HORSE HEAVEN – Jane Smiley

There are some books that leave a lovely ache.  Some books that reach into your bones and squeeze until you say “NO MORE” but you keep reading anyway.  For me, Jane Smiley’s HORSE HEAVEN is one of those books.  Smiley is a talented author who can write with that perfect level of fervent passion that is often either too much or not enough.  Her level is the Goldilocks level – just right oh so matter of fact.  She won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1992 for A THOUSAND ACRES, a book I read ages ago after the movie came out. 

HORSE HEAVEN was published in 2000, but it just found its way to the top of my TBR pile.  Spanning two years and following all sorts of folks and horses in its 561 pages, this novel is a bit of a mouthful but at no point does it feel as if its spiraling or rambling.  Each word is placed with careful precision.  It makes for a beautiful world of beautiful creatures, but we all know horse racing isn’t beautiful.
The grit of this novel, the treatment of the horses, caused some expected unease.  For many in the sport, it isn’t about the individual horse – it’s about the sport, the race, the glamour, the victory, the roses.  And in the high stakes world of ponies, people will do just about anything to win.  And while the main four horses may have ultimately received the best happily ever after possible for them, their journeys to that point were not always pleasant.
Early in the novel, one of our main characters, Joy Gorham, mare manager at Tompkins ranch, opened a letter from an 11-year-old girl, Audrey Schmidt.  The young girl was, as many young girls are, bitten by the horse bug.  There was a horse near her school that she took a fancy to and began to care for.  The horse was mistreated and half-starved.  She contacted the Thoroughbred Protective Association and provided the information from the tattoo on the horse’s lip and learned that he was *Terza Rime, a stakes winner who won seven races out of 52 starts, who had been sold by Tompkins ranch.  The girl is leaving the area and is concerned about the horse she calls Toto, so she writes to Mr. Tompkins, the former owner.  She concludes her letter as follows:
I think that since *Terza Rima won $300,000 dollars for you, you should take him to your farm and keep him there.  My Dad says that that is what a decent person would do, but he doesn’t think very many horse people are decent.  You are in California.  We are in Texas.  That isn’t very far.
The reader quickly learns that this remarkable horse had been sold by Tompkins for $7,000 after serving his purpose as a racer.  Since he was a gelding, he was of no further benefit to the farm.  (Don’t fret – Joy gets the horse, and Audrey ends up getting her own pony after a series of unfortunate events for both her and the horse that ultimately ends up under her care.)
The sentiment that Audrey’s father had expressed rings true throughout the novel – many of the characters are not decent.  Horses are drugged, abused, raced with known injuries, and sold to slaughter.  They are often easily discarded without a second thought.  Don’t get me wrong – there are many people who love the horses, but those are seldom the people in positions of power.  Exercise riders.  Grooms.  Some trainers. 

Early in the novel, the wife of one of the owners finds herself in an affair with her trainer.  (No surprise there.) I liked this trainer.  I loved the leadup to the affair and the writing about and of the affair. I liked Rosalind with him. But the affair, like most, simply cannot continue.  This is a high stakes world.  And when it ends, Smiley wants to ensure her reader is finished with the trainer just as much as a Rosalind is; he hits her dog.  Eileen, a feisty Jack Russell (and one of my favorite characters in the whole novel), was doing terrier business and barking, and he hit her.  A vet was called and assumed she’d been kicked by a horse.  She’s fine, but the impact of that scene on Rosalind is felt by the reader long after Eileen has forgotten about – there was no turning back after that.  Not long after, Rosalind finds a new trainer – one who believes in her horse, hasn’t seen her naked, and doesn’t hit her dog.
HORSE HEAVEN is a novel of the human condition.  Our hopes and fears.  Our dreams and failures.  Our regrets.  It’s not pretty, but neither is life.
The heart of this novel beats fast, like hooves around a racetrack.  It’s gritty, messy, and uncomfortable at times – but gosh how she breathes.

BEST IN SHOW – Laurien Berenson

While everything is on lockdown due to COVID-19, I am still very much working and my amount of “reading time” has seemingly dwindled, so I’m a bit behind my 2020 goals. I’m hoping to pick it back up and better manage my reading and writing time. That said, Laurien Berenson’s BEST IN SHOW was a fun and quick cozy mystery for anyone who loves the sport of purebred dogs, cozy mysteries, or dogs in general.

I’d honestly forgotten about the hot pink hardback that I’d picked up from the used bookstore. I was working on one of my works in progress, which was a murder mystery at a dog show, and I wanted to see how Berenson handled explaining aspects of the dog show without interfering with the flow of the plot. (My WIP is dark, gritty and about as far from a cozy as you can get. I set it aside for Merchants Town and haven’t found the time to return to it.) In the spirit of “research,” I bought this one and another one, and then I promptly forgot about them. But when I looked at the TBR pile, that hot pink spine called for attention.

BEST IN SHOW is a Melanie Travis Mystery, and I may have been a wee bit disadvantaged to have entered into Melanie’s world so late in the game (this is book ten in a series that she is still actively writing), but it certainly can survive as a standalone. Set at the Poodle Club of America National Specialty Dog Show, the novel is full of poodle-love. (Berenson is most decidingly a poodle person.)

 Being part of what I call the “fringe” fancy (one foot in, one foot out), I am quite familiar with national specialties, and I know that PCA is the best of the best. My personal and professional experiences had me read this with a different lens, and at times I found some of her explanations obnoxious and unrealistic. (Example – I don’t much think she’d need to explain how PCA worked or how the handlers must pick up the poo at the hotel to a professional handler who has been in the sport for years.) I also questioned the trustworthiness of the narrator. At times, she seemed still the novice to the dog world, but her beloved Aunt Peg has been a top breeder of poodles for decades. Her brother is married to a professional handler. Her lover is a handler. She herself has bred a litter of poodles. This isn’t her first rodeo at PCA – though it is her first time showing; however, at times she acts like she’s never been before and doesn’t know who the Sisters, who have been running that raffle for years, are. She talks about how small the dog show world is and how the poodle world is even smaller, but she is puzzled by some of the professional handlers and doesn’t know the contenders.

 I imagine I wouldn’t feel this way if I’d started at the beginning of the series, so this likely isn’t a fair criticism. I also get that much of what she does is a writing choice that affords Berenson the opportunity to explain certain things and allows her to create an air of mystery around certain folks that is necessary in a whodunit.

That said, it’s a fun little mystery. There is a murder. There is an affair between a rich client’s wife and their hot handler. There is a “fix” in the winners ring. There is a pet psychic. There is a neatly tied up resolution with an unexpected twist solved by, of course, Melanie. And then there are the poodles. Berenson does a fantastic job of capturing and appreciating the electrifying energy of a poodle, both in and out of the ring. She equally does an excellent job of capturing the thrill of even just being pulled for the long list at such a prestigious show.

As a final note, this was published by Kensington Publishing Corp. and I imagine there were multiple folks who had their hands on this manuscript before it went to print. Yet this was printed: “The problem – as every dog show exbitor knew full was – was that bredding dogs wasn’t a money-making venture.” … … … (Yes, I know there are mistakes in my works, but I also didn’t have a publishing company behind me and I did run it through spellcheck once or twice…)

As a final note that is unrelated to the book, this year’s PCA was canceled due to COVID-19. I know this was a heartbreaking decision for many, and I wish the club, exhibitors, breeders, owners, spectators and remarkable poodles the best of the best come 2021’s show.

WEDDING BELLES – Haywood Smith

Let me start by saying that I love Southern fiction.  There are charming books set in the South, with charming women you want to go have brunch with.  WEDDING BELLES by Haywood Smith (2008) is not that book.  Georgia, Linda, Diane, Teeny, and Pru are notthose women. 

To be fair, I’ve never read anything by Ms. Smith, and this is the third book in the Red Hat Club series.  I picked it up at a little free library because the cover looked like something cute and sweet – a candy of a book.  Plot-wise, it had the potential to be an absolute romp and sometimes I want something sweet, like icing on a cake.  This is the first book in a very long time that I nearly refused to finish.
Let’s start with our narrator, Georgia Baker.  Bless her heart, but she is the absolute worst.  She is not a good friend.  She is not a good wife.  And she is not a good mother.  But she will proclaim that she is all three all the day long, and especially from the church pew come Sunday morning.
Exhibit A: She claims that she has been Wade’s close friend for 30 years.  Bullshit.  She’s hated that man since he sexually assaulted her friend Linda.  (And I won’t even touch on that little scene.)
Exhibit B: She wants the world to think she’s a good wife.  She repeatedly lets the reader know she purposefully married a man she didn’t love so she wouldn’t get hurt.  (They’ve been married for 30 years at this point.)
Exhibit C: She wants the world to think she’s a good mother.  She nearly causes her daughter to go into a panic attack over sex with a man she loves before marriage.  She lets someone else pay a lot of money to have the man her daughter intends to marry “checked out” by professional investigators.  The man who is also her close & personal friend. 

Again.  She is awful.
Her daughter, Callie, is marrying a man 30 years older than her.  But, as our Karen of a narrator makes quite clear, it’s not as bad as if Callie were marrying a woman.  And it’s certainly not as bad as Linda’s daughter and that “Osama-damned-son-in-law.”  (Those early sections made me not want to finish the book.)
Now let’s talk about the book itself, shall we?  There were certain things in the actual writing that annoyed me. 

1)      She repeats herself.  Over and over again.  I don’t need to be told five hundred thousand times that MYOB is Mind Your Own Business or that it’s Sacred Tradition of Friendship #5 – I get it.
2)      Rachel.  Why is she even in this novel if not a vessel to give one of the other women a slice of drama and to showcase again what filthy rich can do?  She flits into the novel like hell on wheels, drives the plot for a bit, and then gets married off to a rich widow.  Maybe they just needed a nasty northerner to remind Georgia that “family is family.”  She was intentionally underdeveloped, flashy as the moment required, and quickly discarded.
3)      Elena.  The best person in the novel is never actually seen.  But she birthed Peach and that little girl made the novel worth slugging through.  (I actually enjoyed Pru’s storyline.)
4)      She can’t remember Wade’s children’s names.  At first, his son is Scott and most certainly not named for Wade.  Then, through the detective’s report, we learn he has three children: Wade Robert, Brandon James, and Laura Elizabeth.  Suddenly at the wedding, his eldest son’s name is Tom.  Ummm…
I could go on, but I won’t.  I was not the audience for this book, and I don’t know that I have ever said that.  Additionally, there were some issues that I think an editor with St. Martin’s Griffin, an imprint of MacMillan, should have gleaned on to and “helped.”
A lot of people ADORE this series and these women; I am not one. 

THE PRIORY OF THE ORANGE TREE – Samantha Shannon

In 2012, I read a news story about a twenty-year-old student at University who was signed by Bloomsbury Publishing in a six-figure book deal.  I was intrigued (and jealous).  The deal was for three books in a seven books series.  The first of which, THE BONE SEASON, was published in 2013.  I’ve had what I call a “literary crush” on Samantha Shannon since; she is one of few authors on my automatically pre-order list.
When she announced that she was taking a little break from the Pale Dreamer to pursue a bit of a passion project, I was again intrigued but a bit wary.  High fantasy is not something I frequently read, despite loving mages and dragons.  Perhaps it is because the stories of men with swords slaying beasts and winning the hearts of the fragile maidens bore me.  But I knew from the first three books of THE BONE SEASON series that Samantha Shannon’s females are far from fragile and rarely need rescuing.  I hit “pre-order” and waited for what seemed like ages for it to be released in 2019.  When it came, I was afraid of not liking it and sat it on a shelf.  But it’s the year of the book dragon and every book dragon needs a book about dragons.
Dubbed a “epic feminist fantasy,” THE PRIORY OF THE ORANGE TREE is nearly as massive in size as it is in heart.  (At just over 800 pages in hardback, it’s one of the biggest books I’ve read in a long while.  Its sheer size makes it a bit cumbersome of a read – certainly not bubble bath material – but this standalone epic will have you craving more pages after the last sentence – “But not today.”)  What is most striking is how expertly the story is woven and how powerful yet realistically flawed the women are.  It is most fitting that I finished this novel on International Women’s Day.
At its heart, this is the story of dualities.  East and West.  Fire and water.  Dragon rider and dragon slayer – Tane and Ead. 

Tane is of the East, and she opens the novel. She has spent her entire life preparing to be a rider and on the eve of Choosing Day, where her destiny would finally be realized, a stranger from the West washes up on her shore and threatens everything she has worked so hard for.  She makes a choice that night that will change the course of destiny – a choice that will destroy what she loves, turn her into a ghost, and breathe new life and purpose into her battered bones.  A choice that just maybe saves the world.
Ead Duryan is a lie.  Eadaz du Zala uq-Nara is the truth.  An initiate of the Priory of the Orange Tree, she poses as a chamberer in the Upper Household of Queen Sabran Berethnet.  She is a mage, her magic coming from the sweet fruit of the Orange Tree.  The Priory is a group of women, led by a Prioress, who slay dragons or “wyrms” and protect the rest of the world with few others knowing of their existence.  Ead is a skilled assassin, trained since birth, who has been sent to protect the western queen at all costs. Legend claims the Nameless One, a fire-breathing dragon hellbent on death and destruction, will awaken and destroy the world if the House of Berethnet does not deliver a female heir.  The Priory, even while questioning the legend, cannot risk it.
Over time and space, the reality of this duality emerges.  The stars align.  The scholars finally understand the ancient riddles involving a hawthorne tree, a mulberry tree, and an orange tree.  But is it too late?  Can the rider of dragons, powered by water and stars, and the slayer of dragons, powered by the fire of an ancient tree, join forces as their ancestors did 1,000 years before?
There is love.  There is betrayal.  There is murder.  There is the Flesh King.  There are animals that help and animals that hinder.  There is a shape-shifting witch.  There are poison darts and pearls sewn into skin.  There are lies and truths.  There is darkness.  There is light.  There is a rose in winter.  And through it all are some of the most remarkable characters you will meet – the idealistic Truyde utt Zeedur, the soul-less Golden Empress,  the haunted Donmata Marosa, the devoted Margaret Beck, the tortured Sabran – these women are fully developed, perfectly imperfect and beautifully portrayed.  And they are strong even at times they appear the weakest.
 “And yet I am reminded – as I so often am – that you never needed my protection.  You are your own shield.” – Chassar to Ead (He raised her after her mother was murdered.)

I will always love THE BONE SEASON, but if this is what Shannon can do with high fantasy – please give me more. 

CROOKED LETTER, CROOKED LETTER – Tom Franklin

It’s been a bit since I’ve read a thriller, but Tom Franklin’s CROOKED LETTER, CROOKED LETTER reminded me how much I love a good literary thriller.  Published in 2010, CROOKED LETTER, CROOKED LETTER is haunting and heartbreaking in its cutting realities and unapologetic portrayal of racism and classism in the rural South. 

If the title didn’t give it away, the novel is set in Mississippi.  (M, I, crooked letter, crooked letter, I, crooked letter, crooked letter, I, humpback, humpback, I)  The novel travels across decades effortlessly, the lives of Silas and Larry weaving in and out and oft

running parallel.

Silas “32” Jones was born to a single mother.  He’d grown up in Chicago, but an incident with one of his mama’s boyfriends has them running back to Mississippi, where she said she knew people.  Silas would eventually learn the “people” she knew was the white Ott family.
Larry Ott was born to a doting mother and a father who drank too much and wished his son liked sports more than the books he toted around.
The boys first meet when Larry’s father stops to pick up Silas and his mother.  It’s cold, and they ride with them into town.  Every morning.  Every morning until Larry mentions it to his mother.  The next day, his mother takes him to school.  Silas and his mother were waiting as usual, his mother handed them used jackets and angrily addressed Silas’s mother.  The pair never rode with his father again.  And his father never forgave him for telling his mother.
The unlikely pair begin a secret friendship.  It was the ‘70s in southern Mississippi, so it had to be secret.  They didn’t hang out at school.  They didn’t bring each other into their respective homes unless no one else was home.  Society simply wouldn’t approve, but the boys were friends – each learning from the other.
As teenagers, their relationship is destroyed by Larry’s father.  Silas had stood up to a friend of Larry’s dad who was sexually assaulting his stepdaughter, much to Mr. Ott’s drunken delight.  Larry had hidden, but his father had seen him.  He followed his son when he went to see Silas and forced the two boys to fight.  Larry was torn between the only friend he’d ever had and the father he wanted so desperately to please.  Fisticuffs ensuedwithout much heart, until Larry uttered the slur that would sever the friendship.  There are some words you can’t walk back from.
Sometime not long after, Larry takes the girl Silas had been protecting on a date to a drive-in and she’s never seen again.  There’s no evidence, no charge, no conviction.  But the town judges him all the same.  Larry Ott’s life is destroyed, and Silas Jones doesn’t look back.
Now it’s decades later.  Silas is back in town as the constable, and another girl is missing.  Larry is the prime suspect.
“The only ghosts here knew the secrets already.”
And the secrets are as crooked as the letter.

The Last Kind Words Saloon – Larry McMurtry

“We don’t rent pigs.”
Larry McMurtry is the man who, without knowing who I am, gave me one of the sweetest gifts when he wrote LONESOME DOVE.  Published when I was toddler, the book was turned into a TV mini-series in 1989.  My father recorded it, and those old VHS tapes were likely the most watched movie in our house.  I remember sick days home from school with my father cleaning his Civil War era gun while we watched.  Snow days where we watched.  Lazy Saturdays when the fish weren’t biting when we watched.  I remember being sent to my room or having him fast forward when they crossed the river and disturbed the bed of snakes.  I remember him assuring me that Blue Duck wasn’t real. I remember the way his eyes turned liquid every time Deets died, and how he’d change the subject when I wanted to know what a “poke” was.  I couldn’t wait until I was old enough to go to Montana.  I remember the way he looked when they hung Jake Spoon, and how he told me that some lines can never be crossed.  I have a worn paperback on my shelf at home, and a signed first audition is one thing I’m always looking for. 

McMurtry’s beautifully drawn characters – especially Gus and Captain Call – remain some of most my loved fictional creations.
THE LAST KIND WORDS SALOON, published in 2014, immediately brought the Pulitzer-winning novel to mind.  But where LONESOME DOVE was a meal I could eat every day for the rest of my life, THE LAST KIND WORDS SALOON seems a hastily thrown together one sheet meal that relies on some of the same ingredients of the meal I love but doesn’t come close to being satisfying.  The novel is considerably shorter than LONESOME DOVE, but there are some aspects that seem pulled directly from the 1980s work.
The steers in the lightening storm.  The sign that Wyatt totes around.  The reporter.  There are a lot of similarities between Jessie and Gus’s Lorie-darlin’.  The cattle drive to Montana.  The relationship between Doc and Wyatt is very much the same foil as Gus and Call.  Teddy Blue has a lot of Dish in him.  (And it’s been a long time since I’ve read LONESOME DOVE.)
McMurtry takes some liberties in this story of the Earps and Doc Holliday, and some of them just don’t work.  Wyatt’s wife was Josephine, not Jessie, and the timeline of their relationship is horribly wrong in this novel.  This bothers me greatly. 

He opens the novel by telling the read “THE LAST KIND WORDS SALOON is a ballad in prose whose characters are afloat in time; their legends and their lives in history rarely match.  I had the great director John Ford in mind when I wrote this book; he famously said that when you had to choose between history and legend, print the legend.  And so I’ve done.”

The fact he plays with the stories and legends surrounding these larger than life figures of the West in the Earps and Wild Bill and Doc doesn’t bother me.  But changing the name of the prominent woman who factored into the life and the legend does.
Additionally, there is also a minor misprint where “Jessie” is printed as “Jesse.”  Much like her name is missing its “I,” this book is missing its heart.
It made me miss the genius that was LONESOME DOVE. 

THE LUST LIZARD OF MELANCHOLY COVE – Christopher Moore

I’m no stranger to Christopher Moore and his ridiculously outrageous tall tales – he is one of a handful of authors who can make me donkey laugh out loud while reading, even in public.  Shoot, just his titles give me a chuckle.  (Island of the Sequined Love Nun, Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal, The Stupidest Angel, You Suck: A Love Story, Fluke, or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings are just some examples.) He writes “comic fantasy” and his stories are absolutely absurd, so if that doesn’t float your boat I wouldn’t suggest you pick him up.  Sometimes the absurdity, for me, gets very close to and at times crosses the line of “too much,” but he can usually rein it in so as not lose me as a reader.  (I’ve read a couple of things prior and I do have several in my TBR pile, but you have to be in certain mood for a Moore novel.)
Published in 1999, THE LUST LIZARD OF MELANCHOLY COVE is a WTF kind of read.  The absurd and the fantastical weave seamlessly out of the mundane and ordinary in this small town of Pine Cove.   The “Lust Lizard” is the Sea Beast fondly called Steve by Molly, the “crazy slut” down in the trailer park who used to be a B actress in Sci Fi films.  Molly took care of Steve after had attempted to mate a gas truck and it exploded, injuring him.  Molly and Steve have a bizarre relationship that takes a weird sexual turn where a weed eater is involved.  And that’s not even the most WTFDIJR (What the fuck did I just read) moment of the novel.
Our hero, if we’re going to have one, is Theo – the pot-smoking (and growing) town “constable” who keeps the wayward folks of Pine Cove out of the sheriff’s hair and off the sheriff’s ranch (which just so happens to a pretty big meth operation for the cartel.)  Everything is going just fine until the blues singer Catfish shows up, Bess Leander kills herself, and there’s a wee bit of a leak at the nuclear power plant.
The leak rouses Steve and brings him (and his lustful longings) to Pine Cove.  The “suicide” has the town psychiatrist thinking that maybe she should be listening to her clients and not just giving them pills.  In cahoots with the pharmacist (who has the most disturbing of fetishes), she switches all their meds to sugar pills.  The lowered serotonin levels are perfect for Steve’s predatory mechanism that makes everyone horny and therefore vulnerable to being prey.  (Food or sex drives everyone, right?)  Catfish has prior knowledge of the beast as he’d killed the offspring of the beast when Steve was a girl.  (I didn’t say it wasn’t weird.)  Steve hates Catfish and wants to avenge his/her child and the sound of the guitar will send him spiraling into a flashy rage.
Things only get worse when Theo stops smoking pot and starts acting like a detective.  Maybe Bess Leander didn’t kill herself.  Maybe the tracks he saw just past the trailer park weren’t a figment of his pot-soaked imagination.  I won’t tell you how it all plays out, but let’s just say again that this is a WTF kind of read.

The phone behind the bar rang and Mavis yanked it out of its cradle.  “Mount Olympus, Goddess of Sex speaking,” she said, and there was a mechanical ratcheting noise as she cocked a hip while she listened.  “No, I haven’t seen him – like I would even tell you if he was here.  Hell, woman, I have a sacred trust here – I can’t rat out every husband who comes in for a snort after work.  How would I know.  Honey, you want to keep this kind of thing from happening?  Two words: long, nasty blowjobs.  Yeah, well, if you were doing them instead of counting words, then maybe you wouldn’t lose your husband.”

LITTLE EARTHQUAKES – Jennifer Weiner

“Little earthquake… They happen all the time.  I hardly feel them anymore.”

“I could have told him that nothing was safe and that no matter how careful you were and how hard you tried, there were still accidents, hidden traps, and snares.  You could get killed on an airplane or crossing the street.  Your marriage could fall apart when you weren’t looking; your husband could lose his job; your baby could get sick or die.  I could have said that nothing is safe, that the surface of the world is pretty and sane, but underneath it’s all fault lines and earthquakes waiting to happen.”
Published in 2004, Jennifer Weiner’s LITTLE EARTHQUAKES was an unexpected delight.  I’m a bit ashamed that I have never read Weiner before, and I know it’s because I tended to avoid the “chick lit” and so-called genre fiction categories.  I was a bit arrogant with my reading and my shelves back then; that was my mistake, and one I’ve learned from. 

LITTLE EARTHQUAKES may be considered “chick lit” but such a label is truly doing it a disservice; let’s stop trying to fit a story in a box and appreciate Weiner for being one helluva storyteller. 

The novel revolves around four very different women who are brought together by the “little earthquakes” that define life.  Weiner does an excellent job of capturing the four different women, their shared experiences, and their relationships.
Lia opens and closes the novel, and her point of view is the only one told in first person.  Her story, which is the heart of the novel, breathes the most life.  She’s fled her reinvented life with her fame, handsome husband, and recently dead baby in LA to return to the childhood home she’d thought she’d long escaped.  Back home, she begins to put her heart and life back together.  She sees a pregnant woman in the park and begins to slip baby trinkets into the woman’s bag or upon her doorstep.  It’s a bit stalkerish, but Weiner cleverly controls her character.  When the woman finally notices Lia watching her, she’s at her wits end with a crying baby.  Unsure of what to do, she invites Lia into her home and cooks her breakfast while Lia gets the baby to stop crying.  A forever bond is formed. 

Becky is the pregnant woman who caught Lia’s eye.  She’s fat and very self-conscious about whether she looks pregnant or not.  (The fact that Lia recognized her as being pregnant quickly cemented the friendship between the pair.)  Not only is Becky fat, she’s Jewish and a chef, and the most interesting character in the book.  I don’t know that I’ve read a book with a fat heroine where her weight wasn’t the plot – it was refreshing.
Becky goes to a yoga class for pregnant women and meets Kelly, a high-energy event planner who places her value on material items and how she is perceived.  Kelly came from nothing, and she’s very worried that the life she’s been building will be snatched from her at any time.  Ayinde, the biracial wife of a pro basketball player, is also in the class.  She was born into a life of privilege with her model mother and actor father.  She never meant to fall in love with an athlete, but she did. It’s an unlikely friendship, but it happens organically when Ayinde goes into labor (on page 22) and Kelly and Becky rush to her aid, even though they’d just met.  By the middle of the novel, the four women are a combined force.
There’s an over-bearing mother-in-law, an affair, a lost job, several breakdowns, delicious food, and a can of mandarin oranges.  There are laughs, tears, blood, sweat, hope, and love.  There’s forgiveness.  There’s a sweetness – like those tinned oranges. 

No, it’s not chick lit – it’s life.

THE GOLDFINCH – Donna Tartt

In the 1980s, a group of kids from Bennington College emerged as the so-called “literary brat pack.” These privileged kids from the East Coast, with their booze and drug-filled delusions, were deemed “cool” and their literary talents highly praised. They were pompous and arrogant, while at the same time intentionally esoteric to create an air of mystery about them. The Bennington College atmosphere, the drugs and alcohol, the privilege and wealth, and the entire coke-laden 1980s molded these writers into who they ultimately became.

 Bret Easton Ellis was a member, and I loathe his writing with a passion. I’ve read AMERICAN PYSCHO and LESS THAN ZERO and I hated them both. I wanted to like them – I really did. And Ellis is good at weaving a story – I just hate his drug-addled characters of privilege and excess.

 “If you like Ellis, you’ll love Donna Tartt. They went to school together. She’s a woman.”

 I remember the way I cocked my head at the speaker of that statement. I hadn’t liked Ellis. And the reason I hadn’t liked Ellis hadn’t been because he was a man. (Years later, I realized the speaker of that statement tried to live his life as if he stepped from the boarding school pages of an Ellis novel, coke included. We all make mistakes.)

Donna Tartt was also a member of the literary brat pack, and one of Ellis’s good friends. They’re still friends. Her rise to fame was a bit more of a slow burn than the others of the “pack.” Her first novel and one that created a cult following for her was THE SECRET HISTORY, published in 1992. The advance for that novel? $450,000. I don’t even know what that would be in today’s money. She was indeed a literary darling from the brat pack. It took her over a decade to finish her second novel, THE LITTLE FRIEND. Over a decade later, THE GOLDFINCH was published, and it won her the coveted Pulitzer. I finally picked it up, determined to give Tartt a fair chance. 

It is 771 pages of drug-addled, booze-soaked poor decisions. Her characters are not likeable and have few, if any, redeeming qualities. A bildungsroman is supposed to show growth of the main character, but Theo Decker doesn’t grow except to become even more of an obsessive, self-absorbed addict. 

This novel heightened my anxiety, and I was so tense when reading it, I thought I needed a Xanax. I didn’t care about Theo. (I felt bad about that because of how the novel opens, but he was a jerk before the bombs went off and his mother died.) I spent over 700 pages in a state over that blasted painting (and quite a few worried about a little Maltese named Popper). Even when Theo conveniently forgot about the painting for pages upon pages despite it being his alleged obsession, it was my focus.

His obsession with the painting gives rise to what I see as one of the many flaws. He talks about how much he knew that painting, especially its weight in his hands. How did he not notice it had been replaced with a schoolbook? The likelihood the schoolbook and The Goldfinch weighed the same is slim to none. Theo even discusses the weight with a “collector,” – pleased that someone else had noted the heft of it. How did he not know it had been switched? Drugs? I suppose it’s possible.

 Making Boris a caricature was also a problem for me, especially his dialogue. And the “boys will be boys” rough housing while drunk and/or high leading to a sexual encounter between the two that is never properly addressed made me shake my head. Boris deserved better. And the reader, who is painfully addressed at the end, also deserved better.

 The idea is great – a young boy has gotten in trouble at school and must go for a parent/teacher meeting. Because they’re running early, they stop at the museum. His mother, beautiful and animated by art, tells him about her favorites, including The Goldfinch – a beautiful songbird tethered to a perch by a short chain. An act of domestic terrorism leaves the museum in rubble and the beautiful mother dead. The boy, suffering from shock and a head injury, has a discussion with a dying old man and he takes the painting. What happens to the boy and the painting and the redheaded girl he’d seen just before the explosion could have been something heartbreaking yet beautiful and full of light. Instead, Tartt made each page more tragic than the one before it.

 It may be pretty writing, pretty like a songbird, but it’s tethered by a short chain to a tragic existence.

CHINA RICH GIRLFRIEND – Kevin Kwan

I recently posted on Facebook for my next reading selection out of these four from my TBR pile.  The first response was for the second installment of Kevin Kwan’s decadent and delicious trilogy.

CHINA RICH GIRLFRIEND is just as delightful and outrageous as CRAZY RICH ASIANS.  Like any good soap opera, there are twists, turns, bastard children, and a murder plot.  Rachel and Nick are back together and he’s not speaking with his mother.  Through a bizarre twist, she manages to work her way back into their lives just in time for the wedding.  It’s the bizarre twist, not the wedding, that is one of the plot bunnies of this snark-tastic little read.
Eleanor Young has found Rachel’s father, and Rachel has a half-brother, Carlton.  After the wedding, the newlyweds head to Shanghai to spend time with Rachel’s newly found family.  Things aren’t so peaceful at the Bao residence, and Rachel isn’t exactly welcomed into the home.  Her brother, however, does welcome her.  He’s a spoiled little rich boy whose poor judgment have left one girl paralyzed and another dead, and both families paid off so his father would never know.  Her brother’s “not my girlfriend” filthy rich fashionista friend Colette plays a big part in the blossoming relationship between Rachel and her little brother.
Another plot twist will take you into the life of Kitty Pong, who will tell you no amount of money can buy class.  But what of Bernard?  What’s happened to him?  The most delightful of unexpected moments that will have you chuckling out loud.
The beautiful Astrid is just as beautiful, but her hard-working husband has become quite the disappointment.  Thank goodness for old boyfriends who remind you of who you are.
And Ah Ma?  She’s still kicking.  She’s pushed her beloved Nicky out, but she’s still very much in control of her family.
Kwan’s writing is sharp and hilarious, even when at its most outrageous.  And now I really want a good xiao long bao.