This was the most perfect way to re-read my favorite Austen. I love annotations, but when reading a classic that has all the notes at the end of the book, or the ends of the chapters, it can be frustrating to flip back and forth. This is the perfect answer: a page of text and a facing page full of annotations. And not just your typical footnotes – there are drawings of items of historical significance (carriages, clothing, furniture, etc.), maps, quotes from Austen’s letters regarding places or events in the novel, detailed historical explanations, as well as the typical explanations of outdated language and antiquated word usage. I can’t wait to get my hands on The Annotated Sense and Sensibility and The Annotated Pride and Prejudice!

Title: The Most Dangerous Thing
Author: Laura Lippman
Genre: Mystery
Publisher: William Morrow
Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
Source: Audiobook from the public library
Audiobook reader: Linda Emond
First line: They throw him out when he falls off the barstool.

I really enjoyed Lippman’s I’d Know You Anywhere, and was hoping this stand-alone mystery would keep me as enthralled. It didn’t. At first, I thought it was the reader, because her performance was just okay – but she also narrated I’d Know You Anywhere, and I listened to it on audio and was engrossed. There seemed to be an emotional distance to this one – I couldn’t relate to any of the characters. The big reveal at the end wasn’t really a surprise, either. I did, however, like the cameo appearance by Lippman’s character Tess Monaghan, a private investigator. I think I would enjoy that series, and definitely need to get my hands on the first one.

Title: Moon Over Manifest
Author: Clare Vanderpool
Genre: Middle grade fiction, historical fiction
Publisher: Yearling
Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
Source: Audiobook from the public library
Audiobook reader: Justine Eyre, Cassandra Campbell, Kirby Heyborne
First line: The movement of the train rocked me like a lullaby.

Books like Moon Over Manifest remind me why I still read children’s fiction. This is fiction that transcends age. Abilene Tucker is a young heroine reminiscent of Scout Finch, and her summer in Manifest, Kansas, reveals her father’s history – and her future. Along the way, she tries to solve the mystery of The Rattler, finds the letters of a young soldier fighting in the trenches of World War I, does yard work for a diviner, makes two new friends, and lives with a pastor named Shady whose church is in a speakeasy. I can’t say enough about this book – it really deserves its own review, but I allowed myself to fall behind again. Just read it. And if you like audiobooks, that is definitely the way to go with this one, as the narrators are all pitch-perfect.

© CarrieK for BOOKS AND MOVIES, 2012. | Permalink | 4 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: audiobooks, children's fiction, classics, historical fiction, jane austen, middle grade fiction, mysteries

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Barbara is an American woman teaching English in Japan during the Vietnam War. She is a stranger to the culture, the language, the people. Her neighbor and fellow teacher, Michi-san, is the only one to make her feel welcome and help cross the cultural divide. When Michi dies, Barbara is bereft – and surprised to discover that Michi has left her a bequest: a tansu chest filled with bottles of homemade plum wine. Each bottle is wrapped in paper – and the papers are covered with elegant Japanese calligraphy. There is one bottle of wine, one sheet of paper, per year – going back twenty years. Barbara, unable to read the Japanese, turns to Seiji, a mysterious young man and friend of Michi’s. As they work together to translate Michi’s legacy, they are drawn together – but is Seiji telling her everything the parchments contain, or is he protecting a secret of his own?

Why is it so hard to write a review of a book that I merely “liked?” If I love a book, I have no problem writing the review. If I hate it, chances are I didn’t finish it. But if I thought it was just “okay” – that’s when I’m stumped.

I truly wanted to love Plum Wine. When I bought it a few years ago, I stood in the aisle of the bookstore, absorbed in the first chapter, and I was excited to read it. But then other books crowded in, and I didn’t get to it until now. Megan at Posey Sessions mentioned that this was one of the books she wanted to read in the new year, and so we decided to read it together and have Twitter discussions. Those discussions – and knowing that Megan was reading along with me – definitely increased my enjoyment with the book, and also made me take the time to articulate why it wasn’t working all that well for me.

There were sections of this book that were written beautifully, and I appreciated the way the author dealt with the cultural differences between Barbara and the Japanese people among whom she was living and working. I’d be interested in knowing if the cultural divide is still as wide now as it apparently was during the Vietnam War era. The customs and culture were fascinating – the tea ceremony, the plum wine, the Kitsune (the fox myths) – all of these added to the picture of a people steeped in history and tradition.

My favorite sections of the book by far were the interactions between Barbara and her students. It was interesting to see the dilemmas they were facing, things like arranged marriage or being considered “untouchable” for working as a mortician, especially considering that the time period was only 50 years ago. The story that Barbara uncovers while reading Michi’s writing is also intriguing – and gives the reader a lot of insight into what life was like for Hiroshima survivors.

Unfortunately, the writing was very uneven. While there were some beautiful passages, there were other sections – especially dialogue – that were awkward and didn’t flow. In many scenes, the dialogue seemed very stilted. And the romance between Barbara and Seiji, which becomes a main focus of the story, didn’t work for me at all. It was portrayed as a great passion, with Barbara’s character continually talking about how drawn she was to Seiji, how much she wanted to be with him – and yet his character did not work as the object of that much passionate obsession. He was a very unlikable character, and even though I realized he had a reason for being emotionally handicapped, I couldn’t find anything to care about in the romance between the two.

Megan and I had some interesting discussions about the book on Twitter. She had some of the same reservations as I did about the book, but she ended up liking it much more than I did, so you’ll definitely want to click over to her review and read her thoughts. This is definitely the case of a book that some of you will probably love – it just wasn’t a great read for me.

Megan was very interested in the Kitsune, or fox myths, that play a big role in the book – especially in Michi’s family history. She was inspired to do some research and digging, and has written a fascinating post on the myths, their history, and other sources of information.

© CarrieK for BOOKS AND MOVIES, 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: historical fiction, multi-cultural fiction

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My wooing began in passion, was defined by violence and circumscribed by land; all these elements molded my soul.

Charles O’Brien was born to an Irish Catholic father and Anglo-Irish mother, and so has the unique ability to be accepted by both elements of a disparate, and often violent, society. He is an itinerant folk healer and collector of Irish history, and he travels the land that he loves. In his travels, he finds himself a spectator – and sometimes participant – in moments of great historic significance, and interacts with people like Oscar Wilde, Yeats, Michael Collins, De Valera, Charles Parnell. He writes of these people, his land’s history – and the woman he loves.

He meets April Burke when she is eighteen and he is forty. He is smitten with both her, and with Tipperary Estate, the land that she inherits. As he undertakes the restoration of the property, he is determined to woo April, as well as to record the momentous events leading up to the fight for Ireland’s independence.

In a modern Ireland, a retired history professor finds Charles O’Brien’s history, and is determined to learn all he can about this intriguing man – and as his research deepens, he discovers that he may be more connected to the man than he originally thought.

Like most of Frank Delaney’s books, Tipperary has a slow build. It always takes me fifty pages or so to really get drawn into the story, but I never regret hanging in there – partly because the writing is simply beautiful, and also because I know that there is greatness to come. Delaney never disappoints, and I again found myself completely hooked a few dozen pages in.

Charles O’Brien is an intriguing character. Even though a grown man, in some ways he is very naive and childlike, which gives him a unique perspective on the events unfolding around him. The early years of the 20th century were full of tragedy, violence, and revolution in Ireland, and O’Brien, being in the midst of this, has no choice but to grow up.

I found April Burke to be a difficult woman to like, mainly because the people describing her (Charles O’Brien and his mother) are both unreliable narrators. As the story unfolds, the reasons for her prickly behavior become evident, and I ended up being completely invested in how their romance turned out.

The estate at Tipperary is a character in and of itself, and the destruction and restoration and further destruction parallel the land in which it resides. I find it difficult not to become overly emotional when reading Irish history, horrified by the injustices perpetrated by the English, and yet also disturbed by some of the tactics Sinn Fein and the IRA used in retaliation. It is such a troubled land, and reading about it makes my heart ache.

Frank Delaney’s books are full of sweeping stories of vivid characters set against the historical backdrop, and his love for Ireland saturates every sentence. I am looking forward to picking up his novel, Shannon, very soon.

© CarrieK for BOOKS AND MOVIES, 2012. | Permalink | 7 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: historical fiction, irish fiction

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The Postmistress by Sarah Blake
From my review: “Blake’s writing is descriptive and literary, but at the same time there is not a word to spare. Description, character development, setting details – each of these elements is exquisitely crafted to allow you be completely absorbed in the story.”

Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry
From my review: “Hannah is at the end of her life, and she looks back over the years behind her, telling her story and the stories of the people she loves. Wendell Berry is one of the only authors who could take such a simple premise and turn it into a work of beauty, a novel that reads like an ode to the simple things that make up a life: family, friends, a home, a place, love, children.”

Next to Love by Ellen Feldman
From my review: “The prologue of Next to Love is some of the most powerful writing I’ve read; I knew as soon as I finished it that this novel would be something special, and I wasn’t disappointed.”

My Name is Mary Sutter by Robin Oliveira
From my review: “Mary is an extremely well-written character: a woman whose passion and dreams war with her love of family and sense of duty. Her strength in the face of the most horrific circumstances, her longing to simply learn, her matter-of-fact way of filling whatever need she sees – these things all made me love her.”

The Winter Sea by Susanna Kearsley
From my review: “I love sweeping historical fiction with star-crossed romance. I love fiction set anywhere in the British Isles, but particularly Ireland and Scotland. I love reading about an author’s writing process. I love books set by the ocean. In The Winter Sea, Susanna Kearsley has taken all of these elements and written a novel that is pretty close to perfect.”

Andy Catlett: Early Travels by Wendell Berry
From my review: “This is a deceptively simple book. On the surface, it is just the story of a young boy’s holiday visit to family, the things he did while there, the people he talked to and worked with. But look a little deeper, and you see how talented Berry is at weaving universal themes like war, love, grief, race relations, change, and the passage of time into Andy’s tale.”

A Place on Earth by Wendell Berry
From my review: “Focusing mainly on Mat Feltner as he waits for word of his son Virgil, who is in Europe fighting, Berry shows how the war devastated not only the young soldiers, but their parents, wives, and families left behind. It is truly a beautiful book.”

© CarrieK for BOOKS AND MOVIES, 2011. | Permalink | 23 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: favorites, historical fiction

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I love the premise of this book: two high school friends in 1986 sign up for America Online, back when the internet isn’t in every home. They are automatically logged in to Facebook – which doesn’t exist yet – and see their profiles for 15 years in the future. They also discover that every time they hit refresh, their profiles change. Understanding how the decisions they make resonate into the future is most of what this story is about – but it’s also got a great love story, too.

Title: The Red Badge of Courage
Author: Stephen Crane
Genre: Historical fiction
Publisher: Various
Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
Source: Audiobook from the public library
Audiobook reader: Frank Muller
First line: The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting.

This was my last pick for the War Through the Generations Challenge this year – and it was just okay. The audiobook reader did a great job with the narration; I’m not sure I could have made it through in print. The author refers to the main character as “the youth” and this tactic distances the reader from the character and the things he is experiencing. I know this one is a classic, and the descriptions of the conditions in the Civil War are very well-written – and disturbing – but it wasn’t a favorite.

Title: A Place on Earth
Author: Wendell Berry
Genre: Historical fiction
Publisher: Counterpoint
Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
Source: Print copy from my personal library
First line: The seed bins are empty.

What can I say? I am so glad I hosted the Wendell Berry Challenge this year. I’m not sure that anyone else completed their challenge goal – not many people signed up to begin with. But if the only thing the challenge accomplished was to prompt me to read more of this amazing man’s work, it was more than worth it. Coming in a close second to Hannah Coulter, A Place on Earth is my second favorite of his books. It isn’t a linear novel, but a collection of scenes that describe the conditions of Port William and the emotions of its inhabitants during World War II. Focusing mainly on Mat Feltner as he waits for word of his son Virgil, who is in Europe fighting, Berry shows how the war devastated not only the young soldiers, but their parents, wives, and families left behind. It is truly a beautiful book.

© CarrieK for BOOKS AND MOVIES, 2011. | Permalink | 17 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: audiobooks, historical fiction, science fiction, YA fiction

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Anne Calloway is newly engaged to a man who can give her the lifestyle she grew up enjoying, a man of whom her parents whole-heartedly approve. Something is missing, though, and Anne postpones the wedding to join the Army Nurse Corps. On the island of Bora-Bora, Anne nurses the men who are giving their all for the United States. She meets Westry Green, a soldier who makes her understand what was missing in her relationship with her fiance back home. They discover an abandoned bungalow, a place where can be alone together, away from the horrors of the world around them. Real life invades when the couple witnesses a gruesome murder – a murder which will tear them apart. Seventy years later, Anne relives her time on the island, her love of Westry, and returns to the island, determined to seek justice and, hopefully, find out what happened to the love of her life.

Like her first book, The Violets of March, Sara Jio has written a novel with two storylines – one in the present time, and one rooted solidly in the events of the past. And, like The Violets of March, I was thoroughly engrossed in both stories.

Most of The Bungalow takes place during World War II, on a beautiful island in the South Pacific. I know that in reality, the bugs and humidity would kill me, but Sarah’s beautiful descriptions of the lush foliage, vibrant colors, and gorgeous landscape had me dreaming of sailing away to a tropical island. Of course, it would help to be there with a kind, sexy soldier like Westry Green.

The love story in The Bungalow is bittersweet, because from the very beginning of the book, you know that Anne and Westry don’t end up together. The question “why?” is one of the things that kept me reading – what could possibly have kept these two people apart, two people so obviously meant to be together? As the story unfolded, I found myself angry and grieved for the star-crossed couple.

The Bungalow will be released on December 27th, unfortunately too late to give as a Christmas gift for any lovers of historical fiction in your life, but not too late to give as a gift to yourself. Having thoroughly enjoyed Sarah’s first two books, I am excited to see what she comes up with next.

© CarrieK for BOOKS AND MOVIES, 2011. | Permalink | 8 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: historical fiction

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Andy Catlett: Early Travels tells the story of nine-year-old Andy, and his first solo trip to visit his grandparents during the Christmas season of 1943. He rides the bus alone and visits first one set of grandparents, then the other, and as he does, we learn who the people of Port William are, and see how time is changing both the place and its people. Modernization is changing the way the people live, and the specter of the war is ever-present, haunting each of them, every day.

This book is another example of Wendell Berry at his finest. His Port William fiction is full of people that I have come to love as if they were family. The more books in this series I read, the more I am making the connections between events and characters. Reading about Hannah living with the Feltners, waiting for letters from Virgil, is even more poignant having read her story – and Andy’s schoolboy crush on her is bittersweet.

This is a deceptively simple book. On the surface, it is just the story of a young boy’s holiday visit to family, the things he did while there, the people he talked to and worked with. But look a little deeper, and you see how talented Berry is at weaving universal themes like war, love, grief, race relations, change, and the passage of time into Andy’s tale.

Reading the books in the Port William series has become a kind of homecoming for me, and I’m glad I still have several titles ahead of me. I want to draw out the reading of these stories, savor them, sink into them, reading each and every one thoroughly before starting through again.

Andy’s thoughts about his grandpa:

He returned to what he called “studying.” He sat looking down at his lap, his left hand idle on the chair arm, his right scratching his head, his white hair gleaming in the lamplight. I knew that when he was studying he was thinking, but I did not know what about. Now I have aged into knowledge of what he thought about.

He thought of his strength and endurance when he was young, his merriment and joy, and how his life’s burdens had then grown up on him. He thought of that arc of country that centered upon Port William as he first had known it in the years just after the Civil War, and as it had changed, and as it had become; and how all that time, which would have seemed almost forever to him when he was a boy, now seemed hardly any time at all. He thought of the people he remembered, now dead, and of those who had come and gone before his knowledge, and of those who would come after, and of his own place in that long procession. Looking at me, he must have remembered that his own grandfather had been the first of our name to come into this place, in a time that had seemed ancient to him once, that he now knew to have been almost recent, and that the time from his grandfather to his grandson had been short. He thought of the living and how they would appear to the dead, until the dead lived again in his thoughts, and the presently living appeared as ghosts of a future yet to come. He thought of the history of his hands. He laid them in his lap and studied them, and he saw that they were hard-used and now almost useless. This was a study he could not have remembered beginning, and surely he knew that it could not be finished, by him or by anybody. ~ p. 59-60

Andy’s thoughts on the things he wishes he had asked:

Uncle Jack forsook his present worries, and the conversation, belonging then to him and Grandpa, took up the burden of times only they had known. They spoke of horses and mules and men and days. Now I can wish that I had stayed and listened and tried to remember. Now I can wish I had foreseen then what I would want to know now, and had asked the questions I now wish I had asked. What did their elders remember of the Civil War, and of the time before that? What did they tell about slavery? After the war, how were things rearranged between the races? Was the Klan active here? What did it do? Who was in it? What was it like here before the railroad came, or all-weather roads, when the only dependable transportation to and from Port William was by the river? What did they remember of the then still-standing ancient forests? How did they make it through the depression of the 1890s? The drought of 1908? But a boy’s mind is different from an old man’s by precisely a lifetime. And so the talk of that day went out into that day’s air and light and the silence beyond, and the silence has kept it. ~ p. 70-71

© CarrieK for BOOKS AND MOVIES, 2011. | Permalink | 4 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: historical fiction, wendell berry

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Title: Water for Elephants
Author: Sara Gruen
Genre: Historical fiction
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
Source: I own the book, but I checked the audiobook out from the library.
Audiobook reader: David LeDoux and John Randolph Jones
First line: I am ninety. Or ninety-three. One or the other.

Water for Elephants is the story of Jacob Jankowski, and is told as a series of flashbacks, memories that Jacob is having while living inside a nursing home. The audiobook I listened two had two readers, one for the old Jacob, and one for the 23-year-old Jacob – and they were both absolutely fabulous.

It’s the middle of the Depression. Jacob is in his final year of veterinary school at Cornell University when he receives the news that his parents have been killed in a car accident. Returning home for the funeral, Jacob discovers that his father’s veterinary practice – which he planned on joining after graduation – is mortgaged to the hilt and now owned by the bank, as is the family home. Having nowhere else to go, Jacob returns to Cornell, but is too grief-stricken and flees in the middle of the final exam. Hopping a train, Jacob finds himself in the midst of working men on the Benzini Brothers Greatest Show on Earth, a circus. His knowledge of veterinary science earns him a place on the show.

Jacob meets August and Marlena, a married couple on the show. August is in charge of the menagerie; Marlena is a performer. Jacob becomes friends with the couple, and soon discovers that their marriage is less than happy. August’s unstable and violent temper has everyone on the show afraid of him – including his wife, Marlena. In spite of her unavailability, Jacob falls for Marlena, and the ripples of consequences begin.

Sara Gruen has written a gorgeous novel full of delicious imagery and descriptions of what life on a circus was like. The book is full of the most unique characters, from the chillingly evil August, to the feisty dwarf Walter and his beloved dog, Queenie. Gruen’s love of animals also comes through, especially in the elephant, Rosie. I’m not much of an animal person, but I came to love Rosie and her quirks.

I loved this book, from it’s beginning to it’s ending, which had me wiping tears away. Highly recommended.

© CarrieK for BOOKS AND MOVIES, 2011. | Permalink | 36 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: audiobooks, historical fiction

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Annie’s life is just the way she wants it. She has her job writing a syndicated travel column, a job that allows her to travel all over the world. She has Nick, her long-time live-in boyfriend, and their home in Los Angeles. Her future is all set – until Nick announces that he wants to break up. Still reeling, Annie meets chef Griffin, and he seems to be just what she needs. Three months later, they’re married and Annie is living in rural Massachusetts, wondering what on earth she has done. Author Laura Dave writes with humor and intelligence. I enjoyed every single page, even though I was kept wondering how things would turn out until almost the very end.

Title: Nathan Coulter
Author: Wendell Berry
Genre: Historical fiction
Publisher: Counterpoint
Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
Source: Print copy borrowed from my mom
First line: Dark.

I don’t think I’ve ever rated a Wendell Berry book less than four stars. Until now. Nathan Coulter simply doesn’t have the brilliant way with words that I loved in Hannah Coulter, Andy Catlett: Early Travels, and That Distant Land: Stories. I was excited to read the story of Hannah’s husband, especially his experiences in World War II, but this was the story of Nathan’s childhood. I appreciated the connections to other Port William characters, but it simply didn’t work for me as well as his other fiction has. Of course, he is still Wendell Berry, and a lesser book of his is leaps above the best of many other authors; thus, the three-star rating.

Title: Beautiful Darkness
Author: Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl
Genre: YA paranormal fiction
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
Source: Print copy from my personal library
First line: I used to think our town, buried in the South Carolina backwoods, stuck in the muddy bottom of the Santee River valley, was the middle of nowhere.

This really, truly deserves a full review, but I let myself get too far behind. I will simply say that this is rapidly becoming one of my all-time favorite YA series. Star-crossed lovers Ethan and Lena, the gothic South, singular characters like Amma and the Aunts – the authors have combined all of these elements and then crafted a story that kept me turning the pages as fast as I could. Only the best of sequels match the greatness of the original – Beautiful Darkness is one of those sequels.

© CarrieK for BOOKS AND MOVIES, 2011. | Permalink | 14 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: contemporary fiction, fantasy, historical fiction, paranormal fiction, women's fiction, YA fiction

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Carrie McLelland, best-selling historical fiction author, journeys to a Scottish village in the shadow of Slains Castle, hoping to find inspiration for her latest novel. She is writing about a little known Jacobite uprising in 1708, using her real-life ancestor, Sophia, as the main character. As Carrie begins to craft Sophia’s story, her writing process is transformed to the point where the words are simply pouring out of her. When she begins to find that the characters and places and events she believes she is creating are actually rooted in historical fact, she wonders if there is something more to it than simply the art of fiction.

I bought The Winter Sea after many bloggers – including Kelly and Marg raved about it when it first came out. I finally found made time to read it, and I am so glad. Review pile, reading obligations be darned – sometimes you simply need to read a book because it is calling to you from the shelf. And this book apparently knew it was just what I needed these past few weeks.

I love sweeping historical fiction with star-crossed romance. I love fiction set anywhere in the British Isles, but particularly Ireland and Scotland. I love reading about an author’s writing process. I love books set by the ocean. In The Winter Sea, Susanna Kearsley has taken all of these elements and written a novel that is pretty close to perfect.

I know a bit about the “Bonnie Prince Charlie” Jacobite uprising, thanks to Diana Gabaldon and her Outlander series, but I hadn’t heard of the 1708 attempt to bring James Stewart back from France to take the throne. I now know a lot, but don’t think that this is a dry book long on history and short on enjoyment. This is a book long on history and long on enjoyment – I enjoyed every single page.

The Winter Sea will no doubt appear on my list of favorite reads of 2011. It was so engaging that it was able to distract me from the stressful things going on outside my reading life – which is the mark of an excellent read.

© CarrieK for BOOKS AND MOVIES, 2011. | Permalink | 21 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: historical fiction

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