The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows

This week for Barrie Summy's Book Review Club I've chosen The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows.

"Sarahlynn - See what you think? Carol"

Perhaps every other book club in America has read this novel sometime in the past two years, but neither of mine did. I'd never heard the title until my mother-in-law passed the paperback to me. We're both avid readers, but our tastes don't always overlap (hooray Diana Gabaldon!) so I wasn't sure what to expect. And I waited about a year before picking it up.

Then I really really enjoyed it.

As a fledgling writer who never seems to get quite as much writing accomplished as I set out to do, I was touched by the author's story. Mary Ann Shaffer wrote for years and years and years, probably her whole life. She belonged to writer's groups and researched and wrote diligently. But she never finished a book to her satisfaction until this one, which she sold when she was 74 years old. She died before the final requested rewrite, and her niece - also an author - finished the project. Both of their names appear on the cover.

But I read all that later, after I'd finished the book and needed to know more about who wrote it. The book itself - the story, the writing, the characters, the style - grabbed me and made me not want to finish.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society is a novel told in letters between an immediately post-World-War-II English author and her friends. Right off the bat, this is not a subject that causes my breath to quicken (except, perhaps, in hasty retreat).

But the main character, Juliet Ashton, has a voice I simply adored. I want to be her friend. I want her to be alive and real today so that I can be her pen pal. I'll even learn to respond to letters, I promise!

The novel tells the story of the German occupation of the British Channel Islands (between England and France) during the Second World War. No, but really. The history just provides fascinating snippets scattered along the way of the real stories, all of which were far more personal.  Individual growth, relationship building, priority setting, and even a mystery.

I have no idea how Shaffer and Barrows managed to write about such sad, indescribably painful, terrible things without making light of them but while still keeping a bright, funny tone to the novel. That feat alone was masterful. While some of the letters were extremely hard to read, I always ended up laughing somewhere along the way. And since there are no chapters, just a series of letters, naturally I read straight through to the end. It's a quick read.

Carol, I enjoyed this one very much; thank you for encouraging me to read it!

--Sarahlynn

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Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout

This month for Barrie Summy's Book Review Club I'm discussing Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout.

I first learned about this novel in book club.  We were listing our all time favorite novels and one reader mentioned this one, then chose it for our next read.  Because of my impressions of the woman who selected the book and the context in which we were discussing it, I assumed Olive Kitteridge was an older novel, perhaps something she'd read in college.  I thought it would have a prominent religious message.  I thought it would be quiet and probably a little conservative or at least conventional.

None of those assumptions proved accurate.

Olive Kitteridge is a novel, though it doesn't seem like one.  It's actually a volume of short stories, many of which are completely unrelated to each other.  Quite a few of the characters show up only in one story and then are gone from the book forever.  This breaks all the rules of good story-telling.  But it works for this narrative, and the one consistent thread is Olive herself.  

She appears in every story, either as a main character - as when her husband is the narrator - or merely as someone who walks through the room in which someone else's story unfolds.

This works in large part because of the author's skill, but also because of Olive herself, who is complicated, fascinating, and nothing at all like I expected her to be. (The series of stories ends up telling one larger story about Olive's life, which makes it feel like a novel, in the end.)

Are you intrigued yet?  I hope you are.  Because I loved this book and want you to go read it too so we can talk about it.

(And after that, perhaps you can point me to a good grammar tutorial on using an awkward word like "assumptions.")

P.S. "Elizabeth Strout’s most recent work, Olive Kitteridge, a novel in stories, won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize, was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was a New York Times Bestseller. She is the author of two previous novels, Abide With Me, a national bestseller, and Amy and Isabelle, also a New York Times Bestseller."

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Gotham Writers' Workshop

I'm just finishing up a fabulous workshop on freelance writing at Gotham. Online courses work great with my current schedule. This is what I used for my class bio:

I'm a writer living in St. Louis, Missouri with my husband, our two young daughters, and a snoring pug. When I'm not writing I'm usually reading (everything from Elizabeth Strout to Richard K. Morgan, which is to say: everything), engaging in terribly wholesome family activities, eating, or running.

For ten years I worked in medical publishing but now I stay home and play Uno. For fun I write fiction and narrative nonfiction. (I've published a few short stories and essays and have written four practice novels that no one will ever see.)

For money I do freelance work - both marketing and editorial - for my former employer. But I'd like to do more freelance writing in addition to freelance editorial work.

I recently finished reading WRITER MAMA by Christina Katz, which energized me to start the career transition. I'm looking forward to this class!

A Sudden Country by Karen Fisher

This month for Barrie Summy's Book Review Club I'm discussing A SUDDEN COUNTRY: A Novel by Karen Fisher.

First let me just say that A SUDDEN COUNTRY is the author's first novel and was a PEN/Faulkner Award finalist.  Seriously.

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that I was reading this book and it was making me crabby.  Now I've finished.  In fact, I finished the novel quite quickly, as I raced to the end to see how the two main story lines would resolve.  (More on those in a moment.)

First a bit on why the book annoyed me so much as I read it.  I called it "Madame Bovary on the Oregon Trail" and it's helpful to note that I didn't have a blast reading Flaubert's masterpiece, either.  I spent the first half of A Sudden Country talking aloud to the female main character, Lucy.  "Don't do it, don't do it, don't do it. You idiot. You'll ruin everything. Seriously, don't do it.  Fine, do it.  Die if you want; lose your children, whatever. See if I care."

The characters in the novel are nuanced and flawed.  I mean, really flawed.  And that's good and all, but it's hard to like any of them.  Hard life, hard people, occasionally making stupid choices possibly to just because they can.  So rarely do they have significant choices to make.  Anyway.

Sentence fragments.  I was annoyed by them throughout.  But my least favorite thing about the writing was my friend Jeanne's favorite part, so it's obviously a matter of taste.  Jeanne loved the way the story unfolded slowly, with a sense of mystery.  It drove me crazy.  I thought the vague, dreamlike, and occasionally misleading language drew attention to itself and took me out of the story.  I spent the first few chapters doing math, trying to figure out how Lucy and Israel had all these kids when they'd only been married 4 years, then guessing which kids came from which previous marriages.

Reviewers on Amazon were split between loving the writing style (sentence fragments, partial explanations, imagery-rich details short on clarity) and hating having to read certain sections more than once to figure out what was going on.  I found myself somewhere in the middle.  Sometimes the style worked for me, sometimes it annoyed me.  The author's comment on this issue: "this novel took over ten years, and most of it was written very late at night, by a tired person. So if you find it dreamlike and hypnotic, that’s probably why. I advise reading it under the same circumstances."

I get that!  Enough with the criticism already.

One of the greatest strengths of the novel is the amount of historical detail the author includes "effortlessly."  I'm not usually a huge fan of reading history and require massive doses of personal narrative to make the lessons go down.  (To this day, almost everything I know about ancient Egypt came from a children's novel my mom brought to distract me when I was home sick.)  But at times in A Sudden Country I found the historical anecdotes (daily life on the Oregon Trail) more compelling than story.  The author did a really really good job with her research and with writing it into the story in such a way that it was enjoyable rather than pedantic or distracting.

And then there's the story arc itself.  I love the ending, though I know many people hated it.  I think Lucy's story arc ended just perfectly.  Everything was not wrapped up in a neat little bow, but her life never really was particularly tidy (unlike her home or her campsite).  The other main point of view character and story arc . . . dropped.  Something was building, building, building, I was excited to see how it came out, and then - poof!  Done, over, kaput without ever reaching a conclusion.  Without ever reaching a confrontation, a destination, anything.  It just failed.  This frustrated me.  Doesn't it break all the rules to cut off the story like that without any sort of resolution?  But the more distance I have from the book, the happier I am with the author's choice to handle the story the way she did.

I read a book club version of the novel, and it included an interview with the author as well as a reader's guide bound into the paperback.  You know how sometimes there's one tiny thing someone says or does that jumps out at you and bothers you so much it colors everything else you know about them and their work?  (Tom Cruise's religion, Orson Scott Card's politics, David Hasselhoff's habit of wearing his shirts unbuttoned)  There were two of these such moments in the author interview, and they nearly spoiled the whole reading experience for me.  Now that I've done a bit more research, I suspect that either the author's tone didn't come across perfectly in the interview, or it was edited unsympathetically.  (Note this interview is much more humble and likable, IMO.)

"The road to publication was as rough, believe me, as the journey I was writing about."  I would have laughed at that line at a writer's workshop, but not so much immediately after finishing an engrossing and emotional read.  Really?!  Your search for an agent endangered the lives of your children every day?  You had to leave behind every thing you held most dear?  Sheesh.  I know it's hard to get published, but that's a little Rumpelstiltskin.

This review is far too critical. I'm so glad I read this book. I think you should read it too. It's very good. And educational. Wait! Stop! I mean that in a good way.

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What I Want to Write

I haven't been writing much about writing lately. And that's because . . . I haven't been writing much lately. I've been freelancing more lately. Like, for money. That's important, and it takes up a lot of the time I used to spend writing creatively. (And blogging.)

It's really really hard to keep up with: raising kids, running a household, menu planning (and shopping and preparing healthy food), keeping active, freelancing during "free" time, AND creative writing.

It can be done, of course. In fact, I've done it! (Although when I'm writing busily I often let exercise and eating-in slide a little bit.) So the real reason I haven't been writing as much lately must be something else.

I believe it's because I'm still trying to figure out what to write. Write what you read! goes the standard advice. Well, I like to read lots of stuff. I've tried to write what I read, and even some stuff I don't read as much of for variety.

And after much effort I've determined that it's a real struggle for me to write
children's lit
humor
romance
sci fi and fantasy
and . . . mysteries. I've worked the longest at writing mysteries! I've studied really hard! I've practiced! I've loved reading these all my life! I'm an active member of Sisters in Crime! And maybe one day I'll write a mystery that I think is good enough to share with others.

But in the meantime, where the writing feels most real and most natural and most fun and most exiting is when I'm writing something a lot like . . .

Literary fiction or maybe book club fiction ("commercial fiction," I suppose, though I don't really tend to see the two as such distinctly different genres as some do). So: commercial literary fiction. I think I have drool on my chin. Upmarket fiction.

But the derision!
The pretension!
What unpublished writer could claim to be writing a book like that?!

Those books, the ones that might have stamps from prestigious awards on their covers, the ones with thought-provoking readers' guides, the ones that "use too many words" (as determined by a writer friend of mine who's all about pace and urgency and cutting out all "unnecessary" description) those are the books that really touch me, that really get me excited, that make me think:

I want to do that!

And so. I live. I experience. I feel. I read. I think. I practice. I write.

And someday, hopefully, I'll have a novel I'm proud to show others.

(Image from AllPosters.com.)

Nothing to Read Here

I read a book intending to review it for the May meeting of Barrie Summy's Book Review Club. I decided against writing the review, though.

You know what everyone's mother says about if you can't say anything nice . . . ?

Well, that's not the case here. It's more like I'd be damning the book with faint praise.

And since I didn't have a really strong reaction to the book either way I'm simply not going to review it.

So I could dust off an old review, like this one of Percival the Plain Little Caterpillar.

Or I could review another book I've read recently, like Half Broke Horses by Jeannette Walls or Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Stout.

Or I could just take a month off. I've chosen to do the latter. I'll also include a list of the books one of my book clubs has discussed:

2006
The Tender Land by Kathleen Finneran (memoir)
Fun Home by Alison Bechdel (graphic memoir)
Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber
Plainsong by Kent Haruf

2007
Night by Elie Wiesel (memoir)
Kindred by Octavia Butler
Birds of America: Stories by Lorrie Moore (short stories)
House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende
A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah (memoir)
The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin
The Dangerous Life of Altar Boys by Chris Fuhrman
The Red Tent by Anita Diamant
Bearing Witness by Michael A. Kahn
White Teeth by Zadie Smith
Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey

2008
Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan
Rob Roy by Sir Walter Scott
Lamb by Christopher Moore
August: Osage County by Tracy Letts (play)
Blue Shoe by Anne Lamott
Him Her Him Again the End of Him by Patricia Marx
Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris (memoir/essays)
Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury
Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld
The Women by Clare Luce Booth (play)

2009
The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers
Innocent Traitor: A Novel of Lady Jane Grey by Alison Weir
Lipstick Jungle by Candace Bushnell
The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon
Life of Pi by Yann Martel

2010
Going Away Shoes by Jill McCorkle (short stories)
The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman
The Day the Falls Stood Still by Cathy Marie Buchanan
A Sudden Country by Karen Fisher

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