Friday 5ive- October 15, 2021

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

1)  We went to Florida for the weekend with two other couples. While the guys golfed, the gals walked to the beach. We came upon this set up on the beach, not sure what kind of celebration it was- a birthday or engagement maybe? It certainly was lovely, and not something I have seen before on the that beach.

2)  After an early dinner one evening, we came home, sat around the fire pit, put on the local oldies (sorry Jim) radio station and had a sing-along. One of the gentlemen gave me a run for my money, knowing the words to just as many (maybe more?) songs as I did. I hope the neighbors weren't too upset as it went on until nearly 11pm.

3)  This week I watched a Zoom with Hillary Clinton and author Louise Penny as they spoke about their collaboration on a novel titled State of Terror. The thriller is about a Secretary of State and her closest friend and advisor who team up to discover who is behind a series of terrorist attacks. Listening to the two friends talk about their writing process (Clinton writes in longhand, scans pages, and sends to Penny who is not used to working like that), how they became friends because of Clinton's childhood friend who befriended Penny, and writing a book for the first time with someone during a pandemic. It was a fascinating discussion led by author Will Schwalbe, and the fact that the main characters in this  thriller are "women of a certain age" definitely appealed to me.

4) With everyone watching streaming services, one of the best things I have seen in a long time is on broadcast TV. The new version of The Wonder Years on Wednesdays on ABC is such a fantastic show. Like the original, it's the story of a 12 year-old boy (Dean) and his family in 1968. Don Cheadle narrates the story as the adult Dean, and he is perfect for this. Elisha "EJ" Williams is amazing as Dean, and Dulé Hill as his dad and Saycon Sengbloh as his mom are wonderful. The older brother is serving in Vietnam, the older sister is dating, and I like that we see how the family deals with the things every family faces as well as with issues facing the Black community at that time. Watch this one, it's heartwarming. 

5) I read three books this week. Christine Pride and Jo Piazza teamed up for We Are Not Like Them, a novel about two lifelong friends- one a young Black TV news reporter, the other a white woman married to a Philadelphia policeman. We see how the aftermath of a police shooting threatens to upend their friendship as the story is told from both women's perspectives. Pride is Black, and Piazza is white and that adds an extra layer of authenticity to this thought-provoking and timely story. It's about friendship, race, and what justice looks like. I find myself still thinking about it a week after I finished it. It was a Good Morning America Book Club pick.

Jennifer Haigh is one of my all-time favorite authors, so I was excited to hear that she has a book publishing in February of next year, and I read an early egalley. Mercy Street is about Claudia who works at a women's health clinic in Boston. Claudia is a social worker who counsels women who find themselves pregnant. The clinic has to deal with protesters outside their clinic on a daily basis, some of whom are becoming increasingly emboldened. To deal with the stress, Claudia buys pot from Timmy, a popular dealer whose other client has a connection to Claudia (unbeknownst to her). Haigh's writing is superb, the way she crafts sentences and her descriptions of her characters just stun me. It's a timely book, like We Are Not Like Them. 

Jane Ward's The Aftermath deals with the fallout of the suicide of David, who owns a bakery with his wife Jules. David is heavily overleveraged financially, which Jules does not know. When he can't see a way out, he drowns himself. The book moves forward two years to deal with how the aftermath affects several people- Jules and her 14 year-old daughter Rennie, David's best friend Charlie, Denise, the cop who investigated David's death, and Daniel, the young banker who called in David's loans. They feel guilt, anger, sadness, and grief and struggle to move forward. It's a real heartbreaker. 

Stay safe everyone, continue to wash your hands, stay socially distant, wear a mask in public, and get a vaccine if you can. We're so close to beating this, we can do it if we work together.

News from Heaven by Jennifer Haigh

News From Heaven: The Bakerton Stories by Jennifer Haigh
Published by Harper ISBN 978-0-06-088964-7
Hardcover, $25.99, 256 pages

I have one shelf on my many, many bookshelves devoted to my all-time favorite books. Jennifer Haigh's debut novel Mrs. Kimble holds a place of honor there. She is remarkable writer, and her last novel Faith just reaffirmed my belief that she is one of the best fiction writers out there.

She recently published a short story collection, News From Heaven: The Bakerton Stories, set in different eras in the coal mining town of Bakerton, Pennsylvania. Some of the characters were featured in her previous novel, Baker Towers. 

Each of the ten stories is moving, and anyone who has lived in a small town with one major employer will recognize the people in these stories. Haigh's describes people in just a few sentences and you get them right away. Teenage Regina describes her mother this way in Broken Star:

"She greeted all presents this way- you shouldn't have- no matter how worthy the occasion or how trifling the gift. It was a habit born of embarrassment. No gift- even one she'd always wished for- was worth drawing attention to herself."

I feel like I know this woman because I know people just like her.

She also has such a sense of place, as with this sentence from the same story:

"Night was falling as we left the bus station, an amenity that, until then, I hadn't known the town possessed."

There are many people who live lives in a small box, and even those who live in a large city may contain themselves to just a few blocks.

There were a few stories that really moved me. A Place in the Sun is about Sandy Novak, one of the characters from Baker Towers.  Sandy is handsome man who left Bakerton to head west. He ends up living hand-to-mouth, bartending here, working as short-order cook there. He sleeps with his boss' wife, then steals from the boss and takes off to Vegas with a younger woman. Life hasn't turned out the way he hoped, and he thinks he has one last chance for a big score.

Sandy's story continues back in Bakerton in To The Stars, where Sandy's siblings Joyce, Dorothy and  George are left to deal with the fallout Sandy leaves behind. We see the family dynamic in this encounter about Joyce:

"She accepts condolences and prayers. It is her role, always: the public face of the family. Dorothy, whose backwardness is known and accepted, busies herself in the kitchen. George is nowhere to be found."

Again, in just a few sentences we know so much about this family and each sibling's place in it.

We see what happens to the high school football hero who can't make it in college in Favorite Son, which also has the best line in the book:

"For a certain kind of teenager, a small town is a prison. For another, it is a stage."

 A lonely nurse meets a handsome younger man and her life changes in Thrift. What Remains tells the  sad story of Sunny Baker, the last remaining descendant of the Baker family, the founders of the Bakerton.

The story that moves me most is The Bottom of Things, which features Ray, someone who made it out of Bakerton and ended up with a good life in Houston. Ray reluctantly goes home for his parents 50th anniversary party, and feels guilty for what he left behind. His has no relationship with his sons since he divorced their mother years ago. His brother Kenny has never gotten over his time in Vietnam; it is this relationship that seems to hurt the most.

News From Heaven is about family, relationships, loyalty, guilt, and the sacrifices people make. It's about the people who live in this decaying town and how that decay affects them. As I read this, I felt like I was peeking in the windows of these people's homes and watching them live their lives. The lyrical writing soars, and I wish I was reading this again for the first time. It's one of the best books so far in 2013.

rating 5 of 5

Jennifer Haigh's website is here.

Listen to Jennifer discuss News From Heaven on Book Club Girl's Authors on Air.

Listen to internet radio with Book Club Girl on Blog Talk Radio

Faith by Jennifer Haigh

Faith by Jennifer Haigh
Published by Harper Collins ISBN 978-0-06-075580-5
Hardcover $25.99

When I first read Jennifer Haigh's debut novel, Mrs. Kimble, which won the PEN/Hemingway award, I was just stunned. She revealed the life of Mr. Kimble by telling the stories of his three wives. I bought many copies of the book and gave them as gifts.

In her two subsequent books, Baker Towers and The Condition, Haigh lived up to the promise of her first novel. When I saw that her latest book, Faith, was publishing in May, I put that at the top of my TBR list, and am I glad I did.

Haigh sets her story in Boston in 2004, shortly after scandal began to rock the Catholic diocese. Many priests had been accused of sexually abusing young people, and the large Catholic community was devastated.

Sheila McGann tells the story of her half-brother, Art Breen, a priest accused by an eight-year-old boy's mother of molesting her son. There is an element of mystery to the novel as Sheila attempts to discover whether the charges are true.

Art's mother, a devout Catholic, believes her son could never do what he is accused of. Sheila's brother Mike, a former cop and father of three young boys, is disgusted, believing that no eight-year-old boy could lie about being molested. Sheila supports Art, but has her doubts.

The title of the book, Faith, is brilliant, for this is a book not about religious faith, but more about faith in your family. Sheila says to Mike,

"Sorry, Mike, but sooner or later you have to decide what you believe." It was a thing I'd always known but until recently had forgotten: that faith is a decision. In its most basic form, it is a choice.

I love those lines, because faith really is an active thing. You can grow up attending mass every week, participating in the sacraments, but to really have faith, you have to choose to believe in something.

Family is at the heart of this novel, and Sheila's family has its troubles, like most. She says:

We are a family of secrets. Without knowing quite how I knew it, I understood what might be said, and what must be quiet. If from the outside the rules appeared arbitrary, from the inside they were perfectly clear.

I suspect that Sheila's family is not as unlike other families as she believes. I think many people reading this book will relate to the McGann/Breen family.

What I like about Haigh's books is that the characters are so real, you think that you actually know them. Father Art is the most well drawn. He is a lonely man, even as a youth; perhaps being a stepson and stepbrother added to that sense of being different.

As a priest, Art cannot marry or have a family of his own, and this isolation hurts him. His loneliness is palpable, and when he meets the young boy and his drug-addicted mother, he feels a sense of family and belonging.

The least well drawn character is Art's mother. Sheila and Mike do not like their mother, they make many cutting comments about her, but I was never clear exactly what she had done to warrant this dislike. She seems to be very distant from her children, and perhaps the author made her character less clear to her children to emphasize that distance.

Faith is an emotional ride, and it affected me deeply. Days later, I find myself still thinking about Father Art, my heart aching for him. The writing is superb, the characters are so real. It is simply the best book I have read this year. It ranks up with Emma Donoghue's amazing Room in the emotions that I felt when I read it.

I grew up in a Catholic family, and that part of the story resonates with me, but you do not have to be Catholic to appreciate the richness of this story. If you have siblings, you will understand the feelings here.

Rating 5 of 5 stars.

Thanks to Harper Collins and TLC Book Tours for the preview copy.