Fictional Food
I guess that should really be “food in fiction,” because there’s nothing fictional about the food except that it appears in a novel.
Are you one of those readers who has to ration your supply of cozy mysteries because every time the author describes some sumptuous treat in the pages of your book, your tendency is to fetch some to enjoy yourself while reading? It’s all too easy to put on a pound or two if you let fiction be your guide, and the food to which I am specifically referring on this Hallowe’en day is, of course, that treat traditional to Thisby Island, the infamous November cakes created by Maggie Stiefvater for the pages of her book The Scorpio Races.
Every October on the island of Thisby, the capaill uisce, or water horses, emerge from the sea like foam made flesh. The giant horses are a danger to anyone who comes near, being both predatory and carnivorous, but the islanders have a yearly tradition of capturing and training them to run a race along the beach on the first day of November. Winning the Scorpio Races yields both fame and substantial fortune, but the races also take many lives. Katherine (called Puck) has decided to enter her land mare in the races to earn the money to save her home, while Sean Kendrick is competing for the right to buy the water-horse stallion Corr. The two teens, both orphaned by capaill uisce, become both allies and competitors in this race for glory or death.
In the cold and damp that is a Thisby November (think Wales or Ireland climate), there is nothing more welcome than a cup of salted butter tea (thanks, I’ll stick to English Breakfast) and a hot, sweet, buttery November cake. Here is a link to the recipe, created by Maggie. They are not simple to make, nor are they cheap, but they are well worth the trouble. The description from the book:
Finn finds my left hand, opens my fingers, and puts a November cake in my palm. It oozes honey and butter, rivulets of the creamy frosting joining the honey
The Scorpio Races
in the pit of my hand.
It begs to be licked.”
Maggie Stiefvater
If your food plan doesn’t allow for such treats, at the least you can make a yearly tradition of reading The Scorpio Races, one of my favorite books by Maggie Stiefvater and perhaps soon to be one of yours as well.
Reverse the trope
We’ve all read the book or seen the (probably Hallmark) movie: The protagonist is a successful young executive of a major corporation; his assets include a tasteful wardrobe, a midtown rent-controlled loft, a sports car that screams big money with every rev of its engine, and the perfect girlfriend, from the top of her sleek chignon to the tips of her Louboutins. She shows up to work every day at the publishing house or the art gallery, dressed in a pencil skirt and crisp white blouse, manages her business with a firm hand while terrorizing her subordinates, and at the end of the day orders Thai take-out, because she never bothered to learn to cook. Everything in their mutual world seems well ordered and meant-to-be, if a bit regimented.
Then our man is sent by his employer to a picturesque small town, probably to either acquire or shut down some competing business, and while he’s there he meets her: The One. She is the antithesis of everything he thought he wanted—she has long, curly hair, wears sundresses and flip-flops, and is earnest about protecting her home and family from the rapacious big-city villain. Despite apparent incompatibilities, they fall in love, and the young executive suddenly decides that giving up the city for the country, the tense 60-hour work week for the laid-back life of a construction worker/baker/shepherd, is the way to go, if only he can be with his true love.
And of course he is also giving up the city girlfriend, the icily perfect career woman whose urges and drives he once wholeheartedly shared. He pretty much dumps her without compunction, and that’s the last we hear of her in this story, because it’s all about his renaissance as a man of the people living in a one-horse town and making babies with his soul mate.
In Book Lovers, by Emily Henry, Nora Stephens is that woman—a literary agent known as the Shark for her ruthless bargaining on behalf of her clients—and she has been summarily dumped for the country girl not one, not two, but three times. So when her beloved younger sister, Libby, comes up with the idea of a sisters’ vacation, a month’s retreat to Sunshine Falls, North Carolina, Nora acquiesces for the sake of spending time with her sister before Libby is subsumed, yet again, into motherhood with the birth of her third child, but has no illusions about the lure of the small town. She is a city girl, born, bred, and determined to remain.
Libby has other ideas: She has designed the trip as a transformation for Nora, and hopes to lure her away from her business-first attitude to become a more well-rounded person with an actual personal life. (It’s hard to love again after the multiple humiliations, so Nora puts it all into her job.) Libby has visions of Nora picnicking with a hunky country doctor, but instead, almost the first person Nora encounters is Charlie Lastra, a handsome but surly editor who rejected one of her clients’ books a couple of years back, thereby earning Nora’s abiding dislike. What he is doing there in Sunshine Falls is just one of the mysteries Nora finds herself confronting as she tries and fails to find any redeeming qualities about rural bliss. She misses the coziness of her apartment, the sound of car horns, and her Friday night Tom Yum Goong, and nothing is going to keep her from them, beyond this month-long time-out. But Libby (and maybe Charlie) have other ideas about Nora’s fate.
I have to say that I loved this book unreservedly. The clever ploy of turning the cliché upside down and telling the story of the city “girl” who was (repeatedly) left behind was brilliant, but only the first of the twists and turns this story takes as Nora explores the depths of her inner self and makes some surprising but not at all clichéd discoveries. And it certainly didn’t hurt that with protagonists who are a book editor and a literary agent, the story revolved around books. I loved the characters, the setting, and the emotional energy, and wanted to read it all over again the minute I rather hastily finished it (not being able to shut off my Kindle until 2:17 a.m. when I arrived at the last word).
I enjoyed two other books by Emily Henry, but when I reviewed them I used words like “meet-cute” and “feel-good,” and while I extolled the witty banter and the chemistry between the protagonists, I also saw the predictability inherent in those two wish-fulfillment stories. Book Lovers is different—I wouldn’t call it a parody, but it certainly has those moments, and the point isn’t the happily ever after but the acquisition of self knowledge. There is also both banter and romantic sizzle, but they aren’t exactly the point—or at least they are far from being the main or only one.
I don’t always have a lot of respect for either romance or relationship reads in terms of their originality or their ability to hold my attention, but this one was a five-star.
Legal luck
I was talking, this past week, with my Readers’ Advisory students about the peculiarities of mystery fiction, one of them being the prevalence of the series. I’m sure some are saying to themselves, But, fantasy! and yes, other genres, notably fantasy and science fiction, are also heavy on series. The difference is, the series exists in those genres specifically to advance the story, while in mystery fiction that’s not true or, at least, true in a different way.
Mystery readers love their series because they get attached to the protagonist. If you think of some of the series out there that have not just been popular on the page but also on the television or the big screen, it is the character who is the prevalent element around which everything else circles. Harry Bosch, Kinsey Milhone, Walt Longmire, Stephanie Plum—in every case, readers keep reading (or watching) because they find the character compelling. It doesn’t seem to matter so much what the story is, as long as the dynamic and charismatic detective is at the center of it.
For this reason, mystery readers can be more forgiving than readers of some other genres. If the character is one they like and with whom they identify, and if more details are revealed about this character in each subsequent book in the series, mystery readers may go along a book or two or even three further even if the mysteries themselves—the plots—aren’t so great, just because they enjoy the familiarity of the character’s world and person.
This doesn’t mean that mystery readers can’t be hypercritical of a poorly plotted novel—a clumsy reveal, a red herring that doesn’t go anywhere, an epilogue for an ending instead of the direct action that they crave—but they will hang in, hoping for a renaissance of their writer’s story-telling skills, just to be with the character.
I have found myself being a perfect example of this with several mystery series over the years (Elly Griffiths, I’m looking at you), none more obvious than my abandonment of John Lescroart’s legal mysteries that all take place in the courtroom long after the (initial) crime was committed. The masters of this oeuvre are, of course, Grisham and Turow, but Lescroart’s Dismas Hardy definitely held his own until…he didn’t. The first two-thirds of the series was fresh and exciting, starting with #1, Dead Irish; I liked the protagonist, the side characters, and the setting (San Francisco). But after a while I could have written many of the scenes myself, because they were based on and exceedingly repetitive of similar scenes in every single volume. I think I finally gave up at about #17. To give him credit, Lescroart did try to shake things up by going with different characters from the same world (Abe Glitsky, Wyatt Hunt), but since they all worked in the same or adjacent venues that had already been exhaustively portrayed (and ate lunch in the same dismal hole that had been described at excessive length in each and every volume), it just didn’t work, and I gave up on Lescroart.
This soured me for quite a while on the subgenre of legal thrillers itself, but I’m happy to say I may have discovered a new one for which I can muster enthusiasm. I read the first book—Open and Shut—in David Rosenfelt’s Andy Carpenter series, and found it fresh, somewhat humorous, and possessed of a mystery both satisfying and entertaining, so now it’s only incumbent on me to keep reading and see how long it lasts—there appear to be at least 25 more books behind that one.
Open and Shut introduces Andy, a brash young defense attorney whose choice of profession pleases neither his father, a formidable former District Attorney for New Jersey, nor his financially and politically ambitious (and temporarily estranged) wife, Nicole. Then, after asking Andy to take on a seemingly unwinnable appeal for a man on death row who was convicted seven years previous, his father drops dead at a Yankees game, leaving Andy with two puzzles: Why would his dad, who was heavily involved in convicting the guy himself, put Andy in this position; and why did he hide the fact that when he died, his son would be inheriting 22 million dollars? It slowly becomes clear that these two seemingly unrelated facts are somehow tied together; but does Andy really want to know how his father acquired $2 mil almost 37 years ago, but never mentioned it or touched a dime of it for all this time?
Some things I liked about this book: The protagonist, a down-to-earth, pragmatic guy with his share of issues; his associates—sharp (though pessimistic) investigator and potential love interest Laurie; Kevin, who gave up the law to run a laundromat because he was too good to lose and felt guilty no matter who he prosecuted or defended; and of course Andy’s golden retriever, Tara, who is his best friend and tends to garner more attention than most of the humans in Andy’s vicinity.
I liked it well enough to keep reading the series; we’ll see how long it takes for Andy to wear out his welcome.
Interlude
After dedicating a chunk of time to the Sydney Rye saga, I circled back to read the second book in the Veronica Speedwell series by Deanna Raybourn. Called A Perilous Undertaking, it is indeed a story fraught with potential missteps, as Veronica and her colleague, Stoker, must deal with royals, police detectives, high society eccentrics, and a whole slew of artsy bohemian hedonists as they try to figure out who committed a murder in 1887 London.
The catch is, someone has already been convicted of the crime; but at least one extremely high-up individual doesn’t believe Miles Ramsforth, art patron, to be guilty of killing his pregnant mistress, Artemisia, and has demanded that the unconventional duo prove it by discovering who did. Since the case is emphatically closed according to the police, there will be little assistance (or cooperation) from that direction, so Veronica and Stoker explore the original circumstances of Artemisia’s death with an eye to who benefits, and use a variety of stratagems to spend time with and focus on the many suspects.
I liked this book almost as well as the first. The various relationships are continuing to evolve, the new characters are fun and interesting, and the places the story goes are unexpected. I will probably continue with this series, though not right away.
That’s because, at the moment, I am rereading the first and second books in the Finlay Donovan series by Elle Cosimano, for two reasons: One is that the third book is due out in January, and I always like to review before continuing; but the other is that Ms. Cosimano has graciously agreed to be a guest speaker during the mystery genre segment of my readers’ advisory class at UCLA’s library school this coming Tuesday (via Zoom, since she is an east-coaster). We are all excited about her appearance; if you wish to read my review of her books about the hapless accidental hit woman, it can be found here.
After I am finished with her two books, I am quite excited to read the brand-new (out on Tuesday, and pre-ordered to arrive from Amazon that same day) Barbara Kingsolver novel, Demon Copperhead (with a nod to David Copperfield). I have loved every one of her books with the exception of her greatest success story, The Poisonwood Bible, which people tend to either love or put down after 100 pages of effort. I was one of the latter; but everything else in her catalogue is a winner for me. I hope this one is, too!
Mysteries need another name
I have been off the radar for a while because, when I bought the Sydney Rye mysteries, I bought them in an e-book omnibus of eight books, and I have spent the past two weeks reading all of them, which did a big favor to my Goodreads challenge for the year but didn’t do much for this blog!
They are specifically titled the Sydney Rye Mysteries (by Emily Kimelman), but after the first one, I have to disagree with that genre specification. Although in book #1 there is a dead guy whose killer must be discovered, and this puzzle leads to others within that volume, the subsequent books are not what I would characterize as mysteries. There aren’t specific crimes to solve, although there is a high level of criminality throughout; the books are much more like thrillers or suspense.
The events of the first book have awakened in Joy Humbolt, now rechristened Sydney Rye, a passion for justice, and her first step towards that, in book #2, is to go along with Detective Mulberry’s plan for her, which is to work with a Tai Chi and weapons master whose parallel expertise is teaching dogs to be fighting partners; Sydney and her dog Blue train with Merl and his dobermans, and turn into a couple of badasses practically unrecognizable to the friends and family of Joy Humbolt.
Subsequent to this training, Sydney basically looks around for injustices (or they arrive on her doorstep), from white slavery to organ harvesting, and goes after the people responsible, sometimes on her own but mostly aided by various people from her past, including Mulberry, her sometime romantic partner and computer hacker Dan, the aforementioned Merl, several imprisoned and abused women she rescued who decided they wanted to pass on the favor, and various well-met strangers along the way. And while there is a specific issue, bad guy or guys, and challenging task in each book, none of them could be characterized as mysteries. There are occasionally bigwigs behind the little guys who have to be discovered and ferreted out, but if you are wondering how to characterize these books, they have a greater resemblance to the Jack Reacher (Lee Child) franchise, for example, than to any traditional murder mystery series.
If you like that kind of thing, however, with a legendary protagonist and a lot of exciting action with a positive conclusion for the downtrodden, then by all means broach the Sydney Rye books…just don’t think of them as mysteries!
By the way, the eight volumes aren’t the end of this series—numbers nine through 15 currently exist, and who knows (besides Emily Kimelman) if there will be more?
Mystery twists
I can definitely be classified as a mystery reader, but most of the series I pursue are contemporary, with a preference for serious subjects and tending towards either character-driven or procedural themes. Every once in a while, however, I branch out to see what other mystery readers are discovering in such subgenres as Cozy, Historical, Noir, or Caper stories. I have occasionally taken a segue into legal mysteries, and I also enjoy a good thriller that may be related to mystery but not quite defined by that genre.
This week I tried out a couple of different subgenres, and I have to say that I am enjoying them enough to plan on continuing reading the series after this initial review is over.
The first book I read was A Curious Beginning, Deanna Raybourn’s series about lepidopterist Veronica Speedwell. It’s a historical, set in the Victorian era, and features an intrepid spinster who has never fit into a mold, and never intends to. Veronica travels the world in pursuit of scientific inquiry, makes her own living by selling rare specimens of butterflies, and occasionally has a discreet romantic dalliance.
As the story opens, she is wrapping up the affairs of the second of her two elderly adoptive aunts to pass on, and anticipates, now that she has surrendered their cottage and has no further ties to England, embarking on her most ambitious trip ever. Her plans are interrupted, however, when ruffians attempt to kidnap her right off the street in daylight, and she is saved by a sincere but somewhat enigmatic German baron, who tries to convince her that she is in danger and offers her a ride to London. She doesn’t really give credence to his warnings, but since that’s where she was headed anyway, she’s happy to take advantage of the free trip. Once there, he places her temporarily in the care of his friend Stoker, a taxidermist with hidden depths, vowing to return and reveal all. Unfortunately, before he can impart to Veronica the specifics of the plot against her, the baron is murdered, and she and Mr. Stoker are left to their own devices to figure out why someone wants Veronica dead and gone.
I was hooked on both this protagonist and her story within about 15 pages. Veronica is a progressive female determined to conduct herself on her own terms, and uses her considerable intellect paired with feminine guile to make her own way. One reviewer on Goodreads styled her as “a cool Nancy Drew for the turn of the century,” and that’s not a bad characterization! The story itself is sufficiently endowed with plenty of action and enough exciting twists to hold a reader’s interest, but the heart of its success is the witty banter carried on between Veronica and her initially unwilling partner, Stoker. The development of both of these characters is what kept me reading and led me to check out book #2 in the series as soon as I was finished with the first.
The second series on which I embarked is the Sydney Rye mysteries, by Emily Kimelman, beginning with Unleashed, although as the first book opens, Sydney is known by her original name, Joy Humbolt.
Joy has had an active 24 hours: First, she dumped her boyfriend, Marcus, a possessive schmuck who was fixated on the idea she was cheating on him (she wasn’t); then she lost her cool at work and took down a pastel-clad woman with bad hair in spectacular fashion for not understanding the difference between a macchiato and a frappuccino, for which she was fired; and finally, she went to the pound in Bushwick, Brooklyn, and adopted Blue, the largest dog on the premises. Two days later, she was the new owner of a dog-walking business on the Upper East Side, purchased from a friend of a friend, and 24 hours after that, she found herself embroiled in a murder mystery after golden retriever Toby (one of her dog-walking charges) led her to a dead body in an alley. This discovery would prove to be the true game-changer of Joy’s week, and possibly of her life.
Although this protagonist’s story is completely different from that of Veronica Speedwell, it is her character, combined with the vivid depiction of her environs and the details of her life that immediately grabbed my attention. Joy is, like Veronica, a bit edgy, a bit feisty, and with a similar tendency to refuse to tolerate bullshit. The way the amateur sleuth story details Joy’s discovery that she was meant to be a detective and to right wrongs is engaging, and the characters who surround her to either promote or foil her task are equally personable.
Although I can be a creature of habit in my reading tastes, I’m really glad that I stepped away from my usual preferences to try out these two original and absorbing series.
Choosing single
I was interested to read Flying Solo, the new book by Linda Holmes (author of Evvie Drake Starts Over), because of the character-related premise—a woman who has no wish to either get married or have children. Being one of those women (but 25 years further along in life than this protagonist), I thought it would be interesting to see if the author had the character stick to her guns or cave at the first sign of romance. I actually end up falling between two of those women on the age spectrum—the protagonist, Laurie, on the verge of her 40th birthday, and her beloved great-aunt, Dot, who persisted until she was 90 (although it didn’t stop her from having a lot of interesting relationships!).
Laurie Sassalyn has been living in Seattle for about 15 years, most recently with her boyfriend, Chris. They planned to wed, but as the date got closer, Laurie realized that a. she didn’t want to get married, and b. she didn’t want to marry Chris! So two weeks before the ceremony she called it off, and then spent the following months packing up and sending back the many wedding gifts. Just when she has worked through this laborious task, her great-aunt Dot dies, and Laurie ends up being the designated family member to go back to her home town of Calcasset, Maine, to sort through the massive amount of stuff Dot accumulated in her long and experience-filled life. Dot was an enthusiastic world traveler and a collector of both people and memorabilia, and her house is packed full of tchotchkes and Polaroids; Laurie has dedicated herself to putting eyes on each and every object before deciding whether to keep, sell, or discard. (Having had to do this when both my parents passed, I could viscerally relate to this part of the story as well!)
While in Maine, Laurie reconnects with both friends and former beaus from her childhood there—notably, her friend June, now married and a mother of two, and her old boyfriend Nick, who she has seen only once (an uncomfortable encounter at a mutual friend’s wedding) since she broke up with him in high school. He was married last time she saw him, but now he’s divorced, living and working back in their mutual home town, and they fall into a natural camaraderie that Laurie is determined won’t turn into something more, because she is resolute about not staying in Maine or disrupting her lovely single lifestyle.
While going through Dot’s things, Laurie comes across an unusual (for her aunt) artifact: a carved wooden duck decoy, hidden at the bottom of a cedar chest under some quilts. Laurie takes a liking to it and wants to find out more about it, so she turns to the estate-sale guy she has hired to help her dispose of such of her aunt’s belongings that she doesn’t want to keep. He investigates a little and tells her the duck has no financial value, but she is suspicious of his subsequent interest in taking it off her hands. All of a sudden the quest for the provenance of the duck decoy turns into a caper that ends up involving Nick (a librarian who does stellar research), June, and a few new friends as well. In the midst of this, Laurie has to decide: How does she stick to her resolve to remain independent and alone (and in Seattle) while being enticed by the sweet and caring (and hot) boyfriend from her past?
(1896-1984)—of Crisfield, Maryland
Some readers (and reviewers) have characterized this as a “second chance at romance” book, but I saw it as anything but that. At first I thought it was going to be one of those “she doth protest too much” books where the heroine ends up compromising everything she “thought” she wanted for a man but, refreshingly, it doesn’t turn out to be that book. The characters are witty, nice (all but one), and full of common sense, and the setting is likewise warm and homey without being clichéd. The plot device of tracking down the origins of the duck gives a fun twist to the more usual “went back to my hometown and had a revelation” style of book, providing a mystery for the characters to solve together. But we still get to see the resolution of Laurie’s feelings about relationship vs. independence, and it is both satisfying and skillfully written.
The author makes a comment in her acknowledgments about “navigating the complicated and very unnerving second book blues,” but I liked this book much better than her first, and would recommend it. It’s definitely not deathless prose, but as a (somewhat pithy) cozy “relationship” book it’s better than most—down to earth, comfortable, and with some unexpected outcomes.
Openings
Los Angeles Public Library finally let me have The Ten Thousand Doors of January, by Alix E. Harrow, a book about which I had massive anticipation after having devoured Alix Harrow’s second book, The Once and Future Witches (review here). And while that book was about spells hidden in plain sight and this book was about elusive doorways, in a real sense both books are about openings.
The 10K Doors beguiled me from almost the first page. The language was beautiful, evocative, persuasive. The story begins with a book, which is always a way to my heart. And the door theme carried me back to every beloved tale in which someone found an opening to somewhere else and was brave enough to step through it, from the classics (Alice in Wonderland, The Phantom Tollbooth, Narnia) to more recent works (Mirrorworld, Shades of Magic, Un Lun Dun), but it particularly put me in mind of Wayward Children, the stunningly original series by Seanan McGuire that portrays a group of children who have had the experience of going through a portal to the world of their dreams, only to later be ejected and left longing to return. The Ten Thousand Doors of January is the ultimate portal novel.
Like the protagonists in McGuire’s series, January Scaller is a misfit in her own life. Her childhood has been simultaneously comfortable bordering on indulgent, and immensely restrictive; while her widowed dark-skinned father travels on business for his employer, January lives a sedate, smothering life sequestered in Mr. Locke’s mansion that is filled with the artifacts and treasures her father has brought back to him from all over the world. January spends most of her young life torn between gratitude for Mr. Locke’s guardianship and patronage, and resentful that she is kept like another of his precious objects, locked up in a house with no company save for that of a repressive nursemaid/chaperone. As a person of color, January is ogled and patronized by the lily-white British society within which the wealthy Mr. Locke moves (the story begins in 1901), and she has no friends save an Italian grocery delivery boy and the enormous and fanatically loyal dog with whom he gifts her.
As a solitary child, January naturally seeks out ways to amuse herself, and becomes immersed in certain texts and books not meant for her eyes, writings that reveal a possible escape from her overweening patron. But after her father dies and Locke discovers she may have abilities he and his friends value, January must call upon all her thus-far meager resources to save herself from their plans, and also prevent the doorways she has discovered from closing forever.
Books can smell of cheap thrills or painstaking scholarship, of literary weight or unsolved mysteries. This one smelled unlike any book I’d ever held. Cinnamon and coal smoke, catacombs and loam. Damp seaside evenings and sweat-slick noontimes beneath palm fronds. It smelled as if it had been in the mail for longer than any one parcel could be, circling the world for years and accumulating layers of smells like a tramp wearing too many clothes. It smelled like adventure itself had been harvested in the wild, distilled to a fine wine, and splashed across each page.
Although the book has a somewhat slow start, and the protagonist is initially almost frustratingly passive despite her inner nature (“The will to be polite, to maintain civility and normalcy, is fearfully strong. I wonder sometimes how much evil is permitted to run unchecked simply because it would be rude to interrupt it”), the story within a story of Adelaide (Ade) and Yule Ian Scholar (Julian), who find one another when Yule crosses through a door from his home into a Kentucky wheat field, pulls you first into that world and then into the possible connections with January’s, and after that it’s total fascinated attention to the very last page.
This book is almost haunting in its sadness and yearning for the freedom of a wider world, and a longing for the ability to translate otherness into belonging. The loneliness of January, motherless and separated from a father who wants to keep her safe but believes that can’t happen if she is with him; the solitude of Ade, searching relentlessly for the door that will carry her back to Julian; the alienation of January’s friend Jane, exiled from her homeland because of a promise; all act upon the reader to provoke a desperate wish that these people will get what they want, find what they seek, and in that process make the universe a more fluid place.
Doors become more than just passageways to new experiences; they are also symbols of openness and change, qualities that January considers essential while Mr. Locke deems them threatening to existence. Stagnation is antithetical to those who wish for true freedom for everyone, while to the people in power it is an essential component in consolidating their dominance. January is one girl up against a wall of opposition, but she finds unexpected resources from her past, from her few allies, and finally from within. This story connected with my dogged belief, despite the mundanity of everyday life, that there is both magic and hope out there somewhere, if only the way can be found.
It bowled me over.
Relationship fiction
This is my alternative title for the pejorative term “women’s fiction.” I was angry from the moment I first heard that term (from Joyce Saricks in Genreflecting, no less!); it segregates both the readers and the writers and makes the books seem “less than,” as if they don’t deserve to be included in the tide of mainstream fiction. Has anyone ever segregated books into “men’s fiction”? Even when they are filled with macho testosterone—Jack Reacher, Vince Flynn, Jason Bourne—no one ever suggested that only men would enjoy them. So why this?
Saricks defines women’s fiction as “books written primarily by women for women, that feature female characters, and that address the issues women face in their professional and domestic lives.” While acknowledging that this is a solid and definite trend, especially if you include the outliers of chick lit and erotica, I find the descriptor “women’s fiction” to be dismissive and ghettoizing. So I decided to insist on calling this “relationship fiction.” It still focuses on the most important aspect, which is the relationships between the characters, but it would include male writers who write about relationships, and would avoid the condescending terminology.
Having settled that, I read a prime example this past week in Our Italian Summer, by Jennifer Probst. The book features three generations: Grandmother Sophia, mother Francesca, and daughter Allegra, whose relationships could use some work.
Single mother Francesca is the work-obsessed owner of an advertising agency she is convinced will immediately fail without her constant attention. Except for constant exhortations to her daughter to be the best, and impatient dismissals of all of Allegra’s interests that don’t match with Francesca’s high expectations, she has handed over the day-to-day mothering of her daughter to her own mother, Sophia. She is, of course, perversely jealous of their close relationship, and finds herself feeling shut out even though she is the one who created the situation.
Sophia spent most of her life as a supportive wife and mother, and watched her daughter show disdain for Sophia’s life choices while following in the footsteps of her father, who was somewhat absent due to his own work ethic but who appeared to Francesca as a dazzling role model of everything she wanted to be. After his death (the implication is from over-work and stress), the only constant in their mother-daughter relationship seems to be a constant state of misunderstanding.
As for Allegra, as she prepares to enter her senior year in high school she is finding that she is no longer content with the society or conversation of her somewhat vapid girlfriends from her private school, and makes some new friends, who promptly get her arrested when illegal substances are found in the car in which they are riding around. This causes Francesca to start making plans for Allegra’s summer that don’t involve any of the fun Allegra was anticipating—a job, an internship, a camp. But Francesca’s own lifestyle intervenes first, as a breakdown in the midst of a presentation at work lets her know that she can no longer work at the same frantic pace.
Sophia, with a secret worry of her own, decides that the trip to Italy she and her husband always talked about but never took would be the perfect opportunity to get her daughter and granddaughter out of their respective comfort zones and make them confront their issues with one another. Francesca surprisingly agrees, more focused on the necessity to remove Allegra from the influence of her new friends than on her mother’s grand plans to visit the country of her heritage and use the trip to fix relationships—but Sophia doesn’t care about the reason, only that they will go.
There is a lot of interpersonal baggage to work through in this novel, but it’s not all emotional angst; the book is also a lovely travelogue of Italian towns, landmarks, art, and food, with a little romance thrown in along the way. It turned out to be a pretty good balance of these two sides of the story, and I ended up enjoying it quite a bit.
Another author whose books focus on both place and relationship in somewhat the same way is Jenny Colgan, whose stories I have previously extolled here. I made a discovery that she had written a “boarding school book” and a sequel, and released them a few years back under a pseudonym…and no one found them. So she has now republished the first two under her own name, and has plans to write two to four more for the series.
I have always had a soft spot for those, apparently in common with Colgan, who talks in her introduction about how she wistfully idealized boarding school life based on her readings of everyone from Enid Blyton to R. F. Delderfield, and decided to write her own series for adults. The first of these is called Welcome to the School by the Sea, set at a school called Downey House, which is situated in southwest England near the cliffs of Cornwall—another enticement for me, since I seek out fiction located in that idyllic county.
The book is subtitled Maggie Adair #1, Maggie being a new professor who has descended 400 long miles from chilly Scotland and a confrontational public school experience to be a live-in English professor at an all-girls’ school on the English Riviera. From the subtitle I’m assuming that Maggie will be the constant throughout the series, while the girls will come and go as students do, but in this first book we also follow the fortunes of two specific students: Fliss, a child of privilege who has been sent against her wishes, and Simone, a scholarship girl who isn’t quite sure that she should have worked so hard to achieve…this.
I enjoyed the book, although it won’t count as one of my top five favorites of Colgan’s. It follows the typical clichés of class warfare between the posh girls and the outsiders, Fliss being one of the former and both Maggie and Simone representing the two fish out of water. Maggie struggles to fit in amongst the somewhat aloof staff, sticking out as much for her youth and enthusiasm as for her Scottish accent and poor clothing sense; Simone, the Armenian child of a doting mother who overwhelms her with care packages full of sweets, retreats within herself to hide her vulnerability to the catty comments and sometimes nasty tricks perpetrated by her three roommates.
There are romantic complications—Maggie has a steady, live-in boyfriend at home who doesn’t think much of her accepting a “snob job” so far away from him, home, and family, which leaves her open to the attractions of a handsome professor from the boys’ school just a few miles distant. And the headmistress of the school, Dr. Veronica Deveral, has a secret from her past that’s about to blow up her present, should it become known.
I liked everything Colgan did with the story, and will read on in the series, but it isn’t a compulsive favorite the way some of her others have been, so I will take my time, first visiting some much-anticipated sequels to series by other authors that have just hit their publication dates.
The Book Adept 