Tag: Fiction

Perfect Daughter

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Linscott, Gillian. The Perfect Daughter. Macmillan, 2001.

Reason read: Linscott celebrates her birthday in the month of September. Read in her honor.

It is difficult to be the prim and proper daughter of a military father and a snobbish mother in 1914 England. [It’s probably difficult to be a child of such parents in any given era.] Giving in to the pressure of perpetual perfection, did Verona finally commit suicide? Or was something more sinister at play? Found with a clever noose around her neck, it looks like the former. When details are revealed, readers must consider the era. Left-wing politics are raging, women are fighting for the vote, and Verona went from being a well-mannered daughter to a runaway, albeit talented, artist living in squalor with a group of Bohemian anarchists. Her life while she lived and breathed was fraught with contradictions, but it is her death which confounds us more. Her autopsy reveals she had been pregnant and had a great deal of morphine in her system. Her friends and family report her behavior was so strange they hardly knew her anymore. Maybe she led a promiscuous life. Maybe she was an addict. Was Verona’s cousin to blame? Suffragette and political agitator, Nell Bray had little contact with Verona; she barely knew the girl, and yet she finds herself trying to solve the mystery. Curious by nature, Nell wonders how a young girl from a well-to-do family could end up deceased on her parents’ property. Is her strange death a message to her society-slaved parents? Or was someone else to blame for her demise?

Author fact: Linscott worked for the BBC before she became a novelist.

Book trivia: This could be a movie.

Setlist: Chaliapin, “O Dem Golden Slippers”, and Schubert.

BookLust Twist: from More Book Lust in the chapter called “Ms. Mystery” (p 169).

Jungle

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Sinclair, Upton. The Jungle. Robert Bentley Inc., 1946.

Reason read: Sinclair celebrated a birthday in September. Read in his honor. I also needed a book set in the Midwest for the Portland Public Library’s 2024 Reading Challenge.

In my version of The Jungle (Robert Bentley, Inc., 1946), Sinclair provides an introduction and in that introduction he describes how he came to Chicago at twenty-six years old and started visiting the meat packing district. The living and working conditions of the mostly immigrant workers prompted him to interview them at home, where conversations inevitably turn confessional. Sinclair even crashed a Lithuanian wedding and used the experience in the opening scene of The Jungle.
I will not lie. Reading The Jungle by Upton Sinclair was painful. Jurgis, with his haunting mantra, “I will work hard. I will work faster. I will work longer” was heartbreaking. The desperation for employment – children lying about their ages to get work, women giving out their bodies to find work and bringing bribes of their bodies to stay employed. Look up misery in the dictionary and you should find Sinclair’s The Jungle.
As an aside, pay attention to the words used in the socialist sermon. Monster. Exhaustion. Beaten. Starvation. Horror. Darkness. Obstacles. Threatening. Hostile. Destroy. Fury. Prison. Oppression. Grim. Toiling. Agony. Suffering. Difficulties. Trapped. Hideous. Pain. Wretched. Curse. Misery.
In the end, Jurgis fades into the background as the sermon on socialism, morality, the word of God, and the future of Chicago takes over.

Book trivia: Jack London endorsed The Jungle saying it will run away with you. He was right.

Quote to quote, “They trick you and then they eat you alive” (p 69).

Confessional: I would like to think everyone has read this best selling classic. However, until now I was not one of those people. I never had to read it in grade school, high school, college, or graduate school. It was not on any supplemental list supplied by my teachers.

Natalie connection: 10,000 Maniacs performs a song called “My Sister Rose” which depicts a family wedding. Natalie sings about “dollar dances with the bride” much like the dancing described in the early pages of The Jungle. Music can take you back to your homeland.

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust in the chapter called “One Hundred Good Reads, Decade By Decade: 1900s” (p 175).

Ways of Dying

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Mda, Zakes. Ways of Dying. Picador Press, 1995.

Reason read: Ways of Dying was awarded the M-Net Book Award in September. Read in recognition of that event.

Told in the collective voice of “we,” Ways of Dying unfolds the story of Toloki and Noria. The community owns the story, but keeps an emotionally safe distance. Toloki makes his living as a professional mourner. What an interesting vocation. Toloki will be there if you need someone to help carry a casket; he will wail as if he just lost his own best friend, or he can rescue a body from the morgue before officials dump it into a mass grave. Toloki’s most important task is to attend funerals to comfort the mourners. It is at one such funeral that he reconnects with someone from his childhood. As children, Toloki was always jealous of the beautiful and mysterious Noria. No matter how hard he tried to please his father, Noria was the only one his father had eyes for. Noria acted as Toloki’s father’s artistic muse. Now, years later, Noria is a changed woman after suffering so much heartache and loss. Together, they forge a new friendship.
Confession: there was so much misery in Ways of Dying that I could not trust a happy ending.

Lines I liked, “That Mountain Woman had razor blades in her tongue” (p 30), “If you don’t praise yourself while you are alive, no one else will” (p 147), and “He is willing to find more ways of living” (p 192).

Author fact: Mda was a visiting professor at Yale at the the time of Ways of Dying‘s publication.

Book trivia: Ways of Dying won the M-Net Book Prize.

Setlist: “Silent Night”

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust To Go in the chapter called “South Africa” (p 215).

Roadside Confessions

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Feulner, Glen. Roadside Confessions. Glen Feulner, 2024.

Reason read: This is one of my favorite Early Reviews from LibraryThing.

This is fiction. This is fiction. This is fiction. I have to say that to myself over and over again like a mantra because Roadside Confessions is so beautifully believable and I (confessionally), I wanted it to be true. The journey is real. The grief is real. Grief puts people on pedestals and guilt gives them a golden halo. The suicidal tendencies are real (desire to burn by fire; drown in the ocean; hang inches above the dirt; a gun to the temple). What started as a writing exercise for Glen Feulner in 2003 turned into an AI-assisted love story. A man, torn apart by grief and guilt after losing his wife to cancer, makes a California to Maine sojourn to come to terms with his loss. Added to the drama: he might commit suicide along the way. As they say in Maine, hard tellin’ not knowin’.
While Roadside Confessions is a short read (I cracked it open on my lunch break and inhaled it faster than my black bean burrito), the words are powerful and the accompanying photographs are just gorgeous. Speaking of photography, only a handful belong to the author (fourteen, I think) and that was my a-ha moment. They are all beautiful nature shots and not a one is of the deceased beloved wife. But. I digress. Back to the writing.
Feulner sinks down and grinds into what it feels like to mourn deeply. If you have ever listened to Dermot Kennedy’s music and really heard his passionate lyrics, you could make the comparison. Feulner is just as lyrical and emotional. You just have to get over the voice changing from speaking about Allison to speaking to Allison. If you owe the reader nothing, do not assume our expectations. Besides all that, I (obviously) enjoyed every word and when I get over the fact it isn’t a true story I’ll read it again and again.

As an aside, I want to meet Kathleen Jor Hall-Dumont. I like blunt people.

As an another aside, Feulner tells his readers that there is a Roadside Confessions playlist on Spotify that readers can listen to. Maybe I don’t have the right subscription but I couldn’t find it. Bummer. Here is the music mentioned in Roadside Confessions:
The Replacements, Elvis Costello, the Smiths, and Death Cab for Cutie.
Here is another disappointed – this was an AI assisted book.

Boy Meets Boy

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Levithan, David. Boy Meets Boy. Alfred A. Knopf, 2003.

Reason read: August is the new back to school month. Since most of Boy Meet Boy takes place in a school, read in honor of lockers everywhere.

The world inside Boy Meets Boy is the fantasyland where we all want to live, or at least visit whenever the mood strikes us. A place where kindness reigns supreme and hate just does not seem to exist. At. All. Main character, Paul, is unlike any teenage boy you will ever meet. He is sensitive, smart, funny, romantic, thoughtful, and a serious empath. His environment is a high school where students, dissatisfied with clubs of the cultural norms, create groups like the Joy Scouts, the French cuisine club, and the Quiz bowling team. The janitors are closet (pun totally intended) wealthy day traders. The parents form groups like P-FLAG (Parents and friends of lesbians and gays). The town itself is ultra-accepting – there is a bar called the Queer Beer bar where straight guys sneak in to hit on lesbians. It’s like a paradise for the LGBTQ community: the perfect world where everyone is welcomed and joyfully accepted. Even insults are always playful and harmless. The quarterback can also be the homecoming queen – shoulder pads and manicured nails come together in one character, Infinite Darlene. Cheerleaders can afford Harleys. Mothers make pancakes that resemble the topography or states or continents. Imagine that.
But. In order to have an interesting story, you need conflict. Right? The conflict is love and all of its broken hearts. Paul was once dumped by Kyle. Now Kyle wants Paul back, but only after Paul has started something with a new boy, Noah. Noah has been burned himself. So when Noah finds out Paul kissed another boy, he’s a goner. Now Paul wants Noah back while Kyle chases Paul. Then there is Ted who was dumped by Joanie for Chuck. Somehow, Paul tries to mend all these hearts, including the ones he has no business mending. The big question is, will he win Noah back or will Kyle win his heart?

Author fact: Even though David Levithan wrote a long list of books, I am only reading Boy Meets Boy for the Challenge.

Book trivia: I could easily see this being made into a movie.

Music: Dave Matthews Band’s “All Along the Watchtower” (but not really DMB) and “Typical Situation”, “One More Day”, Depeche Mode’s “Personal Jesus”, “We Are the Champions”, Cole Porter, Pink Floyd, “Bizarre Love Triangle”, “I Will Survive”, “She’s All Mouth”, Elvis’s “Love Me Tender”, “Heartbreak Hotel”, “All Shook Up”, Ella Fitzgerald, PJ Harvey, Erasure’s “Always”, Indigo Girls, Chet Baker’s “Someone to Watch Over Me”, Beatles, “If I Had a Hammer”, “Time after Time”. “It’s Always You”, and “Let’s Get Lost”, and “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore”.

BookLust Twist: from More Book Lust in the chapter called “Best for Teens” (p 23). Interestingly enough, Pearl thought Boy Meets Boy was more appropriate for boys than girls.

Well of Loneliness

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Hall, Radclyffe. The Well of Loneliness. Anchor Books, 1928.

Reason read: Hall’s birth month is in August. Read in her honor.

When her parents were disappointed that their newborn had not been the boy they expected, they went ahead with the name they had picked out pre-birth: Stephen. For 1928 that was pretty progressive, especially since no one in their society circles really questioned it, not even Stephen herself. Her full name was Stephen Mary Olivia Gertrude Gordon. It was a name that seemed to overshadow her true identity and caused her some confusion as she navigated her way through childhood. Living in an environment where societal norms and expectations were rigid, Stephen often found herself clashing with the traditional gender roles.
Hall uses all the clichés to make obvious Stephen’s sexual orientation even as a young child: Stephen developed a strong romantic attachment to her nanny, she wanted to hunt, climb trees, and ride horses like a boy. She instinctively needed to change her appearance by cutting her hair and building her muscles and wearing pants and ties. She thought dresses were ridiculous, girlish emotions even more so. These feelings and desires were contrary to what was expected of a girl in her society, leading to a sense of internal conflict and confusion as she tried to understand and accept herself. She knew she was different but could not articulate why. As a teenager, Stephen was thrilled to make the acquaintance of a boy with whom she seemed to have so much in common. Here was a person with whom she could be her true self…until he admitted he was falling in love with her. Of course she could not love him back in the same way, as her own feelings did not align with his blossoming romantic affection. All through her formative years, Stephen’s father could not tell her the truth about her “strangeness” and yet he knew. As a result, he was overprotective and sheltering. There is a naivete to Stephen throughout The Well of Loneliness. Even when she found reciprocated love with Mary, a young woman she met during the war, she was never secure in her feelings, often plagued by a persistent fear of rejection and misunderstanding.

Quotes to quote, “My God, child, you’ll have worse things than this to face later – life’s not all beer and skittles, I do assure you” (p 113) and “This will happen sometimes, we instinctively feel in sympathy with certain dwellings” (p 249).

Book trivia: Well of Loneliness includes a note from the author which assures the reader that even though a motor ambulance unit of British women existed in World War II, the particular unit Hall wrote about only existed in her head.

Author fact: Hall led the life described in Well of Loneliness. It is thought that many of Stephen’s experiences were actually Hall’s memories.

Music: “Ole Sole Mio”.

Nancy said: Pearl pointed out that Well of Loneliness could be the first novel to address homophobia.

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust in the chapter called “Gay and Lesbian Fiction: Out of the Closet” (p 94).

Pride

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Cary, Lorene. Pride: a Novel. Nan A. Talese Publisher, 1998.

Reason read: Pride is what some would call “chick lit” which I also call “beach reads” and since August is the last good month to visit the shore…

The friendship of four women. Each one of them has issues, both public and private. Roz (Rozzie) is the wife of a successful politician who has now set his sights on a higher office. At the same time as battling cancer, Roz is trying to be a mother to a difficult teenager and supportive of her husband’s ambitions. What she can’t get behind is the fact he has been having an affair with one of her best friends. Arneatha is an Episcopal priest locked in grief after losing her husband. She struggles to find herself in a world without him. Tam is the equivalent of Steve Martin’s wild and crazy guy. She does not take her sex life or career seriously. Audrey is a recovering alcoholic is struggles everyday with lure of addiction. And speaking of Audrey, Lorene Cary painted a fuller picture of Audrey with more colorful detail than any of the other women. It was if Cary knew Audrey best.
Pride is a testament to friendship. Like a pride of African lions, the women of Cary’s novel need to stick together in order to survive.

Quote to quote, “And the drums kept pounding like I love them” (p 318). Amen.

Author fact: Cary also wrote The Price of a Child which is on my Challenge list.

Book trivia: this should be a movie.

Playlist: “You Are So Beautiful to Me”, “My Funny Valentine”, “America the Beautiful”, “Maple Leaf Rag”, Otis Redding, Ray Charles, Frank Sinatra, Boyz II Men, James Brown, LL Cool J, “Zip-A-Dee Doo Dah”, Piaf, Mahalia Jackson, Lena Horne, Michael Jackson, “Four O Clock Blues”, James Brown, Bong Crosby, “Only the Lonely”, Duke Ellington, “His Eye is on the Sparrow”, Peggy Lee’s “Is That All That There Is?”, Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song”, “Getting to Know You”, Rachmaninoff, the theme from Family Matters, the theme from Magic Flute, and “Claire de Lune”.

Nancy said: Pearl includes Pride in a list of books to consider.

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust in the chapter called “African American Fiction: She Say” (p 13).

Feral Creatures in Suburbia

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Liebhart, D. Feral Creatures in Suburbia. 9:25 books, 2024.

Reason read: an Early Review book from LibraryThing.

A single mother trying to wrangle a violent teenage son, a girl trying to cope with intense school bullying threatens suicide enough times to land herself in a psych ward, employers abusing drugs, a doctor battling two aggressive cancers; we have all been there before. We have all had bullies at one time or another. We know people with incurable diseases or inconsiderate neighbors. We have all known a deep and abiding love. Secrets, miscommunications, assumptions, jealousies, they are common to us all.
Even though each chapter was in the voice of a different character I kept getting them confused. The chapters were short which didn’t give me a lot of time to get to know and fully absorb each person.
A small disappointment was the ability to only get inside Myra’s head. She was the only teenager with her own voice. We also got to see life from her mother’s point of view. Why not add Logan’s voice in contrast to his mother, Julie’s? Not knowing Logan’s motives kept assumptions at an all time high. Maybe Liebhart wanted it that way, considering the end.

The episode with the not broken-no wait-broken arm was curious.

Music: Chopin, Vivaldi, Black Sabbath, and Ozzy Osbourne.

Comanche Moon

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McMurtry, Larry. Comanche Moon. Simon and Schuster Audio, 1997.

Reason read: to continue the saga of Gus and Call. confessional: the book was written after Lonesome Dove but I wanted to read the series in chronological order so that there would be no surprises (people dying, relationships initiated, that sort of thing). For example, in Dead Man’s Walk Gus was smitten with Clara, but in Comanche Moon she marries someone else.

When we join the Texas Rangers in Austin, this time they do not have a particular mission. Their main objective appears to be keeping the Comanche tribe from interrupting the travel of whites headed west across their land. They spend more time burying the dead than they do protecting them when alive. Augustus McCrae and Woodrow Call are growing up and developing deeper relationships with women. Like Dead Man’s Walk, Comanche Moon is full of torture and death, but it is the characters that make it the epic tale that it is.
This might be a spoiler alert, but I found myself liking McMurtry for not having the happy endings we all think we need. Maggie and Clara find different men to love. Blue Duck exacts his revenge on his father. Good men die. Despicable men somehow thrive.

As an aside, I think I would have liked to be friends with Clara. She is outspoken, straightforward and intimidating. Cool.
According to various places on the web, a Comanche moon in Texas history is a full moon in autumn. Okay.

Interesting fact: if you want to catch a horse or kill a man, wait until they are relieving themselves. Neither horse nor man can react quickly when they are taking a piss.

Book Audio trivia: Frank Muller was the narrator.

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust in the chapter called “Western Fiction” (p 240).

Fruit of the Lemon

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Levy, Andrea. Fruit of the Lemon. Picador Press, 1999.

Reason: Jamaica won its independence in August. This year it was celebrated on August 6th. Read to celebrate the history.

Faith Jackson is a Londoner just trying to make her way. She has a decent job, an apartment full of roommates, and a loving family living close by. Born to Jamaican parents, Faith does not look like a pale-skinned Englishwoman, but this has never been a problem until Faith wants to improve her life. At the corners of this seemingly content life, she starts to notice subtle roadblocks; a prejudice towards her gender and skin color. Why does she have to jump through hoops to get the job for which she is perfect?
Fruit of the Lemon will make you think about unconscious bias. There is a scene when Faith’s nationality is assumed. Even though she was born and raised in England, when people saw her dark skin, they immediately assumed she was from “away.” When she answered she was from London everyone wanted a different answer. In the end a trip to Jamaica made her realize she was more than her skin color. She was a great-granddaughter, a granddaughter, a daughter, a cousin, a niece, and an aunt.

Author fact: Levy passed away on Valentine’s Day in 2019 after a long battle with cancer.

Book trivia: Fruit of the Lemon is Levy’s third book. I am also reading Small Island and Long Song for the Challenge.

Setlist: “Lemon Tree” (as an aside, the Merrymen do a great version of “Lemon Tree”), “Danny Boy”, Louis Armstrong, Nat King Cole, “Hey Mister Tallyman”, The Sound of Music, Oliver, Shostakovich, Cilla Black, “Abide with Me”, “Away in a Manger”, Miles Davis, “Ave Maria”, “Jingle Bells”, and “God Save the Queen”.

Nancy said: Pearl said not to forget Andrea Levy.

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust To Go in the chapter called “Cavorting Through the Caribbean: Jamaica” (p 56).

“The Adventure at Wisteria Lodge”

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Doyle, Arthur Conan. The Complete Sherlock Holmes. “The Adventure at Wisteria Lodge.” Doubleday and Company, 1930.

Doyle loves words. Case in point: John Scott Eccles, the man who comes to Sherlock for help describes his experience as incredible, grotesque, singular, unpleasant, improper, outrageous, queer and bizarre. All that really happened was that he spent the night at some place called Wisteria Lodge as the guest of Aloysius Garcia, but upon waking found that everyone had disappeared, including the host. As he was sharing this incredible, grotesque, singular, unpleasant, improper, outrageous, queer, bizarre news with Sherlock and Watson, the inspector from Scotland Yard arrives to say Aloysius was found murdered. Through a series of tips and clues, Sherlock is led to the home of Mr. Henderson. He is actually Don Juan Murillo. How he is connected to the disappearance of Aloysius Garcia, I am not sure. Of course, there is a mysterious woman who isn’t as she seems.

Story trivia: Holmes looks back at mysteries solved in other stories.

Burning Marguerite

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Inness-Brown, Elizabeth. Burning Marguerite: a Novel. Alfred A. Knopf, 2002.

Reason read: part of Burning Marguerite takes place in New Orleans. Hurricane Katrina destroyed New Orleans in the month of August.

Marguerite Ann Bernadette-Marie Deo, otherwise known as Tante, has passed away. Burning Marguerite starts with James Jack’s third person perspective, and at first, you think it’s going to be his story. However, Marguerite, in her own voice, tells the genesis of her nearly one hundred years and how the orphan James Jack came into her life. The reader gets to know Tante more James, which, in my opinion, is a missed opportunity. James Jack is a character ripe for exploration. As it stands, he is a thirty-plus-year-old man who has never strayed too far from his sheltered island home somewhere in Vermont. He rarely has romantic relationships. The reader does not hear of friendships. His only mission is to take care of Tante. She is all he has ever known since his parents died in a tragic accident when he was just a baby. Meanwhile, Marguerite has lived a colorful life, experiencing great loves and losses from turn-of-the-century Vermont to 1920s New Orleans and back to the island of her childhood to live out the rest of her days as a hermit. A word of caution: Marguerite’s history is harsh. The more I read, the more I wept for her. A third character is the island as it lives and breathes, influencing the townspeople as if it had a personality of its own. Its harsh winters and small-town gossip do well to feed a sense of unease.

Confessional: I had a little trouble with chronology. I’ve tried to make sense of it a few times. Because Inness-Brown moves the timeline around I am not sure of the order of events after Marguerite’s death. She and James Jack argue about a married woman, Faith, on a Sunday night. Faith is leaving the island Monday morning and Tante wants James to go to her. Because of Faith’s marriage James refuses and out of anger sleeps in a secondary cabin, away from Tante. In the morning he finds Tante dead. At first James Jack feels the need to report the death and goes to the sheriff’s office. He changes his mind after he’s sitting across from the sheriff. Tante would not want the law involved with her remains. Meanwhile, Faith had a flight to catch sometime on Monday but she would have to go the mainland first. So when does James Jack catch up to her and ask her for help with Tante?

Line I loved, “I wanted to interpret your look, to read that gaze, but I had not yet learned the language in which your eyes wrote their message” (p 41). Stunning.

Author fact: According to the back flap of Burning Marguerite Inness-Brown lives on an island in Lake Champlain, Vermont. I have to wonder if Grain Island is modeled after South Hero.

Book trivia: Burning Marguerite is Inness-Brown’s first novel.

Setlist: “It Was Just One of Those Things”, and “Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You”.

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust in the chapter called “First Novels” (p 88) and again in the chapter called “New Orleans” (p 168).

Valley of Fear

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Doyle, Arthur Conan. “Valley of Fear.” The Complete Sherlock Holmes. Doubleday and Company, 1930.

Reason read: I am still slogging through Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s complete works. He died in July so I am picking it back up.

I took a break from Sherlock Holmes because I was getting bored of the formulaic storytelling. Even though the plot of Valley of Fear follows a scheme we are all familiar with, my hiatus was long enough that I did not mind. I could stomach the repetition of gimmicks used in previous stories. (Sherlock being condescending and Watson’s all-forgiving attitude bothered me the most.) Additionally, the second half of the story was so different from the first that I forgot I was reading a Sherlock Holmes mystery. The refreshing shift in the narrative in the second half of the story kept me engaged, as it provided a deeper understanding of the characters and their motivations in part one. Part One finds Sherlock investigating a murder at a remote location, complete with a moat and drawbridge. Meanwhile, Part Two delves into the backstory of McMurdo, weaving and unraveling and weaving again a tangled web of secrecy and deceit that extends beyond what initially seemed obvious. His involvement in the clandestine society steeped in blackmail and murder not only adds depth to the storyline but also sheds light on the darker side of the era (the start of the Chicago mafia family?).

As an aside, the final solution to the mystery reminded me of the first episode of The Closer, a television show starring Kyra Sedgewick. Everyone assumed the wrong identity of the victim which made the ending interesting.

Author fact: Many people believe Doyle was trying to get away from Sherlock Holmes stories when he wrote Valley of Fear as Holmes does not appear in the second half of the story.

Book trivia: Valley of Fear is the last novel in the collection. From here on out I am reading short stories.

Playlist: “I’m Sitting on the Stile, Mary” and “On the Banks of Allan Water.”

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust in the chapter called “I Love a Mystery” (p 117).

Carnival

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Mackenzie, Compton. Carnival. D. Apple & Company, 1921.

Reason read: the Culzean Summer Fair happens in July in Scotland. A good portion of Carnival takes place in Glasgow.

The life of Jenny is a complex story with themes of identity, love, and sacrifice. Her journey is a verbose exploration of the human experience, filled with unexpected twists and turns. Throughout the narrative, Jenny’s internal struggles and external choices paint a vivid picture of a woman who is unafraid to defy societal norms and follow her heart, despite the challenges she faces. The exploration of her gender identity, her romantic entanglements, and her passion for ballet all contribute to a rich and multi-layered portrayal of her character. For lack of a true plot in Carnival Jenny navigates the tumultuous seas of love and self-discovery. Her interactions with the men in her life, Maurice, Fez and Zack, reveal the complexity of her emotions and the depths of her desires. Her willingness to make bold decisions, such as sacrificing her career and friendships for a life in the country, highlights the fierce and unyielding nature of her convictions. Jenny’s story is a testament to the resilience of the human spirit and the complexities of the heart. It does not come without a warning.

Lines I liked, “There is nothing to counterbalance the terrors of childhood in Hagworth Street” (p 30) and “It was glorious to think of someone who could make the worst headache insignificant and turn the most unsatisfactory morning to a perfect afternoon” (p 196).

Author fact: Compton Mackenzie’s full name was Sir Edward Montague Compton Mackenzie.

Book trivia: Carnival was interpreted on the big screen three different times. Of course I have not seen any version.

Music: “March of the Priests”, “Athalie”, Wagner, Brahms, Verdi, “Tannhauser”, “Lucky Lindy”, Chopin, Victoria Monks, “The Eton Boating Song”

BookLust Twist: from More Book Lust in the chapter called “Tickle Your Funny Bone” (p 217). But, here is the thing. Carnival is only listed because it is one of the first ten books reprinted by Penguin. None of those ten books were necessarily known for their humor. Mackenzie, however, did write some funny stuff.

Year of Lesser

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Bergen, David. A Year of Lesser. Harper Collins Publishers, 1996.

Reason read: Canada Day is in July. A Year of Lesser takes place outside Winnipeg in a small town called Lesser.

Orbital relationships. At the center is Johnny. What is it about this man that has women lining up to act the fool for him? His wife, Charlene, is never on the same page about wanting or not wanting children. His mistress is already a mother with a teenaged son. Both slobber over him despite the fact he is a man-child who can’t decide between love and lust. He works for a feed store and runs a drop-in center for teens. It’s complicated.
No question Johnny worships women. He observes them through a detailed and hungry lens. He notices the soles of their feet, their popped-pregnant belly buttons, the curve of an upturned nose. Yet, Johnny is a God-fearing, born again and again, Bible reading religious man. It’s complicated.
I felt bad for Charlene. What is she supposed to do about a husband who admits he is having a child with another woman? The whole town knows about Johnny and Loraine. Then I felt bad for Loraine. Pregnant with Johnny’s child and yet, he stops coming around. Rumors like smoke from a fire start to swirl about Johnny and a teenaged girl. It’s complicated.

Detail I had trouble with: Johnny is trying to quit smoking. You don’t readily carry cigarettes if you are trying to quit. How then can Johnny so easily offer Loraine a smoke?

Author fact: Bergen has written a bunch and Nancy said he is one of her favorites, but I’m only reading The Year of Lesser for the Challenge.

Line I liked, “He’s trying to weigh time and desire” (p 7).

Playlist: Led Zeppelin, Peter Tosh, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and the Rankin Family,

Nancy said: Pearl said the author was a favorite of hers.

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust in the chapter called “Canadian Fiction” (p 51).