Beach Trip by Cathy Holton

Release date: 2009 / 406 pages

Synopsis (from back cover): For four college friends, a beach trip promises a chance to reconnect and reminisce. Having traveled distinct and diverse paths since the early 1980s and their freshman days at a small Southern women’s college, the quartet — now in their forties — reunites for the first time in North Carolina’s Outer Banks. Over the course of a week they eat, drink, laugh, and cry. But one by one each reveals the hardship and heartache she’s hidden from the others. And one secret threatens to change their lives, and their bond, forever.

First line: “Lola was engaged to Briggs Furman, so her roommates were stunned the evening she came home and told them she was in love with a boy named Lonnie.”

Review: My streak of luck continues – another review book I thoroughly enjoyed!  Beach Trip is a dream read for those of us who love character development.  Holton creates four fully-realized, 3-dimensional women who are equally complex and interesting.  After only a few pages, I felt as if I knew each woman quite well and was able to comfortably sit back, knowing I was in good hands.

The premise is a reunion of college friends, now in their mid-forties, each having chosen a different path in life.  Holton transverses time deftly – between the college years and the present, with occasional interim scenes as well.  The context is a week-long visit to South Carolina and Holton’s sense of place is wonderful:

“Ahead they could see the island in the distance, with its lighthouse, Old Baldy, rising from the intereior like a giant chess piece.  A sailboat passed in front of them, its sails straining with the wind.  As they approached the island, Captain Mike cut the engines, and the yacht slowed to a crawl as they entered the harbor.  The whole island had been built to resemble a sleepy New England fishing village.  Tall gray-shingled cottages and storefronts clustered around the marina.  Behind the village, to the north and west, the marsh glimmered between banks of tall grass, while the interior of the island surrounding Old Baldy was covered in a maritime forest of live oak, saw palmetto, yaupon, and wax myrtle.”

Although the friends were close in college – roommates – we quickly learn that each has secrets they were unable to share forty years ago.  Revealing these secrets provides a satisfactory pace and momentum to the narrative, including a lovely conclusion, which is necessary since the book is long – over 400 pages.  However, this is most likely why the characters are so thoroughly and satisfactorily known by the end.

So, I do recommend this novel to anyone who loves character development.  It would be a perfect choice for a vacation read – engrossing enough to shorten a long plane ride, but not burdensome in its mood or prose. 

If this sounds up your alley, simply leave me a comment and I’ll put your name in the running!

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Review and Free Giveaway: Beach Trip

Happy Tuesday!  Recently The Reader’s Advisor Online Blog highlighted a new feature of Google called the Wonder Wheel. 

photo credit: POSITiv

Here’s a search to try:

• Go to Google and type in:  Jodi Picoult readalikes
• Hit Enter
• Click Show Options on the top left
• Click Wonder Wheel on the bottom left

What do you think?  Possibilities for book clubs?

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Google Wonder Wheel

In the Land of Invented Languages

By Arika Okrent, Spiegel & Grau, $26
For hundreds of years, geniuses and kooks have invented, from scratch, perfect new languages that will unite the planet in utopian rational harmony. For hundreds of years, they have failed. Okrent takes us on a tour of the most colorful attempts: Solresol, the language built entirely from the seven notes of the musical scale (statements could be sung or played on the violin); Láadan, a language to express the full range of women’s experiences (ásháana = “to menstruate joyfully”); Dritok, made from chipmunk noises (clicks, pops, and hisses). She ends, delightfully, with one of the most successful, Klingon: There are instructional videos, conferences, even a translation of Hamlet in it. All of these failures ultimately add up to a celebration of the power of natural languages: They are spontaneous, organic, and gloriously, humanly flawed. –S.A.

Dark Places
By Gillian Flynn, Shaye Areheart, $24
In her first psychological thriller, Sharp Objects, Flynn created a world unsparingly grim and nasty (the heroine carves words into her own flesh) written with irresistibly mordant humor. The sleuth in her equally disturbing and original second novel is Libby Day, the survivor of a famous mass murder (the victims were her mother and two sisters; the accused her brother) paid to reinvestigate the tragedy by a secret society of true-crime obsessives. They believe her brother—to whom Libby hasn’t spoken in 25 years—is innocent. It’s Flynn’s gift that she can make a caustic, self-loathing, unpleasant protagonist someone you come to root for, even if you never entirely like her. –M.K.S.

 How to Sell
By Clancy Martin, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $24
A novel about the duplicity and shady connections that underlie the jewelry business—or at least one grubby sector of it, in Fort Worth, Texas—turns out to be just as much of a con as the games its coke-snorting salesmen play. The fun, flash, and fakery of Martin’s story are all on the surface, expertly hooking the most casual browser. But underneath it’s a timely capitalist satire (wide-eyed Canadian Bobby Clark’s unsentimental education in the dastardly business of American consumer culture) that stealthily creeps toward heartbreak: of Bobby and his nasty brother, Jim, liars and sinners both, but all too human; of their crazed and broken father; and of the women they don’t know what to do with after they’ve sold them a bill of goods. –B.K.

 The Food of a Younger Land
Edited by Mark Kurlansky, Riverhead, $27.95
As more and more Americans are eating locally grown, nonprocessed food by choice, interest in an era when such an approach was the only possibility makes sense. Kurlansky—author of food histories Salt and Cod—investigates “America Eats,” an effort by the Federal Writers’ Project to document the local idiosyncrasies of American cuisine in the thirties and forties. The book is a thoroughly entertaining collection of highlights from the never-completed project’s archives at the Library of Congress, including recipes like “Squirrel Mulligan” and kitsch traditions. To wit, this description of the “Washington Community Smelt Fry”: “The thousands of guests departed, each content that a good performance had been given and that a most worthy member of the fish family had been eulogized.” –B.M.L.

Newton and the Counterfeiter
By Thomas Levenson, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $25
Levenson gives us a historical metamorphosis you’d never believe if it weren’t so well-documented: Isaac Newton—the antisocial human calculator who revolutionized Enlightenment science—as badass London supercop. In the 1690s, England faced a financial crisis that almost destroyed the country: The silver coins at the foundation of their economy had been counterfeited, clipped, melted down, and sold overseas until there was little left to spend. The desperate government summoned Newton to be warden of the Royal Mint. He aimed his genius at the money problem, organizing a massive recoinage and tracking, Law & Order style, a counterfeiting supervillain. The plot is fast, loaded with rich pockets of history (gravity, alchemy, bubonic plague), and strangely resonant with current affairs: Imagine Stephen Hawking solving the global financial meltdown while catching Ponzi schemers. –S.A.

Just Like Family
By Tasha Blaine, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $25
The author worked briefly as a nanny, an experience so unsettling it led her to write this book—a thought-provoking, intimate, and well-reported series of character portraits far deeper than many books about the child-care relationship, which have tended toward arid ideology or focused only on the employer. In three sections, we meet a trio of contrasting nannies: a career Caribbean nanny (Claudia) working in the West Village, an emotionally fragile live-in nanny with wealthy control-freak employers, and a bossy young pro so invested in her job she crosses boundaries in problematic ways. Blaine is sympathetic to all three, but her heart is clearly with Claudia, whose dissolving marriage and struggles to stay afloat financially—while wheeling a stroller through boomtown Manhattan—could form a book of their own. –E.N.

Fordlandia
By Greg Grandin, Metropolitan, $27.50
In 1927, Henry Ford was the world’s richest man, with a company so strong it tried to do something only countries usually manage: It became a colonial power. Seeking a source for tires and gaskets, Ford exacted a concession from the Brazilian government for a piece of Amazon jungle the size of Connecticut and set out to build a rubber plantation. Moreover, he decreed the town of Fordlandia would be an all-American place, never mind the habits of the locals (bandstands and ice-cream shops were built; Prohibition was enforced). From page one, it’s clear Fordlandia was doomed. Two things keep you reading: curiosity over how long this harebrained scheme could go on, and Ford himself, who, in his later years, was less a visionary than a wack job, full of crackpot ideas about diet, sociology, and (as everyone knows by now) Jews. –C.B.

NYPD Confidential
By Leonard Levitt, Thomas Dunne/St. Martin’s press, $25.99
Leonard Levitt has been covering the politics and personal relationships of One Police Plaza since 1983, giving him access to the city’s governing elite—connections he puts to excellent use here. The book examines New York’s heralded drop in crime in the nineties (with an egomaniacal Rudy Giuliani center stage), and it’s fascinating to see how toxic the atmosphere at NYPD headquarters became despite—or because of—that success. Levitt addresses the big issues via an engaging, character-driven narrative and wisely never resorts to the macho melodrama that poisons so much of tabloid police reporting. –B.M.L.

 Bury Me Deep
By Megan Abbott, Simon & Schuster, $15
In 1931, a young wife, Marion Seeley, is deposited by her husband on the steps of a TB ward in Phoenix. Eager to escape her job as a medical secretary among the “lungers,” as patients are known, Marion quickly falls in with the wrong crowd: fading flappers with marcelled bobs and blank eyes. Enter Gentleman Joe, a married “wet druggist” who is all about the “business of ruin.” He unlocks a dark obsession in Marion, and, true to noir style, desperate passions lead to despicable actions. In this novel based on the true-life case of the “Trunk Murderess,” Abbott turns the stuff of sensational confession magazines into a rich meditation on the unclouded depths of the soul. –C.R.

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New York Magazine Recommends…

Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama

Release date/ Length: 2005? / 7 CDs

Synopsis (from back cover): In this lyrical, unsentimental, and compelling memoir, the son of a black African father and a white American mother searches for a workable meaning to his life as a black American. It begins in New York, where Barack Obama learns that his father — a figure he knows more as a myth than as a man — has been killed in a car accident. This sudden death inspires an emotional odyssey — firsts to a small town in Kansas, from which he retraces the migration of his mother’s family to Hawaii, and then to Kenya, where he meets the African side of his family, confronts the bitter truth of his father’s life, and at last reconciles his divided inheritance.

Review: What better way to celebrate Independence Day in the U.S., but with a review of President Obama’s first memoir!  And oh how I loved this!  Last winter I read The Audacity of Hope and was a little disappointed – it seemed more like a politcal treatise than an actual memoir. 

Well, Dreams from my Father was definitely personal, not political, and satisfied all three “requirements” I recently identified that result in a satisfying memoir experience:  the writer is likeable, the writing very strong, and I gained not only insight into who our current president is and why, but insight into who I would like to be in the future, as well.

I listened to this memoir — which I recommend wholeheartedly since Obama has such a resonant voice.  Also, good memoirs tend to be naturally intimate, so listening to the writer’s voice describe his childhood, his challenges, and his journey to selfhood added another level of intimacy that was very satisfying.  In fact, I think I will try to listen to future memoirs whenever possible for this reason. 

A few things that struck me about Dreams from my Father — just how “human” Obama is…  We have a tendency to objectify our leaders as either saviors or devils (at least in the U.S.), and I realized that Obama is just as human as I am — only tremendously smarter and infinitely wiser (thankfully). 

He is forthcoming about his mistakes — even the youthful ones like the first time he was accused of “liking” a girl and responded in a very common, boyish way.  At the time he wrote this, he could not imagine becoming a senator nevermind president, so he is neither calculating nor coached.  This memoir seems to be his attempt to reconcile the many forces in his life and integrate them into an identity.   Rather than feeling a responsiblity to read this (as I did The Audacity of Hope), Dreams from my Father is more like a gift. 

This leads to the next quality I so appreciated — how reflective this memoir was.  Obama could have so easily blamed his absent father for not providing a male role model.  Yet, he takes responsibility for his actions and is instead proactive about learning not only who his father was, but what he will keep as a legacy from this absent father.

Obama is so analytical and cerebral by nature, yet I was most impressed by his compassion and willingness to never accept an easy answer to complex problems.  It is apparent that Obama has tackled the difficult challenges in his life with a clear understanding of their complexity, but has not turned away from this challenge – which leads me to believe this will continue in his public life, as well.

So, I strongly recommend Dreams from my Father as a memoir and hope readers will give it a try, regardless of political affiliation.  I think too often in this country we substitute the judgement of others for what we know to be true and allow the loudest voices to drown out our own.  Fortunately, the quiet, reflective voice of this memoir refuses to do either.  I love not only looking up to my current leader, but wanting to follow his example in my own life.  I finished reading this wanting to enrich my own voice with more compassion and less bitterness.

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Sunday Salon: Dreams from My Father

Angela!!  I hope you enjoy it as much as I did…

Don’t worry if you didn’t win this time — many, many wonderful books coming right up! 

Hope everyone is having a great 4th of July!!

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The Winner of the Late Lamented Molly Marx is…