Thank you, Christina Baker Kline, for getting me out of my reading slump! I just finished Bird in Hand, and I am BACK!

Bird in Hand, which I blogged about here, is about two couples - Ben and Claire, and Alison and Charlie. Alison and Claire were childhood best friends. After Claire and Ben (who were already engaged) met Charlie while they were living in London, Claire set up Charlie and Alison, who wind up getting married too. This book is, at its core, about when happens when Claire and Charlie finally confront the fact that they are with the wrong partners, and that they are in love with each other.

The book opens with a book party and a car accident. The accident and its aftermath are the catalyst for the ultimate destruction of these two marriages, which was already underway. Kline tells this story unflinchingly, taking on the difficult truths that these four people face with sharp detail and brisk pacing. I had a lot of trouble putting it down.  There are no villains here, just four people who found themselves approaching the midpoint of their lives and trying to figure out who they are and what makes them happy, and what sacrifices they are willing to make.

I liked this quote, about Charlie dealing with his wife's accident:

[H]e knew that, really, her culpability wasn't the issue - it was that he'd been on the brink of self-discovery, a quest that had nothing to do with her. It was separate from her, from the children, from their life. But this accident made it impossible for him to pursue it. He felt now, at the edge of a feeling more powerful, more dangerous than he could ever remember having experienced - a bottomless despair.

Kline's a detailed writer - mostly in the description of her characters' interior thoughts and emotions - and I felt like I really knew and understood these four people by the end of the book. I cared about them and could understand what made them act as they did. She also did a nice job of sharing just enough of the past to make the present make sense, through well-chosen flashbacks and memories.

How did I not know about Christina Baker Kline before? I will be reading more of her books! Great read, and highly recommended.

FTC disclosure: Thanks to Morrow for sending me a review copy of this book.

I've always been fascinated by military spouses and the challenges they face when their partners are away for long periods of time, often out of reach and facing constant danger. I am therefore intrigued by Standing By: The Making of an American Military Family in a Time of War, by Alison Buckholtz, a book about being the wife of a Navy pilot on active duty. Buckholtz read at Politics & Prose last spring, but I wasn't able to attend the reading.

Many of the reviews I have found online of Standing By are by other military wives who have found a lot in common with the memoir, such as Marrying the Navy.  Here is a guest post from Buckholtz on Blue Star Families about the effect of deployments on children.

One of my favorite parenting blogs, StrollerDerby, wrote about Standing By last spring - here's an excerpt:

The power of Buckholtz's book remains in the stories of her children, Ethan and Esther, the reminder that her story could be ours. In her frankness, she is both eminently likeable and identifiable. She is just a mom. She's careful to assure single parents that she doesn't want to diminish their battles by claiming to be one (she has a partner . . . even if he's thousands of miles away), and yet she is. My already hearty respect for single parents who juggle it all grew with each page. 

Buckholtz is also careful to remain apolitical, making this a book about the military family - not a book about the war. You won't find the names Bush or Obama in Standing By. And as a liberal mother who has always been pro-military personnel but decidedly anti-war, for that, I'm grateful. It let me read about a family and their love.

I'd love to read this.

The Indie Next List featured Last Night in Montreal by Emily St. John Mandel in its June 2009 newsletter, and I thought it looked intriguing. From Amazon:

When Lilia Albert is seven, the father she has not seen in more than a year suddenly appears in the middle of the night and steals her away from her rural Canadian home. She is never again seen by her mother or brother. Instead, her independently wealthy dad moves her from one U.S. city to another, along the way educating her in matters both practical and not. Is he a spurned ex-husband who refuses to accept the court's custody decision? Or is he Lilia's savior, taking her away from something awful? When the novel opens, Lilia is a twentysomething Brooklyn dishwasher living with a disgruntled grad student named Eli Jacobs. When Lilia unceremoniously leaves him—a pattern she's perfected—Eli is bereft. As he obsessively searches for her, the story integrates the viewpoints of private investigator Christopher Graydon and Graydon's neglected daughter, Michaela, who has long resented Lilia's looming presence in her family's life. While the plot is occasionally contrived, the fast pacing and unusual characters make this a compelling first novel. Highly recommended for all contemporary fiction collections.

Literary Feline really liked Last Night in Montreal, saying, "Told in third person, the novel flits back and forth between the past and present and between the characters. The changes are subtle, but I had no difficulty following each of the story threads. This is definitely a book that is more about the process, the journey that falls in between the beginning and the end. While certain aspects of the outcome may not be surprising, the way it comes together was completely unexpected. Last Night in Montreal was a pleasure to read. It was beautiful--poetic even--in writing and profound in scope."

Dawn at She is Too Fond of Books also really liked Last Night in Montreal and posted her review here. Amazon reader reviews are also very positive.

Would love to hear from EDIWTB readers who have read this!

I am in a book lull right now. I am not enjoying the book I am reading... it's not drawing me in, and I don't look forward to reading it. I think I am going to set it aside, which is something I rarely do, and move on to something else.

I circled a book in BookPage a few weeks ago called Home Safe by Elizabeth Berg. Berg is one of those authors that I always see in bookstores, but I've never read anything by her. Home Safe looked good: a successful novelist tries to cope with the death of her husband while she learns some secrets about him and tries to make sense of them. BookPage calls Home Safe "a perceptive and sensitively written novel - a compassionate, illuminating narrative that examines the nature of love and the process of grieving."

EDIWTB reader Nancy West wrote a guest review of Home Safe for the blog - here it is! Thanks, Nancy!

I can’t think of a novel with a nicer protagonist than Home Safe by Elizabeth Berg. Helen Ames is simply one of the kindest, most well-meaning characters ever to serve as centerpiece of a work of fiction.  Here’s my favorite example out of many: struggling with a difficult relationship with her 27-year-old daughter, frustrated by writer’s block and heading into her first holiday season as a widow, Helen looks out a train window as she travels through the dark en route to her parents’ home for Christmas. “Every now and then, there is a house with a light on. She strains to see the people there, and across what seems a vast distance, she wishes them all well.” She wishes them all well? All the strangers whose houses are visible from the train tracks between Chicago and St. Paul? But yes, that’s just the kind of person Helen is. Blessed with personal happiness and creative success, she seems to have no greater priority than the general well-being of all of mankind.

A successful novelist living in the Chicago suburbs, Helen has enjoyed a wonderful marriage to a dear man who dies suddenly of a heart attack when Helen is 59. His loss reveals to her just how much she feels incompetent at managing, from personal finances to home repairs to effectively parenting the couple’s one child. And although it hasn’t been all that long – less than a year, when the novel begins – her friends and daughter are already expressing their concern that she isn’t bouncing back as quickly as she should. It doesn’t help that writer’s block is clouding a previously successful career or that none of the prompts that previously inspired her writing are working for her anymore. (The insider’s view of a novelist’s work life, including her rivalries with colleagues, her feelings about teaching, and how it feels to fail miserably at a speaking engagement, are an added attraction to the story.)

Though she doesn’t use the term, we can imagine Helen identifying herself as part of the sandwich generation, worrying about her 20-something daughter – a single magazine editor whom Helen would dearly like to see settled down with a husband – and her elderly parents, always a source of succor but gradually experiencing declines in their own health. What everyone except Helen seems to realize, though, is that the people Helen worries about are all managing their lives much better than she is; she would be better off tending to her own emotions than assuming they need her ministries.

Into the situation falls a bit of a mystery: Helen’s accountant calls to say that the retirement account that she believed held nearly a million dollars is nearly empty. Helen is bewildered as she contemplates all the possible ways her husband could have spent $850,000 before his death without telling her. Though she acknowledges all the tawdry possibilities – bigamy, blackmail, gambling – none of them seem likely to her. Soon enough, the mystery is solved for her, but it only serves to open up a new sphere of questions and decisions to ponder – even as the healing process gradually begins and Helen meets new friends, contemplates life changes and tries to return to her writing.

Ok, this book doesn't take me anywhere outside my domestic fiction comfort zone, but I read about Bird in Hand, by Christina Baker Kline, in More magazine and thought it was worth a look. From Amazon:

In her fourth novel Kline traces the construction and collapse of two long-term relationships. On her way home to New Jersey after an awkward party for her lifelong friend Claire's highly autobiographical first novel, Alison gets into a car accident that kills a boy in the other car. Even though the accident wasn't her fault, Allison, a mother of two young children, is wracked with grief and guilt. Her husband, Charlie, also struggles with the impulse to blame his wife, especially as he longs for any excuse to escalate his nascent affair with Claire and end his marriage. Episodes detailing the inevitable collapse of Alison and Charlie's marriage, as well as Claire's marriage to her well-meaning husband, Ben, are interspersed with vignettes revealing the four friends' 10-plus–year history together. Shifting perspectives and thoughtful interior monologues reveal just how isolated, and in some cases misguided, the characters are. Kline's unflinching gaze and lovely prose sets Kline's novel apart from the herd of infidelity/marital ennui novels. It's well-done, thoughtful and thought provoking.

I've read a couple of blog reviews of Bird in Hand and they are uniformly positive (Joseph's Reviews, Bibliophile by the Sea).

Book Club Girl has a guest post from Christina Baker Kline this week about her two book clubs. She lives in Montclair, NJ (where I am actually headed this weekend - my brother and his family live there too), which allegedly has the highest concentration of novelists of any city in the U.S. Here is a New York Times article about Montclair and why so many novelists live there.

Would love to hear from EDIWTB readers who have read Bird in Hand.