Piglet
When they talk about reading this book, people have a lot to say about misogyny, about agency, about maintaining façades, but not so much about the thing that struck me, something pretty literal about the whole plot as it relates to the main character: People are failing her, life is failing her, and she is failing herself because she is trying to make and keep herself small.
A few people on Goodreads reacted negatively to this book as just another eating disorder saga. I didn’t read it like that at all. Yes, she has an intense relationship with food, but if everything else were copacetic, that would be considered normal—she’s a cookbook editor and a foodie, so what? But everything else isn’t right in Piglet’s life (imagine, for instance, going through life being called “Piglet” by all your loved ones!), and the common denominator is that she’s too big for the life she has been seeking.
She’s too big for the lower-middle-class background into which her parents and sister expect her to continue to fit herself; she’s too big for the upper-class environment to which she aspires—too flamboyant, too expressive, too filled with emotions. She’s too big to fit into the expectations of her fiancé, who wants her to act appropriately despite his own bad behavior. She’s too big physically—tall, awkward, a little overweight. And everyone faults her for this, and keeps encouraging her to cram herself into roles, relationships, corsets, dresses, mindsets, all of which goes against her nature. But it takes her just a little bit too long to figure out that none of the behavior she is forcing upon herself will fill up her hunger for love, for acceptance, for recognition. So she makes a series of disastrous decisions that feel inevitable in the moment, until they don’t and she rebels.
She has one voice of reason in all of this—her pregnant maid of honor, Margo, who ends up going into labor early and has to miss the wedding, but who persists in telling Piglet that she deserves more. Piglet doesn’t listen, but when she upends everything, Margo is the one she seeks out.
This is being touted as literary fiction, and I wouldn’t quite go there, but…the author is immensely skillful in the way she gets the reader to think about big-picture decisions by dwelling on seemingly incidental conversations and descriptions of food—choosing it, preparing it, eating it. She is also really good at creating essentially unlikeable characters and getting you to care about them. The book tells a story that is in one way small in scope, but in another is about a very big question: What’s the point? What do we want? In certain moments I felt an overwhelming impatience with Pippa’s choices (yes, that’s her real name)—or lack of them—but I have to confess that I mostly loved this book and found it as satisfying as one of the meals she makes during the course of the story.
Addendum: I found it fascinating that this novel was written by Lottie Hazell in conjunction with, and inspired by, getting her Ph.D. in Creative Writing, with a focus on food-writing in twenty-first-century fiction. I would definitely read another book by this author.
Faint praise
The phrase “damning with faint praise” (from a poem by Alexander Pope) keeps coming to mind as I think about the book The 100 Years of Lenni and Margot, by Marianne Cronin. But I think what my reaction to this book really suffers from is damning from excessive praise!
It’s just another lesson to me to go my own way when I pick things to read instead of following the popularity contest of a narrow number of books that “everyone” on Facebook is reading and about which they are raving.
I did love the opening lines, in which Lenni hears the word “Terminal” (in reference to her condition, from her doctors and nurses in the hospital in which she now lives) but instead pictures an airline terminal, where she is awaiting imminent departure on a flight to…somewhere.
I also liked Lenni’s narrative about the life she was living in that hospital, with its boredom occasionally alleviated by an interesting person (like an old woman wearing a purple bathrobe and clinging to the side of a trash bin while trying to reach something within its depths, or a priest who doesn’t know what to make of Lenni and her questions). But once Lenni, the 17-year-old terminal patient, and Margo, her 83-year-old friend, met and became friends, I felt the focus moved so much more toward Margo that further character development of Lenni was suspended until near the end of the book, to its detriment.
As a painter, I loved the concept that the pair came up with as a project for their art class. Added together, their ages (17 + 83) made 100, a nice round number on which to base a goal, which they do:
So, we will paint a picture for every year we have been alive. One hundred paintings for one hundred years. And even if they all end up in the bin, the cleaner who has to put them there will think, Hey, that’s a lot of paintings. And we will have told our story, scratching out one hundred pictures intended to say: Lenni and Margot were here.
As an artist, I wish there had been more detail about the individual paintings. They were supposedly each based on an event from one year in the life of each person, but the stories themselves took precedence and there were mere glimpses of the art, not the full descriptions they deserved as the central theme! I also felt like the narrative kept pulling and pushing between the two characters while giving Margot the advantage, with the result that I never felt fully engaged and emotionally invested like all the other people who loved this book seemed to be. I felt like too much importance was given to Lenni’s interactions with Father Arthur, the hospital priest, and too little to her own personal story; and Margot’s tales were all over the map—as they would be covering an 83-year span—taking too much away from the present-day events.
The language was lovely, and there was a lot to like about the book, but it didn’t wow me the way I expected. On to the next….
Jakarta farce
I just finished reading The Good, the Bad, and the Aunties, the third book in the series by Jesse Q. Sutanto, and I have to say I am glad the trilogy ends here. Again, as in the second book, it wasn’t bad…but it didn’t make it to great either. The book suffers from the droning extended inner dialogue of its main character, Meddy, who is a mass of frets and worries about everything under the sun, with no real ideas of her own for how to combat them. She has been dominated her whole life by her Ma and her four aunties, and while one would hope to see some evolution from the first book to the third—particularly because during that timespan she has reconnected with her long-lost love, gotten married, and killed and disposed of at least two people—she’s essentially the same self-deprecating bundle of nerves we met on page one of the first book.
Similarly, the aunties are characterized each by their one or two distinguishing qualities, and never expand into fully fleshed-out human beings. Big Aunt is dictatorial and imposing, Second Aunt is sly and competitive, Ma is loud and bossy, and Fourth Aunt, the most cosmopolitan of the women, fancies herself as the coolest (she is a singer) and comes across as disdainful and dismissive. They have a few wee moments, here and there, of dropping out of character to become more humanized, but the overall picture hasn’t changed.
Nathan is a nice addition to the family, now that we are past the wedding, but his personality is mainly filtered to us through Meddy’s astonishment at how well he is getting along with her crazy family, and aside from some random observations by Meddy on the excellence of his abs, is likewise kind of faceless
The premise of this one is that Meddy and Nathan, after an extended honeymoon tour around Europe, have met up with the aunties in Jakarta to spend Chinese New Year with the Indonesian side of the family, which is vast and lively and shares many of the qualities we have come to expect from the aunties themselves—overly concerned with things like good manners, saving face, being extravagantly hospitable, and so on. I did enjoy the group scene of them all celebrating together, the cousins and children bonding over food and fun and much eye-rolling over the burden of dealing with the older generation. But this isn’t enough to carry the rather silly plot, and all too soon it’s back to the aunties doing the wrong thing in the clutch and Meddy having to figure out how to save the day despite her crippling anxiety and low self-esteem.
At the big celebration, an old beau of Second Aunt’s shows up to reclaim her affection, bearing extravagant gifts. “Red envelopes” are given out to the children—packets of cash that are traditional gifts for the new year—but there is one packet amongst them that was intended for someone else entirely (a business associate of the beau’s) but got mistakenly gifted to who knows who in the confusion of the celebration. Now those in the know (the beau, the aunties, and Meddy and Nathan) have to figure out who has it, get it back, and give it to the business rival to avoid dire consequences. But, as is usual with this cast of characters, things go typically awry and get ever more complicated.
Maybe I’m just in a weird mood—not the one to sufficiently appreciate this book—since many people gave it four and five stars. I found it more stressful than enjoyably chaotic, and was glad when it was over. I vastly preferred her stand-alone book that I read a few weeks ago, and hope she writes more like that one.
Finlay’s road trip
I was excited to get the notice from the library that Finlay Donovan Rolls the Dice, the latest in the series by Elle Cosimano, had landed on my Kindle this week. The overwrought novelist-turned-criminal’s story continues right from where Book #3—Finlay Donovan Jumps the Gun—left off. The open questions at the end of that book: Will Finlay’s nanny, Vero, get out from under her debts to low-life underworld characters? Will her sister Georgia manage to make things last with new FBI girlfriend Sam? Will Finlay convince ex-hubby Steve that things are over between them, and will she finally manage to have a real relationship with police detective Nick—a problematic quandary since she has participated in so many criminal activities to which she can’t “cop,” pardon the pun. Will Finlay and Vero take back the Aston Martin that someone stole from them and also rescue Vero’s crush, kidnap victim Javi? There were so many dangling threads to remember that I almost immediately wished I had stopped to reread #3 before assaying #4!
Because I had read that book within days of its release more than a year ago, it took me a while to get into the rhythm of this new book. The series is really one long story, so you have to be up on all the events from page one of Book #1 in order to really get what’s going on. You also have to understand what this series is and what it is not; while there is a boatload of illegal activity taking place on its pages, it’s really more of a French farce than it is a mystery or thriller, although the fast pace and quick twists and turns certainly make it exciting. Someone on Goodreads compared Finlay and Vero to Lucy Ricardo and Ethel Mertz and, although they are smarter and more savvy, the relationship between them and among all the other disparate characters, from teen hackers to police officers to mob bosses, does bear a certain similarity—and that chemistry is Cosimano’s real advantage.
In Book #4, the cast all take a complicated road trip to Atlantic City in pursuit of their various objectives—and everybody, and I mean everybody, comes along, from Finlay’s mom, kids, and ex-husband to all the cops (crooked and straight) and criminals (major and minor). There are numerous misdirections of everyone involved, no one seems to have a real handle on what’s going on, and all are giving a good imitation of chickens minus their heads.
My ultimate conclusion after reading this chapter in Finlay Donovan’s story is that it was a little too busy. There were so many things happening to so many people all at once, and their connections were sometimes so confusing (wait—who is Ricky, again?) that it was hard to keep straight at times, which meant there was less focus on the strengths of the franchise—the snarky banter, the romantic entanglements, the misunder-standings that propel the heroine and her cohorts. I did enjoy it, but I’m glad that a few characters permanently exited the page (no, I’m not saying who, though some will be a surprise and others not) so that perhaps the next book will be less frenetic and more tightly focused. I did enjoy getting to know Finlay’s mom, Susan, but I also wanted a little more of the Nick/Finlay inter-action, I wanted to hear about Zach’s progress with potty training and Delia’s latest faux pas; and the characters’ days-long lack of sleep and irregular meals made me almost as tired as they were!
I hope that Elle takes a deep breath and keeps everyone closer to home for the next one. Yes, there will be a next one—there was a significant cliffhanger at the end of Dice about nosy neighbor Mrs. Haggerty that leaves us waiting eagerly for its resolution in (sigh) another year!
Delightful whodunnit
I guess that headline makes my blog post kind of unnecessary; but I could not wait to offer up a reaction to Vera Wong;s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers, by Jesse Q. Sutanto.
Let me start by saying something unrelated about the text of this post: I had a rain leak in my roof right above my computer yesterday, and my keyboard got drenched. It is dried out now and still mostly works, but there are a couple of significant issues: The backspace (delete) key instead turns off the sound, and the apostrophe either appears as a semicolon or not at all. So as much as it pains me to write a review in which there are no apostrophes, since the book title itself contains one then needs must if I want to write it before I have access to a new keyboard, which I do! I will attempt to write without contractions as much as possible, apart from the book title, seen above with semicolon.
I previously reviewed two other books by Sutanto, and I liked them well enough (the first better than the second), but this one feels like a whole different level of enjoyment. It is as quirky as those, for sure, but it is less frenetic, more logical, and abounds with interesting and likable characters. The book is solidly based on the main title protagonist, while all others revolve around both her and a circumstance in which she finds herself embroiled; but there is no lack of either detail or interest in every other actor in this little play Vera Wong is creating in her attempt to solve a murder.
Vera is a small but intense lady with a tea shop in the middle of Chinatown in San Francisco. For the past few years her clientele has dwindled down to a single visitor per day, but Vera has not let this discourage her: She still arises before dawn, dons her athletic costume and gets in a brisk walk before opening the tea shop in anticipation of composing the perfect brew for every need from her vast store of jars and bottles full of exotic ingredients. But one morning Vera descends from her apartment to her shop to discover a body on the floor! Mostly unperturbed but intensely curious about who he is and how and why this young man has ended up dead inside her shop, Vera decides she is the ideal person to help the police investigate, and takes a few things into her own hands that would better have gone to the detectives who later respond. But when those detectives are then unable (or, in her view, uninterested and/or unwilling) to solve what Vera has decided must be a murder, Vera waits to see who else arrives and begins to compile her suspect list based on the level of interest each person shows. In her view, nobody is better suited to this task than a Chinese mother of a certain age!
Each of the people who subsequently turns up has some sort of connection to the dead man, and Vera is in her element as she alternatively prods and snoops in her attempts to get at the truth. The fact that she makes a friend out of each of them in the process (and also tries her hand at matchmaking) is not, in her eyes, a deterrent to exposing one of them as the killer. The humor and inevitability of her progression is equal parts poignant and hilarious.
The sole bone I have to pick about this story (and with this author) is the way Vera is persistently described—as a little old lady. The descriptions of Vera—her hair, her clothes, her mannerisms—suit the picture, but then Sutanto reveals her age and everyone reading this book above that age is going to be outraged, because Vera is 60! I think you have to add on a minimum of a decade, and probably half again or even double that, in order to legitimately be referred to in that precise way. As a woman of 68, I feel elderly in some ways (mainly in my crackly knees and blips in short-term memory), but I do not think I will consider myself as a little old lady until about the age of 84! Yes, Vera is a granny, but a little old lady she is not! Read it and see if you agree…
Mistaken identity
The ratings and comments on Goodreads for On Rotation, by Shirlene Obuobi, are so spot-on to illustrate why publishing companies have to be held accountable for the way they promote a book. There were a few people who thoroughly appreciated the story for what it was, which was a combination of “relationship fiction” and and the immigrant experience, with coming-of-age (early 20s variety) thrown in; the rest were disgruntled and showed that in their ratings, because the blurbs had led them to believe this was a rom-com.
Don’t get me wrong: There is a romance in this book that takes up a significant amount of air. But it isn’t a comedy (although there are a few funny moments), and it doesn’t have that coy, somewhat self-conscious vibe that lets you know when you’re supposed to acknowledge the ironies or coincidences or other plot points common to the specific rom-com subgenre.
Instead, it’s a narrative about the experiences of a young black woman in medical school; but moderating that more generic scenario is the specificity of being a first-generation Ghanian, seeing how that sensibility and those traditions differentiate a part-West African, part-British heritage from that of the American descendents of slaves. It’s a showcase for the immigrant point of view—the older generation who gave up much to move their lives to a new arena having hefty, sometimes crushing expectations of and for their children, who are perceived to have every advantage and are expected to make perfect choices. It’s an examination of friendship and love and what place and importance those two levels of engagement can have in life. And yes, it’s also a romance, but from a more complicated context than the usual rom-com fare.
On Rotation focuses on Angie, a 20-something black woman who is prioritizing her career goals and having to juggle wildly to keep up with everything else. The style is engaging, and the cast of characters is lively, diverse, and inclusive. I liked the detail of the story where she decides to enhance her chances at getting a plum residency by doing a study about how the black experience with doctors and hospitals differs from that of white patients. While I am a white woman, the fact that I have a health condition about which many doctors are ignorant and/or dismissive made me able to relate to and appreciate the information she gathered.
The challenges of trying to live up to her parents’ expectations, which are many and encompass both the significant and the trivial—including everything from her success as a doctor and her choice of romantic partner down to the tidiness of her apartment and how she wears her hair—will probably ring true for many of us, but there is definitely an added amount of pressure for children of immigrants. I loved the connections she had and maintained within her circle of “ride or die” friends, and the bewilderment and grief with which she faces the possible ending of one of those relationships. And the shallowness of her past dealings with men who appreciated certain aspects but couldn’t embrace the whole of Angie were a nice contrast to the relationship she wants but doesn’t trust with a man who may be different.
I confess that I would have preferred a little less of what was going on inside Angie’s head at all times for a little more of what was happening in the thoughts or behind the scenes of certain other characters; but this is a minor caveat—it was, after all, Angie’s story.
There was one truly irritating aspect of the book and, perhaps blessedly, something I could blithely choose to ignore: The author appends footnotes to almost every page, in which she didactically explains medical terms, Ghanian customs, black hair, contemporary slang, and everything else she must have believed the reader was either too ignorant to get or too lazy to research. But because I read this as an e-book, the footnotes all appeared sequentially at the very end of the book and, rather than jumping back and forth between whatever page I was on and the last 20 pages of footnotes, which is a major pain when reading on a Kindle, I simply gave up on knowing what she was choosing to share in those addenda, which probably saved the book for me. Footnotes in fiction are almost never a good idea unless they serve an alternate purpose, such as the ones in Jonathan Stroud’s Bartimaeus saga, wherein the main story is about the boy magician Nathaniel who summons an ancient genii, while the footnotes contain the sly side commentary of the genii himself. So I guess my recommendation for enjoying Obuobi’s book is to read the Kindle version and ignore the asterisks liberally seeded throughout the text!
Silly sequel
I just finished the sequel—Four Aunties and a Wedding—to yesterday’s book by Jesse Sutanto. It was, like the first, full of the antics of Medellin “Meddy” Chan and her idiosyncratic Indo-Chinese aunties, this time on her wedding day, and although it still had the trademark 2nd-language bloopers and irrational beliefs and superstitions of the first, it was even more frenetic.
Perhaps too frenetic. On the one hand, the descriptions of the aunties’ signature wedding-day outfits and their acquisition of vernacular Brit-speak so as to fit in when they go to London and meet Nathan’s family (their most favored expression being “the dog’s bollocks”) was highly entertaining, and the few interactions between Meddy and bridegroom Nathan were sweet and soulful. But these things were overwhelmed by a plot that took the hard-to-believe events of the first book to a whole less plausible level. (What I’m trying to say here is, it was way over the top.)
Meddy and Nathan are getting married at Christ Church, Oxford, which solves several problems: It’s the hometown of Meddy’s uptight new in-laws, which makes them happy (plus being a beautiful venue), but it lets her off the hook regarding inviting everyone in her entire insanely extended Chinese-Indonesian family, cutting the guest list from the thousands to a mere 200+. She and Nathan want the aunties to enjoy being guests at the wedding, so they have decided to find other vendors to supply the wedding with cake, flowers, makeup, photography, etc. But, as is typical in Meddy’s life, the aunts have worked out a “surprise” for her that she can’t be appropriately filial and still turn down: They have found another Chinese-Indonesian family of five who also do weddings, and hired them on the couple’s behalf.
The first meeting and all the planning goes unexpectedly smoothly, but then Meddy overhears her contemporary, the photographer Staphanie (yes, it’s spelled that way), talking about “taking someone out” on her big day and learns, to her horror, that the family of wedding vendors is Mafia and will reveal her family’s secret (from the first book) if she tells anyone. After this the entire book kicks up the adrenaline to a ridiculous degree as the aunties and Meddy scramble to keep anyone from killing anyone else while keeping it all from Nathan and his parents.
The parts with which I had the most trouble were the actual mechanics of the wedding day. First of all, if any bride spent this much time behind the scenes, ignoring her bridegroom and her guests in favor of running around with her aunts, neither the groom nor the guests would remain so sanguine. Second, about those guests: A few of Nathan’s business investors are highlighted as Meddy and the aunts try to figure out the intended target of the Mafia “hit,” but the rest remain a faceless mass, which is a bit antithetical to the whole idea of only close family and friends attending the wedding. Where were they, and what was their response when Meddy kept disappearing and the aunts became increasingly more embarrassing? And after the description of Meddy’s dress as being tightly corseted on the top half and unbelievably tulle-heavy (and too wide to fit in elevators) on the bottom half, it was hard to believe the things she was accomplishing while wearing it, especially without ripping it or getting it dirty. The thing that bothered me the most, though, was the thought of the total ruin of what was supposed to be a joyful and important occasion. It leant an air of melancholy to this slapstick comedy that lessened its potential impact.
But…I can’t say I didn’t enjoy it, because I did. One thing I liked about both of these books was the highlighting of Indonesian and Chinese cultures, with the contrasts between the lower and upper socioeconomic families and how different they can be despite common descent. The author states that she hoped to create sympathy and understanding without verging on stereotype, and for the most part she pulled it off, although better in the first book than in the second. I’m a little concerned that venturing on volume three may top off my tolerance for quirky mayhem and send me over the edge into annoyance, but I will probably still read it and then complain about it because hey, that’s what I do!
If you enjoyed such reads as the Finlay Donovan series by Elle Cosimano, as I mentioned in my last review, then the Aunties books may be something you would also want to read.
Lighthearted…and also dark?
I love finding a book that successfully combines light and dark humor. The last book/series I read that did that was the Finlay Donovan series by Elle Cosimano, and I have now found another: the “aunties” books by Jesse Q. Sutanto. i just finished the first and liked it enough that I immediately went to my library website and checked out #2 in the series to start on tomorrow morning with breakfast.
In Dial A for Aunties, Meddelin Chan is the third-generation American 20-something from a mixed-race Indonesian/Chinese family of women who all live in close proximity in Glendale, California, and work together in the family wedding business. Big Aunt does the cakes and food, Second Aunt the makeup and hair, Third Aunt (Meddy’s Ma) the flowers, and Fourth Aunt is the entertainment, a singer at the after-wedding reception, while Meddy herself is the wedding photographer. While she loves photography and does enjoy certain aspects of her job, she didn’t really plan for her future to consist of living and working with the aunties (“Don’t leave your big day to chance, leave it to the Chans!“); but she is a dutiful (and guilt-ridden) daughter, and when her (mostly male) cousins all decamped to other cities or states after college, she swore she wouldn’t likewise desert the aunties.
This led to major heartbreak for Meddy, though, because Nathan, her college love and, she believes, the love of her life, was offered a prestigious job in New York City and, rather than disappoint the aunts or hold him back from choosing success on the other side of the country, Meddy breaks up with him so he is free to pursue his dream while she can keep her promises to the family.
The story begins a few years after the breakup. Meddy has dated a few guys in the meantime, but her heart isn’t in it, and her Ma and aunties have begun to despair of ever having grandbabies. So Ma signs up for online dating posing as Meddy, cultivates a relationship with the rich and handsome Jason, and then springs a date on Meddy that’s “blind” for her but not for Jason, as he feels they have really gotten to know one another online and through texts! Meddy reluctantly agrees to the date, which is to take place the night before the family does their thing at a huge society wedding on a resort island off the coast of California. The evening ends up going horribly wrong, leaving Meddy in a panic, needing the aunties to bail her out of trouble in the midst of preparing for their big job.
I don’t want to say much more than this, because the pleasure of this book is in discovering the mishaps as they occur and trying to figure out how the clueless yet ingenious aunties will fix them. The publishers did a disservice to the reader in outlining too much of the story on Goodreads, so don’t read it if you prefer to be surprised, as I do. It’s well worth the wait! Let’s just say it’s an exciting wedding weekend, and there’s a reason for the title being reminiscent of “Dial M for Murder.” I laughed out loud or shrieked in disbelief several times.
Binchy’s best?
The winning title for that is endlessly debated in Facebook reading groups, but having just completed my third (fourth?) reread, I can say that this is the one for me. It’s hard to synopsize Scarlet Feather, because there’s so much going on all at once in different arenas, but I’ll give it a shot.
Cathy Scarlet and Tom Feather met and became fast and eternal friends in catering school; both of them have had the unwavering aspiration to start a catering company together. Not a restaurant, but rather a company that cooks for large functions and intimate dinner parties alike and delivers (and sometimes serves) the food to whatever venue is required. The story begins on New Year’s Eve; Cathy is catering a party for her harridan of a mother-in-law, while Tom is out walking the streets trying to cool down after a jealous outburst when he saw his girlfriend on the dance floor with a drunken, handsy party goer. Tom happens upon a “premises” that would be perfect for their business, while Cathy encounters her husband’s niece and nephew, the twins Maud and Simon, at the NYE party. This evening kicks off the book.
Cathy is married to Neil, the son of Hannah and Jock Mitchell. Cathy’s mother, Lizzie Scarlet, used to clean for Hannah and bring Cathy along with her when Cathy was small, so the fact that Cathy has wedded the son of the snobbish Hannah is a big deal. Lizzie’s husband/Cathy’s father Muttie is a sweet man whose “bad back” has kept him from doing any meaningful work in his life but hasn’t prevented his frequenting the local bookie’s and spending every penny he can scrounge on the horse races. Neil is a barrister with big ideals to help people with immigration problems and find solutions for the homeless, and is constantly on call to deal with important issues.
Tom is involved with the beautiful Marcella, who aspires to be a model while working as a manicurist at Hayward’s, the big department store. She spends her off hours working out and attending any function where she has a chance of getting her picture taken and into the society pages in the newspaper, all to advance her dream career.
Maud and Simon are the young children of Jock Mitchell’s brother, Kenneth, and his wife Kay; Kenneth travels quite a bit with his friends, while Kay has a drinking problem, and their elder son, Walter, isn’t, shall we say, a responsible individual, so when the twins find themselves alone in the house on New Year’s Eve, they decamp to their uncle’s and become a problem that has to be solved by anyone willing to take it on. This turns out to be Cathy and Neil, aided by Lizzie and Muttie.
The feature that makes Scarlet Feather the one for me is Binchy’s treatment of the characters and how she shows their interactions, changes and growth. Specifically:
- Tom and Cathy and their passionate aspirations. I love a story about people who are determined in every way to do whatever they set their hearts on, and won’t be deterred. And the contrast between what they were doing and the lofty heights to which Cathy’s husband Neil aspired was a good reminder that yes, there are more important things in the world than running a small business, but the truth is, you never know what is your role in life, and how it will impact those around you. So it’s best to be focused on being impactful from whatever position in which you find yourself.
- Maud and Simon, the nine-year-old twins who are tossed from pillar to post throughout this story. There needs to be more emphasis on and exposure (in fiction and in life) of the plight of children who are not wanted by their biological family but who may be badly wanted by the many caregivers who step up to help them when they’re in need, as was also noted in the history between two other characters in the book. Also, the twins are so hilariously written, it’s a joy every time they appear on the page.
The one thing that irritates me about Binchy’s books, because it feels like simple laziness, is her insistence on using the same five surnames (and many of the same given names too!) for every character in every book she wrote. Scarlet and Feather were the anomalies in this one, for obvious reasons (had to have a title and a name for the catering company), but the rest are a small assortment of Ryans, Flynns, Daleys, Hayes, and Nolans, without an O’this or an O’that to be found, and I swear there is a girl named Orla in every book but it’s never the same girl. Since Irish monnikers run to two pages on the internet, a little more imagination in the naming would have been good. But that’s just pickiness—I really do enjoy her books to an extraordinary degree. You might, as well!
Binchy’s last
Before I began writing this, I did a search of my own blog to see if I had reviewed a Maeve Binchy book previous to this one, and I was surprised to find that I hadn’t. But I read all of them for the first time so many years ago that I guess they predate the inception of my becoming an independent reviewer. I am sure that I probably reviewed some for my library’s blog once upon a time, but after my retirement the new and “progressive” library director decided that a book review blog was unnecessary for a library (yeah, just ponder that for a minute) and discontinued it, so that legacy is lost.
I did find, however, that I had mentioned various writers and their books in connection to her, most of them falling short of the simple genius that was Maeve’s gift; usually, the publisher’s blurb that this or that tome was “perfect for fans of Maeve Binchy” just led to disappointment and unfavorable comparisons.
A Week in Winter is unfortunately her last book; she wrote it in early 2012, then passed away unexpectedly that July, and the book came out in October. She suffered terribly from osteoarthritis in her latter years, and also had heart disease, and died of a heart attack after hip surgery at age 72. But before that she wrote 17 novels, half a dozen short story collections, and a couple of plays, and was also a columnist for The Irish Times for about a decade. I started reading her in the ’90s, I think, and mostly kept up with every novel she wrote, with a couple of exceptions. But I somehow never went back and read this one, so when it came up on the Facebook “Friends and Fiction” page, it was a welcome reminder to do so.
It’s hard to say why her books are such genius—they are set in Ireland, either in the country or in Dublin, and center around family life, small businesses, and the tensions between Irish rural and urban life as influenced by the cultural changes that took place from World War II to the new century. They are small stories, in the sense that they focus in on one protagonist and the people—family, friends, work colleagues—directly connected to them in some way, and are both wholesome and somewhat uneventful, in contrast to so much that’s currently being published—no mysteries or thrills here. But Binchy had a way of understanding universals and then bringing them home at an intimate level that spoke to people, and with a couple of exceptions I have read her books two and three times to remind myself of how much I received from them.
This latest built on a formula she had used before, in which she began with the story of one character who she explored in detail, and then branched out to incorporate short vignettes of the lives of those who revolved around this character for some reason. She did it in her popular book Evening Class, which features Nora (known as Signora) as a teacher of Italian and then explores the back stories of all the students who enroll in her night class, going on to send them all together on a trip to Italy.
In A Week in Winter, the protagonist is Chicky Starr, who decides to turn an old mansion on the western coast of Ireland into a small hotel; the second half of the story develops around the people she recruits to help her, and all the guests who book in for the first week the hotel is open. But first we get the story of Chicky—who she meets and loves, why she leaves her family home in Stoneybridge and ends up in an impersonal existence in a boarding house in New York City, and what brings her back to Ireland to set up as a hotelier.
I will say that while I enjoyed reading this, it wasn’t my favorite of Binchy’s by a long shot; while I do like this formula, I find that I have preferred her novels that focus more closely on one set of people and don’t bring in so many attenuated stories of strangers to fill their pages—books such as Firefly Summer, Tara Road, The Glass Lake, and Scarlet Feather. But there was definitely an appealing story line that wended its way through all the connected lives, and it also made me want to travel to Chicky’s place and spend my own week in its comfortable, well-heated rooms, eating Orla’s good cooking, taking bird-watching walks along the rugged coastline, and finding a pub alive with good Irish music for an evening’s entertainment.
If you haven’t experienced Binchy’s books, you might be wondering what is so special about them. I don’t know that I can adequately explain it: They are cozy but not sappy, unchallenging but not unintelligent; and the characters and stories are so engaging that they make you want to know these people—frequent their restaurants and hotels and shops, live in their neighborhoods, have a mid-morning coffee break with them. The only writer whose name comes up consistently when anyone says they want to read someone who writes like Maeve Binchy is another of my favorites, Rosamunde Pilcher. They also remind me of a more old-fashioned version of Jenny Colgan’s books, but slightly less twee. (No offense to Colgan—I love her books—but they aren’t quite as universal as those of Binchy or Pilcher.)
If you haven’t read Binchy, don’t start with this one—pick one of the ones I named above, with characters you stick with throughout. Oprah featured Tara Road as one of her book club books in 1999, which may account for the exponential growth of Binchy’s readership; but I think she would have been a big seller, regardless. Try one and see if you agree.
The Book Adept 