Four Books That Got Me Through February

Reprinted from auburnpub.com

Four Books That Got Me Through February

February was tough month, and between the freezing cold and multiple snowstorms we had plenty of time to stay inside and read good books. I read several in February.

I’ve read every book Tayari Jones has written, including her last novel An American Marriage, which I and many others felt was tremendous. Her new novel Kin may be her best yet. 

Vernice and Annie both lost their mothers as babies. Vernice’s mother was murdered by her father and Annie’s mother abandoned her at birth. Both girls were raised by their aunts and were best friends all the way through high school.

Vernice prepared to attend college, something not many people, especially Black women in 1950’s and ‘60s Louisiana, did. Her tight knit community rallied around her, raising money and providing clothing. 

Feeling out of place surrounded by wealthier people, Vernice did her best to fit in, helped by her roommate who became her best friend. Her future was bright.

Annie was obsessed with finding the mother who left her and instead of college, she and her boyfriend ran away to Tennessee to find the woman. With no money or prospects, Annie and her boyfriend end up in dead end jobs. 

While their lives diverge, Annie and Vernice stay connected through the years, and when Annie needs her most, Vernice is there for her. It’s a beautiful story of friendship and how losing your mother as a young child affects your entire life. Kin is Oprah’s Book Club choice this month and has already received much well-deserved praise, including mine.

Sadeqa Johnson writes wonderful historical fiction and her newest Keeper of Lost Children tells a largely unknown story set after WWII. Following the war, American soldiers were sent to occupied Germany. 

Ethel is the wife of an Black American officer stationed in Germany. Wanting to have a baby and discovering that she is unable, Ethel is despondent. One day she comes upon a orphanage run by nuns. Most of the children there have been left by their mothers who were shunned because they had babies whose fathers were Black American soldiers.

Ethel decides to find adoptive families for these children back in the United States. She creates a program for this, and she and her husband even adopt several children.

Ozzie is a Black soldier in Germany who falls in love with a German woman. Flash forward to 1965 and Sophie is headed to a prestigious boarding school on scholarship. This is an opportunity to make something of herself and get away from her parents who treat her as a farmhand.

Keeper of Lost Children threads together these three stories to create a fascinating tale based on a real program that brought babies to the United States for adoption. I highly recommend it.

If you are missing the Olympics, Layne Fargo’s novel The Favorites will take you back there. Kat is young girl who dreams of becoming an gold medal Olympic ice dancer like her idol Sheila Lin. 

Kat’s boyfriend Heath does not have the same dream, but because he loves Kat he wants her to be happy. They become a team, and after winning competitions in the Midwest, they work their way to Los Angeles to train with Sheila Lin.

Lin’s twins, Bella and Garrett, are destined to become gold medal winners like their mother. Soon it becomes clear that Kat and Heath may be the only ones who stand between Bella and Garrett becoming Olympic champs.

The story is told by Kat, and interspersed are comments from people participating in a documentary about Kat and Heath. We watch them over the years as Kat’s ambition pushes them to great heights, and eventually low lows.

If you think hockey is a rough sport, wait until you read about these cutthroat people involved in ice dancing. The Favorites is a real page-turner.

Anna Quindlen writes heartfelt novels and her latest More Than Enough is beautiful. Polly is a high school teacher who longs to have a child with her loving husband as they struggle with infertility. 

Her best friends from book club give her an ancestry DNA test as a joke, but when she takes it, she discovers a connection with someone she doesn’t know. When she meets the person she connected with, they are both confused and surprised. 

As Polly becomes more involved with her new family member she looks for answers. Her father has dementia who lives in a memory care center, and the scenes between them are lovely. Her mother is a highly respected judge with whom Polly has a challenging relationship.

The characters are so well-drawn, and I would love to know more about Polly’s brother. Their relationship is so realistic, as is Polly’s relationships with her friends in book club. Anna Quindlen’s novels always touch my heart.

Topical Fiction at Bryant Park

This week at the Bryant Park Reading Room, the subject was topical fiction with authors Tayari Jones and Lisa Ko discussing their books, An American Marriage and The Leavers, respectively.

Lisa Ko and Tayari Jones

I got a copy of Jones' An American Marriage at last year's Book Expo and devoured it when I got home. She has such a way with language and her characters, I think she is one of the best writers in America today.

Lisa Ko thinks so too; she introduced Tayari Jones by saying that as she read Jones' Silver Sparrow, she had a notebook by her side, decoding the structure of the novel to discover how Jones wrote it. (I agree with her, Silver Sparrow is brilliant.)

Tayari Jones introduced Lisa Ko by congratulating her on getting nominated for a National Book Award for her debut novel The Leavers. Ko also won the Bellwether Award before the book was even published. That is a lot to live up to!

Jones read a scene from her book, the one where Roy has just been sentenced to 12 years in prison for a crime he did not commit. Listening to her words wash over the crowd was mesmerizing.

An American Marriage is about Roy and Celestial, married for just 18 months when he is sent to prison. Their marriage is not perfect, but what does a separation like that do to a marriage? Although the story deals with the issue of incarceration (Jones mentions that 1 in 6 women in this country have a loved one incarcerated- a husband, son, brother- and how that disrupts gender expectations).

But at it's heart, it's the story of a marriage and what happens when the husband is gone. Can a marriage survive that? Read An American Marriage to find out.

Jones also discussed getting a phone call from Oprah, hearing that her book had been chosen for Oprah's Book Club and what that meant to her. She also talked about trying to figure out how to write the story in the first person. Telling it from just Celestial's point of view wasn't the whole story, so she added Roy's story. When she included the point of view of Celestial's childhood Andre, it became an animated love story.

The Leavers couldn't be more topical. Polly, an undocumented Chinese immigrant, goes to work one day at a nail salon in New York City and never comes home. Her eleven-year-old son Deming is all alone until he is adopted by a white couple, moved upstate, and renamed David.

The story is told from the point of view of both Polly and Deming, and tells how they tried to find their way back to each other. Given the recent events this week on the US/Mexican border, this is a story that will resonate with anyone who watches the news.

The Leavers is about "finding a sense of belonging when it's taken away", according to Ko. She reads a piece to the audience about Polly's journey to the United States, and the $47,000 she has to repay the smugglers who got her out of China.

Both authors talked about people finding things in their books that they had not intended, and how different audiences react to their books. Jones says that some white people who have read her book ask her if Roy is guilty (and it is very clear in the book that he is not guilty). She said she thinks "You can't even trust a hypothetical black man?" when she hears that comment.

Ko said that people read from their own personal perspective, and she stated that some white adoptive parents have told her that they don't like how she wrote the adoptive parents in her book.

Jones said that it's not necessarily race, but proximity to the issue that affects how people react. She met white people in Tennessee who had loved ones incarcerated, and they could relate to her book very well. I found that to be very insightful.

When asked what books they enjoyed as children, Ko liked the Choose Your  Own Adventure series, and Jones loved Charlotte's Web because she felt unappreciated like Wilbur the pig.

An audience question about how the authors write was interesting. Jones writes on an old-fashioned typewriter. (Anyone who follows her on Twitter has seen her collection of typewriters). Ko keeps many notebooks, and never leaves home without one to jot down ideas. She writes in longhand in the park, uses her Notes app on her phone, and edits on her computer, printing it out and writing on the paper to edit.

An American Marriage is one of the best novels I read this year, I was pleased to buy Jones' first novel Leaving Atlanta, and have it autographed.  She was very excited to see the new edition of her book, it was the first time she had seen it. I also bought a copy of Ko's The Leavers as it has been on my radar for a long time.

Tayari Jones

It was such an interesting conversation, thanks to Bryant Park for hosting these terrific author events. More information about their events can be found here.

My review of An American Marriage is here.
My review of Silver Sparrow is here.

An American Marriage by Tayari Jones

An American Marriage by Tayari Jones
Published by Algonquin ISBN 9781616201340
Hardcover, $26.95, 320 pages

Five years ago, I went to my local Barnes & Noble to hear Judy Blume interview a young author, Tayari Jones, who spoke about her book Silver Sparrow.  Her novel, about a man who married two women and had a daughter by each, was so brilliant and moving, I was mesmerized by it.

Last June, I was thrilled to meet Ms. Jones again, at the Book Expo in NYC, and to get a copy of her upcoming book An American Marriage, which publishes Februrary 6th. Once again, Tayari Jones has written a stunning novel, and it has already garnered so much worthy praise, including being Oprah's Book Club's latest pick. (Hooray!)

Roy is a black man who grew up in a small Louisiana town called Eloe.  His mother worked at a meat-and-three restaurant, his daddy worked at a sporting goods store. They weren't poor, but "there was nothing extra."

Roy made it to Morehouse College on a scholarship for first generation college students. While there, he met and fell in love with Celestial, a young woman who grew up in Atlanta, the daughter of a well-to-do family.

Celestial and Roy were happy together- Roy had a good job as a salesman for a textbook company, Celestial was an artist, making cloth dolls and hoping one day to hit it big selling them. They were married for just over a year, when it happened.

While visiting Roy's parents, they stayed at a hotel. The visit with Roy's parents didn't go well (his mother wants grandbabies, Celestial wants to wait), and Roy and Celestial have a big fight.

When a woman is attacked that night at the hotel, she tells the police it was Roy who did it. In a moment, his entire life is turned upside down. He is charged, tried and convicted and goes to prison.

Not only is Roy's life upended, so is Celestial's. The story is told from three points of view- Roy, Celestial and her childhood friend Andre's.

We see how the bonds of Roy and Celestial's marriage are tested throughout their separation. Roy states "I believed that our marriage was a fine-spun tapestry, fragile but fixable. We tore it often and mended it again, always with a silken thread, lovely but sure to give way again."

An American Marriage is a heartbreaking novel that deals with the big themes of the difficulties and joys of marriage, race, class, loyalty, and the price of mass incarceration (both to the individual and society as a whole), through the prism of Roy and Celestial's marriage.

Tayari Jones at the Book Expo

I didn't want An American Marriage to end. It is a book to savor, and I was sad when I finished it. You feel so deeply for these characters, caught up in a situation not of their making. Tayari Jones is an amazing storyteller, and she weaves her way into your heart and soul with her words.

I give An American Marriage my highest recommendation- you must read this book!

Tayari Jones' website is here.
My review of Silver Sparrow 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. 

Tayari Jones' luminous novel SILVER SPARROW

Silver Sparrow by Tayari Jones
Published by Algonquin Books ISBN 978-1616201425
Trade paperback, $13.95
Source: Picked up a copy at BEA 2011

When a novel starts with the sentence, "My father, James Witherspoon, is a bigamist", you know it's going to be an intriguing book. Tayari Jones' luminous novel has two narrators, Dana Lynn Yarboro, who knows that she has a sister and that her father has two wives, and Chaurisse Witherspoon, who does not know about her sister or her father's other wife.

Dana tells us how her daddy was buying his first wife Laverne an anniversary gift, and he fell in love with the woman at the gift wrap counter of the department store, her mama Gwen. Gwen knew right away that James was married, yet she still dated him, fell in love and had his baby. She also insisted that they get married in the next state over, and James agreed.

When Dana was five, she drew a picture of her family in school, including her daddy's two wives and two girls. Her daddy told her then that she couldn't tell anyone about him or his other wife or daughter. When Dana asked if they were a secret, he told her "no, you've got it the wrong way around. Dana, you are the one who is secret."

That moment changed her life. Dana and her mother would go 'surveilling', following Laverne and Chaurisse around, spying on them. Every Wednesday, James would come to Dana's house for dinner, sometimes accompanied by his best friend Raleigh, who also knew the secret.

Gwen fought for her daughter, shaming James into paying for science classes, any extra she could get to make up for the fact that Dana did not have a daddy she could acknowledge publicly. Gwen worked long, hard hours as a nurse, resenting that Laverne, the other wife, got to work out of her own home in a beauty parlor she owned.

Dana resented Laverne and Chaurisse, especially when Chaurisse got things Dana wanted. She got a job at the local amusement park, but couldn't take it because Chaurisse got a job there too. When her daddy presented her with a beautiful rabbit fur jacket, she felt special, until she saw Chaurisse wearing the same jacket.

The second half of the book is narrated by Chaurisse, and I thought it was the stronger half of the book.  Chaurisse is a sympathetic character. She is lonely, not pretty or smart like Dana. She didn't have any friends, and neither did her mother.

I found this intriguing; none of the women in this book had friends, they were all lonely. You might say that because Dana and Gwen were a secret, they probably wouldn't have many friends, but why didn't Laverne or Chaurisse have friends? Laverne was exposed to many women at her home beauty salon, but she seemed to have no friends. I wonder if this is a commentary on these women or on all women?

I didn't really have a handle on James as a character, he seemed to be an OK guy, but he always appeared a bit out of focus for me. Raleigh, on the other hand, was a fascinating character. James' mother took him in as a child, and he grew up like James' brother.

Raleigh had so many good qualities, but somehow he got swept into James' deceptive life. He always seemed to be the one who tried to make things right, to smooth things over for everyone. But he was lonely too, never having a family or love of his own because he had to keep the peace for James and his two families.

The author said that all stories are about secrets, and that what happens when the secret is revealed is the interesting part. Eventually, James' secret comes out, and the sadness and heartbreak that follows makes for gripping reading.

The writing in Silver Sparrow is just beautiful, and this story has a lot to say about the relationship between mothers and daughters and between sisters. One line really resonated with me. Chaurisse was a bit envious of the easy conversation between her mother and Dana, saying "it was like my mother was a newspaper that everyone could read except for me." I think it's true that we don't see our mothers in the same way others do.

This luminous story grabbed me right at the beginning, and I found myself caring so deeply about these characters, it was like they were people I actually knew. I rooted for them all to be OK, even though the situation dictated that it may not end that way. Tayari Jones has written a lovely novel, one that begs to read again and again.

rating 5 of 5

Tayari Jones and Judy Blume appeared at the Algonquin Book Club at Barnes & Noble 86th St. in NYC. My blog post on that is here.

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