that of persuading the government to increase funding to improve school lunch programs. Her indomitable dedication to providing schoolchildren with more healthful-eating options earned Waters a fair share of detractors, who argued that seasonal food was a dispensable luxury for already underfunded schools. As with her restaurant, however, her philosophy regarding the project was “If we do it right, the money will come.”

The James Beard Foundation named Chez Panisse outstanding restaurant and Waters outstanding chef in 1992; the foundation also presented her with a lifetime achievement award in 2004. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2007, received the French Legion of Honor in 2009, and was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2015. Waters wrote a number of cookbooks and We Are What We Eat: A Slow Food Manifesto (2021; written with Bob Carrau and Cristina Mueller). Her memoir, Coming to My Senses: The Making of a Counterculture Cook, was published in 2017." From The Encyclopedia Britanica