Two Books That Transport You To A Different Place and Time

Reprinted from the Citizen:

At The Water's Edge by Sara Gruen
Published by Penguin Random House ISBN 9780385523233 
Hardcover, $28, 368 pages

In The Unlikely Event by Judy Blume
Published by Knopf ISBN 9781101875049
Hardcover, $27.95, 416 pages

One of the great things about books is that they can transport you to a completely different place and time, a place you can visit right from your chair. Sara Gruen’s novel, “At The Water’s Edge” and Judy Blume’s “In The Unlikely Event” are two of those books.

Gruen’s best known for her hugely popular book from a few years ago, “Water For Elephants” that was made into a movie with Reese Witherspoon. Set during the Depression, it was a love story set in a circus, and it is one of those books that you will find featured prominently in new and used bookstores.

“At The Water’s Edge” is also set in the past, mostly in Scotland in 1944. Maddie is married to Ellis, the son of a wealthy family from Philadelphia. Ellis, Maddie and their best friend Hank spend their days and nights and Ellis’ family money going to parties and getting drunk most nights.

Maddie’s mother had a questionable reputation, and Ellis’ mother has not made Maddie welcome in her family. Maddie and Ellis are spoiled, with maids and cooks to care for their every need.

Years ago, Ellis’ father was in Scotland to prove that the Loch Ness Monster was real, and he was accused of faking photographic evidence to do so. After Ellis has a fight with his father, he decides to go to Scotland to prove that what his father was unable to- that the Loch Ness Monster is real.

Of course Maddie and Hank tag along, even though Scotland is in the middle of WWII, with bombings from the Germans a frighteningly common occurrence and rationing of food in effect. They are so oblivious it never occurs to them that this is a bad idea.

They end up in a small Scottish town at an inn run by a gruff man who is not happy see these spoiled Americans show up on his doorstep expecting to waited on hand and foot, as if at a five star hotel. 

Over the course of their stay, Maddie becomes involved with the people who work at the inn, while Ellis and Hank spend their time drinking and trying to find the monster. Maddie begins to see how little character Ellis and Hank have, how cruel they can be to anyone they consider beneath their station, even her.

Watching Maddie evolve and grow over the course of the story, becoming a stronger, more caring woman gives “At The Water’s Edge” its heart, and she is an unforgettable character. I liked “At The Water’s Edge” even more than “Water For Elephants”, I found it to be a deeper, richer story and I highly recommend it. 

Judy Blume, known mostly for her classic children’s books, bases her new adult novel “In The Unlikely Event” on events that occurred in her hometown of Elizabeth, New Jersey in 1951-52 when she was a teenager. 

In the space of less than two months, three passenger planes crashed over the city of Elizabeth, killing many. Blume brilliantly takes this true story and we see how the crashes affect the people of the city.

She includes real characters and adds her own, and we see the story mainly through the eyes of teenage Miri, who lives with her single mother (she never knew her father) and her loving grandmother.

Miri is going through all of the usual teenage angst, meeting her first love, hanging out with her best friends, when the first plane crashes. Miri sees it happen, as the plane nearly crashes into the school where she is at a holiday party.

The crash stuns the city, and when a second plane from Syracuse crashes near a school, crazy conspiracy theories begin to be discussed. Some teens have heard that aliens are crashing the planes, looking for children to abduct.

When a third plane crashes, just outside an orphanage, there are survivors and Miri’s young boyfriend is a hero who rushes to save people trapped in the plane. 

Blume does an amazing job creating her story around the real events. Through Miri and her friends and family we see how these events frighten people, making them uneasy. Given the unsettled nature of today’s world, with terrorism on the rise, “In The Unlikely Event” , although set in a simpler time, can feel contemporary.

But Blume’s theme here is a good one, as spoken by Miri’s mother to Miri when Miri expresses her fear of flying. She tells Miri “you don’t want your fears to limit your possibilities”. That is good advice indeed, and “In The Unlikely Event” is a book worth waiting for from Judy Blume.

“At The Water’s Edge”- A

“In The Unlikely Event”- B+

Summer Reads 2015

Reprinted from auburnpub.com

Summer is right around the corner (isn’t it?), and that means it’s time to search out books for the beach, lake, pool deck, summer cottage or back porch. Click on the title below each book to get more information.

First up, there are the so-called beach reads. The Fifty Shades of Grey fans may have to wait for the next installment Grey, but in the meantime they may want to check out the latest chapter in Jackie Collins’ ‘Lucky’ series, titled The Santangelos. Once again she blends a cocktail of sex, violence, and general mayhem amongst Lucky and her extended family. It’s a real page-turner, and there are graphic sex scenes, so fair warning. 

The Santangelos

Dorothea Benton Frank returns to the Lowcountry of South Carolina for her summer novel, All The Single Ladies, the story of a nurse caring for a patient who becomes good friends with her patient’s best friends. There’s lots of female bonding here, and this is aimed at women who have lived life, and have to deal with adult children, and mothers and grandmothers too. 

All The Single Ladies

Shelley Noble’s novel has an actual beach setting. In her novel Whisper Beach, Vanessa left her home there at age seventeen when she became pregnant. Fifteen years later, she returns home for a funeral, and ends up staying for awhile to help a old friend with her failing restaurant. This one is also about friendship, lost love and coming home. 

Whisper Beach

If fast-paced thrillers are more your style, Jessica Knoll’s novel Luckiest Girl Alive has been favorably compared to Gone Girl. Ani FaNelli has a glamorous job, a handsome, wealthy fiance, and the world on a string. But a secret from her past has threatened to derail all that she has worked for. Critics have been praising this debut novel from Knoll, a Hobart and William Smith Colleges graduate. 

Luckiest Girl Alive

Author Charles Dubow's followup to his novel Indiscretion is Girl In The Moonlight, about Wylie, a young man who has been enchanted by Cesca, a wild, spirited, beautiful young woman. Cesura toys with Wylie over the years, destroying him in the process for any other woman. Their passionate relationship over the years takes the reader from the East Hamptons to the Upper East Side of Manhattan to Paris and Barcelona. 

Girl In The Moonlight

Judy Blume, best known for her iconic children’s books like Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret? and Forever, has written an adult novel this year, In The Unlikely Event. Taking place in Elizabeth, New Jersey, it tells the story of Miri, who returns to her hometown thirty-five years after a series of plane crashes occurred there (which actually happened). We see how all these years later, people in the town are still haunted by the plane crashes, and Blume brings to vivid life the feelings of growing up in that place at that time in history. 

In The Unlikely Event

If you prefer to read non-fiction, Los Angeles Times reporter Jill Leovy’s Ghettoside- A True Story of Murder in America takes a look at murder in Los Angeles. Los Angeles has almost one murder every day, and many of them go unsolved because no one seems to care about the victims. 

Ghettoside

Leovy writes about the case of Bryant Tennelle, a young black man who was murdered and doomed to be an unsolved and forgotten homicide until detective John Skaggs caught the case. Skaggs doggedly pursued justice for Tennelle, and by telling this story Levy shares how the epidemic of young black men killing each other exists and how it could be stopped. 

Joseph J. Ellis, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his book Founding Brothers, returns with The Quartet- Orchestrating The Second American Revolution, 1783-1789 about the four men- George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay and James Madison- who, after the American Revolution, worked to draft the Bill of Rights and ensure that the states would accept the powers of the federal government in order to create a strong national union. 

The Quartet

Actress Kate Mulgrew has been working on TV for over thirty years, best known as Mary Ryan on the ABC soap Ryan’s Hope, as the first female captain of a Starfleet vessel on Star Trek-Voyager and can currently be seen as tough prison inmate Red on Orange Is The New Black, and she recounts her life’s story in the brilliantly written memoir Born With Teeth. It’s honest and fascinating, but fans looking for gossip will be disappointed. 

Born With Teeth

Whatever you read this summer, I hope you enjoy it.

Algonquin Book Club: When Judy (Blume) Met Tayari (Jones)

Tayari Jones & Judy Blume at Barnes & Noble

I was thrilled to discover that the Algonquin Book Club would be at my neighborhood Barnes & Noble webcasting a discussion between Judy Blume, (Are You There God, It's Me Margaret?) and Tayari Jones, whose newest book is the luminous Silver Sparrow.


The room was filled with quite a diverse crowd; young and older, women and men, publishers, editors and readers. But the one question that everyone seemed to have was "How do Judy Blume and Tayari Jones know each other?" Judy has sold over 80 million copies of her books, many of them young adult classics, and Tayari is a relatively new writer, whose latest book is her best known.

The answer is that in the recent past, Tayari was speaking at the Key West Literary Seminar, pondering a change in publishers for her next book. A woman she didn't know came up to her and said she heard that Tayari was looking for a new publisher.

Tayari thought "Why are people talking about my publishing situation?" The woman took her over to Elisabeth Scharlatt, the publisher at Algonquin Books, and then left. Elisabeth asked Tayari "How do you know Judy?", to which Tayari replied "I don't know anyone named Judy." Elisabeth informed Tayari that the woman who just introduced them was none other than Judy Blume!

Judy and her husband invited some of the new authors to dinner that night and Elisabeth was there too. Judy joked that she was a matchmaker, mating a "wonderful young writer to a wonderful publisher." And that is how Judy met Tayari and Tayari became an Algonquin author.

Tayari said that the trajectory of her career changed when this happened, but she was ready. "You have to be ready, and I had something worth sending, Silver Sparrow."  This came at the right time in her life, when preparation met opportunity.

Silver Sparrow tells the story of James, a man married to two women who each have a daughter by him, born just four months apart. The second wife and daughter know about the first wife and daughter, but the first wife and daughter are in the dark regarding wife and daughter number two.

Judy asked why Tayari gave away the secret in the first sentence, "My father, James Witherspoon, is a bigamist." Tayari believes that it is more interesting that one woman married a man, knowing he was already married. She says that all stories are about secrets, like Romeo and Juliet, and that's what keeps us turning pages. She says that there are two important things, what is the secret and what happens when the secret comes out.

We learned that Tayri uses a manual typewriter to write her stories; actually, she uses six of them, and they each have names. The pink one is 'Tuscadero', named after Fonzie's girlfriend from Happy Days, who always wore pink. The deep purple one is named 'Jeannie' and 'Andre' is a 1919 one she bought on Ebay.

The subject of categories, or classification, like women's fiction, chick-lit and YA, came up. Judy says "I hate them!" Tayari brought up a good point, that it is not necessarily that the classifications themselves, but the way people perceive or react to the classifications that matter. If people reject a book out of hand because it is "chick-lit" or YA, it is not the classification that is wrong, but their perception that that category is a lesser one that is wrong.

The discussion was delightful and informative, and I hope that my neighborhood Barnes & Noble can host another one soon. You can get more information on future webcasts at Algonquin Books Blog here. And you can watch the entire discussion here.
http://www.algonquinbooksblog.com/bookclub/silver-sparrow-by-tayari-jones/#webcast