Shelving the Book Reviews

One of the characteristics of a blog that I love is change. I know that five years down the road, my current blog may have evolved in a completely different direction and it's exciting to know that I can tweak and hopefully perfect what I'm writing.

That being said, I've realized that while I personally love reading, writing book reviews hasn't been very inspiring for me the way that writing about my craft and cooking projects has been. 

I can trace this reluctance to my school days. I loved learning about new authors and classic literary works through our summer reading program, but I balked at the idea having to write papers about what I'd read.

So for now I'll put away my regular book reviews and reserve them for those books that inspire me enough to write about it. I hope everyone has a great weekend!

BB: Seer of Sevenwaters

Disclaimer: I cheated -- I've really enjoyed this series so I bought this book with some of my Christmas money.

Seer of Sevenwaters, by Juliet Marillier, is the fifth book in a series about the noble family of the titular location.

The Sevenwaters family lives in ancient Ireland (they say Erin) and the forest that is part of their holdings is one of the last bits of territory held by the gods of the old pagan religion. The Sevenwaters family are not only devout adherents of that religion, but advocates for it abroad. The gods also like to use the family to their own ends, which is a catalyst for much of the action in the series.

Enter Sibeal, the fourth daughter. She has traveled to Inis Eala, an island where her cousin runs a training school for warriors. Two of her sisters live there with their husbands and she is spending the summer with them before she dedicates her life to the druidic order.

Not long after she arrives, a ship is wrecked on the reef near Inis Eala and there are only three survivors. Sibeal rescues one of them herself, a young dark-haired man that she names Ardal. A breath away from death, Ardal cannot remember anything from before the wreck. It becomes clear that one of the survivors doesn't want Ardal to reveal what he knows.

When the truth is revealed, Sibeal must accompany Ardal on a dangerous journey (enter meddling gods) and then make a terrible decision: choose between her growing love for him and her calling to serve the gods.

I enjoyed the other four Sevenwaters novels very much, and I think my high expectations hurt the reading of this one. The biggest issue I have with the novel is the pacing. It feels like an eternity before the characters catch onto the weirdness of the relationships between Ardal and the other survivors. I think part of the problem is that Marillier is working to set up the next novel within this story. 

Another thing that irked me is how the characters dealt with one of the survivors, a woman named Svala. It's pretty obvious that something is really not right her. While the others think that she's just severely traumatized, it was painfully obvious to me what her true origins were.

Marillier has drawn on many Irish story traditions to shape her novels; these Irish legends are intertwined with rich characters that face similar journeys and tragedies, and I think that's what kept me interested in the series.

I won't give this one up because I like the series as a whole, and I think my opinion would approve after a second read. But in light of my criticism, I'm going to give it a new rating that reflects its potential, but you shouldn't go out of your way to purchase a copy.

Library Pick

BB: The Glassblower of Murano

The Glassblower of Murano by Marina Fiorato first caught my eye because of it's location. I traveled briefly to Venice and Murano in 2008 and I was entranced by both islands. It's humbling to explore a city as old as Venice and it's hard not to be drawn into the mystique, even when you're overwhelmed by tourist kitsch off St. Mark's Square.

When folks talk about Venetian glass, most of those products come from the island of Murano, which is a few miles north of Venice proper. There are still active fornace there today and dozens of tiny glass shops line the canals.

In ancient Venice glassmakers held a very high position in society and they were the sole practitioners of this mysterious art for centuries. Unfortunately the Venetian Republic held a monopoly over the artisans by forbidding them from leaving the Republic or sharing glassmaking methods, particularly those that involved mirror-making.

Glassblower starts with one such ancient artisan, Corradino Manin. He is one of the Republic's great glassmakers, and he has betrayed his homeland and his fellows to protect someone he loves.

The novel speeds forward to the present day where we meet Corradino's descendant, Leonora. She's come to Venice to start a new life after a difficult divorce, and to try and convince the male-dominated glassmaking industry to let her study with them.

As the book flips back and forth between the two family members, Leonora struggles with the fallout of Corradino's actions 400 years later, and in turn we learn the truth from Corradino's perspective.

Bookshelf Bookstore: The Final Solution

Today's review is of the short novel The Final Solution by Michael Chabon.
According to Chabon's page on HarperCollins, this novel is an homage to 19th century detective novels, particularly the Holmes stories. You'll soon see why even if, like myself, you've never read such a story.

The story opens in southern England, 1944. A boy is walking along a set of train tracks and upon his shoulder sits an African gray parrot. This amazing sight catches the attention of an elderly man of 89, who is known in the village as an eccentric beekeeper and a formerly world-famous detective.

The boy is Linus Steinman, a Jewish refugee recently arrived from Germany. He doesn't speak and he seems afflicted by both a physical and emotional illness. The old man notes upon their first meeting that he has "a face as wan and empty as the bottom of a beggar's tin cup." 

But even more amazing is that his parrot, Bruno, almost constantly recites a string of jumbled numbers in German, among other bits of poetry and mimicry. There is no clue as to what these numbers mean -- are they a secret Nazi code? Bank account numbers? Or, considering Linus's situation, something more horrifying?

Bookshelf Bookstore: The Tenderness of Wolves

The Tenderness of Wolves by Stef Penney is a novel that I originally read last fall, but I enjoyed it so much I wanted to share with you here.  

In 1867, Canada is a sparsely populated wilderness. Immigrants from the United Kingdom and France fight the elements to survive, and the Hudson Bay Company (know as "the Company") controls all trade in region.

In Dove River, a small town on the northern edge of Georgian Bay, Laurent Jammet, an independent trapper and Frenchman, lies dead in his cabin, his throat cut. Mrs. Ross, his neighbor, discovers him while looking for her son Francis and is the one who alerts the town elders of the horrible act.

She will soon regret this because she realizes that her son, Francis, has disappeared around the time of Jammet's murder. This suspicious timing convinces some in the town that Francis must in fact be the murderer.

Determined to bring Francis home and learn whether he did kill Jammet, Mrs. Ross sets out with William Parker, a trapper and another suspect in Jammet's murder, to find him and learn the truth. Talk about gutsy!

Meanwhile, news of  Jammet's death spreads and attracts all types of folks like Thomas Sturrock, a con man with ties to another Dove River tragedy, and representatives of the Hudson Bay Company. Whether they are interested in solving Jammet's murder is uncertain.

As Mrs. Ross and Parker march further into the wilderness, their discoveries reveal that Jammet's death was just one tiny piece in very large puzzle. It's as this point I do feel that the plot could have used a little more editing -- at my last count there are four major mysteries introduced during the course of the book. Thankfully I didn't find it that hard to follow and amazingly, they do all intersect and finally emerge as one crazy truth in the last twenty pages of the novel.

Though the plot could use some edits, the language Penney uses to shape the people and places is lovely. When Mrs. Ross arrives at Jammet's cabin just before the fateful discovery, she sees "walls [that] have faded over the years until the whole thing looks gray and woolly, more like a living growth than a building." 

Despite some plot issues, this is a beautifully detailed story I couldn't wait to finish. 

Keep it

Bookshelf Bookstore: Annie's Ghosts

This is the first post in a series I’m dubbing Bookshelf Bookstore. I’m a bibliophile with a book buying problem, and as the new year starts, I’ve decided that instead of heading to my local Borders or even the library, I’m going to look first at my own bookshelf for a "new" tome to read. The Bookshelf Bookstore posts will include a short review, sans spoilers, for those also interested in finding a "new" read and rating of one of the following:

Keep: A book that I’ll re-read regularly
Pass it On: good enough to recommend to friends, but not to keep
Donate: This is for the books I can’t finish and/or don’t find worthy to pass on

The company that I spent the last year at, by virtue of being a media company, is always receiving books from an assortment of folks hoping that we would feature their titles in one of our publications or on one of our websites.

Since the majority of these books are unsolicited, they usually get put away in office corners and eventually moved to our giveaway bookshelves. I loved browsing the latter, because we did get an interesting range of titles.

The most recent find is titled, Annie’s Ghosts, written by Steven Luxenberg, a Washington Post associate editor. Luxenberg uses secondary and tertiary sources as well as historical documents to weave the history of his family.

Luxenberg’s family knew that Beth, Luxenberg’s mom, had a sister, but she had never been a topic of conversation because Beth had told them her sister had been institutionalized at a very young age. In fact, Beth introduced herself as an only child to all she met. But as Beth’s health declined in the late 90’s, several pieces of information came to light that her lifelong stories were fabrications. This previously unknown sister had been institutionalized as an adult, that she’d died in 1972, and their mother had known everything.

It’s hard to imagine how I would personally take this kind of news, especially in a family where deceased siblings, parents, and grandparents are still talked about today. I probably would have reacted the same was as Steve Luxenberg -- with lots of questions rolling around in my head and the need to know why.

Why did his mother create this secret, let alone allow it to take on the proportions it did? What societal and cultural mores were in place to affect both his mother’s subterfuge and his aunt’s life? And what about this mysterious aunt -- what was her condition for being institutionalized? What was her life like?

It can be difficult at times to follow the story because Luxenberg doesn’t arrange this history using a novelistic form. He tells his story chronologically, and any dialogue he uses is pulled directly from recorded conversations and historical documents. Many of his sources are old friends of his mother, and he has to comb through 60-year-old memories to find the truth.

There are also chapters interspersed within that delve even further into Luxenberg’s family history that can be distracting from the main story line of Annie and Beth. However, these chapters are important because they give insight into the older Luxenberg’s actions and context to the external forces that affected the family.

In finding these answers, Luxenberg maintains an interesting degree of objectivity and doesn’t share too many details about how he and the members of his family felt about his mother’s deception. I think that even if his family had been willing to share their full opinions, this story is about Steve's journey.

Luxenberg eventually comes to terms with his mother’s deception, but one question haunts him: how would his mother and aunt’s lives have been different if they’d been born at the end of the 20th century instead of the beginning? Throughout the book Luxenberg alludes to the answer, and I think that is the real tragedy of this family history.

Pass it On