Summer Reading Picks

Reprinted from auburnpub.com

Memorial Day is past and now Summer Reading Season is upon us. This month’s column is filled with suggestions for books for everyone to read at the beach or on your front porch.

For the person who enjoys a good family story, J. Ryan Stradal’s new novel, Saturday Night at the Lakeside Supper Club tells the story of four generations of women involved with the running of their family supper club in a small town in Minnesota. Some of them take to the family business, others feel confined by it. You’ll feel dropped right into this community. Stradal never misses, his books are must-reads for me. 

Susie Luo’s debut novel, Paper Names tells of the immigrant experience seeking the American dream. Tony leaves his job as an engineer in China to give his family a better life in New York City where he now works as a doorman. The lives of Tony, his young daughter Tammy, and Oliver, a lawyer who lives in the building where Tony works, collide after a violent incident. 

If Historical Fiction is your favorite genre, Luis Alberto Urrea’s Good Night, Irene, a story about women who worked for the Red Cross in Europe during WWII, is inspired by his own’s mother experiences. 

Kristin Harmel’s The Paris Daughter is set in 1939 Paris where a young mother forced to flee the Nazis entrusts her daughter to her best friend. Her return after the war leads to complications.  

Lisa See’s Lady Tan’s Circle of Women is also inspired by a true story, this one about a female physician in 15th century China who undertook medical care for women when no one cared about them. 

Mysteries and thrillers are always great beach reads. William Landay’s All That Is Mine I Carry With Me begins when a mother disappears and her husband, a defense attorney, is suspected but never charged in her disappearance. Her raises their three children alone and when her remains are found 20 years later, their children must decide if is he is guilty or not. 

Dennis Lehane’s new novel Small Mercies is set in Boston during the summer of the busing protests of the 1970s. When a teen girl goes missing the same time that a young Black man is killed in the subway, her tough Irish mother will stop at nothing to find her, including running up against the most dangerous mobsters in town. (This one has raw and offensive language, as well as violence, appropriate for the time and subject.) 

Liv Constantine’s The Senator’s Wife tells the story of a DC power couple. Sloane is a philanthropist married to a Senator, and when complications from her lupus become challenging they hire an assistant. As Sloane’s health deteriorates, she begins suspect her assistant is up to something nefarious. This one has twists galore. 

Romance novels and sunshine go together and this season the queen of summer beach reads Elin Hilderbrand is back with The Five-Star Weekend. This one celebrates friendship as Hollis, a popular food blogger, invites her best friend from each stage of her life to join her on a five-star weekend. It doesn’t go as smoothly as she hoped.

Susan Wigg’s Welcome to Beach Town begins when the town’s elite high school valedictorian, a scholarship student, reveals a town secret during her speech that tears the town apart. When she returns to the town years later, will everyone welcome her back and forget why she left or is she still a pariah? 

For people who prefer Nonfiction, Helen Ellis’ collection of humorous essays, Kiss Me in the Coral Lounge, celebrates life with her loving husband as they navigate the Covid lockdown in New York City. The hilarious essay 'An Email To Our Cat Sitter’ is worth the price of the book alone. Give this one to your favorite couple celebrating an anniversary in June. 

Bethanne Patrick’s memoir Life B- Overcoming Double Depression recounts the book critic’s lifelong struggle to deal with depression. When she hits her fifties, Patrick finally receives a diagnosis and the help she needs to become healthy for herself and her two daughters. 

Summer always brings a big biography, and this year it’s Jonathan Eig’s King-A Life a 688-page comprehensive look at the life of Martin Luther King Jr.  This one has garnered much critical praise. 

I hope there is something here for you to read this summer, email me with your summer picks.

Friday 5ive- A Bookish Week

Welcome to the Friday 5ive, a weekly blog post about five things that caught my eye this week.
It's been a week filled with lots of exciting bookish things.

1) Thursday was our annual Beach Club Book Club meeting. We meet at a fantastic beach club on Atlantic Beach on Long Island. The weather was perfect-bright, sunny and hot. The ladies prepared some appetizers, followed by sandwiches and couscous salad, and ending with these gorgeous and delicious cookies baked by Buttercream and Biscuits. We had a great discussion of Lisa See's powerful novel, The Island of Sea Women.  (My full review is here.) The book is about two best friends, women divers on the island of Jeju, South Korea, and what happens when you can't forgive someone you love because you don't understand. One of the club members has a son who lives in South Korea and that gave an added dimension to our discussion. Many thanks to our hosts!

Beach Club Book Club

2) On Tuesday, I attended a book event at The Corner Bookstore on the Upper East Side for debut novelist Jonathan Vatner's book, Carnegie Hill. The overflow crowd (there were people outside on the sidewalk!) heard Jonathan read from a particularly humorous chapter (a scene about a woman visiting a doctor to consult about cosmetic surgery) of his book. Vatner, in discussion with author Grant Ginder, was inspired by a friend who lived in a co-op on the Upper East Side. His friend would share the emails he received from the co-op board, and Vatner turned that into this hilarious novel about residents of an Upper East Side co-op building that has gotten rave reviews. I can't wait to read it.

Jonathan Vatner

3) The Readerly Report is one of the podcasts that I subscribe to and enjoy a great deal. Gayle and Nicole talk candidly about the books they enjoy, the ones that didn't particularly move them, and other bookish things. They invited me on their show, and we had a fantastic chat about book events we attend, books we're reading, authors we like, and I answered their five questions they ask all their guests. You can listen to it here. And if you like podcasts about books, I highly recommend The Readerly Report, but be warned, listening will increase your To Be Read pile significantly.

4) I found the sign of the week at my local Italian grocery store, Agata & Valentina. While picking up some chicken thighs at the butcher counter, I noticed a sign advertising Filet Mignon from Seneca Falls NY. I was so excited, I took a photo and I know the butcher was wondering what I was doing.

5) In addition to my continued reading for our Italy trip, I read a memoir by Cheryl Stritzel McCarthy, Many Hands Make Light Work. It's about her family of nine children growing up in Iowa in the late 1960s, and 1970s. I loved this book! It's a sweet family story, and anyone from a big family will relate to it. The title comes from father Joe's favorite saying, "Many Hands Make Light Work" as the family owns several student rental homes, and the children spent much of their growing up years doing routine maintenance (mowing grass, shoveling snow, painting) and actual demolition on the homes. There's so much here to enjoy- a big Catholic family who enjoy each other's company, just reading about their daily routine will leave you speechless. Dad is a college professor, and Mom runs the home with an efficiency that is astonishing. Everyone should read this book, and I will have a full review this weekend.

We will be off to Italy next Friday, so I'll be back here in a few weeks with lots more to share with you all. Ciao!

Two Novels Featuring Women During War

Reprinted from the Citizen:
This month's Book Report highlights two novels written by women that deal with women living through war and working in traditional male roles.

Author Kate Quinn's previous novel, The Alice Network, was about a female spy network in World War II France that helped the Allies defeat the Germans. It was a best-seller and even today still resides on the paperback best-seller list. Her new novel, The Huntress, is also partially set in World War II. Following the war, Ian, a Brit, and Tony, an American, have teamed up to find Nazis who have escaped punishment for their crimes. They are looking for a Polish woman known as the Huntress, who is known to have slaughtered innocent children. 

Nina is a Russian woman who escapes her hardscrabble life to join a cadre of female fighter pilots. The most interesting parts of this big, sprawling novel deal with Nina's experiences as a fighter pilot. The Russians created a team of all-female fighter pilots who had to work twice as hard as the male pilots to prove themselves worthy. Nina found a family among these women, and the descriptions of their battles is heart-pounding on the page. 

Nina has personal reasons for wanting to find the Huntress, and joins up with Tony and Ian, who have a lead that the Huntress may be hiding in America. They turn the tables on the Huntress, as she now becomes the hunted.

In a small Massachusetts town, a teenage girl named Jordan is happy that her widowed father has finally found love again with Anna, an immigrant widowed mother of a young girl. They have become a happy new family, but something nags at Jordan about her stepmother.

All of these stories intersect in an intriguing way, and Quinn certainly knows how to ratchet up the tension in this thrilling story. Sharp-eyed fans of The Alice Network will recognize a cameo appearance by one of the main characters from that novel.

Lisa See's novel, The Island of Sea Women, is set on Jeju, an island off the coast of Korea. Young-sook and Mi-ja are best friends who are learning how to become divers, like Young-sook's mother. In their culture, the women are the breadwinners of the family, while the men stay home and take care of the young children and the home. 

Diving for fish (abelone and octopus are prized) can be dangerous, and the women work as a team to keep each other safe, but accidents do happen. Young-sook becomes betrothed to a teacher, but she is jealous that Mi-ja has captured the attention of a handsome businessman who lives in the city. Young-sook and her husband happily welcome three children into their lives. Mi-ja and her husband have a son, but Mi-ja's marriage is troubled.

The Island of Sea Women begins during the Japanese occupation of Korea, and the people of Jeju fear the soldiers. When the Korean War begins, their country is torn apart as Russia and China back North Korean communists and the United States back South Korea. See describes what became known as the 4.3 Incident, where Koreans massacred their own people, including many people on Jeju, while the Americans did nothing to stop it. It is told in horrific detail, and the losses suffered by Young-sook cause a permanent fracture between her and Mi-ja.

The book begins and ends in 2008 as a family of Americans have come to Jeju, now a popular tourist destination. A family of four are looking for anyone who knew a family member who used to be a diver on Jeju. Young-sook avoids the tourists in general, happy to just spend her time on the beach, but this family, particularly the teenage daughter, is persistent.

The Island of Sea Women"is the kind of book you get lost in, taking the reader to an unfamiliar world. See clearly did a great deal of research to create her brilliant novel (as her acknowledgments pages attest), and it adds to the authenticity of the story.

It is an emotional book, one that will bring tears to your eyes as you read about the inhumanity people inflict during war. But at its heart, it is a story of the friendship of two girls and what happens when that friendship is tested. This is a must-read book.

If you read

BOOK: The Huntress by Kate Quinn

GRADE: A

PUBLISHER: William Morrow

COST: Trade paperback, $16.99

LENGTH: 560 pages

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BOOK: The Island of Sea Women by Lisa See

GRADE: A+

PUBLISHER: Scribner

COST: Hardcover, $27

LENGTH: 384 pages

Lisa See in Conversation With Adriana Trigiani at Barnes & Noble

Last week I had the pleasure of attending a terrific conversation between Adriana Trigiani and Lisa See at Barnes & Noble Union Square in NYC about Lisa's newest novel, China Dolls, which has a gorgeous cover.

The novel tells the story of three young Asian women who work in a Forbidden City nightclub in 1938 San Francisco. Like her previous novels, this one was also thoroughly researched, and on her website she has posted fascinating interviews she did with three women who performed on the Chop Suey circuit (similar to the Chitlin Circuit of the South) here.

One of the interviewees is called Mai Tai, and yes, the drink was named after her. See ran into a man who knew Mai Tai at a book signing, and he laughed and then began to list some of the famous men she slept with from Hollywood.

See's great-great grandfather came to the United States and ended up becoming the patriarch of Chinatown in Los Angeles. See has 400 relatives on her father's side, most Asian, but her mother's family is very small. (Her mother is author Carolyn See.)

Although See doesn't look Asian, she identifies heavily with her father's side of the family because as she said "we identify with people around us, they're our mirror." And so many of her novels, such as the popular Shanghai Girls and its sequel Dreams of Joy, have Chinese protagonists.

Trigiani asked See, whom she called "a real storyteller" about her writing life. See is an early riser and staggers to her office answering emails while her husband exercises to his Eminem music playing loudly.

She must write 1000 words a day, which as she points out "isn't that much, about four pages." If she has written 997 words, she forces herself to come up with three more words, proving her mother's point that "the word control freak was invented for me."

See doesn't outline her books, but she does start with the last sentence first, so she knows where she's going emotionally. She said that sometimes the characters will take her in a completely different direction that she thought she would be going.

See spoke lovingly of her husband, a lawyer whom she says is very handsome, even asking for corroboration from her cousin who was in the audience. They have been married for 33 years, which drew a round of applause from the crowd. She said that her "rock solid life" helps her work life and reflects that.

In discussing China Dolls, See spoke of her research, of how on the Chop Suey circuit of the 1930s and 40s there was an Chinese Sinatra, a Chinese Houdini and a Chinese Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. From this research came her three main characters: Grace, who ran away from an abusive home life in Ohio, Helen, who grew up in a traditional Chinese compound home in San Francisco's Chinatown, and Ruby, a Japanese girl posing as Chinese.

Ruby is "unlike any character I have written" See said. "She loves sailors and they love her!". Trigiani said "I've never read a character like her- you blew it apart. You showed a real sense of diversity in the Asian community."

In the Q&A section, someone asked See about the Tiger Mom controversy. See said she didn't see the big deal, students should be studying and working hard. In the Asian community there is respect for elders and family, and immigrants see education as a path to keep moving forward.

One thing she said that I found intriguing was that "all of us have someone who was scared enough and brave enough to leave their country to come here." That struck a chord with me and many others I'm sure.

A few of the women at the event were not familiar with Adriana Trigiani and were totally charmed by her, asking me about her books. Her latest, The Supreme Macaroni Company is now in paperback and I highly recommend it. (My review is here.)

I'm looking forward to reading China Dolls, and will post a review when I do. For more information on China Dolls,  go to See's website here.
My review of Shanghai Girls is here.

A novel that transports the reader

One of the best things about reading a good book is that it can transport you to a time and place that you could not visit any other way. Lisa See's new novel, Shanghai Girls immerses the reader in 1930's Shanghai and Los Angeles.

I am more familiar with the immigrant stories from Europe, having read two interesting Irish immigrant novels recently, Brooklyn by Colm Toibin, and Mary Beth Keane's The Walking People, which also dealt with two sisters who had a secret. I was not so familiar with immigrants from China, which made for an enlightening experience.

We meet two sisters, Pearl and May, who are the only children born to a well-to-do businessman and his wife. The young women live a good life, buying beautiful clothes, going out every evening, working as models for a man who paints calendars. They can almost ignore the poverty surrounding them in Shanghai.

When their father loses all his money gambling, he sells his daughters into arranged marriages with two Chinese brothers who live in Los Angeles. The sisters are horrified and plot to escape from their father.

When Japan invades China, the girls and their mother must flee inland to avoid the war raging around them. The characterization of the mother, who at first appears to be the stereotypical subservient Asian wife, right down to her bound feet, is a revelation. It is their mother who shows inner and outer strength, willing to sacrifice herself to save her daughters.

The sisters end up at Angel Island, an immigration station in San Francisco akin to Ellis Island in New Jersey. Their time there mirrors the experiences I have read about at Ellis Island. I had never heard about Angel Island before this.

Their journey takes them from Shanghai to Los Angeles, and it is riveting. See has set her novel in a momentous time in Chinese/American history. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor had repercussions for all Asian immigrants, as many Americans were unable to differentiate Chinese, who also disliked the Japanese after they invaded China, from Japanese. When China became Communist, Americans were undergoing the Red Scare, led by Senator Joseph McCarthy. People feared Communists, and that fear and hatred was transferred to Chinese immigrants.

As the immigrants worked to build a life in this country, they faced racial discrimination. Since these immigrants looked different than European immigrants, it was easier for people to identify them as immigrants. Their customs were different from European immigrants, whose ancestors settled America hundreds of years ago, and this separated them from many Americans.

Along with the history lesson, See has written a beautiful story about sisters, love, loyalty, sacrifice and family. Pearl and May are fascinating characters, and their sisterly relationship is one that many can identify with. The family that they both marry into is also interesting, and the relationship that develops between Pearl and her husband is tender.

Shanghai Girls is a beautifully crafted story that will keep the reader turning the pages. The fact that the reader learns much about the history of Chinese immigrants at this time period is a bonus.

Rating 4.5 of 5 stars