Friday 5ive- October 1, 2021

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

We're now into fall, and the weather here in NYC has turned cool this week. 

1)  We went to a wedding in the Hamptons on Saturday, and it was lovely. The reception was outside the Roundtree in Amagansett under a huge tent, which was appreciated. The passed hors d'ouerves were delicious- lobster avocado tostadas, beef sliders, and lamb meatballs were my favorites. The wedding band was terrific, they had all ages of guests up and dancing, and the floral centerpieces were so beautiful. It was a wonderful celebration.

2) We stayed overnight at the Topping Rose House, a renovated 19th century home that is billed as "the only full-service luxury hotel in the Hamptons." It was pretty fancy, and the highlight for me was a library on the second floor, filled with books on all the shelves. There was even a book on the nightstand in our room, something you know I loved.

A book on the nightstand greeted me!

3)  The Topping Rose House has a Jean Georges restaurant, and breakfast was included with our room so we enjoyed Eggs Benedict and the best chocolate croissant I've ever had outside on their beautiful porch.

4) If you have any hockey fans in your group, check out Untold: Crimes and Penalties on Netflix. The documentary tells the story of the Danbury Trashers, a Conneticut minor league hockey team bought by a man with mob ties. Jimmy Gallante buys the team for his 17 year-old son to run. They became known for their overt violence, and their rabid fans. It's truly a crazy story, and if you remember the 1977 Paul Newman movie, Slapshot, you'll want to watch this one. 

5) I've read four books in the past two weeks, two memoirs, a psychological suspense story, and a family story. Eleanor Henderson is a novelist I really like, so I was interested in her memoir, Everything I Have Is Yours- A Marriage. Henderson is a professor at Ithaca College, married to a man who has a chronic illness that may have a psychological basis. Her husband has rashes all lover his body that turn into painful lesions. Multiple doctors are unable to come to a satisfactory diagnosis or cure, and his suffering leads to severe depression. Henderson has to hold down a full-time job, care for her two young sons, and deal with her husband's illnesses. She's an amazing writer who illuminates what it means to love someone so deeply.  

Qian Julie Wang's memoir, Beautiful Country, tells her story as a seven-year-old girl who leaves her home in China to move to Queens with her parents. As undocumented immigrants, Qian and her family have to be careful to stay under the radar, and avoid any situations that may draw attention to themselves. Her parents were professors in China, in New York they scrape by working in sweatshops (where a young Qian works with her mother after school) and in other low-paying jobs. Qian's savior becomes the library, where she teaches herself English. The book covers her life up to age twelve, when she earns admittance to a prestigious school filled with mostly white, wealthy students. It's a brilliant memoir, and it was the Read With Jenna September pick. Everyone should read this book to understand the perseverance of the human spirit. 

María Amparo Escandón's novel L.A. Weather shares the story of a Mexican-American family living in Los Angeles. Oscar, the father, has been keeping a secret from his family that will affect them all. He spends his days obsessed with the Weather Channel, and his wife, an artist, is fed up with his behavior and withdrawal. Their three adult daughters are all having marital crises that come to a head during this time. The characters are fascinating, and the family dynamic is enlightening. 

The last book I read is an egalley of a psychological suspense novel that publishes in March. John Searles' Her Last Affair intrigued me because of its setting in an abandoned drive-in theater. (My hometown still has a drive-in theater.) Skyla is a blind widow who is looking for a tenant for the cottage on her property. When Teddy comes looking for a place to stay, Skyla happily rents him the cottage and they begin to spend time together. Teddy reconnects online with an old girlfriend who is bored with her life and makes plans to visit him. Jeremy is a failed writer about to be evicted from his New York apartment when he takes a low-paying job reviewing a restaurant in Providence, where he used to live. While he's there, he plans to look up a woman he had a crush on. How these lives collide will keep you guessing up to the end, and Searles throws in a few twists that had me gasping. The abandoned drive-in setting is perfect for the creepy atmosphere, and I loved how Searles tied in the old movies with each chapter. Her Last Affair has such a cinematic feel to it, it would make an great film. Be sure to read this one when it publishes on March 1, 2022. 

Stay safe and healthy everyone, be sure to wear a mask in public, wash your hands frequently, and please get a vaccine if you have not yet done so. Do it for those who can't yet get one.

The Twelve-Mile Straight by Eleanor Henderson

The Twelve-Mile Straight by Eleanor Henderson
Published by Ecco ISBN 978-0062422088
Hardcover, $27.99, 520 pages

One of the great joys of reading is discovering an debut author whose work just blows you away. Eleanor Henderson did that to me with her 2011 novel Ten Thousand Saints, set in 1987 New York City and Vermont. It is such an amazing book (made into a movie in 2015), I put it on my Most Compelling Books of 2011 list.

I was thrilled to hear that Henderson would be at the Book Expo this year signing copies of her followup novel, The Twelve-Mile Straight.  I was first in a long line of people, all eager to tell her how much we loved Ten Thousand Saints and how we couldn't wait to read this new one.

Eleanor Henderson at the Book Expo

The setting for The Twelve-Mile Straight is a small town in Depression-era rural Georgia in 1930. Young Elma Jessup gives birth to two babies- one black, one white. Her daughter is the child of the grandson of the wealthy man who owns the farm that her sharecropper father Juke works. Elma and Juke accuse a young black man who works for Juke, Genus Jackson, of raping Elma resulting in Elma's son.

Juke, who made moonshine on the side that he sold to men in the town, convinced others to join him in making Genus pay by lynching him, dragging his body behind a truck and leaving it in the road in town. The death scene is horrific, and we soon learn that there is more to this story.

Elma's mother died when she was a baby, and Elma was raised by Ketty, their black housekeeper. Ketty's daughter Nan grew up with Elma, and they were best friends, even though Elma went to school and Nan worked with Ketty, eventually learning from her how to be a midwife.

As the story unfolds, we find out that there are many secrets in this house, secrets that will affect everyone who lives there for years to come. People are curious about Elma's two babies, and their two different fathers, and Elma eventually meets a doctor, Oliver, who wants to study this unique phenomenon.

Oliver is a terrific character; he suffers from polio and he wants to be a research doctor. He is fascinated and compassionate towards Elma and her babies. There is a couple, Sarah and Jim, who came from up North and work on Juke's land. Why they are there is a mystery, but they provide company for Elma, for which she is grateful. And gentle, quiet Genus is such a sweet young man, his murder is devastating.

There are some powerful scenes in the story, including a baptism for the babies, where several townsfolk turn out believing that at least one of the babies "has the devil in him." Oliver's memory of his time spent on a ship filled with other polio patients because people feared catching polio was heartbreaking.

Henderson creates such a sense of time and place, you can feel the blazing summer sun and see the dust kicking up on the twelve-mile straight road. The reader is transported to this world, one that she conjured from stories her father told of his growing up, one of eight children born to a sharecropper.

Her writing is so precise, it feels like she worked to craft the perfect sentence for each paragraph. I got so lost in The Twelve-Mile Straight that frequently I found myself completely tuning out my surroundings, losing all track of time and place.

But it is the relationship between Elma and Nan that is at the heart of this emotional, moving story. The two women are as close as sisters, but it is the secrets between them that drive the momentum of the book to its shattering conclusion.

I highly recommend The Twelve-Mile Straight, and if you haven't read Ten Thousand Saints, pick that one up too. I'm not the only one who feels this way, The Twelve-Mile Straight has made many Best of Fall lists. 

Eleanor Henderson is a professor at Ithaca College, and her website is here.
My review of Ten Thousand Saints is here.

Book Expo 2017- Book Covers

Once I return from the annual Book Expo, I love to go through the books I picked up and check them out. There are so many ways to organize them- by publication date, by author name, or by subject.

This year I took notice of the covers. Book cover art has gotten increasingly more intricate and interesting over the years. It's fun to see what clever art directors come up with to catch the reader's eye.

Women looking away from the camera is something that has been popular. This photo shows three books that feature the protagonist looking away from the camera, giving the effect of longing. I'm patricularly interested in reading Sujata Massey's The Widows of Malabar Hill, about a female lawyer in 1920's India, and these three books are all historical fiction.

From woman facing away on the cover, we have covers where we only see the backs of our protagonists here. Need to Know, about a female CIA agent involved in Russian intrigue seems to be a timely read. (I believe Charlize Theron has optioned this for a movie.) Thrillers tend to like to use this on the cover.

This next one is a new one- covers featuring people with no faces. I guess this can be interpreted as protagonists who are enigmatic?

Then we get the covers with the faces up close and personal, like these two striking books. 

Instead of people, these covers feature buildings on their covers. Brendan Mathews' debut novel The World of Tomorrow, with its Irish immigrant story set in 1939 New York City, looks to be this year's We Are Not Ourselves. Speaking of Irish,  I can never resist a Alice McDermott novel, an Oswego State graduate.

Trees and branches without their leaves will be very popular in the coming months. I'm really looking forward to reading Tayari Jones' An American Marriage. Her previous novel Silver Sparrow was just phenomenal. Eleanor Henderson's The Twelve-Mile Straight is another one I can't wait to read, as I loved her Ten Thousand Saints.

From trees, we move to birds on these covers. Sarah Schmidt's See What I Have Done retells the Lizzie Borden story and I am intrigued by that one.

This vibrant red color is sure to catch the eyes of readers perusing bookstore shelves. Leni Zumas' Red Clocks is geared towards readers of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and will surely benefit from the Hulu adaptation of that book.

These books capitalize on the Gone Girl familiarity by putting girl in the title, but none are of the thriller genre. The Radium Girls is a narrative nonfiction book that will appeal to readers of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, and the cover of The Girls in the Picture is just stunning.

Married women seems to be a lively topic as these three book titles suggest. I can't wait to read Tom Perrotta's Mrs. Fletcher as I have been a fan since Little Children. (And his HBO series The Leftovers just knocked me out.)

Future Book Expo post will discuss some of the events that took place at the Expo. If you attended Book Expo, what were your favorites? Beth Fish Reads has highlighted some of the books she is looking forward to here and here. 

Ten Thousand Saints by Eleanor Henderson

Ten Thousand Saints by Eleanor Henderson
Published by Ecco ISBN 978-0062021021
Hardcover, $26.99

I had heard good things about this book, but wasn't sure I'd be interested in the coming-of-age story of straight edge teens in the late 1980s New York City. Boy, was I wrong.

Henderson has such compassion for her characters- Jude, the drug-using boy in love with a girl who slept with his best friend Teddy, Eliza, the lost rich girl with a secret, Johnny, Teddy's straight edge musician brother hiding from himself- that you feel like you know these people and care deeply about what happens to them. Even Teddy, who only exists for 72 pages yet whose presence influences all of the main characters, is so vivid, I felt I knew him well.

The minor characters are well drawn too; I particularly liked Jude's estranged father who left his family behind years ago, and although he faithfully sent support checks, checked out of his son and daughter's emotional life. Henderson has created this world that I had no idea about, the straight edge world of young people living in poverty on the Lower East Side of New York City in the late 1980s. It was a much different world there than it is today. They live with the homeless, violence and drug dealers in Tompkins Park, and with the fear and ignorance spawned by the AIDS epidemic.

There is one scene, a fight scene, that echoes S.E. Hinton's classic book, "The Outsiders", and I loved her homage to that story about teens also on the outside of mainstream society. (One of the characters even mentions the book later in the story.) This book will appeal to all of us who grew up loving "The Outsiders".

Part of the story takes place in Vermont, and Henderson creates that world with as much care. I felt like I was dropped into this story, these worlds that I knew little about. Great fiction can open up your mind and heart to characters and new ideas, and "Ten Thousand Saints" is great fiction. It is one of the best books I have read this year, and I can't wait for more from Eleanor Henderson.

I read this book in two sittings, I just couldn't put it down. These characters manage to crawl inside your heart, and when they make bad decisions and mess things up, you just want to hug them and tell them it will be alright.


rating 5 of 5 stars