LIFE AFTER LIFE – KATE ATKINSON

Oops, didn't get my book finished for book club! Well dang it, when a month has 5 Mondays it's hard to keep appointments straight! Never-the-less I did finally get it finished, then it took me a few days to decide if I liked it. It wasn't one of the best I have read, but it was interesting. At some place in the middle it got put aside for a day or two so I could ponder.

When I tell friends I just read a “born again” novel their eyebrows raise because they all know that being a hard-core mainstream protestant I don't go in for any of that charismatic fallderoll. (I don't mind those who do, to each his own, and every person needs to find his or her own path.) But, this isn't that kind of “born again.” Ursula, the protagonist is literally reborn many times, thence living many parts of her life over.

The first chapter is but a page and a half. Ursula is 30 (in 1930) and assassinates Hitler only to be instantly killed herself. The next chapter is her stillbirth during a snowstorm in 1910 taking less than a page and a half. Next chapter – birth again, but this time the doctor arrives in time to resuscitate her. The chapters then begin to get longer and the method of death comes later, and often quite shockingly. It was necessary to put a sticky note on the contents page so in order to go back and check each time a new chapter started to get my bearings. I have never done that before! Markers on footnote pages and on map pages yes, but never on the contents page. Many chapters/lives take place leading up to and during World War Two. Even though every time she starts a segment of her life over she doesn't remember the other life, each reliving leaves some residual impressions and dark fears. She even tells a psychotherapist that she feels that her life seems like a palimpsest which it actually is!

Some of my friends who read it didn't like the jumping from time periods and the lost feeling of not knowing where you were each new chapter. That was disconcerting at times, but I liked it constructed that way. If you want to read this book and don't like that style I guess you could read all the chapters by date, as I have heard some have done with Frazier's book Cold Mountain. Probably the author wants us to feel as disjointed as Ursula does sometimes. The characterization is really good, her family is quirky, but also full of poignant and often sad people. My only big beef is that in several re-livings there is a murderer of young girls. Sometimes the murders are evaded and sometimes don't. He is seen by the reader but never unmasked in the book, and he appears to never see justice. I hate it when that happens, even though I know in real life many, if not most, murders go unsolved.

Since this review ended sooner than I thought please allow me to digress about my discount used book from abebooks.com. I read most of my books from the library, but if it is for a reading group I often like to buy old and used copies so I can write in the margins or pass them along to friends and family. Now, I love abebooks.com but once in a while the description does not accurately describe my purchase as it did not this time. A few times I have complained to them but I gave that up as too much of a nuisance. I wanted a beautiful hard copy to put in my personal library, but the one I received is a discarded copy from a library which apparently does not use bookends. (Some of you will know what I mean.) My copy has lain too long at an angle on the shelf, the spine is broken in three places, and the beautiful decorative front end page has been torn out. I truly hate it when the sales description says, “good” when the piece is actually simply “acceptable.” One for my garage sale next summer. 

LIMBO

Limbo is a funny word. When I was a child in Van Wert, Ohio some of my elementary friends talked about a thing called "limbo" and they meant a place an unrepentant or unbaptized person went upon death which was not Hell but not Heaven. Sometimes I could give them money to put in a little can for their church and they would pray these people out of limbo, or so they said, if I am remembering it correctly. It was always a little scary to me and I never really bought it, so as the word "limbo" evolved over the decades to be used as in Webter's online third and fourth definition (an intermediate or transitional place or state; a state of uncertainty) I am now more comfortable using it. Well, that is where I have felt I have been since April 22, 2014 when my mother passed away. I never ever, even when we were told in October that she would never get better, imagined my life without my mother. She was an only child, I was her only daughter, I had only sons and only grandsons. It was just she and I for so many years and for the last six she lived with me. Limbo for me has followed. Isn't it a strange coincidence my first blog is about a girl in limbo?

RIP Marjorie Ellen Griesinger Chapman 1926-2014

IF I STAY – Gayle Forman

I work part-time in a public library in a very small town and last week a young girl came in to sign up for a library card. All went well until she was asked if she was looking for anything in particular. “Yes, If I Stay,” she said. “So sorry was the reply, we don't have that one,” and we knew because that was not the first inquiry and since the movie is newly in the cinema it is in demand. I hate hate hate it when that happens, I feel we should be able to get books fast and as soon as there is any indication it will be in demand. But such is not the case in small towns in Indiana with tiny budgets. Nevertheless, I then rushed out to buy it, read it, and donate it to the library so I don't have to witness any other eager teen's dismay.

If there is anyone who hasn't contemplated the state of “limbo” (that transitional state of not being in one place and yet not fully in the other) I have never met them. As a matter of fact that seemed to be a frequent topic among my school friends when I was about 11 or 12. No one seems to know if there really is such a state or what it would feel like to be thus. If I Stay is a tale of a girl not only in limbo following a car accident, but realizing she is to make the decision to pass on into death where all of her immediate family have gone, or to stay on the earth and live on which means bearing unquestionable grief, pain, and uncertainty.

Sounds like a painful read doesn't it? But it isn't! It is most certainly a teen book but as an adult I fully enjoyed it. It is fascinating to follow Mia from the scene of the accident to the hospital waiting room where she watches her extended family grapple with their own grief, worry, and acceptance. She must weigh the consequences of either of her choices as they do also. Some beg her to stay, but some give her permission to go if she wants to, and both of those feel like gifts to her and measures of lovingly granting her freedom.

I liked the structure of the book with alternate chapters being in the present then in the past. Characterizations were deftly written making the reader feel vested in many characters. Mia's parents are not portrayed as perfect and certainly not as traditional, which is refreshing. Friends, like Henry, and Kim have problems and foibles of their own that they are working through.

The love story between Mia and Adam is also non-traditional but feels real. This small book is an afternoon read and I am pretty sure should be a satisfying little movie. In the end of my copy there is a section of book club discussion questions, but better than that a little bit about where Mia is four years later. It will make you want to pick up the sequel.

HOTEL ON THE CORNER OF BITTER AND SWEET – Jamie Ford

“What his son, Marty, never fully understood was that deep down there was an Ethel-shaped hole in Henry's life, and without her, all he felt was the draft of loneliness, cold and sharp, the years slipping away like blood from a wound that never heals.” (sigh) That quotation on page four portended a book to feed my soul. It is about his son not understanding how Henry feels at the loss of his much beloved wife, Ethel.

Occasionally such a book finds its way into your life. One with sentence structure and characterization to take your breath away. This is one for me. After reading it for the second time, it still holds that same “food for my heart and soul” as it did at our first encounter.

I also get to give away 20 brand new copies of this title on April 23, 2014 as a "giver" for World Book Night and my prayer is that those copies will find souls to nourish as it did mine. The book binding is artistically satisfying. A mix of butterscotch, vanilla, and green colors combined with a depiction of children by the sea in the mist (Henry Lee and Keiko Okabe) are enough to elicit feelings of anticipation for a great read.

Hotel is so well written as to make the reader actually feel what it must have been like to witness the nightmare of the rounding up for internment of Japanese-Americans during WW II. Families were torn apart, losing all their belongings, their homes, jobs, being persecuted by their own country that they were loyal to and mostly in which they were born. The people watching the nightmare transpire were equally emotional, some feeling confusion, helplessness, and broken-heartedness, but others with glee, hatred, and feelings of superiority.

But this book is not really about the internment. It is a multiple love story and one of finding oneself after major life altering events. In Seattle, Washington second generation Chinese-American Henry Lee lives in Chinatown while his best friend Keiko lives in Japantown. The Chinese and Japanese of Seattle are at odds already because back in China a war still rages between the countries, animosity seeping into the American subcultures. WW II is raging and public sentiment toward people of Japanese origin is quickly getting bitter and violent. Henry and Keiko both have earned scholarships to go to a white school where they work together in the cafeteria. She is a third generation American-Japanese girl. Her grandfather immigrated long ago and both her parents and Keiko were born in Washington and speak no Japanese. Henry and Keiko become best friends, spending many hours and days together haunting Jazz clubs listening outside to the music, spending time with Henry's jazz-playing friend, Sheldon, and haunting record stores looking for a rare record.

When the US military trucks show up with weapon-bearing soldiers to round up all the Japanese-Americans and herd them onto trains a chilling scene follows as Henry tries frantically to find his friend, and to understand why this is happening. Of course looters take over the Japanese neighborhoods immediately and it all happens so fast. It made me feel physically sick reading about it. We can only hope that we will not soon be repeating that in America, but today I see much of the same resentments being openly shown to our Muslim-Americans and it seems eerily similar.

After 40+ years pass The Panama Hotel is sold to a young woman who plans to restore it to its full prewar glory. In the basement she finds a cache of stored mementos and valuables belonging to the families that were sent away in 1942. Those families had thought they would be returning soon, which they never did. Henry recognizes Keiko's parasol.

On page 7 - “The more Henry thought about the shabby old knickknacks, the forgotten treasures, the more he wondered if his own broken heart might be found in there, hidden among the unclaimed possessions of another time. Boarded up in the basement of a condemned hotel. Lost, but never forgotten.” Thus Henry, with the help of his son and his dying best friend, embarks on a mission.

I hope I didn't make this book sound maudlin. It isn't at all, and I learned so much about the times in places like Seattle where large numbers of Japanese and Chinese descendants lived together yet very much apart. There is a whole sub-story about Henry trying to find his place as an American while dealing with the old traditions and prejudices of his father, and much irony in history that we can only see in retrospect, such as Mr. Okabe, an American born lawyer, being first persecuted, interned, then sent with the Japanese division of the Army to Europe to fight the Germans. Another favorite line of mine is on page 265 when Henry's father dies and he realizes he has too many obligations and therefore cannot wait for Keiko, his love, to return. He will help his mother in his father's place, go to China to finish his education, marry a nice “Chinese” girl, cover up his sadness and, “...do what he always did, find the sweet among the bitter.”

I'm sure your public library had this book for you to read and if it doesn't ask them to buy it. I will be read and I am glad to have read it twice!

** Footnote: my mother passed away a few days after I finished this entry and I did not get to hand out my free copies. However, my two friends Beth and Wendy did it for me. They passed out 20 copies of The Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet in Dunkirk Indiana and I pray at least some of those books brightened some lives as it did mine.

THE WEIRD SISTERS – Eleanor Brown

Weird. Can that be a sentence on its own? Well the book is weird, the characters are weird, and the title reference to Macbeth is weird because it lead me to think the sisters were going to be witches! They were not witches, they were just “weird.” It is a beauty though, nice iridescent white cover with beautiful and delicate green vines meandering over the cover and through the title. There is also a quotation on the front saying, “See, we love each other. We just don't happen to like each other very much,” which is apropos considering as the reader I didn't particularly like any of them either. The first person plural narrative also gave me pause. At first I kept thinking there must be a fourth person watching the other three referring to “we” all the time, but then there was only the three, therefore a collective first person. Recently I have come across some other contemporary writers using that voice such as Buddha in the Attic by Otsuka but it isn't my favorite.

My friend Wendy says I am weird because since high school, I have loved Shakespeare. I tell her good teachers made it real to me and taught me to appreciate Shakespearean references in contemporary media whether it is in literature, television, or simply in everyday references. This book is full of such references and quotations as well although to ad nauseam sometimes. Three eccentric adult sisters return home with the idea of ministering to their mother who is suffering from breast cancer. Each is really escaping from her failures and fears and is shocked to find her siblings also home. They find themselves revisiting their relationships with each other, dealing with their emotionally distant, renowned Shakespeare scholar/college professor father who insists on answering questions with rhymes, couplets, and quotations from plays, and figure out where they want to go with their futures. All that while dealing with a seriously ill mother and the eccentricities of their small college town in rural Ohio.

The sisters names are all from Shakespeare too and I am sure the author chose them to compliment each personality. The oldest is Rosalind named from “As You Like It” and is so controlling she cannot let the others make decisions but also cannot move on with her fiance to craft a new life on her own. Bianca from “The Taming of the Shrew” is bossy, bitchy, over-sexed, deep in debt, and at a loss for how to start over. Cordelia from “King Lear” has returned home after years of drifting as a drugged hippie, pregnant, and facing 30 with no skills or education.

The plots fit together nicely actually. As the family progresses down the path of surgery, chemotherapy, and rehab with the mother, the women also grow, change, evolve, and move on. For me it was fun to fit in the idea of a whole family who has lived for many decades with no TV, with a penchant for books, and a love of a centuries-dead writer as their compass. I liked it, but what I didn't like was the one plot line of spinster-librarian bowing out and prodding the library board to hire a non-librarian (Bianca) to fill her shoes, indicating that being a librarian isn't rocket-science. What! Librarianship isn't hard, you don't need a degree? Librarians beware when reading this book. But “All's Well that Ends Well” (wink wink).

ALONG THE WAY: THE JOURNEY OF A FATHER AND SON – Martin Sheen & Emelio Estevez with Hope Edelman

I do hate it when I write a review and forget to post it! This one is from August 2013 who knows why it slipped past my attention. Oh well... My church study group decided we wanted to watch the movie The Way with Martin Sheen and Emelio Estevez and also to read their book. We rented the DVD from the library, purchased our books, and met at a group members house this time instead of church. We made popcorn and cookies and had quite a nice party of it. After the movie we discussed both it and the book Along the Way. Great idea. I would recommend both to any discussion group.

The Way is a full length movie. A pilgrim story in which a busy professional father, Tom, must go to Europe to claim the remains and possessions of his son Daniel. Daniel died tragically while hiking the Camino de Santiago (The Way of St. James), a centuries-old pilgrimage over Spanish mountain country to the Cathedral de Santiago. After getting to Spain and collecting his son's things and his ashes Tom decides to make his own pilgrimage and scatter the ashes along the way that Daniel planned to hike. He even uses Daniel's backpack and hiking gear. On his trek Tom rethinks his relationship with his son and also even though he wants to be alone and to be left alone he ends up traveling with three other pilgrims. While hiking together they each work through some serious issues. It may sound dull but it is a really good story and the characters are unique and worth getting to know.

The book Along the Way is a memoir examining the relationship of this father and son. It is a delightful read, is not a “tell-all” of family skeletons, and most definitely not where you would go to get the dirt on Charlie Sheen's recent meltdowns. In dual first person voice Martin and Emelio have written alternating chapters which fit together quite nicely in this respectful book of a mature father and adult son reflecting on their relationship. The construction of the book is a back and forth type of dialog between the chapters. I understand that Hope Edelman conducted interviews with the two, constructed the manuscript, then submitted it to them for review and editing. The tone is respectful even when the chapters contain scenes of family trials, episodes of Martin's drunkenness, and Emilio's misbehavior.

Along the Way begins with Ramon Estevez (Martin's given name) childhood being raised in Dayton, Ohio one of ten children of immigrants. His mother was Irish and his father Spanish. He was raised with lots of love but little support for his desire to be an actor. He was young, just 21, when he married and started his own family. Times were very hard for an aspiring actor with so many responsibilities. With candor, telling stories that had to be painful, Sheen makes it clear how he struggled with being a father, husband, actor and alcoholic. Raised Catholic he also talks often of faith.

While not as philosophical as Sheen, Estevez also reveals his own foibles, struggles, and vices during his journey from “Brat Pack” actor, too young father, and budding screen writer to mature father, son, and responsible adult. The love of family, respect for each other, and dedication to becoming the best persons they can be is elucidated in this lovely book. The vehicle that makes the chapters flow into each other is the backstory of their working together on their move The Way, and their trek to the homeland to meet the relatives in Spain where Sheen's father had been raised. The same area in Spain is where Estevez has chosen to settle and have a vineyard. I would read this book again and I would watch the film again. They make me think and they make me feel hopeful. 

THE NAZI OFFICER'S WIFE – Edith Hahn Beer

Sometimes one needs to read a book that hurts. It helps you to remember to be vigilant so you can be a voice of protest in the present when you witness prejudice, meanness, and injustice. This is such a book. This autobiography by Edith Hahn Beer is very good even if it does make your hair stand on end and your heart ache.

What makes this Holocaust survivor book different is that this educated and outspoken Viennese Jewish woman was forced to hide from Nazi attention, becoming what is referred to as a “U-boat” or a person hiding in plain sight. After being forced into a ghetto and then to a work camp she returned to Vienna to find her family and friends deported or in concentration camps. At first she went underground but finding it too hard to survive she was able to use forged papers from a friend to start a new life in Munich. She married a Nazi Party member, Werner Vetter, held down a job, and bore a child but lived every day with the paralyzing fear of being found out. Edith lost herself during that time. Werner married a complete person that in reality didn't even exist. It came as no surprise that after the war he was not happy with the real person, lawyer, judge who was no longer home cooking and cleaning and being the hausfrau he wanted.

Hahn Beer began her story in the midst of the war, at her job for the Red Cross in a hospital for foreign war criminals where she witnessed a nurse smuggling food to patients and homeless Jews. This is to set the reader up for understanding that there were acts by ordinary citizens trying to deliver mercy during merciless times. She had assumed an alias, was pretending to be an uneducated farm girl and 21 when she was in actuality 29 and highly educated. The next chapter takes the reader back to her happy adolescence and progresses through to when the Nazis have taken over her world and she is denied the opportunity to take her last final to complete her law degree, through her years as a “U-boat” and finally to the present. The construction of the book works well to tell her story. Hahn Beer is never over sentimental, not exceedingly graphic, nor maudlin but her story is clear and heartbreaking. She makes it quite plain that the reader should face facts, the German people did know what was going on, the Christian church did nothing to help and indeed sanctioned the movement, and yet there were and are good people who did and will always step up.

Thank goodness Edith's long time friend and lover Pepi preserved their correspondence and her identity papers enabling her to reclaim her personage after the war and also helping her to reconstruct her experiences decades later. Unfortunately post war Austria under the Soviet occupation was not good. After her marriage to Vetter fell apart Hahn Beer fled to Britain and later to Israel. She died in 2009.

This book is a gem. It is the only one I have read about “U-boat” people. Once I picked it up I couldn't put it down. Knowing it was true at times nearly made my heart stop. In the thirties when Edith and her friends were in college their perspective of Hilter and his ilk were that he/they were idiots and ranters, not real thinkers, and not to be taken seriously soon to be gone. One friend commented that, “There might be a time when people would no longer know the difference.” That conversation brought goosebumps to my arms. Not only for them because that is what happened, but for us as I am afraid that those times may have come today to America. There seem today to be many idiots ranting on the TV and on the radio who are not “wise thinkers” at all, and many today don't seem to know the difference - indeed.