Crunch Time, by Diane Mott Davidson

I was feeling so ready for a mystery binge--but I started with a bad one. Diane Mott Davidson's series featuring sleuthing caterer Goldy Schulz has totally jumped the shark. Not only is Crunch Time silly and unbelievable--it's boring!! But maybe some of the recipes are good!

The First Husband, by Laura Dave

I guess I should have known from the title and the fact that Amazon offered The First Husband in a package with a Jennifer Weiner that this book would be a quintessential "chick lit" story, but somehow I allowed a brief synopsis to convince me it might be more. It's not. I also thought that the main character's career as a travel writer might be interesting to learn more about. It wasn't. Don't bother!

State of Wonder, by Ann Patchett

Ann Patchett returns to South America in State of Wonder and, while not as compelling as her masterpiece, Bel Canto, it is well worth reading. The book's central character is Dr. Marina Singh, a 43-year-old pharmacologist for a company in the Twin Cities; she is having an affair with her boss, Mr. Fox, a man who is little more than a cipher. Much more real is Dr. Annick Swenson, Singh's mentor when she was training to be an ob-gyn (she quit medicine when she accidentally blinded a baby during a caesarean). Swenson is now in the Amazon jungle, using funding from Singh's company to research why women of the Lakashi tribe remain fertile into their 70s. Swenson is not keeping the company up-to-date on her progress--they don't even know exactly where she is--and Marina's lab mate, Dr. Anders Eckman, has gone to South America to find her.

When a letter arrives from Swenson, reporting Dr. Eckman's death, both his widow and Mr. Fox want Marina to go to Manaus to find out what happened and ascertain the status of Swenson's research. Marina does not want to go, but she succumbs to the pressure and heads out on her journey. She spends several weeks in Manaus--sans luggage--trying to make contact with the young couple who are the gatekeepers to Dr. Swenson and wandering through the city, reflecting on her earlier life. While Marina's back story is interesting, she still somehow fails to come completely alive as a character, and the section of the book set in Manaus drags.

Dr. Swenson finally makes her appearance, however, and Swenson agrees to take Marina to her research station. From here, the pace of the story picks up, with a number of intriguing developments. Marina learns new and startling information about Swenson's research, is forced into providing medical services to the Lakashi (and into reexamining why one bad outcome caused her to leave the practice of medicine), and tries to find out exactly what happened to Anders. The ending is both startling and somewhat unsatisfying, as I still felt unsure about what path Marina will follow when she returns to Minnesota.

Favorite passages:

At that moment, she understood why people say You might want to sit down. There was inside of her a very modest physical collapse, not a faint but a sort of folding, as if she were an extension ruler and her ankles and knees and hips were all being brought together at closer angles.

Marina filled her lungs with frozen air and smelled both winter and spring, dirt and leftover snow with the smallest undercurrent of something green. . . . Instead of growing up inquisitive and restless, she had developed a profound desire to stay, as if her center of gravity was so low it connected her directly to this particular patch of earth.

Room, by Emma Donoghue

By a strange coincidence, Novel Conversations will be discussing Room the night after the heavily promoted Diane Sawyer interview with Jaycee Dugard airs. Room tells a story that seems to have a number of similarities with the real-life Dugard story, but it is told from the story of five-year-old Jack, who lives in a 11 x 11 room with his "Ma." In fact, Jack was born in the room, the product of his mother's repeated rapes by their captor, whom they call "Old Nick."

Jack is happy in Room (he names most objects, not using articles...it's "Plant" not "the plant"). His mother has created a life that, though severely restricted by their circumstances, is rich with love. They share music and stories, have "Phys Ed" for exercise, play games, and create crafts from the meager supplies available (they blow out eggs and use the shells to create a snake that Jack stores under Bed). They have a television, but Ma limits Jack's viewing time. To Jack every channel is a different planet, and only what happens inside Room is real.

While Jack is happy, Ma is not doing so well. Some days she is "Gone"--sleeping and unresponsive. Her teeth cause her constant pain. And Old Nick is still raping her several nights a week. After Jack's fifth birthday, Ma begins to "unlie"--to begin helping construct a more accurate view of the world outside Room. She also hatches an extremely dangerous escape plan. It is, I suppose, a "spoiler" to say the plan succeeds--but I'm not sure anyone would want to read the book if Jack and Ma never got out of Room. Indeed, their experiences trying to understand and cope with "Outer Space" and reintegrate with Ma's family are by far the most interesting and thought-provoking parts of the book. The post-Room period also offers Donoghue a chance to satirize the media, who go crazy when the story of Jack and Ma's escape becomes public.

The author has done a marvelous job getting into the mind of five-year-old Jack (or at least it seems like she has--what do I know about the mind of a five-year-old?), and I admire the skill and humor with which she has drawn her unusual narrator. On the other hand, I think I would have enjoyed the book more if we had gotten the story from both Jack and Ma's perspectives. Although I think the device of multiple narrators is over-used, this might be a case in which it would have worked. Nonetheless, Room is worth reading, both to experience Jack's mind and to think about the philosophical questions it poses.

Favorite passage:

When I was a little kid I thought like a little kid, but now I'm five I know everything.

The Long Good-bye, by Meghan O'Rourke

Over the past few years, I have read several memoirs of grieving, but The Long Good-Bye resonates in a way the others haven't. Perhaps that is because O'Rourke is writing about her mother's death, and I have a mother (still very much alive, thank goodness), whereas the other works are all about husbands, and I haven't had one of those for years. Or perhaps it's because O'Rourke is about the same age as I was when I experienced a devastating loss (I do suspect that grieving changes with the age of the mourner). For whatever reason, I found The Long Good-Bye moving in a way that encouraged reflection.

O'Rourke's mother, Barbara Kelly O'Rourke, was in her early fifties when she was diagnosed with cancer. O'Rourke is unflinching in describing her responses to her mother's illness, the realization that she is probably going to die, and her actual death. (O'Rourke decides to get married while her mother is in treatment--and then to get divorced just months later, adding to the unbelievable layers of stress she was feeling.) When Barbara dies, O'Rourke is devastated by how much she misses her mother, how "unmoored" she feels.

As she struggles with her grief, she reads prodigiously about mourning, and she shares insights and excerpts from her reading. This choice is not only instructive--we learn as she learns--it also helps to ground her pain in the experiences and wisdom of others.

O'Rourke writes about this difficult subject with great grace. I highly recommend this book for anyone seeking to understand more about how people deal with loss and grief.

Favorite passages:

Other people--friends, colleagues--got used to my mother dying of cancer. But I did not. Each day, sunlight came like a knife to a wound that was not healed.

The desert was dry and majestic and it calmed me; I was empty and it was, too. The open sky over the land, the juxtaposition of the minute and the majestic--it all expressed the dissonance I felt, and having my sense of smallness reflected back at me put me strangely at ease. How could my loss matter in the midst of all this? Yet it did matter to me, and in this setting that felt natural, the way the needle on the cactus in the huge desert is natural.

It's not a question of getting over it or healing. No, it's a question of learning to live with this transformation. For the loss is transformative, in good ways and bad, a tangle of change that cannot be threaded into the usual narrative spools. It is too central for that. It's not an emergence from the cocoon, but a tree growing around an obstruction.

Sing You Home, by Jodi Picoult

Jodi Picoult is an adventurous author--a few years ago, she incorporated a comic book into one of her novels. With Sing You Home, she (lyrics) and collaborator Ellen Wilber (music) have written a soundtrack for the book. The 10 songs, performed by Wilber (provided on CD with print copies of the book, available online to those who read an ebook), are each connected to a chapter in the novel. Since one of the central characters in Sing You Home, Zoe, is a music therapist, this ancillary could be a good idea--but the songs I listened to were mediocre and did nothing to enhance the reading experience. Top-notch recordings of the songs that Zoe used in therapy or listened to herself would perhaps have been more effective.

Aside from the addition of the soundtrack, Sing You Home follows Picoult's successful formula. It features multiple narrators--in this case music therapist Zoe, her husband Max, and friend Vanessa--each with a distinctive voice. The story rests on current "hot topics"--gay marriage, infertility, and evangelical Christianity. Many of the story's conflicts are played out in the familiar setting of the courtroom--and there's a Picoultian twist at the end.

To avoid being a "spoiler" (I'm feeling sensitive about what I write because a review of another Picoult title is by far the most viewed page on my blog), I won't say more about the plot, other than to say that some of the crucial developments in the story weren't believable to me. They certainly could happen, but I didn't feel Picoult provided the context we needed to believe that they would happen.

The parts of the books that I most enjoyed were the scenes in which Zoe was practicing her profession of music therapy. These scenes gave me insight not only into how music therapy can work but an appreciation for how a therapist changes e course during a therapy session to meet the client's needs. I didn't hate the rest of the book--and at least no children died tragically as a plot device (only pre-born children). Still, Picoult's innovations have not prevented her books from becoming predictable--even the supposed "twists" no longer really surprise.

Favorite passage: None

The Kitchen Daughter, by Jael McHenry

The first chapter of The Kitchen Daughter is a gem. Ginny Selvaggio is at her parents' funeral, and she's having difficulty dealing with all the people--looking to her sister for cues, as well as rescue, she also uses what are clearly long-term coping strategies--thinking about cooking, cooking, and shutting herself in the closet with her hands shoved into one or another pair of her parents' shoes. McHenry describes Ginny's responses so well that we immediately grasp that Ginny has some kind of social disorder (which turns out to be undiagnosed Asperger's--probably) and how she copes with it; we also like her, want to cook with her, and understand quite a bit about her family situation.

Ginny's married sister Amanda is well-intentioned but a bit too "take charge," and much of the story is about their conflicts--about whether they should sell the family home (where Ginny still lives), whether Ginny should move in with Amanda's family, and whether Amanda's daughter Shannon might have the same problem that Ginny has. There's also a magical realism element--starting at the funeral, when Ginny cooks something exactly as specified on a hand-written recipe card, the ghost of the person who wrote the recipe appears. Through these appearances, Ginny learns more about her family history and is warned against letting Amanda do something...what neither we nor Ginny know. In another subplot, the family's cleaning lady plots to get Ginny out of the house, and Ginny becomes friendly with her grief-stricken son.

Reading this book is not about the plot--it's about the window into Ginny's mind and her coping strategies (I absolutely love her 'Normal Book" and the way she thinks about cooking and food to calm herself). And it's about pondering what it means to be normal, to help someone you don't really understand, to grieve.

Recommended.

Favorite passage:

I lose myself in food. The rich wet texture of melting chocolate. The way good aged goat cheese coats your tongue. The silky feel of pasta dough when it's been rested and rested just enough. How the scent of onions changes, over an hour, from raw to mellow, sharp to sweet, and all that even without tasting. The simplest magic: how heat transforms.