What I’m reading now: The Shoemaker’s Wife

The Shoemaker’s Wife is the latest novel from Adriana Trigiani. Like her other novels, it draws on her Italian American heritage to craft an epic story of love and family. It starts in the Italian Alps in the early 20^th century, where Enza and Ciro meet and then lose contact with each other as Ciro is innocently banned from the village. They are reunited in New York City as each is building a new life and improving their fortune through an immigrant’s hard work. They end up in the mining area of Minnesota where there is a need for shoemakers. Trigiani bases this novel on her grandparents’ love story. The descriptions of place are full and enveloping. Her accounts of Ciro’s shoemaking process and Enza’s skill as a seamstress are vivid and rich. As with Trigiani’s other books that I love, I did not want the story to end. I did not want to leave those characters, and hope that she will continue the story in her next novel. — Rita

Off the Shelf: Riveting new psychological suspense & mystery novels

After reading Rosamund Lupton’s incredible debut novel, Sister, I went searching for more well written gems of psychological suspense and mystery, those that are also described as literary fiction or literary thrillers. Though it wasn’t intentional, I ended up finding and reading three more impressive debut novels told in the first person (one alternating). All four were equally exciting, though very different, and kept me turning pages late into the night.

Sister takes the form of a letter from Beatrice Henning to her younger sister Tess, who has been found dead, shortly after giving birth to her CF stillborn son. Bea rushes back to London, leaving her successful life in New York behind, as soon as she hears that Tess is missing. Her sister’s body is discovered a few days later on the floor of a bathroom in Hyde Park, and her death is ruled as a suicide. Beatrice moves through shock and grief as she becomes convinced that her more free-spirited sister could not have taken her own life. Despite differences and distance, Tess and Bea have always been close and this love between sisters is at the heart of the story. Unable to convince authorities or those closest to her, who only see her pain and subsequent denial, Bea turns detective. She attempts to inhabit Tess’s life by living in her apartment, taking over her waitressing job, and even befriends someone who’d been involved with Tess in an experimental medical program during her pregnancy. As the reader is thrown into Bea’s frantic search to find the truth, suspicion is thrown on Tess’ friends and lovers, and events both past and present take on a much more sinister air. When the threads of Tess’s story pull tighter, Bea risks her own unraveling, and even her own life. Sister is a gripping, masterfully written, debut novel with a chilling plot twist that will surprise even the most astute armchair detective. 

Turn of Mind by Alice LaPlante is another literary gem, in which the suspense is in a lower key, but no less compelling. The whodunit takes second place to a searing depiction of a woman losing her mind to dementia and the family drama surrounding her. The author takes us into the mind of Jennifer White, who is a fiercely intelligent woman, a retired orthopedic surgeon and recent widow, in the throes of second stage Alzheimer’s. Her best friend Amanda has been found murdered with four fingers surgically removed from one hand and it is clear that she is somehow involved. She herself has no memory of the murder so the reader is kept sharply on edge, as her dire circumstances, and the facts of her turbulent friendship with the victim gradually come to light.

The inside scoop: The Buddha in the Attic

I just finished The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka. It is a short book describing the journeys of Japanese picture brides from Japan to San Francisco. Their collective experiences are shared, from their wedding night, settling into married life, backbreaking work in the fields, or the life of domestic help for white folks, raising families. They eventually are faced with internment and the tragedy of losing the life that they have created in America. 

Another fiction book that deals with the Japanese internment is Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jaime Ford.  Taking place in Seattle, a young Chinese boy befriends a young Japanese girl based on mutual exclusion. Their friendship grows until she is sent to the internment camp in Puyallup. Their separation haunts him for the rest of his life.

Dear Miss Breed by Joanne Oppenheim is the true story of San Diego Public librarian Clara Breed who befriends many of the Japanese children that visited the library.  She sends them letters of encouragement and care packages of books when they are interned. The correspondence from the children over the years describes the squalid conditions that the Japanese Americans endured for the duration of the war. 

And finally, Stubborn Twig is the true story of the Yasui family of Hood River, OR. Their life as Issei (first generation Japanese in America) and Nisei (second generation) is documented, continuing to the third generation. All of these titles share what it is like to be rounded up from one’s home, distrusted, accused of spying for the Japanese (because of nationality and facial features) and forced to live in camps under inferior conditions.

– Rita

On January 6, 1987, a bill (H.R.442) was introduced in the House of Representatives to have Congress and the President formally apologize and make restitution for the treatment of Japanese Americans during World War II.  The following year it would be passed as Public Law No. 100-383.  The National Archives has an excellent bibliography of the history and documents related to this topic: Documents and Photographs Related to Japanese Relocation During World War II

Blurbs from the Branch- Mad Men Booklist

I recently (finally) got caught up with my new favorite TV series, AMC’s Mad Men (as a side note: I checked all four seasons out through the library.  If you haven’t watched it yet, the hold lines move pretty quickly, probably because the show is so addictive that people finish each season as soon as they can).  Now that I’m done with the most recent season and have to wait until next year for season 5, I need something to keep me busy in the meantime.  That being said, I am more of a reader than a TV or movie watcher, so I’ve come up with a list of books that we have here at Bethany that will satisfy me and my fellow Mad Men fans.

 For fiction, we have two books that actually make an appearance on the show: The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner and Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand.  Published in 1961, Revolutionary Road, by Richard Yates, is about a discontented couple living in the suburbs.  Not all that similar plot-wise, but historical fiction set during the 1960s nonetheless, Philip Roth’s American Pastoral is about a man who loses his American-dream lifestyle as a result of the socially turbulent 1960s.

 In the nonfiction category, we have a book by Tom Brokaw, focusing on the Baby Boomer generation (since Don and Betty’s kids Sally and Bobby are Boomers), Boom!: Voices of the Sixties: Personal Reflections on the ‘60s and Today.  For the women of Mad Men, we have the title Are You a Jackie or a Marilyn? : Timeless Lessons on Love, Power and Style by Pamela Keogh.  And there are plenty of relevant biographies: Fragments: Poems, Intimate Notes, Letters by Marilyn Monroe, Reading Jackie: Her Autobiography in Books by William Kuhn, Bobby and Jackie, a Love Story by C. David Heymann, and Brothers, the Hidden History of the Kennedy Years by David Talbot.

 I hope you find something in here to (somewhat) feed your craving for more Mad Men! Does anyone else have suggestions about what to read or what to watch next??

-Jeannine

The inside scoop: The Luck of the Buttons

 If you need a quick easy read for a 2 hour flight, try the juvenile fiction title The Luck of the Buttons.  It takes place in 1929 Iowa. The heroine, Tugs Button, was born into this family that sees themselves as less than ordinary; a luckless, unattractive, hapless, pitiful, pathetic, unfortunate, miserable family. Tugs embarks on a summer of change … she is befriended by the popular girl who wants to run the 3 legged race with Tugs since they have legs of the same length, she wins a Brownie camera in the 4^th of July celebration raffle, and she solves a mystery that saves the townsfolk their honor and their money. Tugs learns that being a Button is exactly what she makes of it!    The Luck of the Buttons is by Anne Ylvisaker and is available in book, or book on CD.