Beach Blog 2020

Drive to the beach (June 20, 2020) – finished listening to The Care and Feeding of Ravishingly Hungry Girls by Anissa Gray.  Althea and Proctor are arrested for holding charity events and then keeping the money.  Turned in by their teenage daughter, Kim, they sit in jail as the story opens, awaiting their trials.  Meanwhile, Althea’s youngest sister Lillian reaches out to their middle sister, Viola, begging her to come to Michigan.  Lillian is struggling as she is now caring for her sibling’s daughters, Kim and Little Vi as well as Nai Nai, the grandmother of her now deceased ex-husband.  Viola, feeling unmoored herself after just breaking up with her partner of fifteen years, Eva, reluctantly makes the trip from Chicago.  How the three sisters come to terms with both the past and the present is told through their alternating voices plus that of Proctor.  It’s a story about taking responsibility for your own choices and recognizing what we owe other people.  Recommended for readers who like Tayari Jones.  4 stars

Days 1-2 (June 21-22, 2020)  – Beach Read by Emily Henry seems like an appropriate place to begin a two week stay at the ocean.  The beach in this case, however, turns out to be lakeside, in Michigan (Am I reading only books set in that state?) where January Andrews, a writer of “women’s fiction” – a term she hates – has taken up residence next door to Augustus Everett, a novelist who has been short-listed for the National Book Award.  Their first encounter is hostile – there’s a loud party going on at his place and she’s trying to sleep – but eventually they get off on better footing.  They are each suffering writer’s block for reasons that are gradually revealed and challenge each other to write in the other’s genre, agreeing to give each other lessons in how to find source material.  January’s lessons are trips to carnivals, bowling alleys and local bars where strangers meet and find romance.  Gus takes her on his research trips to interview people who were survivors of a backwoods cult.  The first third of the book is breezy and light, filled with witty repartee and aggression that masks longing – not unlike what you might find in a good Hallmark movie; in fact, I wondered if this book would turn out to be the book Gus writes.  Then, it becomes more serious as they get to know each other and share the reasons for their emotional struggles.  The book is ultimately, at least in part, about opposing world views.  January believes in and has – until now – written happy endings.  Gus is more cynical and accuses her of naiveté. How they navigate to different places while, of course, falling for each other, makes it a satisfying first day at the beach read! 4 stars.

Days 2-3 (June 22–23, 2020)  – After finishing Beach Read and continuing with the titular ocean theme, I moved on to Sea Wife by Amity Gaige.  Juliet and Michael are struggling with their marriage --- her, an unfinished dissertation, two small children who exhaust her and a husband who comes home late wanting only a beer and sports on the television, and him – trapped in a tedious corporate job and increasingly preoccupied with the need to be free of the ties that bind.  Michael proposes that they buy a sailboat and live on it for a year, a suggestion that Juliet thinks is insane but one to which she eventually acquiesces out of desperation.  They travel to Panama where they pick up their 44-foot sailboat, which Michael renames Juliet despite the warning from the boatyard men that changing a boat’s name brings bad luck – clear foreshadowing.  The story is told alternately by Juliet who is back in Connecticut, the sailing experiment over, and Michael, through the journal he keeps.  The reader soon knows that something disastrous has happened but not what or how until much later. Michael’s entries reveal that he is thriving on this sea adventure, feeling the freedom and self-reliance that he found missing in his regular life.  Juliet progresses from a novice to a fairly capable sailor, able to navigate the boat through a literal storm.  The author seems to have done her homework about sailing as the handling of the boat seems realistic.  The novel explores the complications of marriage and the push and pull between satisfying oneself and making compromises for those we love.  4 stars

Day 4 (June 24, 2020) – Next up was The Truants by Kate Weinberg, a book that does contain a beach scene but which takes place largely in East Anglia.  Jess Walker is a student at a university in Norfolk (England), lured to this less prestigious college over Oxford after reading a book of feminist literary criticism by Dr. Lorna Clay, a professor there whose specialty is a seminar on Agatha Christie.  Jess is drawn like a moth to a light to her mentor, becoming enamored with the beautiful and charismatic intellectual to whom she eventually becomes a pet student and to Alec, a slightly older South African journalist and the boyfriend of her best friend, Georgie.  Lorna warns Jess about triangles; what seems a strange admonition at the time resonates in multiple ways as the novel progresses.  Secret relationships, stories about the past that may not be completely true, and manipulative encounters make this a noirish literary thriller.   4 stars.

Days 5 and 6  (June 25-26, 2020)– Ron Charles in The Washington Post recently recommended Megha Majumdar’s new novel with the headline “A Burning is blazing up the bestseller list and emerging as the must-read novel of the summer.”  Jivan is a hijra (I had to look this up) – a person born physically as a male who lives as a woman.  A Muslim girl from the slums, Jivan makes a careless comment on Facebook and is subsequently labeled a terrorist and arrested for blowing up a train.  Bewildered by this turn of events and sure that she will be vindicated, she reaches out to Lovely, another hijra, whom she tutors in English and to whom she was bringing books the day she went to the train station.  PT Sir, a physical education teacher in the girls school that Jivan attended, hitches his fortunes to a right-wing political party and becomes increasingly involved in doing their duty work, which eventually includes testifying against Jivan.  The novel, told in the voices of these three characters, highlights the corruption of India and makes your heart hurt for those at the bottom of society who live in poverty and face discrimination. 5 stars

Days 7-9 (June 27 – 29, 2020) – The Perfect Wife by J.P. Delaney begins with Abbie, a 30 year old woman, who wakes up in what she thinks is a hospital room; machines buzz and whir around her.  Has she been in an accident?  Are husband Tim and son Danny okay?  Soon Tim, a Silicon Valley titan (Think Elon Musk.) is beside her, reassuring her that they are all fine, that she was in an accident five years earlier. . .that she died. . .that he’s managed to create an artificial version of Abbie, called a cobot, an artificial life form with Abbie’s memories and emotional intelligence.  Tim brings Abbie to the home where she remembers being a happy mother, wife and successful artist, but something seems off and she begins to question both her husband’s motives and the veracity of her memories about their relationship.  Filled with twists and turns, the novel is a suspenseful page-turner.   4 stars

Days 10-11 (June 30 – July 1, 2020) – The next book continues with the theme of the search for identity.  In The Last Flight by Julie Clark, two women meet at JFK Airport, both fleeing their lives for different reasons. Claire Cook is the wife of a wealthy man from a political family (like the Kennedys) who is about to make a run for the U.S. Senate.  To outside onlookers, they are a beautiful, mutually supportive and happy couple; for Claire, the marriage is suffocating and dangerous and she longs for a way out, recognizing that the only way he will let her go is if she disappears entirely.  She spends a year carefully planning a getaway, tucking away money and obtaining new identity papers but on the morning she plans to execute her plan, her husband pulls the rug out, telling her she is going to a conference in Puerto Rico and that he will go to Detroit.  Despairing that her planning was in vain and that he will now find out when he picks up her package of money and papers at the hotel where she was supposed to be staying, she is easily enticed by Eva, a woman she meets at the airport, to switch planes and places.  They exchange phones, wallets and clothes and Claire heads to Oakland while Eva is agrees to travel to Puerto Rico.  When the plane bound for Puerto Rico crashes, Claire realizes that her husband will assume she is dead and that she really is now free to be Eva or anyone else she wants to be, but when she moves into Eva’s apartment, she realizes that what Eva has told her about why she was running away is not the truth.  Eva’s back story is gradually revealed in flashback chapters as Claire attempts to uncover the truth about Eva and to stay hidden from her husband.  Definitely a great summer read!  4 stars

Days 12-13 (July 2 – July 3, 2020) -  For my birthday, my mother-in-law gave me two mystery novels by Margery Allingham, saying that an English friend of hers told her they are among his favorite reads.  Mystery Mile, #2 in the series featuring amateur detective Albert Campion, was first published in 1930 and is decidedly dated.  The two women who are among the main cast are referred to as “girls” and the men are always deciding who among them will “watch over them” as the others investigate.  An art dealer who comes to the country manor to purchase a painting is “the Oriental”.  Albert meets American Judge Lobbett on a trans-Atlantic crossing, saving him from death aboard the ship.  This is the fifth narrow escape (the previous four actually resulting in the deaths of others around him such as his chauffeur and maid) Lobbett has experienced, and he hires Campion to find the criminal mastermind currently terrorizing New York City who believes Lobbett possesses a clue as to his identity.  Having just spent a week and a half reading far better written and more complex contemporary mysteries, I confess I will not read the other Allingham.  Two and a half stars.

The drive home and beyond (July 4 – July 8, 2020) – Listened to Still Midnight by Denise Mira, a Scottish mystery featuring a recurring protagonist, DS Alex Morrow. On a quiet night in suburban Glasgow, three armed men break into a home demanding to see Bob, intent on kidnapping him.  The family are Indian Muslims with names like Omar and Amir and appear bewildered at the request.   One of the family members is inadvertently shot in the confusion and the kidnappers grab the father of the family and drive off with him in a van.  The story moves back and forth between the detectives who are investigating, the bumbling amateur criminals and the perspective of the kidnapped man.  The characters are well-drawn and the mystery is complex.  4 stars