Friday 5ive- October 21, 2022

Welcome to the Friday 5ive, a weekly-ish post featuring five things that caught my attention this week.

1) Sunday was a beautiful day in NYC so we took a walk through Central Park. It was so good to see the park filled with people, and it seemed like everyone was celebrating a birthday, we ran into mutliple celebrations..

2) The Center for Fiction hosted a discussion between Silas House, about his book Lark Ascending, and one of my favorite authors, Barbara Kingsolver, about her novel Demon Copperhead. I read an early copy of Demon Copperhead, and it is Kingsolver's best book yet, a contemporary retelling of Charles Dickens' David Copperfield. Her young protagonist deals with a mother who is an addict, living in a broken foster care system, poverty and the beginnings of the opioid crisis in Appalachia. I haven't read Silas House's book yet, but it sounds fascinating. It's a dystopian story about a young man who leaves the United States for Ireland, seeking refuge from devastating fires and political persecution  where he walks across the country with a dog he finds. The discussion was fascinating about two epic books, and what it means to be a writer from Appalachia. I watched it on YouTube, but I wish I had been there in person.

3) I love getting book mail, and this week I received my Stories & Suspects box filled with fantastic mystery books from Bantam. It features the new book from Susan Elia MacNeal, Mother Daughter Traitor Spy, about a mother-daughter duo living in Los Angeles during WWII who end up spying on people involved in the Nazi movement for the US government. It has a lot of resonance for events happening today. It also has a new crime drama  by William Landay (I liked his Defending Jacob), a psychological suspense from Catherine Steadman (The Family Game- a Book of the Month selection for October), a locked room mystery by Jilly Gagnon (All Dressed Up), and their Buzz Pick, a debut novel from Erin E. Adams titled Jackal about missing girls in a Rust Belt town. The box was sponored by Tony's Chocolonely, one of my favorite chocolate treats.

4) Stanley Tucci's Searching for Italy is back on Sunday nights on CNN, and we are enjoying traveling to the different regions of Italy. The first few episodes took us Calabria, Sardinia and Puglia and we've seen a lot of seafood dishes this season. 

5)  I adore Mary Beth Keane's books, and her upcoming 2023 novel, The Half Moon, is wonderful. Malcolm and Jess are a happy couple living in Gillam, a small town a hour upstate from New York City. Jess desperately wants a baby, and after several expensive and emotionally draining IVF tries doesn't undertstand why Malcolm is willing to give up on their dream. Malcolm's dream is to own the Half Moon, a bar he has worked in for years. They are at a crossroads, and the novel explores how that came to be and where it is headed. It is  phenomenal, I read it a little bit at a time because I did not want this fantastic book to end. I wanted to stay with Malcolm and Jess forever. 

Have a great, safe, healthy week.

The Way Life Should Be by Christina Baker Kline

The Way Life Should Be by Christina Baker Kline
Published by William Morrow ISBN 978-0-06-236354-1
Trade paperback, $14.99, 272 pages

The first Christina Baker Kline novel I read, like most people, was Orphan Train. I found the story so engrossing, and I was surprised that I had never heard of the orphan trains before.

After that, I read Sweet Water by Ms. Kline and was happy to report that I enjoyed that one as well. I just finished another book from Kline's backlist, The Way Life Should Be, and I found this book the best of the three.

Angela is a 33 year-old single woman living in Manhattan, with a burgeoning career as an event planner for an art museum. She has a big event coming up that could bring her into the big time if it all comes together.

She has a loving father, a grumpy stepmother, and an Italian grandmother who loves Angela dearly. Nonna taught Angela all about Italian cooking, and Angela always enjoyed spending time in the kitchen with her.

The only thing missing in her life is true love. When her friend Lindsay meets a wonderful guy through online dating, Angela decides to give it a try. She finds a man who runs a sailing school in Maine, and they begin an online romance.

Angela has a picture in her mind of a quaint Maine cottage by the sea, her and her man living together in blissful love. When things go badly at work, she decides to pick up and move herself to Maine to give love a try with her online beau.

There are bumps along the way, but Angela sticks to her guns and is determined to stay in Maine. She starts hanging out a local coffeehouse, and the owner Flynn, an Aussie transplant who followed his heart (and a man too, like Angela), becomes her best friend and offers her a job.

She finds a tiny, dilapidated cottage (nothing like her dream) and convinces Flynn to redecorate the coffeehouse and offer homemade pastries and soups for lunch. Flynn persuades Angela to offer cooking classes, and she makes some new friends.

This book has so much that ticked all my boxes- Angela is a strong woman, Flynn is adorable, there are  lots of delicious descriptions of food (recipes included), a group of interesting new friends (with secrets) and a setting that is new to me (I must visit Acadia National Park).

As someone who has planned events, I found that part of the story fascinating. And any book that has food at its core, if it is well done like this is, will always appeal to me. I also liked that the characters are not one-dimensional (except the wicked stepmother). Angela's boyfriend Richard could have been the stock guy-who-is-really-a-jerk, but Kline gives him shades of color that made him more interesting.

The relationships- Angela and Nonna, Angela and Flynn, Angela and Lindsay- are so believable, you wish you were Angela. I will warn you that The Way Life Should Be will inspire you to dig out all of your food utensils and give Angela's recipes, like Pasta e Fagioli, Chicken Marsala and Basil Marinara, a try.

When Tom asks Angela who she really is, she thinks "the stories we tell about ourselves are filled with half-truths, distorted recollections, and blind spots as well as occasional moments of insight. It's all in the spin, isn't it?" And, I for one, liked the spin of Angela's story.

rating 5 of 5
My review of Orphan Train is here.
My review of Sweet Water is here.
My post about Christina Baker Kline's conversation with Caroline Leavitt at the Center For Fiction is here.

Thanks to TLC Tours for putting me on Christina Baker Kline's tour. The rest of her stops are here.

Tuesday, September 16th: A Lovely Bookshelf on the Wall

Thursday, September 18th: Sara’s Organized Chaos

Monday, September 22nd: BoundbyWords

Thursday, September 25th: Kritters Ramblings

Monday, September 29th: Kahakai Kitchen

Thursday, October 2nd: bookchickdi

Monday, October 6th: A Bookish Way of Life

Wednesday, October 8th: Carpe Libros

Christina Baker Kline & Caroline Leavitt at the Center for Fiction

Christine Kline & Caroline Leavitt

The Center for Fiction in NYC held a discussion between authors Christina Baker Kline (Orphan Train) and Caroline Leavitt (Is This Tomorrow) last month. I had never been there before, and I liked their set-up.

The event was held upstairs in a lovely, intimate space. The evening began with Kline talking about her new novel, about the orphan trains, which I had never heard of until I read Laura Moriarty's novel The Chaperone last year. (My review is here.)

Between the years 1854-1929, children from NYC were placed on trains that stopped in various places in the midwest. The children would get out on the train platforms, and people would choose children to come live with them. Many times, these farmers needed more help on their land, and these children ended up working as farmhands.

Over 200,000 children traveled on the orphan trains. Kline discovered a book about it on her husband's father's bookshelf on a visit to Minnesota and her she began a file on it. She did a lot of research on it,  and visited the Orphan Train Complex in Concordia, Kansas where they have over 300 first person narratives.

The children could bring nothing with them on the trains, no keepsakes; they were stripped of their identities. Their descendants are determined to keep there stories alive, and Kline's novel does that.

Orphan Train tells two stories- a troubled teen has to do community service and ends up helping an elderly women clean her attic. The woman was on the orphan train as a child and the women bond over   the older one's stories.

Leavitt says that she got the idea for her novel, Is This Tomorrow, from an unlikely source: TV's The Killing. She loved the show, particularly how the characters were not who the appeared to be. She combines the mystery in her story, a twelve-year-old boy goes missing in a Boston suburb in the 1950s, with some of her childhood story.

She was the only Jewish child in a Christian suburb, like her main character, and had very bad asthma. She spent much of her time alone. Leavitt was a smart child in a town where only 10% of the students graduated high school so her outsider status was cemented.

The 1950s setting interested her, she called it "one of the weirdest periods of all", citing its combination of need for "perfection with an undercurrent of fear of the Cold War." She did a lot of research, having three people assisting her, but she got some of the most interesting help from Facebook.

Leavitt has a big social media presence on Twitter and Facebook, and when she asked if anyone was a male nurse in the 1960s, or knew anything about crime in the 1950s,  she said "people told me bizarre stories." I guess the moral is be careful what you wish for.

Leavitt told the audience how her first seven books were well reviewed but didn't sell well. When she sent her editor Pictures of You, they passed, saying "it wasn't special." She asked all of her writer friends for names of other editors, and Algonquin Books told her they wanted it.

She has nothing but praise and gratitude for the people at Algonquin. She said she had five previous publishers and "no one wanted to meet me." At Algonquin, everyone was there at the office to greet her, and they helped get her books to a much wider audience.

They talked about the importance of social media and of helping other authors, Kline saying that "other people's success only helps us." It was a wonderful, informative evening and I got to meet Meg Wolitzer and tell her how much I loved The Interestings.

My review of Is This Tomorrow is here.