Monthly Archives: April 2008

“The Girl Who Stopped Swimming” by Joshilyn Jackson

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One hot, summer night, Laurel is sleeping in her perfect, Floridian, suburban home with her perfect husband, when she is awakened by the ghost of Molly, the family’s neighbor and her daughter’s friend.

Molly is dead in the pool outside Laurel’s window and she wants Laurel to know why.

Laurel, it turns out, has seen ghosts before and, as stunned and agitated as she is, we meet a woman stronger than she realizes.  Without utterly falling to pieces, Laurel begins to figure out what could have happened.The book is more insightful and character-driven than a mystery, so I hesitate to label it as such.  Laurel, her husband, her daughter, and her sister are all pieced together more like a who-it-is than a who-done-it.

Serendipitous that I inadvertently picked this book up after The Lace Reader because Laurel is a quilter.
Like the Ipswich lace that the Whitneys read, we are going to draw parallels between the characters in The Girl Who Stopped Swimming and Laurels’ quilts.  What she cannot articulate otherwise is apparent in her quilts.  She knows she’d, “been buttoning shut the ugly parts.”  They are dark and sound compelling.A coffee table book of Laurel’s quilts would be an interesting way to reveal this story.

It’s a little more obvious than I like, but the pace moves along fast enough that I forgot I was annoyed. (Oh, that it were that easy while I’m getting the kids off to school).
Thalia, Laurel’s sister, and literary Mr. Hyde to her Dr. Jekyll, is a mesmerizing amalgamation of emotions.  Laurel loves and needs her while, at the same time, pitying, idolizing and despising her.  Thalia feels the same way about Laurel.  The many family secrets are outed along the way and we see more of Laurel and Thalia’s sentimental foundations than they do.
We need to be invested in their family history to appreciate Laurel and Thalia and how they became the characters we meet.
Despite an auspicious beginning and ending, once the proverbial gloves are off, it becomes a whirlwind of chick-lit machinations for a while.  Luckily, the pace keeps you interested and the author may be doing it intentionally.  The girls realize in their neighborhood explorations, “we’re going to treat this part like a game.  We have to or … get sick with mad and cry.”
There is a thought-provoking twist involving an initially minor character and more from this girls’ perspective would be beneficial.  Initially I was reminded of The Lovely Bonesby Alice Sebold, but this story is different.  If you can enjoy its unfinished veins, and keep the whole idea in your head instead of just what is in front of you, the story has an intriguing message .

“Mr. Pip” by Lloyd Jones

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I just finished Mr Pip and I wanted to strike while the proverbial iron is hot.  I‘m still trying to catch my breath.  I think may have actually said “Wow!” out loud at some point.

When I picked up “Mr. Pip,”  I thought it looked enchanting; a nice island book about how stories can change everyone’s lives, the power of the written word and all that.

Not quite.

Harder and better than that.

In the 1990’s, although situationally that is irrelevant, a young black girl is living on an island somewhere off the coast of Australia.  Near the Solomon Islands is my guess.  Matilda’s town is rotting under the cloak of civil unrest.  Bandits in the jungles and armies fight over the remnants of a prosperous copper mine.Her father – like many others – has gone to the white man’s mainland to work.  The remaining islanders have little structure or means, and live in the haphazard expectation that change – good or bad – is coming.

The pivotal change starts with the decision of the last white man, Mr. Watts, to resurrect some semblance of school for the village children.  Not being a teacher, he chooses “Great Expectations” by Charles Dickens as his primer.Every day he reads one chapter.  The children slowly reach out to the lifeline being cast and Matilda, especially, becomes enraptured.

Mr Watts is giving them another life, “ another piece of the world … (they) could go back to it as often as they liked.”  A world outside their own that both feeds them and encourages the whole village to share.

Parents and grandparents come to school to contribute their views on everything from the color blue to braiding hair.  Lines are drawn between Matilda’s mother and Mr. Watts when religious convictions are tested, but the real story is how all of this holds up when the very real dangers on the island manifest themselves physically.
The horror of war, no matter how small, is here.  The death, the defeatism, the terror, are all-encompassing, and we are very much afraid for the village.  With each blow, they somehow manage to rise again until it becomes too much to bear .Will “Great Expectations” have taught them enough about themselves to stay strong?  Will they remember “to be human is to be moral, and you cannot have a day off when it suits.”

Just as Dickens’ Pip finds he can no longer return to his old life, so does Matilda.  Indeed, no one will ever be the same again.

LLoyd Jones is a very good storyteller and Mr. Pip will leave you both slightly disturbed and yet also encouraged.

“Evening” by Susan Minot

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After three marriages, Ann Lord is the mother of five children.  She is well-off, living in Cambridge, Mass., and Connecticut.  She is a strong-willed, if reticent, woman.  She also has cancer and is dying.

As she remembers parts of her life, we float back in time with her to her most definitive adult experience.  July 1954 was a pivotal month in her self-actualization and, from that point, Minot takes us through a swirl of Ann’s recollections.  Some are coherent, some less so, but none are uninteresting.
Having lost a loved one to cancer as, sadly, many of us have, it is bittersweet to read “Evening.”  The stories are there, the characters are strong, but the gift of Minot’s story is to be present in Ann’s head as she succumbs.  We know how she feels, what she is thinking, and hearing, and seeing.  This story is constructed entirely in her own mind and it is a rare privilege to be there.
As Ann recalls her life in bits and pieces, we feel her regret for a specific relationship that really never was.  Most of Ann’s adult loves seem to be compromised by this one encounter and Ann never admits this to anyone but herself, and, by extension, to us.  In July of 1954, Ann is 25.  She attends the wedding of her good friend on an island in Maine and meets a man against whom all others will be judged unfavorably ever after.
Whether he is ultimately deserving is immaterial.  We behold the weekend in all its extravagant pulchritude and ultimate horror through Ann.  We are there with that intangible feel of boundless summer evenings and mercurial romance.  We remember that rush of joy that holds you in the pit of your stomach when anticipation equals reality.
As she falls in love, we meet the Ann with whom we will share her final days.
As Ann’s kaleidoscope of memories crashes around her, we piece together her life.  Progressing from this pivotal weekend, we envisage the personal walls she assembles and the family who will try to sidestep them.  We meet her husbands and her children with each.  We see the friendships she maintains and the pains she keeps silent, but there is little she remembers as abundantly as this first weekend.
Nothing else is spelled out as distinctly … and the story is better for it.We are a little lost in the recesses of her mind, as indeed, is she – but her final freedom is ours as well.

“The Lace Reader” by Boronia Barry

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“The Lace Reader” was originally self-published.  Once word got out – the publishing houses picked it up.  Justifiable hubris indeed!  I read the entire book in two days … Mom- what’s for dinner?  Nothing kids – I’m reading … (sort of kidding).

The minute I finished the last bit and realized what had had really been going on, I wanted to start again.

Three generations of Whitney women live in the town of Salem, Mass.  A beautiful town with a history of burning intelligent, difficult women at the stake; it seems a perfect fit that these three should live here.  The Whitney women have,” taken quirky to a new level of achievement.”  They fight against their internal demons as much as the awful and wonderful people in their lives.A proverbial witch-hunt on all levels.We find ourselves in a mysterious realm where we do not know exactly what has happened to Eva, the matriarch of the family.  When she disappears, we’ll need to know why and how.
The people with the answers are having struggles with the situational realities of their own lives and the difficulties of their familial interactions.  The matriarch, Eva, may or may not have died.  The youngest Whitney, Towner, drags herself home post-surgery from California for the possible funeral.  May, in the middle, is a famous local recluse.You are never entirely sure from whose point of view the truth comes.  Towner freely admits all accounts are suspect,” never believe me. I lie all the time.”  Who should we believe?  Towner, who suffers the horrible loss of her twin?  Her potential lover, the new town cop?  May, who never leaves her golden retriever-infested island ?  Cal, the dreadful, hypocritical preacher?
To add to this hotbed of turmoil is mystical confusion – all three women are psychic.  (Not all thrilled about it.)  They intuit some occurrences by reading pieces of Ipswich Lace and we wade right in with them.  We need to take everything with a grain of salt and it is mesmerizing trying to decipher the internal/external dialogue that will hopefully explain what has happened.
I love finding a literary world that you’d like to be a part of…  The last was my eldest daughter’s copy of “The Penderwick’s” (by Jeanne Birdsall) in which you could smell summer freedom and thick green canopies of leaves on every page.”The Lace Reader” is the same.You can taste the North Shore’s salty breeze and smell low tide.  You can hear the stampede of golden retrievers romping on May’s island.  When Rafferty takes Towner to dinner at a floating restaurant,(which is really there by the way), you would give anything to be sitting on the gunwale with her.With all of them – aside from Cal, who I would be unable to restrain myself from pulverizing and I’m sure you’ll agree – Mrs Barry depicts elaborately prosaic characters in very poetic terms.  A constant proliferation of insight makes them people to befriend.

In addition to feeling close to the Whitneys, you’ll find Barry’s story-line is superb.  So clever.  Towner, May, Eva and most all of the peripheral characters are so believable and exceptional that the anticipatory feeling of solution is tangible.  You look around every corner with them.You’ll re-read bits to make sure you are where you think you are.  It’s quite something to stride through this tangled web that is a mastery of skilled writing.  Eventually the web becomes a distinctly focused patch of intricately-threaded lace.  Stepping back, we are thunderstruck suddenly to see clearly … and even Towner realizes that,” the spell is broken … [we are] free.”