Book Short
By Stephanie Miller
Under the Stars
By Beatriz Williams
Here is a delightful mind-candy of a mystery/coming of age/feel good novel to get you through the holiday craziness and/or add to a reader’s stocking.
I fell in love immediately with the two protagonists. Aged 150 years apart, each arrives from a shipwreck—one literal and one figurative—onto Winthrop Island off the coast of Connecticut/Long Island. “Under the Stars” is by international best seller Beatriz Williams, the author of “Husbands and Lovers.”
Providence Dare is fleeing a murder charge in Boston and headed to New York City on the good ship Atlantic when it runs aground in a terrible storm in 1840.
Audrey Fisher, wrecked emotionally and financially from the destruction of her marriage and restaurant career, reluctantly arrives accompanying her celebrity mother who needs to dry out as a requirement of a prime new role.
In a fabulous twist of fate, Audrey discovers a trunk full of priceless paintings by one of the 19th Century’s most famous artists, who suffered a tragic death the same year Providence fled his home.
Coincidence? Or are Providence and the painter’s death connected? And, speaking of shipwrecks, is a fatal boating accident in her mother’s past connected, too?
Of course there is a handsome 21st Century hero, complete with a fast car, swanky education, and a successful entrepreneurial venture. Meeting Audrey on the ferry on the day she arrives, the sparks fly along with plenty of witty repartee.
A bit of mystery builds as we learn more about Providence’s voyage and her actions during and after the shipwreck. There is also a parallel journey when Audrey suddenly disappears with a strange man along with one of the paintings.
My Thoughts
You can tell that a lot of semi-connected stories are swirling around this novel. It’s a little bit too feel-good romance, but in stressful times it is a pleasure to read something escapist with a happy ending.
In the end, the bad guys got caught, the gals all got their man, and I was smiling. Enjoy!
/ pp. 240
Sandwich
By Cathrine Newman
Speaking of great escape gift ideas, if I tell you the plot line of “Sandwich” by Catherine Newman, you will be skeptical that it is so enjoyable. A menopausal woman behaves badly and expects unconditional forgiveness from her long-suffering husband and adult children during their annual one-week vacation on Cape Cod.
Many of you will reply, “Why would I want to read it when I’m living it?” (women) or “…I’m living with it?” (men/adult children). But Newman’s setting perfectly captures the surreal way being on holiday jostles our real life with phantasmic otherness.
You will laugh out loud. The dialog is both hilarious and heart-rending, and the family dynamic is completely relatable. Plus, there are lots of great sandwiches.
Micro Shorts
Positivity Bias
Edited by Gillian Burnes (feat. MAINE AUTHORS)
What does it mean to live a happy life? This book of thirteen stories by ten Maine writers gives us memorable, flawed characters who are on the mend or bewitched or at sea – even one struck by lightning – and all headed for a happy ending. That the endings are wholly credible and ignore the traditional constraints of “happily ever after” make the stories even more compelling and authentic.
The book was created in the hope that happy endings are just what we need in our culture devoted to dysfunction and disaster, but it is not a set of happy stories. It’s a collection of protagonists figuring out how to define happiness for themselves.
O. Henry at the Holidays
Edited by Michael Wenzel
Here is a great collection for that reader who has everything. It includes classic stories by William Sydney Porter (aka O. Henry) like “The Gift of the Magi” and “The Ransom of Red Chief,” as well as a few little-known shorts published only while Porter was an editor at the Houston Daily Post. The volume also includes a dozen other stories selected to match key holidays in the American calendar.
Vintage postcards, poems, and various Americana populate the pages and bring to life the spirit of the stories.
Editor Wenzel comes to this collection with long experience with the stories. He was a leader of the Lunchtime Lit reading group at the writer’s eponymous museum. Some of the stories feel dated, but most of them are just delightful and remind us why O. Henry, who died in 1910, remains one of our country’s leading short story writers.
The Goddess of Warsaw
By Lisa Barr
This is a spy-thriller lover’s historical fiction.
Bina Blonski was once a wealthy socialite in Warsaw but finds herself scrabbling for survival in the Nazi’s ghetto along with the last of her fellow Jews. They are the ones who have not already been murdered, starved, or shipped to a concentration camp.
A trained actress, she taps her performance skills to become an assassin in the Resistance. Ultimately, she participates in a weeks-long ghetto battle that gives desperate Jews the choice of dying with dignity rather than slaughter.
Her situations are complicated, and Bina does not escape censure from her family and fellow fighters. We meet her decades after the war, after she has become the world’s most famous femme fatale actress. She doesn’t erase her past. In fact, she embraces it.
No spoilers here, but after a rather bland start, the book races to the end—an inevitable conclusion with a protagonist who never lets go of her hatred. Along the way, there are some very good questions about morality to consider.
Absolution
By Alice McDermott
It’s the heady early days of US nation-making in Vietnam. Military wives must figure out how to overcome boredom, play the role of supportive, politically savvy, beautifully arranged spouses, and fulfill their 1960s goal of being a “helpmeet” to their husbands’ big career opportunity.
The novel unfolds in the form of memories shared between two American women some 60 years after they left Saigon. Tricia Kelly remembers herself as a shy parish kindergarten teacher who went to Vietnam with her husband, Peter — a civilian engineer “on loan” to Navy Intelligence. She is recruited by Charlene, a corporate wife who conscripted lesser females like Tricia into her volunteer army of do-gooders.
In contrast to other McDermott novels I’ve read (including “Ninth Hour,” which I recommend!) that take place in and around New York City and generally include retiring women accepting their lower place in life (until they don’t), “Absolution” takes us to the pre-war days of the Vietnam conflict, where the Americans show very little humility and a lot of hubris. Both the military men and their wives are convinced they know how to fix the lives of the locals.
This is a time and place I have read little about, and that made the power dynamics set in a fascinating backdrop just as compelling as the story itself.
