Tag: Book Review

The Secret Book of Flora Lea by Patti Callahan Henry

The world building elements in Patti Callahan Henry’s The Secret Book of Flora Lea are as varied and finely wrought as brush strokes on canvas. In the enchanting story’s two timeframes, the reader is taken into a quaint hamlet outside Oxford; pastoral fields beside the river Thames; a stone cottage with flourishing gardens; the fairy tale setting of Whisperwood; an antiquated bookstore in London’s town center; and, at the heart of the unfolding mystery, a secret between sisters evacuated from WWII London that haunts Hazel Linden well into 1960.

Excited to be taking an upwardly mobile position at Sotheby’s, on her last day of employment at Hogan’s Rare Book Shoppe in Bloomsbury, 25-year-old Hazel receives a shocking delivery from America of a recently published book titled, Whisperwood that dredges up the central wound of her past. The associated guilt Hazel harbors is never far from mind. “The dread. The panic. The jealousy of other people having small children at their side . . . Some days, she’d turn to that loss and acknowledge it, and sometimes, for blessed hours, she would forget, but then the shadow would fall long and fast onto her soul and she’d remember this: She lost her sister.”

Examining the book in hand, Hazel’s thoughts turn to 1940s London and “Operation Pied Piper, “a nursery rhyme name for a horror of an idea” that swept 14-year-old Hazel and her five-year-old sister, Flora, to the countryside during an uncelebrated part of England’s history that saw the children of WWII’s London relocated from harm’s way. “Now in the backroom of the small Rare Book Shoppe, the past overcame her. She’d been searching for her sister for twenty years now, ever since she’d disappeared when she was six years old from the hamlet of Binsey, and now Hazel had a clue, something to grasp on to and she was not letting go.”

Hazel’s devotion to discovering the truth behind the disappearance of her sister drives the story, and at its center is a 1940s fairy tale Hazel made up, intending to distract young Flora from the war-torn reality around them. The story grows in magical increments and begins each time, “Not very long ago and not very far away, there was and still is an invisible place right here with us. And if you are born knowing, you will find your way through the woodlands to the simmering doors that lead to the land made just and exactly for you.” The details of the imagined kingdom Hazel named Whisperwood were kept secret between the displaced sisters. When the book with that title falls into Hazel’s hands, so begins an expertly crafted suspenseful mystery.

The two timeframes in The Secret Book of Flora Lea create high stakes motivation as Hazel endeavors to discover what happened to Flora, while securing her own future. By 1960, Hazel has made a neat life for herself, despite her family’s unhealed backstory. Engaged to a young man from a prominent family and on course as a purveyor of rare books, when the past comes to haunt, questions of life’s priorities come to the fore, tipping the scale to the importance of family.

The supporting characters oscillate with fluid strategy throughout the story, as Hazel Linden, against all odds, refuses to accept the final judgement on her sister’s disappearance. Callahan Henry keeps the reader in character invested suspense. When all characters are brought into surprising alignment, Hazel asks herself, “Is this where hope met despair? Where the past rushed to the present? Where joy replaced the agony of the lost?”

Patti Callahan Henry delivers, yet again, an historically layered, dreamy tale that keeps the anglophile fires burning, on the heels of her acclaimed 2021 release, Once Upon a Wardrobe. Her descriptive detail is cinematic. Fourteen-year-old Hazel Linden, newly re-homed at the Aberdeen’s countryside cottage, gazes out the kitchen window in the hamlet of Binsey: “What a place this was, Hazel thought. All the wide green space to run; the rippling of the sky that touched the horizon of trees unobstructed by a cathedral or tall building. It was as if by taking a simple train ride the world had unfolded, presenting itself in long stretches of rolling hills and heather fields.”

A charming story that weaves fairy tale, mystery, and historical importance with a good dose of romance, The Secret Book of Flora Lea will appeal to all ages, as the author unfurls a fantastic story about “an invisible place right here with us.”

Salvage This World by Michael Farris Smith

As it appears in the New York Journal of Books

Against the kinetic backdrop of a hurricane brewing and a young mother on the run from Louisiana, author Michael Farris Smith cinematically opens his Southern noir novel, Salvage This World, with a literary split screen depicting a phone call Jessie never wanted to make and Wade never wanted to answer. The desperate Jessie is in flight for her life, and the recovering alcoholic Wade never knew how to act like her father.   

When Jessie, now in her early twenties, arrives with her young son in a stolen car at her estranged father’s ramshackle house in Pike County, Mississippi, Wade stands on his porch, lights a cigarette, and thinks, “She didn’t even tell you. And he ain’t even a baby anymore. She had a baby and didn’t tell you and now the baby is a boy, and she didn’t even tell you.”  

Farris Smith sets the stage for characters wanting to connect despite the mutual, deep-seated resentment at the heart of their estrangement, when Wade dares to ask, “Where is Holt?” and Jessie says, “I can’t believe you said his name.”

Holt is the father of Jessie’s son, and his life has gone from bad to worse. A dozen years older than Jessie, the pair met at the local dairy bar, and although Jessie never asks, she knows the scars on the back of Holt’s neck chart his unlucky childhood.  

The current trouble at the center of the story begins with Holt nursing a hangover prior to meeting Jessie. “Three years before, Holt had awakened with his face in the dirt, out behind a cinderblock bar on the outskirts of St. Francisville.” When he sees a group erecting a revival tent in a nearby field, he is intrigued. It is “as if he were not only still drunk but also trapped in a lucid dream of beckoning.”

The woman spearheading the revival is named Elser. Possessed of otherworldly charisma, she drives a hearse and leads the travelling congregation of The Temple of Pain and Glory by preaching us-versus-them sermons for monetary donation throughout an impoverished South so inhospitable it’s now dwindling in population. “No matter the field or parking lot or beaten up town the Temple of Pain and Glory raised its banner.”

As for her lemming-like parishioners, Elser “beat them with the stick of distrust and they cheered their own suffering.” The cynical Holt observes Elser from the back of the tent and knows, “She had them. The small, wrinkled, lightweight monster of a woman had them.”

In it but not of it, for lack of a better place to go, Holt intuits sinister dealings behind the scenes of the Temple of Pain and Glory, and when he witnesses the handoff of a mysterious key between Elser and a dubious character, events take a turn for the worse as curiosity leads Holt to break into Elser’s lodgings to steal them, resulting in his becoming a hunted man, and sweeping Jessie into a life-threatening story.  

It is dark and disturbing dealings against a do-or-die background, and Michael Farris Smith keeps the tension off-kilter while unravelling the broken character’s surprising cause-and-effect connections. Weaving theft, murder, and kidnapping all having to do with the key, a menacing sky is sure to unleash a hurricane any minute.  

The author’s gift for oblique dialogue is scene stealing. The characters speak cryptically in regional dialect telling of their baggage and downtrodden station, and the bleak settings are commensurate with the tenor of the story, when Wade, unwittingly drawn into Holt’s drama, embarks on a high-stakes  mission in the dead of night to parts unknown. It is “A dense and untamed landscape drenched in darkness and rain. Wade drove along narrowed roads and unmarked roads and roads covered in runnels of muddy water and he went down gravel roads and slick roads that ran along overgrown fields and disappeared into thick forests and he searched and searched to find the crossing that would seem familiar to him.”   

Farris Smith is in top form at the layered story’s breathtaking climax, masterfully guiding disparate variables from a slow burn to an incendiary ending with suspenseful detail, multi-sensory pacing, and a future open to interpretation.

Salvage This World is specifically set yet transcends regional fiction. It’s a masterly drawn, tightly controlled story about the lengths one will go to safeguard their own.   

Michael Farris Smith at Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi

Book Review: The Lioness of Boston by Emily Franklin

April 11, 2023

As my review appears in the New York Journal of Books

In The Lioness of Boston, author Emily Franklin makes a fascinating case for following the beat of one’s own drum. The thoroughly researched historical fiction account of Isabella Stewart Gardner deftly depicts a woman coming into her own within the confines of high-society Boston as perched on the cusp then seen all the way through the Gilded Age.

The four-part story begins in 1861 and sweeps through changing times and multiple continents to 1924, beginning in the first-person voice of a young bride from New York, who struggles to find acceptance in the inhospitable milieu of her blue-blooded husband’s family, only to triumph in the end by leaving her culturally advantageous, lasting mark upon the city that once shunned her.

It is 1861, and 20-year-old Isabella Stewart Gardner is too naïve to realize she is unacceptably unconventional. Newly married to Jack Gardner—the brother of her childhood schoolmate—she dons the blinders of optimism, now that she’s joined Jack’s prominent Boston family. She speaks to the heart of every woman who knows she is totally unique while being widely perceived as sorely different. Isabella contemplates her predicament and says, “Marriage seemed to bring with it an end not only of girlhood but of being in the world as a person with potential. I wanted to hold fast to that possibility—that there was more for me still.”

Isabella’s sister-in-law Harriet advises, “Everyone is watching to see if you will settle in to Boston life. . . . Jack’s standing allows entry, but time and time again you prove that you will not live up to expectations.” When Harriet takes Isabella to the ladies sewing circle, which doubles as one of society’s litmus tests, the outspoken Isabella is a failure. In the New York Times, Isabella reads of Boston’s sewing circle, “Not to be admitted to these mysterious coteries is a species of social ostracism of which the severity is perhaps fully appreciated by the native-born Bostonian.”

Although Isabella is made aware that she wears the wrong shoes, shares her thoughts without a filter, and fraternizes with the wrong people, she is disarmingly likable and persists in cultivating her own interests. When she forms friendships with men in influential positions having to do with literature, the zoological society, and natural sciences, she becomes involved with areas

beyond the customary purview of women and grows to be an object of community fascination to the point where she is frequently written about in the local paper.

When Isabella’s standing as a young wife and mother promises to recommend her, fate has the last word, and when a heartbreaking and life-defining event occurs, the resilient Isabella proves she is constitutionally incapable of being fully deterred.

As time moves on, and in the wake of multiple deaths of friends and family members close to the Gardners, Jack takes Isabella to London to dislodge her grief and revive her spirits. While abroad, Isabella aligns with an artistic community of creative misfits who eventually make good. She befriends such artists as Manet, Cezanne, Renoir, and Whistler, who gather around Isabella as she develops a keen interest in art, which comes to include multicultural antiques, objects d’art, and all that pertains to visual refinement.

In Boston, Isabella fraternizes with Oscar Wilde, Edith Wharton, poet Julia Ward Howe, and novelist Francis Marion Crawford, with whom she begins a clandestine relationship. Through the years, as Jack and Isabella travel back and forth from Boston to Europe, Isabella’s relationships with her iconic circle of friends makes for fascinating correspondence, which Franklin shares throughout the story in a series of interspersed letters that cleverly enlighten the reader to the personal interests of the correspondents, while bringing into focus a woman’s place amid the nuances of the times.

The crowning glory of this multilayered story is the author’s brilliant use of language, which is pitch and tone perfect in animating Isabella Gardner and all other characters, giving us great understanding of the time’s voice and concerns, in multiple settings. The story revolves around well-heeled people and all that makes up their opulent world. The vivid details given to art, literary achievement, and master paintings are seamlessly part of the story.

Isabella Stewart Gardner is driven by the desire to fulfill her own potential. She’s a woman on a personal mission against the judgmental eyes of society. In her written correspondence to Charles Eliot Norton, a professor at Harvard University, Isabella writes of her long-range vision, “Art is not so much the memory of the truth. It’s the memory of what we wish those moments were. . . . I think I should like to collect those moments. I mean to explain somehow the connection I feel between art and memory. A museum of the mind.” Later, she shares the mission statement for the museum she ultimately builds, “I would give the world—or Boston at least—a place, and by doing so it would be as though I were giving the world my own body, my own mind. Here, I would say. Take me.”

The Lioness of Boston is a captivating story of a significant woman in Boston’s history who left that city a cultural legacy to last the ages. This beautiful novel will appeal to those who love masterful historical fiction, literary fiction, and stories of triumphant women who leave an indelible mark.

ABOUT

Emily Franklin is the author of more than twenty novels and a poetry collection, Tell Me How You Got Here. Her award-winning work has appeared in the New York Times, Boston Globe, Guernica, JAMA, and numerous literary magazines as well as long-listed for the London Sunday Times Short Story Award, featured and read aloud on NPR and named notable by the Association of Jewish Libraries.

Book Review: Artist: Awakening to the Spirit Within by Jocelyn Jones

In Artist: Awakening to the Spirit Within, revered acting coach to the stars Jocelyn Jones combines her personal story, the techniques she’s used for legions of students in her thirty years as an acting teacher, and her tried and true spiritual insights. In her book’s introduction, Jones says, “This book is a humble attempt to wake up the artist in everyone—to connect you to your own source of inspiration and the solutions that live in the ether waiting for you to tune in and listen.”

Artist is a combined memoir and tutorial on the mechanics of acting that lay bare the line between art and artist while making a strong case in suggesting that the well of inspiration an actor draws from is the same source for creating an abundant life. The author shares, “Using the same techniques I give actors, I believe anyone can discover and connect to their own depth of joy… It is the structure you create in life that lays the groundwork for an exciting existence.” Continuing with the idea of structure, Jones says, “The more confident you are in the structural choices you make for your life, the more freedom you’ll feel living in the moment. The more freedom you feel living moment to moment, the more joy you invite into your life.”

The daughter of Tony-award winning, character actor, Henry Jones, Jocelyn Jones grew up in the midst of theatrical royalty and intuited that “Acting is about creating a life where there once was none. It’s about manifesting,” and “We are what we believe. We need to wake up and take responsibility for our thinking.” Equating skills for three-dimensional acting with life-skills, Jones suggests that “thoughts and feelings (inner life) color how the actor does the behavior; after they connect to all that, the words come.”

A bi-coastal youth, due to her parents’ divorce, Jones divided her time between New York City and a beachside community in Los Angeles. Preferring to live as a student of life, as opposed to pursuing scholastic achievement, Jones found divine inspiration in nature, learned to trust synchronicities in affirming her life’s path, and realized that the core of an artist is not so much talent as an acute sensitivity.

The author has much to say on the idea of being present in one’s own life and suggests that time speeds by because most are not actually in it, and that to slow down time, there is merit in being “in the moment” to fully experience “what is.” The author places emphasis on appreciating life’s day to day variables. “Oddly, it is the mundane details of life that bring the truth to both acting and living… When you fall in love with the mundane details of moment-to-moment living, you fall in love with the miracle that is life.”

Interspersed throughout the book are exercises the author uses to teach actors that are equally important techniques to use in life: Meditation, objective observation, and communing with nature to name but a few, and each exercise is designed to help us make decisions about what we want in life, while focusing a keen eye on what we choose to do. Jones recommends asking questions. She recommends finding fulfillment in discovery, and says, “Art is the expression of that which you have personally discovered…It’s the joy of discovery that permeates the expression.”

Artist: Awakening to the Spirit Within is an insightful, accessibly written book that hits all the high notes of art and creativity with an aim toward helping us lead an inspired life. For the actor and the layman, it’s an uplifting, life-affirming book sure to inspire all readers to create and discover the art in their own lives.

For the last 15 years Ms. Jones has served as a confidential “Creative Consultant” on some of Hollywood’s highest-grossing pictures. Known as a secret weapon to industry insiders, she has advised clients on everything from acting, to which projects to choose; to doctoring scripts; to developing their future projects. Her consulting work has been considered an invaluable asset by some of Hollywood’s biggest stars.

An in-demand Acting Coach for over 25 years, Jocelyn has shepherded hundreds of actors from novice to starring careers at The Jocelyn Jones Acting Studio, where she works with a handpicked group of actors, directors and writers.

She began her teaching career at The Beverly Hills Playhouse, where she taught for Milton Katselas for over 17 years. She has her own studio (The Jocelyn Jones Acting Studio) in West Los Angeles.

Hear Jocelyn Jones Interviewed by the inimitable Grace Sammon of Storytellers Podcast here:

THE STORYTELLERS! Jocelyn Jones remarkable woman, storyteller, acting coach of the stars, author of ARTIST!

Listen https://youtu.be/qc-PQDIJlpo

#ar…

See more

Book Review: Darkness by Bharati Mukherjee

As it appears in the New York Journal of Books

The 12, starkly realistic and fully realized short stories in Bharati Mukherjee’s Darkness incrementally tell of Indian immigrants reconciling an opportunity to make a fresh, upwardly mobile start with the hard knocks of being a stranger in a strange land. The characters’ inherent faith, cultural, and social mores are weighed against new frontiers in their search for footing. Their struggles concern what to maintain and what to shed in the face of family loyalty, racism, and ingrained tradition. In the interest of a bright future, the characters divest themselves of religious doctrine and caste systems that don’t migrate. They persevere in the search for identity as they chisel their way in a land of promise. In braving to push boundaries, they are made aware of their limits.  

In this updated collection of classic short stories, the universally lauded Bharati Mukherjee writes in her 1992 author introduction, “I have joined imaginative forces with an anonymous, driven underclass of semi-assimilated Indians with sentimental attachments to a distant homeland but no real desire for permanent return.”

The characters in Darkness are of all ages and represent the immigrant experience from multiple points of view. Some are in arranged marriages, some are single, and some are divorced. The short stories portray characters in different settings. They differ in gender, background, faith, and occupation. Each impactful story is predicated on what it means to be a fish out of water.

In “The Imaginary Assassin,” a first-generation American tells of her family lore that

led from a dusty, Ludhiana village to Yuba City California. “The plan had been for grandfather to slip into the illegal alien’s underground at the end of the visit, make a fortune, then bring in the rest of his family.” The narrator confesses that as an adolescent, “The shabby diligence of our immigrant lives in Yuba City shamed the romantic in me,” but one night, her grandfather sets her imagination ablaze by recounting a fantastic tale—in a mixture of Punjabi and English—of his involvement in the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi.

A memory of the divided nation between Hindus and Muslims sets the stage for “The Lady From Lucknow.” Nafeesa Hafeez, the Indian narrator now living in Atlanta, compares her ill-fated, extramarital affair with an America to a long ago scandal in Lucknow, which she can’t help but use as a frame of reference when her affair is exposed. Hafeez concludes, “I have lived a life perched on the edge of ripeness and decay. The traveler feels at home everywhere because she is never at home anywhere.”  

Immigrating to Canada has its complex challenges. In “The World According to Hsu,” it is said of half Indian and half Czechoslovakian freelance journalist, Ratna Clayton, “In Montreal she was merely English, a grim joke on generations of British segregationists . . . In Toronto, she was not Canadian, not even Indian. She was something called, after the imported idiom of London, a Paki. And for Paki’s, Toronto was hell.” On holiday with her Canadian husband, on an island off the coast of Africa, in the middle of a revolution, Ratna navigates the locals who try to place her nationality. Mukherjee writes in laser-sharp language devoid of emotion when Ratna, in a restaurant full of fellow travelers, pours herself a glass of wine, “feeling for the moment at home in that collection of Indians and Europeans babbling in English and remembered dialects. No matter where she lived, she would never feel so at home again.”   

That this powerful collection of timeless short stories is now back in print with Godine Nonpareil imprint is a gift to benefit Mukherjee devotees and new readers alike. Such literary luminaries as Amy Tan, Robert Olen Butler, and Joyce Carol Oates have written glowing endorsements of Indian American Canadian Bharati Mukherjee’s body of work, and this collection exemplifies the reason. Mukherjee lays bare the method behind her magic, when she writes fitting words for this collection in Darkness’s introduction: “For a writer, energy is aggression: urgency colliding with confidence. Suddenly, everything is possible. Excluded worlds are opened, secretive characters reveal themselves. The writing-self is somehow united with the universe.”

For readers, writers, immigrants, patriots, and expatriates the world over, Darkness by Bharati Mukherjee is a study in excellence of a short story’s highest achievement.

Bharati Mukherjee was an Indian American-Canadian writer and professor emerita in the department of English at the University of California, Berkeley. She was the author of a number of novels and short story collections, as well as works of nonfiction.

#bookreview: Be an Angel by Roma Downey

As it appears in the New York Journal of Books:

A beautiful, timeless, and timely collection of inspirational passages to use as a daily touchstone, Roma Downey’s Be an Angel: Devotions to Inspire and Encourage Love and Light Along the Way makes good on its title. It’s lovely in its optimism, succinct in its knowledge, efficient in its compact arrangement, and wonderfully structured for the reader’s convenience.

That actress, producer, and author, Roma Downey is a household name due to her starring role as an angel in the nine-year run of the fantasy/drama television show, Touched by an Angel, which justifies her hand in writing this book; it is her humility to which we’re attracted. In the book’s introduction, the author states her impetus in writing the book: “Over the years, because of my role on TV, people often mistook me for an actual angel.” Realizing the responsibility of her high-profile position, she explains how she rose to the challenge: “Della taught me that if we’re going to be used by God, we need to let go of our expectations and get out of the way.”

The 52 chapters of Be an Angel encourage the book’s use as a daily devotional to ponder in an incremental manner that, once coalesced, will impress as an overall way of being in the world, “bringing light into darkness.”

The chapters are neat and accessible, each beginning with a recognizable, inspirational quote followed compatibly by a short example of Downey’s personal experience to illustrate her point. Her manner is intimate and confessional. Her concerns are universal. Her tales range from anecdotes to transparent first-person narratives. Her settings range from home and hearth to her presence on social media.: “I recently posted this verse to my social media story one morning just after dawn . . . with the rest of the world, I had been watching a terrible international conflict evolve thousands of miles away.”

There are interesting stories in this well-arranged book, and the reader is given a look behind the curtain of a person leading a fascinating life. Downey shares her acquaintances and accomplishments with awe-struck wonder. She roams out into the world to India and returns to us with a message: “In India I encountered a profound oneness with humanity. We all love and lose. We have families and dreams . . . I

learned that we can understand one another’s pain if we open ourselves to it.”

Covering such subjects as hope, faith, gratitude, forgiveness, and grace, Downey suggests with a light hand that the beginning of enduring change might all start with you: “I started looking at what irks me considering what I’d want changed then doing for someone else what I’d want done.” Downey arrives at a conclusion: “We can’t change everything, but we can work toward peace when we change ourselves . . . if we don’t tend to what’s inside, we simply don’t have the bandwidth to be the change on a grander scale.”

Though anchored in Christian doctrine, Be an Angel transcends principle to embrace a larger concept of God. “It’s so essential in our frenetic world to step aside and be with God in stillness.” The author finds God in nature, “Often, I use the shift between activities to experience His presence in nature . . . I return to being not merely doing one more thing.”

The arrangement of this book is user friendly. Be an Angel is both an owner’s manual and a guide.  Beneath each of the 14 general categories, there are three companion stories illustrating Downey’s subject in exemplary form. At the end of each essay is a prompt for the reader’s consideration written as a reflection, and the reader is invited to put what they’ve read into practice.

For dreamers and students, thinkers and searchers, Roma Downey’s Be an Angel is a collection of spellbinding essays that reads like a devotional. Its tone is enlightening and encouraging. It’s a beautiful book you’ll want to keep at your bedside and give to your family and friends.  

Claire Fullerton is a staff reviewer at New York Journal of Books.

Roma Burnett OBE is an actress from Derry, Northern Ireland. For nine seasons she played Monica the angel in the CBS television series Touched by an Angel. She produced the mini-series The Bible for the History Channel and also appeared in it as Mary, mother of Jesus. She has performed on stage with the Abbey Theatre, The National Theatre of Ireland, and has appeared both on and off Broadway. She played the leading role of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis in the Emmy award-winning miniseries A Woman Named Jackie for NBC.

Book Review! New Release!

My Last Innocent Year by debut author Daisy Alpert Florin, is an intimate, insightful novel; a 21-year-old’s first-person account depicting her last semester at small town Wilder College in 1998 New Hampshire. The coming-of-age story concerns a fish-out-of-water New Yorker named Isabel Rosen, who’s finding her footing in an elite liberal arts environment where she hopes to become a writer.

As an only child, four years after her unconventional mother’s death, Isabel remains devoted to her hard-working father who owns and operates Rosen’s Appetizing Store in the Jewish neighborhood in which she was raised. Her childhood’s insular world was comprised of, “Orchard Street, Essex Street, Rivington, Delancey, streets, where Jewish immigrants had settled at the turn of the century, dragging their history and sadness behind them.”

As she navigates the road to adulthood on the grounds of Wilder College, Isabel is haunted by the memory of her parents’ tenuous marriage. They’d met when the 25-year-old Vivian walked into Rosen’s Appetizing, when Abe Rosen was 40. Their marriage seemed to be a union of opposites. “My parents’ marriage had always been a mystery to me,” Isabel says. In contemplating her deceased mother, she explains, “My mother was an artist, and her art always came first. . . . She seemed to be searching for something in her work, a life beyond Rosen’s Appetizing and the Lower East Side. Escape. She wouldn’t have been the first artist looking for that.”

The story begins with an ambiguous, sexual experience between Isabel and Zev Neman, an Israeli student at Wilder who might have been too forceful—Isabel lacks the experience to discern. When she recounts the episode to one of her roommates, Debra Moskowitz—a budding, subversive activist—events are set in motion by Debra to get Zev Neman back, no matter the questionable tactics. Isabel is tolerant of Debra when she discovers Debra suffers from episodic depression. Isabel realizes, “I’d seen Debra at her worst, and I’ve found that is often what binds women together. Men admire each other when they are at their best, but women enjoy meeting each other in pits of despair.”

Joanna Maxwell has a troubled marriage. A professor of English studies, she’s married to unstable professor Tom Fisher, with whom she shares a young child named Igraine. Due to their upending divorce proceedings, Joanna forfeits teaching the creative writing class Isabel is scheduled to take to last minute substitute, Professor Conneely. Isabel later reflects, “Connelly was older, married, my professor—there were rules about these things. Later, I would understand there were not rules about these things and would run from inconvenient attraction to a colleagues’ or a friend’s boyfriend, as quickly as possible.”

Professor Connelly was once a celebrated poet. Now in his early 40s, he writes a column in a small-town newspaper and never discusses his failed attempt at writing a novel. Good looking in an unselfconscious way, Isabel attends his writing class and says in hindsight, “I’d had crushes before and I would have them again, but there was something different about this.” “There is something that passed between two people when there was a mutual attraction, a frisson.”

When the taboo attraction between Isabel and Professor Connelly transcends the classroom, parallel lines are drawn with the public scandal between Monica Lewinsky and President Clinton, occurring in the same timeframe, and unsettling Isabel with fear of an unequal power balance. Professor Connelly encourages Isabel to be clear about what she wants, so “there are no misunderstandings.” In hindsight, Isabel says, “I understood well enough what had happened, understood too why he had asked me, back at the beginning of things . . . He had seen the end embedded in the beginning in a way I hadn’t. It was how adults behaved, I knew now, and I would never again not see the world in the same way.”

My Last Innocent Year is written with confessional intimacy verging on stream-of-consciousness storytelling. It’s softly delivered coming-of-age themes pertain to such questions as individuality versus conformity; desire versus boundaries; and passion versus practicality along the road of growing into one’s own. A tale to please YA readers and well beyond, it’s a poignant story that doesn’t shy from sharp edges, universal, timeless, and timely.

Claire Fullerton’s most recent novels are Little Tea and multiple award winner, Mourning Dove. Honors include the Independent Book Publishers Book Award Silver Medal for Regional Fiction, the Reader’s Favorite for Southern Fiction Bronze Medal and various other literary awards.

Buy on Amazon

Variety is the Spice of Life by Sally Cronin

I have long been a fan of Sally Cronin’s writing, so it was with great enthusiasm that I read her November 2022 release, Variety is the Spice of Life, whose title is delightfully appropriate for the assembly of poetry and prose that covers a range of topics.

In Ms. Cronin’s author introduction, she states the essence of her book’s intention, “In this latest collection of poetry and short stories I have attempted to capture the beauty and raw power of nature, and the resilience of humans as they face a modern world of change and disruption.” The author does that and more, and the entirety of this book is a breath of fresh air replete with creative nuance.

The book begins with a series of soul-stirring poems—each short, pithy, and inspirational enough to serve as its own existential meditation. In Expeditions we are encouraged to “ignore those who say it’s foolish to try to reach for the stars,” and in Bear Witness, we are asked to consider the plight of the immigrant, “do not look away, bear witness to tragedy, give deepest respect…do not become complacent.” In Lullaby, Ms. Cronin sings the praises of women, by musing on the different voices used to sooth an infant, “but words that mothers sing to babies all around the world loving.”  

#17 in Variety is the Spice of Life reads as a first-person essay, in which the author shares her experience with DNA Ancestral testing. Written in unembellished prose, it’s a beautiful, confessional piece that fittingly precedes the Choka, Origins, in which the author muses on her own genetic line that ends with  powerful impact. In another treatise on family, Face in the Mirror, culminates in the realization, “I’ve morphed into my mother.”

Rounding out the poems is a series titled, A Snapshot from My Garden, and those of us who have followed the author for years know well of the celebrated setting. Ireland is captured in The Colour of Life, and in The Robin—Size Doesn’t Matter, a red robin is declared “the garden’s emperor.” A life span is metaphorically depicted in Blossom, and the series closes with an individual look at bees, butterflies, doves, and cats. 

Ms. Cronin brings her unique voice to eight delightful short stories. Her craft is economic and straight forward, striking an overall tone in a momentum pairing bright language with broad strokes. Her small-town settings are atmospheric and depict character as place, her subjects are humanistic and appeal to animal lovers, nature lovers, and those who applaud a well-deserved sense of cosmic comeuppance.  

In The Neighborhood Watch, a cat has the last word. In The Green Hill an elderly couple’s day out in a windswept, coastal region has a sense of the uncanny, and in On the Run, a frozen foods employee living under an assumed identity sees her turbulent past brought to justice.

Variety is the Spice of Life by Sally Cronin is a well-balanced, uplifting collection of poetry and prose both poignant and entertaining. It’s a thoughtful and satisfying book that casts a light on the best of human nature.

Variety is the Spice of Life is available on Kindle!

The Author, Sally Cronin

Sally Cronin is the author of sixteen books including her memoir Size Matters: Especially when you weigh 330lb first published in 2001. This has been followed by another fifteen books both fiction and non-fiction including multi-genre collections of short stories and poetry.

As an author she understands how important it is to have support in marketing books and offers a number of FREE promotional opportunities on her blog and across her social media. The Smorgasbord Bookshelf My blog is https://smorgasbordinvitation.wordpress.com

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/63362080-variety-is-the-spice-of-life?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=I4AxOvUnDe&rank=1

Book Review: Reef Road by Deborah Goodrich Royce

My Book Review, as it appears in the New York Journal of Books:

Author Deborah Goodrich Royce’s psychological thriller Reef Road hits the high notes of suspense with breathtaking sleight of hand, building as it unfolds in alternating chapters written in two tenses like puzzle pieces that keep the reader on their toes.

The story is one-part true crime detective novel that reads like creative nonfiction concerning a decades’ old unsolved murder, and one-part literary thriller involving a woman enmeshed in a self-created chain of events now careening out of hand. Reef Road seamlessly weaves two storylines while suspensefully delaying their linkage, oscillating with a slow burn between what is perceived at face value and what really happened.

The story opens in media res, under the prologue’s heading The Wife. It is May 2020, in the advent of Covid-19’s lockdown, when two boys find a disembodied hand washed up on Palm Beach, Florida’s sand. When the boys alert the authorities, so begins Reef Road’s harrowing backstory that leads to that severed hand.

An unspecified voice under the heading A Writer’s Thoughts narrates intermittingly throughout Reef Road. The writer researches the 1948 Pittsburg death of 12-year-old Noelle Huber, whose murder to date remains unsolved. Now living abjectly alone in Palm Beach with an aged dog named Cordie, the decidedly peculiar writer has personal interest in the case and reports, “I grew up under the shadow of a dead girl—a girl I had never met, whose family had not heard of me, a family I would not know if I passed them on the street, nor would they, in turn, know me.” The weight of the dead girl’s shadow is due to the writer’s neurotic mother, once a close, childhood friend of Noelle Huber’s, who remained indelibly scarred by her murder in such a way that made her exceedingly nervous and cast a pall on the writer’s childhood.

Investigating decades’ old evidence, the writer’s feelings are complicated by residual resentment associated with the case. In speaking of the damage incurred from growing up with her paranoid mother in a small town on the outskirts of Pittsburg, the writer says, “My mother’s imprint of her friend’s murder was that of the twelve-year-old child she’d been at the time. A large part of her was frozen in 1948.”

In addressing what it was like to grow up with a damaged mother, the writer says, “I didn’t want to have that kind of mother. I did not want to be that kid. I did not want to come from the family I did, with some string attaching us all to a dead girl.” In explaining what clearly becomes an unhealthy obsession with Noelle Huber’s murder, the writer says, “A single act of violence does not end. Noelle Grace Huber was murdered seventy-two years ago this year, but, for me—for others like me—it never ends.”

Linda Alonzo does not speak Spanish. Married to a prosperous Argentinian named Miguel Alonzo, she is the mother of two young children who grew up in Pittsburgh and now lives in the tony section of Palm Beach’s Reef Road. The marriage is difficult, and with regard to Miguel, “Linda increasingly chafed under the yoke of his control.” Yet the perks of the marriage outweigh the obvious. “Linda and Miguel were walking the edge, all right. The edge of what, precisely, she did not know.”

Diego Alonzo is presumed dead. The elder brother of Miguel, his last known whereabouts was in the mountains of Bolivia decades prior, after he fled another fight with his mother, before all lines of communication went dead. In the dark of night, the mysterious Diego manifests at the Alonzo’s Reef Road front door, and ushers in familial upheaval complicated by the constraints of the Covid-19 pandemic, making his visit protracted, adding chaos to Linda and Miguel’s fragile marriage, and leading to an inciting incident in the tumultuous story: “At eleven a.m. on a Sunday morning, Linda picked up the phone to call the police and report her family missing. Why she had not called the cops, the day it had actually happened was an act of omission that would come back to haunt her.”  

The exciting, page-turning intelligence of Reef Road cannot be overstated. The clever story will please lovers of mystery, crime, and thriller genres. Author Deborah Goodrich Royce handles the balance of Reef Road’s off-kilter story with a magnificent, firm grip. The novel is rife with uncanny connections and flawed main characters with hidden agendas. It’s tense with secondary characters, whose impacts are stunning, as events ricochet in a series of strange chain-reactions sprung from perfectly timed twists you’ll never see coming.  

Meet the Author: Deborah Goodrich Royce

Deborah Goodrich Royce’s literary thrillers examine puzzles of identity. Finding Mrs. Ford and Ruby Falls will be joined by Reef Road in January 2023.

Deborah began her career as an actress, starring as Silver Kane, sister of the legendary Erica Kane (played by Susan Lucci) on the ABC soap, All My Children. She went on to star in feature films such as April Fool’s Day and Just One of the Guys, TV movies such as Return to Peyton Place and The Deliberate Stranger, and series such as Beverly Hills 90210 and 21 Jump Street.

After the birth of her daughters, she moved with her family to Paris and worked as a reader for le Studio Canal Plus. In the 1990’s, Deborah was the story editor at Miramax Films in New York. There, she oversaw readers, manuscript acquisitions, and script development, editing such notable screenplays as Emma by Doug McGrath, and early versions of Chicago and A Wrinkle in Time.

With writing partner, Mitch Giannunzio, Deborah won a grant from the Massachusetts Arts Council in 2002 to develop and workshop their original screenplay, Susan Taft Has Run Amok.

With her husband, noted small-cap investor, Chuck Royce, Deborah restored the 1939 Avon Theatre in Stamford, CT. Under her leadership, the Avon hosts an ongoing series of film luminaries, most recently, Mira Nair, Richard Gere and Chloe Sevigny. The late Gene Wilder, a longstanding advisory board member of the Avon, was an early advocate for Deborah’s writing.

Deborah and Chuck have restored several hotels (Ocean House, Deer Mountain Inn, Weekapaug Inn, and The Margin Street Inn), a bookstore (The Savoy in Westerly, RI), and numerous other Main Street buildings in Westerly, RI and Tannersville, NY.

Deborah serves on the governing boards of the New York Botanical Garden, the Greenwich Historical Society, and the PRASAD Project and the advisory boards of the American Film Institute, the Greenwich International Film Festival, the Preservation Society of Newport County, and the Preservation Foundation of Palm Beach. She is a former trustee of the YWCA of Greenwich and the Garden Conservancy.

About

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Foster by Claire Keegan

In emotionally evocative, simplistic language, author Claire Keegan tells the story of a young girl sent to live with rural Irish relatives, while her over-burdened mother is due to have yet another baby. First-time experiences and awkward adjustments give the tentative girl her first taste of self-worth and belonging to a childless couple now aching to share their heart. A story profound in tacit nuance and cultural identity, the poignant ending resonates with an appropriateness both heart-rending and satisfying.

      Claire Keegan is an Irish writer known for her award-winning short stories. Her stories have been published in The New Yorker, Best American Short Stories, Granta, and The Paris Review; and translated into 20 languages.

An international bestseller and one of The Times’ “Top 50 Novels Published in the 21st Century,” Claire Keegan’s piercing contemporary classic Foster is a heartbreaking story of childhood, loss, and love; now released as a standalone book for the first time ever in the US