After some consideration, I’ve decided to ramp up my volunteer work for the remainder of the year. This means that likely the only reviews I’ll be posting on my blog from here on in are these ‘minis’ at the end of each month. (And I refuse to feel guilty anymore!)

And, since you won’t be seeing individual reviews at Exurbanis, if you’d like more of my thoughts on any of these books, please leave a comment on this post and I’ll reply there.

1. Gillespie and I by Jane Harris

Although this is alternately told from 1888 Glasgow and 1938 London, the main story is the earlier one. Harriet Baxter recalls two years in the lives of the Ned Gillespie family.

We know almost immediately that Harriet will prove to be an unreliable narrator and trying to see past her perspective to what really happened is lots of fun. 4½ stars

2. A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth

Set during an 18-month period in 1950-51 India, just a few years after Partition, it involves several families of the upper Hindu castes, and a Muslim family. The story was decent and the class perspective a different one than I had encountered in the past, but it was just plain too long.

At 1,349 pages in hardcover (1,488 in the paperback that I read), this is one of the longest English language novels ever written. Was it worth two weeks of my life? Meh, I don’t think so. 4 stars

3. The Land of Decoration by Grace McCleen

A ten-year-old girl, devoutly religious and emotionally estranged from her father, is bullied at school – and then more. How she and her father react to the persecution that comes because of their religion, her father’s status as a factory ‘scab’ during a major strike in the town, and the psychological twistedness of the bully and his father, forms the core story.

I couldn’t stop turning the pages, but other readers may not feel the same. This book can be interpreted in many, many ways and I’m certain it will be the source of numberless discussions and widely varying reactions. 4 stars

4. Winnie and Gurley: The Best-Kept Family Secret by Robert G. Hewitt
When Hewitt published NO INSTRUCTIONS NEEDED: An American Boyhood in the 1950s, evidently several readers took him to task because he had not elaborated on the grandmother with whom he had spent so many childhood hours.

He was fortunate enough to inherit the ephemera and other materials that allowed him to trace the courtship and married life of his grandparents, and to discover a disturbing family secret.

Anyone who has tried tracing their family tree will be fascinated by this. 4 stars

5. The Mapping of Love and Death (Maisie Dobbs, Book 7) by Jacqueline Winspear

I love Maisie Dobbs. And, until this book, I’d loved all the stories in this mystery series. The book wasn’t bad, mind you, and provided lots of interesting details about the mapping of war.

But there were just a couple too many coincidences that advanced the solving of the mystery to suit me: Maisie’s friend just happened to try to match-make her at dinner with a man who just happened to know a guy who made films of the troops in WWI and who just happened to have filmed a cartography unit (and all this just happened to have come up in dinner conversation 14 years after the end of said war). The cartography unit caught on film just happened to be the one Maisie was looking for, and the villain just happened to be visiting the unit that day and was captured on celluloid trying to stop the film crew.

You get the picture. And I didn’t think the clues were fair enough to allow the reader to solve the case – unless one must consider that anyone and everyone introduced in the gathering of information might be more involved than that. I hadn’t noticed this element in previous Maisie books.

ANYWAY – I still love Maisie and I’m going to continue reading this series, hoping that this is just a blip in Winspear’s otherwise impeccable record. 3½ stars

6. A Place for Johnny Bill by Ruth Bishop Juline

I read this for the Books That Made Me Love Reading Challenge. Johnny Bill Mason is the eldest child in a family of migrant workers, following the crops around the southeastern US in the late 1950s.

I remember checking this out of our public library time after time after time. I must have been fascinated by the poverty of these people – people who had less money than my working-class family. And who were poor in more than finances: Johnny Bill’s greatest dream was to settle someplace so he could get some book-learning and have a dog. We didn’t have a dog, but I had a home and a school routine, and lots of books to read.

Unfortunately, A Place for Johnny Bill hasn’t stood the test of time or perspective for me. 3 stars

For Canadian readers:

Gillespie & I

A Suitable Boy

The Land Of Decoration

The Mapping Of Love And Death: A Maisie Dobbs Novel

Kindle editions:

Gillespie and I

The Land of Decoration

Winnie and Gurley: The Best-Kept Family Secret

The Mapping of Love and Death: A Maisie Dobbs Novel

Last week the boats in Toney River, Nova Scotia were lined up ready to take on their traps (seen piled on the wharf in the background).

The meme Snapshot Saturday is hosted by Alyce of At Home With Books. Visit her blog to see more great photos or add your own.

I took this on Wednesday in beautiful Malagash Nova Scotia. The water of the Northumberland Strait (part of that same North Atlantic that sunk the Titanic) really was that blue.

Could you tell that it was was only 5C / 40F?

Introducing the piece The $64 Tomato, The Gardener’s Bedside Reader says:
“Vegetables harvested from the garden have a freshness and fullness of flavor well above and beyond anything one can buy in a supermarket. But how does a homegrown tomato, for example, compare in price to one purchased at the local Piggly Wiggly? In this excerpt from the book The $64 Tomato: How One Man Nearly Lost His Sanity, Spent a Fortune, and Endured an Existential Crisis in the Quest for the Perfect Garden (…) William Alexander does the math, with surprising results.”

The results aren’t actually that surprising, given the title of both the essay and the book, but you get the picture. This was an entertaining excerpt of what promises to be an entertaining and down-to-“earth” book. (Sorry – the fresh air’s gone to my head.)

I love this series and I’m honoured to be featured today on Kim’s blog. Go on over and have a look at my favourites.

What do you think of them? How would you have answered?

P.S. Today I’m using the ‘ou’ spellings I was taught in school as a ‘tip of the hat’ to Kim who is an ex-pat Australian living in London, UK. Enjoy – tomorrow I’ll get back to American spellings.

Tired of the dreary British climate as she and her husband Joe neared retirement, they decided to sell in Britain and move to sunny Spain. The book begins with (Victoria’s) discontent with England, the process of their decision to make the move, and their search for the ideal piece of Spanish real estate (“The House”). Finding a reliable real estate agent was aided greatly by their serendipitous meeting with another ex-pat who had lived in Spain for some time.

The Tweads found a run-down terrace house with rudimentary bathroom facilities and less-than-that kitchen amenities, in a small village tucked into the mountains. They set about making (extensive) renovations and moving their worldly possessions. They made friends with their neighbours and became acquainted with the villagers and village life, all the while receiving what seems a steady stream of visitors from England.

With a fresh perspective and laugh-out-loud humour, Victoria shares all of this with us. I tremendously enjoyed reading Chickens & Mules because

• Victoria’s voice is down-to-earth. She finds the humour in village life and is not afraid to laugh at herself too. There are also no judgements as to superiorities of one culture over another. I believe this is a key reason the Tweads were successful and happy in their move.

• It was well-written and edited. There are no bumpy repetitions, badly constructed sentences, or annoying typos.

• There are photos! On my Kindle, they are in black and white. On a Kindle Fire, Nook Color, iPad, or other reading device with color graphics, you’ll see them in their full glory. BUT. Only a few of the books on my Kindle have a desk-top component – I’m not familiar enough with the technology to know why or why not—and Chickens and Mules is one that does. THAT desk-top copy of the book has colour photos. The paperback version of the book also has b&w pictures, but you can also view them (and MANY others) in colour on Victoria’s website.

• Victoria includes three dozen yummy-sounding recipes for everything from Spanish Spinach to English Sticky Toffee pudding, with the emphasis on Mediterranean dishes.

I recommend Chickens, Mules and Two Old Fools: Tuck into a slice of Andalucían Life to anyone who’s ever dreamed of moving someplace sunny (and who hasn’t it?!), anyone contemplating moving to another country and culture, and to arm-chair travellers, no matter how house-bound; in fact, to anyone who’d like to share a few laughs and a few dreams with a charming couple.

P.S. Victoria is kindly offering a free download of Chickens, Mules and Two Old Fools to anyone who’d like to read it. You can get the coupon code and/or subscribe to a free Village Updates newsletter here.

P.P.S. After spending this time getting to know Victoria and Joe, and having viewed the photo of their renovated guestroom, I’d visit too!

For Canadian readers:
Chickens, Mules and Two Old Fools: Tuck Into a Slice of Andaluc an Life

Kindle version:
Chickens, Mules and Two Old Fools

Perhaps that’s because I read the back story about Grenville’s research, in the non-fiction Searching for the Secret River, before I read the novel.

It was a quandary: I signed up for Amanda’s Truth in Fiction Reading Challenge which requires me to  read  book pairs that are comprised of one fiction book and one related non-fiction book. Whispering Gums suggested that I try these two books and I immediately reserved them at the library. Unusually, they arrived the same day, so I had to make a decision: which would I read first? The non-fiction was an inter-library loan with no renewal allowed & $1 fine for overdues, so it won the toss.

When Grenville first considered the idea of searching her family history, she thought she would write a non-fiction book about her ancestors. However, she found complications in this concept. As she says “When you were a white Australian, investigating your own family history could lead you into some murky territory.”

Grenville is referring here mainly to the treatment of the Aboriginal people – a tragedy repeated as well in North & South America as white Europeans moved to those places to live, displacing the native peoples who occupied the land before them.  Grenville determined that she “might not be able to enter the Darug consciousness, but (she) could make it clear that there was one.”

This approach to the story required that she be able to imagine her great-great-great-grandfather’s attitudes and reactions, of which there was little record. It became apparent to her that a piece of fiction would allow her greater scope in telling the story and taking into account the windows into the cultures of both sides that she hoped to deliver.

Before I started Searching for the Secret River, I was afraid that I might be bored with dry facts and history. Indeed, not. Grenville’s writing is simple and lovely to read, both in fiction and in non-fiction. I particularly enjoyed the genealogy aspect of her search as I also have, in the past, traced my family tree. Her descriptions of the thrill of standing on the very dock on which her ancestor worked, or in finding the court records which contained his “voice, speaking directly across nearly two centuries! The actual phrase he used!” brought back similar elations in my genealogical investigations.

Knowing the “facts” then, I began the fictional account, The Secret River.  The story is told from the point of view of William Thornhill, born into poverty, and an apprentice riverman in late 18th century London. Grenville tells us of the temptations of his work:
“He loved the docks for their excess. So many casks of brandy, sacks of coffee, boxes of tea, hogsheads of sugar, bales of hemp.
With such a quantity, how could a little be missed?”

Thus, Thornhill is drawn into thievery which leads to a sentence of death – or exile in Australia. He & his wife Sal and their young son make the long journey down under. Once there, they face the challenge of building a new life in a strange climate and unknown country, inhabited by mysterious black people whose culture is unlike anything they have experienced.

The author has done an excellent job of providing insight into the lifestyle of the aboriginal people and the culture clash that occurred between them and the new settlers. She also helped me to understand how the British culture that the Thornhills and their countrymen tried to establish permutated into a new set of values – one that by necessity took into account the very land which they tried to subdue.

But, having read the back story, I knew how the novel ended and that compromised the suspense that other readers might feel in the plot. Having said that, I still maintain that it was a very good reading experience.

If you haven’t read either of these books and both interest you, you’ll probably enjoy the fiction account more if you read it first. There’s always the possibility that you’ll then be bored by the build-up to its writing in Searching. But if you enjoy history, genealogy, or just observing the birth of a really good story, you’ll still want to read the non-fiction as well. Four stars to both.

The Secret River qualifies for the Truth in Fiction Reading Challenge, as well as for the What’s in a Name Reading Challenge, the Global Reading Challenge as my Australian entry, and the Australian Women Writers Reading Challenge.

Searching for the Secret River qualifies for the Non-Fiction Non-Memoir Challenge, the Seconds Reading Challenge, the I Want More Challenge, and the Dewey Decimal Reading Challenge.

For Canadian readers:
The Secret River
Searching For The Secret River

I was blown away. From one cramped room with barely room to walk, we have a two story light & airy open space complete with kids area, teens area, a community activity room, a half-dozen big screen computers with Wi-Fi, washrooms, staff offices, and two beautiful reading areas. One of those is in the second floor loft and looks out over Tatamagouche Bay and the Northumberland Strait.

I know that ultimately taxpayers funded this project, but I’m ever so grateful to the powers-that-be who allocated monies to this project. Thank you, thank you, thank you!

How are you celebrating your community library?

The bright side is, it’s been too cold (expected of this season) for many buds to have appeared so nothing’s been ruined by last night’s weather activity.

Let me guess: warm & sunny where you are?

I thought I’d show you a little bit behind the scenes of moving a village library to its new premises.

That old branch closed for good on March 17th.

The new premises are now complete and the official grand opening is next Wednesday. (April 11th). I can hardly wait to see inside!

No moving vans or professional crews – or even U-Hauls for us.

These are all volunteers.

For more photos of the move, click here.

I wasn’t able to help, but I love that community volunteers made this possible. It’s part of what makes rural living so great.

What do you think of our moving methods?