The healing powers of the ocean. And dogs.

Daniel Galera's Blood-Drenched Beard was one of my most-anticipated titles of early 2015.  Set during the off-season at a Brazilian beach town, it features an unknown narrator and his dog, Beta, both coming to terms with their grief over the narrator's father's suicide.

Before dying, the narrator's father told him a story about his own father.  He had gone to the small fishing village Garopaba and killed at a dance by dozens of people stabbing him to death.  But there was never any body found.

After the funeral, the narrator goes to Garopaba, taking Beta with him.  He rents a small apartment, swims every day, and slowly starts seeking out information about his grandfather.  But this is harder for him than for many people as he has a rare condition that makes it impossible for him to remember people's faces.  This may be part of the reason why the narrator is a loner more than he is anything else.  All his friendships and relationships seem transitory, ephemeral.  This perhaps makes the book seem darker than it is.  Actually, there are many moments of humor and happiness here, often coming out in surprising ways.

I've never had a pet before, and I don't generally enjoy stories about people and their pets.  However, I really loved the relationship here between the narrator and his dog, Beta.  The two grow closer, and after Beta has an accident, you can see the love that exists between them.  Beta has more of a personality than many of the other characters, and her personality is kind and loyal.

The ocean is as much a character as anyone else here; it's the water and the beach the narrator escapes to when he is upset, not any person.  Perhaps because the ocean changes constantly, every minute, and so the narrator doesn't feel like he has a memory problem while he's there.

I actually don't know why I enjoyed this book so much.  The writing style is very casual and easy-going, much like the beach town in which the story is set.  There isn't much plot development - it's mostly just the main character meeting people, doing things with them, and then moving on.  The story line around his grandfather really only picks up (in a pretty random way) in the last 20% of the book.  But I liked the vignette-feel.  People respond to grief in so many ways; seeing the narrator's movement back and forth in forming real friendships with people and then moving away, thinking about his father, spending time with his dog, it all felt like a very real portrayal of a man coming to terms with the fact that he will never see his father again.  And he can't even remember his father's face to call to mind once in a while.

One annoying thing about this story was the narrator's lack of name.  I am not sure why he didn't get a name, since everyone else in the story had one.  And since there were no quotation marks to denote conversation (WHY do some authors hate traditional grammatical cues so much?!), it was often difficult to know who was talking, and who was being addressed.  But I was always eventually able to figure it out, even if it required some backtracking.

The last 20% of the story left me a little confused, and the book ended very abruptly, seemingly in the middle of a conversation.  But even so, I really enjoyed reading this one.  It was a great, meaty book to read after the lighter tomes of the holiday season.

Note:  This review is based on an advanced reader's copy.  I received a free e-book in exchange for this review.

Musings: Bring Up The Bodies

I loved this book.  I have a massive girl crush on her and if I could have a literary dinner with some of my favorite authors, she would be on the invite list.  I love everything I've ever read by Hilary Mantel, I freely admit, and Bring Up the Bodies is no exception.  It's that book I was anticipating receiving so much that I became listless in my reading of anything else while I waited for it to arrive in the mail, knowing that it didn't really matter what I was reading, I would drop it the minute I got my hands on this one.  That's exactly what happened, and the book didn't disappoint.

Bring Up the Bodies is the second book in Hilary Mantel's trilogy about Thomas Cromwell, following on the enormous success of her Booker Prize-winning Wolf Hall.  I loved Wolf Hall, not only because it truly humanized a man who has become more a demonic caricature of himself in the centuries since his life, but also because of Mantel's lyrical writing style.  Bring Up the Bodies is written in the same style (though she clearly has taken note of reader complaints about her use of the pronoun "he" and is much more careful here to make very clear which "he" she is referring to), and I was utterly swept up in it.  It begins, as the cover illustrates, with falconry at Wolf Hall, where King Henry VIII fatefully meets Jane Seymour and sets in motion one of the most dramatic stories in known history.  Once again, we are led by our faithful and highly skilled guide, Thomas Cromwell, through the nooks and crannies, the twists and turns, of Tudor England as Henry VIII turns his affections from Anne Boleyn to Jane Seymour.  The book spans the course of a year, and half of the book takes place over only a few weeks, but this is the climax of Thomas Cromwell's career, the point of no return.  This is when he tests his friends and makes clear his enemies in a way that will set his life on an irreversible track.

Musings: A Slave in the White House - Paul Jennings and the Madisons

A Slave in the White House:  Paul Jennings and the Madisons is a long title that is pretty misleading.  Much of the story is taken up not with Paul Jennings (the slave) but with the Madisons, particularly Dolley Madison, with another good chunk devoted to Daniel Webster.  I assume the historical record is scarce on details related to Paul Jennings' life, so Elizabeth Dowling Taylor, the author, had to embellish by putting in a lot of details about other people.  But in that case, she should have chosen a different title.  I started the book really hoping to delve deep into the Madison administration and Paul Jennings' unique viewpoint on it, particularly as the slave of "the Father of the Constitution" who fought so hard for American liberty but did not give liberty to the African-Americans he owned.  But that is not what I got.

Paul Jennings was born into slavery on Montpelier, the Madison plantation.  As a young man, he accompanied James and Dolley Madison to the White House as a household slave.  (I thought this would comprise the bulk of the book, but in reality it was only one chapter, and most of that chapter was about Dolley Madison.)  After Madison left office, Jennings worked as his personal manservant for the rest of Madison's life, marrying a slave on a neighboring plantation and making life plans, expecting to be freed in the former President's will.  But Madison did not free him, wanting to ensure that his beloved wife Dolley was comfortable in her widowhood.  Montpelier, though, was not the thriving plantation it once was, and Dolley sold off some of her slaves.  Jennings became terrified that he, too, would be sold, and approached Daniel Webster for help to buy his own freedom.  Once Webster gave him the loan, he worked hard all the rest of his life to free himself and his children and earn a living for himself in Washington, DC.  He also wrote a very short memoir, A Colored Man's Reminisces of James Madison, which was published in his later years and which was a primary source in this book.

Musings: Wonderstruck

Brian Selznick's Wonderstruck is a new illustrated novel by the author of The Invention of Hugo Cabret.  I really enjoy the way Selznick incorporates visuals into his stories.  He's heavily influenced by cinematic techniques of zooming in and out, and his illustrations are really quite captivating.

Wonderstruck takes place in Minnesota and New York, alternating between 1927 and 1977.  Ben is a young boy growing up in backwoods Minnesota in the 1970s.  His mother has recently passed away and he misses her horribly.  He never knew his father.  One night, going through his mom's old things, he comes across a few clues that may lead to his father.  Impulsively, he hops on a bus and goes to New York, hoping to find his father.

Running concurrent to this is Rose's story, told in lovely pencil sketches.  Rose is a deaf girl growing up in 1927 Hoboken, NJ.  She loves silent films, but leads a lonely existence.  Her mother and father are divorced and neither pays her much attention.  She is close to her brother Walter, but he lives in New York.  One day, she, like Ben, gets up and goes to New York to visit her mother.

Joint Musings: A Band of Noble Women

I heard about the book A Band of Noble Women:  Racial Politics in the Women's Peace Movement from Eva and was instantly interested in reading it.  We both got to read the book through NetGalley and decided to discuss our thoughts and share them with all of you in a joint review format.


A Band of Noble Women is a non-fiction book about key players in the Women's Peace Movement after WWI- a group of women internationally who wanted to ensure that war would never happen again.  As the group was comprised of women all over the world, there were many politics involved, but the US contingent in particular had to deal with the racial politics of the day and African-American women serving as delegates faced significant setbacks.  The result?  They started fighting for rights at home.  This book highlights some truly wonderful, fascinating women who did so much to fight discrimination in the world, specifically in the United States.  While the book had some severe flaws, I am grateful to have read it solely to have learned more about these strong and passionate women.

Below is Eva's half of our review of this book.  I responded to the same questions, and these are posted over on Eva's blog.  Check it out, if we've piqued your interest at all!

Musings: Lionheart

Lionheart is Sharon Kay Penman's new novel about Richard I's time on crusade in the Holy Land.  It is, like all her novels, epic in scope, with an impressive amount of detail and a lot of research.  I have not read the two books that come before it in this series- Time and Chance and Devil's Brood- though I read the first in the series on this fascinating Angevin family, When Christ and His Saints Slept.  This book picks up right around Richard's coronation, after which he promptly left (on a somewhat meandering journey) to the Holy Land to pit his own military prowess against that of Salah-al-din in hopes of regaining Jerusalem for Christians.

The Angevins are one of the most interesting families in western history- they have a sordid history of deceit and distrust and ill will, and while I can't imagine that it was at all fun to be living under their rule, it is a lot of fun to read about them.  I should have read this series in the proper order, but I confess that I found When Christ and His Saints Slept to be very long, repetitive and lacking spark, so I wasn't very motivated to read its sequels.  But Richard the Lionheart is one of those giants of history, still very well known today.  And I loved SKP's book about another Richard, Richard III, in The Sunne in Splendour (in fact, it was the first book I ever blogged about!), and I was confident she would do justice to this one.

Musings: The Chronicles of Harris Burdick

Almost 30 years ago, Chris Van Allsburg (of Jumanji fame) came out with a book entitled The Chronicles of Harris Burdick.  It was a collection of 14 drawings, each with a tantalizing title and an intriguing caption.  And that's all- no stories attached.  There was an interesting back story told about these stories, about a mysterious man named Harris Burdick who dropped the pictures off, promised more of them and the accompanying stories, and then disappeared, never to be seen again.  And now, fourteen brilliant authors have collaborated to each create a story around the pictures, using their titles and the given captions as additional inspiration.

Musings: The Map of Time

The Map of Time, by Felix Palma, is a massive novel about H. G. Wells, time machines, the power of suggestion and the desire to change past decisions.  It is really three novellas in one volume, all revolving around H. G. Wells' novel The Time Machine and a man named Gilliam Murray who claims he can transport people to the year 2000 to witness the final battle between the survivors of the human race and the automatons.  The first is about Andrew Harrington, a wealthy young man who falls in love with a Whitechapel prostitute who is then murdered by Jack the Ripper.  The second is about Claire Haggerty, a woman who believes herself to be in love with a hero from the future that she met while time traveling.  The third is about H. G. Wells himself, and the task set for him to save the world from rogue time travelers.

Weighing in at over 600 big pages, there's a lot going on in the plot that I didn't fit neatly into the three sentences above.  There is, in fact, so much plot that I didn't feel much connection to the characters; they seemed dwarfed by the story arc Palma created.

Musings: The American Heiress

Daisy Goodwin's The American Heiress is a book that I was both excited and nervous to read.  It is full of those ridiculous accolades books these days get- comparing it to the works of Jane Austen and Edith Wharton and probably any other author who writes about the English class system.  This generally sets off warning bells in my head because well, quite frankly, there aren't many people who can write like Jane Austen (or Edith Wharton, I presume, though I've never read her myself).  It's putting a lot of pressure on Goodwin to compare her to those two.

There were other blurbs, too, saying that The American Heiress was a "guilty pleasure" of a read, and that set off all sorts of warning bells.  Jane Austen and Edith Wharton aren't really guilty pleasures reads to me.  I think more of Phillippa Gregory and the bodice-rippers as guilty pleasures.

So it was with some trepidation that I started this book, especially upon learning the heroine's name was Cora Cash (I mean, really?) and that one of the opening scenes is her bullying her maid into teaching her how to kiss properly, complete with a practice run between the two girls.  (Pretty sure Jane Austen would never write that scene!) Cora is the richest heiress in America in the 1890s, and her mother is determined that her daughter will have an English title to go along with all that money.  So they travel to England where Cora has an unfortunate riding accident, is rescued by an attractive man who just happens to be a duke, and spends about a week recovering at his ancestral home, much to her mother's delight.  (Jane Austen definitely already wrote that scene.)  The duke eventually proposes, and Cora begins her life as the Duchess of Rakeham.  But she soon learns that money does not a duchess make, and must deal with the travails of English high society even while she realizes that she doesn't know her husband very well at all.  And her maid?  She's got problems of her own to deal with, too.

Musings: Fist Stick Knife Gun

"When I first found out that Superman wasn't real, I was about eight.  I was talking to my mother who declared, 'No, no, no.  There's no Superman.'  I started crying because I really thought Superman was coming to rescue us from the chaos, the violence, the danger.  No hero was coming."

If you have seen the film Waiting for Superman, about the disturbing state of America's public school system, then you have seen Geoffrey Canada, president of Harlem Children's Zone.  Canada also wrote an autobiography about growing up in the South Bronx during the 1960s, and here it has been adapted to the comic format by Jamar Nicholas.  The title remains Fist Stick Knife Gun as a representation of the way violence in the inner city has escalated.  What used to be dangerous, but not necessarily deadly, has become far worse with prolific access to guns.

Canada starts his story when he's four.  His older brother's jacket is stolen at the park, and when the brother explains to their mom that it was stolen, instead of consoling her son, she sends him to the park to get his jacket back.  She would not tolerate her boys becoming victims.  Soon, though, Geoff's education is tackled by boys who live on the same block as him.  It's not so much to incite violence, but to keep safe, to give the block credibility so that no one will mess with people from there.  He learns how to fist fight, how to gauge an opponent.  He gets a knife.  He gets a gun.

Musings: Fannie's Last Supper

Fannie's Last Supper:  Re-Creating One Amazing Meal from Fannie Farmer's 1896 Cookbook is one of those books in the new-ish "food writing" genre.  It's written by chef Christopher Kimball of America's Test Kitchen about... well, recreating a meal from a Victorian era cookbook.

Except that he doesn't actually re-create a meal based on Fannie Farmer's best-selling American cookbook.  Nope.  He uses her recipes as a base, alters them pretty substantially, and then cooks them for a dinner party.  So while he shares a lot of interesting facts about cooking and its evolution, and about eating and the Victorian era... he doesn't actually deliver on the title of his book.

Review: The Little Prince Graphic Novel

It was only after I started reading this graphic novel adaptation of Antoine de Saint-Exupery's The Little Prince that I realized I have never actually read the original version.  Has this ever happened to you?  I think for me, the case is particularly prevalent with children's books that everyone reads, and so I just assume I have read them, too.  And then... er, I really haven't.  This is one of those occasions.

But after reading this adaptation, I really want to read the original The Little Prince (well, translated into English).  The story is deceptively simple- a man's plane breaks down in the middle of the desert.  He works to fix it and then, almost by magic, a little boy comes up to him and asks the man to draw him a picture of a sheep.  From there, we are taken on a wonderful journey with a man rediscovering his childhood through the help of a mysterious young boy who hails from a distant planet.  The boy (the little prince of the title) describes to the narrator his journey to Earth.  He talks about his home planet, where he is the sole caretaker of three volcanoes and a beautiful rose.  He describes the other planets he visited, all with only one inhabitant- a king, a businessman, a geographer and a lamplighter.  Through the little prince, our narrator begins to rediscover a childlike wonder for the world.

Review: Room

Emma Donoghue is an author I've really enjoyed in the past.  She writes great historical fiction set in 18th century England (Slammerkin and Life Mask), basing whole stories on one-sentence clippings from the Society section of the newspaper.  I was very excited to hear she had a new book coming out, though Room is nothing like her British historical fiction.

NOTE:  The author has asked me to warn readers about spoilers here, though personally I don't think I could write this review without giving away the important bits of information below.

Room is narrated by Jack, a 5-year-old who lives with his mother in a shack, where they are kept imprisoned by Jack's father.  Jack's mother was kidnapped seven years ago, and all of Jack's life he's been in an 11-ft square room.  It's all he's ever known.  But one day his mother comes up with an escape plan, and she and Jack finally get to leave Room.  But living in the big world outside is difficult, with so much noise, so many people, and tons of space.  Jack and his mother have difficulty adjusting to life outside the room, and a life that involves so many other people and things than just each other.

DNF: The Transformation of Bartholomew Fortuno

Well, I suppose it had to happen some time!  The Transformation of Bartholomew Fortuno, by Ellen Bryson, is the first book this year that I was unable to finish.  It saddens me because it sounds so promising!  And in the Author's Note, she mentions Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus, which receives unanimous praise (or at least praise from Ana and Claire).  But this one just didn't work for me.

Bartholomew Fortuno is an act at PT Barnum's New York City museum; he is the world's skinniest man and believes he and the other museum acts have great gifts to share with the world.  One night, a mysterious new act arrives and Barnum seems obsessed with knowing all about her movements.  He enlists Fortuno to keep tabs on the new woman, and also run some tasks for him in Chinatown.  And... that's all I know as I stopped reading right around that time.

Review: The Bucolic Plague

The Bucolic Plague:  How Two Manhattanites Became Gentlemen Farmers is a somewhat misleading title.  Yes, it's about a gay couple in New York that buys a rural mansion, but it's not so much about the farming as it is about relationships and the pursuit of perfection.

Josh Kilmer-Purcell is a former drug addicted drag queen (he brings this up multiple times in the narrative, though I am not sure how it was particularly relevant) turned ad executive.  His partner, Brent, is an MD/MBA who works for Martha Stewart.  On their way home from apple picking, they come across the beautiful Beekman mansion in Sharon Springs, NY and impulsively purchase it.  Then they hire a caretaker to raise his goats there.  They plant a large vegetable garden, have guests over and set about living the dream- city living during the week and relaxing on a farm on the weekends.  Perfect!  Josh soon wants to quit his job and live full-time on the farm, and they set about making this dream a reality.  Except, they soon come to find, making dreams reality takes a lot of work and can be exhausting, and as the economy collapses around them, Josh wonders if it's a worthwhile endeavor.

Review: Picture the Dead

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Picture the Dead is one of those books you see in a bookstore, pick up and thumb through, and then clutch to your chest as you move towards the cash wrap, as though someone might steal it from you.  I had this book in an advance reader's edition, but I know that the hardcover edition will be beautiful and well worth a purchase.

Adele Griffin (two-time finalist for the National Book Award) has written a wonderful story about a family of old money living in a dank, dark and empty home in Boston during the American Civil war.  Jennie lives there at the mercy of her Uncle Pritchett and his wife.  She is lonely- her twin brother Toby passed way in the war and she finds out very early in the book that her fiancee, her cousin Will, also died.  The only Pritchett soldier to return home is Will's brother, Quinn.  But Quinn was never warm, and now he is chased by ghosts and is full of secrets- some of them Will's.

One day, when Jennie goes with her aunt, uncle and Quinn to get a family portrait done, she is briefly visited by Will's angry ghost.  This sets her off on a course to learn what happened to her beloved fiancee in the war.

Review: The Eyes of Willie McGee

After I read and reviewed To Kill a Mockingbird, I was offered The Eyes of Willie McGee to review.  And frankly, it was impossible to turn it down.  Here's a real-life version of the trial in To Kill a Mockingbird, though it's far murkier and complicated.  Willie McGee was an African-American man who, in 1945, was sentenced to death for raping a white housewife, Willette Hawkins.  His trial was unfair- he was tried by an all-white jury who debated for only about two minutes before convicting him in a hostile courthouse where he couldn't even put together two words coherently, he was so terrified of being lynched by the mob outside.

Willie McGee caught the interest of many civil rights organizations in America (mainly the Communists, which may have been troublesome for him), and even more people around the world.  William Faulkner spoke out about him.  Norman Mailer.  Letters poured in from China, Germany, the UK and countless other places, pleading his innocence.

But did those supporters really have the facts straight?  As Alex Heard investigates the case, he finds multiple, serious discrepancies about the "facts" presented.  Did Willie and Willette have a forbidden affair?  Who was Willie's wife at the time, and did she really take care of his children?  Was Willie innocent?  Was Willette as horrible and manipulative as some people believe?

Review: Sweet Dates in Basra

Sweet Dates in Basra, by Jessica Jiji, takes place in Iraq during and soon after WWII.  It begins with two best friends- Omar (Muslim) and Shafiq (Jewish- this confused me as Shafiq to me sounds much more like a Muslim name)- whose families live next door to each other and are very close.  One day, running away from trouble, Omar and Shafiq escape into the house of a friend and Shafiq meets the beautiful housemaid, Kathmiya, and their lives are never the same.

The story winds through the remainder of the war, the riots against Jews as the Germans come in, hints at the threats of Communism and the large, unexpected changes that occur in Iraq following the war.  Through it all, Shafiq & Omar's families support each other, and Shafiq & Kathmiya grow closer and closer.  But there is a secret in Kathmiya's past, and Shafiq's future in Iraq is uncertain.

Review: A Corpse at St. Andrew's Chapel

A Corpse at St. Andrew's Chapel is the second book in Mel Starr's mystery series around Hugh de Singleton, a surgeon and bailiff in 14th century England.  A body is found outside an old church in his jurisdiction, seemingly savaged by wolves.  But there have been no wolf sightings in the area and there is very little blood, which leads Hugh to believe no animal was involved.  The dead man's shoes were stolen, too- no wolf would do that.  Hugh realizes things go even further than he originally suspects when, the more he digs, the more he seems to be a target for violence.  Soon, one of his suspects is found dead of an arrow to the back, and Hugh must hurry to solve the case before he is yet another victim of the plot.

I received this book through the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program.  I have not read the first book in the series, but that did not seem to factor into my understanding of the second at all.  The first book is alluded to, but I had no trouble following this story without having read that one.

Review: Page from a Tennessee Journal

Page From a Tennessee Journal is Francine Thomas Howard's first novel and one of the first books published by AmazonEncore.  While I have serious issues with Amazon as a book retailer, I am glad that the company is publishing books that previously had trouble finding a home.

Page From a Tennessee Journal revolves around four people, but its heart is the women- Annalaura Welles & Eula Mae McNaughton.  Eula Mae has been married to Alex McNaughton for over twenty years.  They have no children, a hole that she feels keenly.  She loves her husband, but there is no physical affection between them.  He hardly pays her any attention and she takes pride in anticipating all his needs and wants, so that he never has to ask her for anything and knows exactly what is on the schedule every day.  But Eula Mae sometimes wishes that she could be more intimate with her husband; she just doesn't know how to apprise him of that fact without him thinking her too forward or, worse, a hussy.

Annalaura is a sharecropper on Alexander McNaughton's farm.  Her husband, John, left some months ago without a word and now she is desperately trying to feed and clothe her four children on her own, with no money.  She doesn't think her husband will ever return, and she is terrified that McNaughton will turn her out of her home if she doesn't bring in a good tobacco harvest.  Sure enough, Alex McNaughton comes to check on her plot's progress, only to find it not performing up to par.  He finds Annalaura attractive, though.  Very much so.  And so he brings her food to feed her children in exchange for spending the night with her.  And then he keeps bringing gifts.  And keeps spending the night.

Meanwhile, John Welles is in Nashville making as much money as he possibly can so that he can get his family its own farm.  This is taking longer than he expects, though, and he is gone for well over a year.  When he returns and sees the state of his family, everything begins to unravel.  John and Alex must come to terms with their own feelings about their wives and their families, and Annalaura and Eula Mae must decide how to respond to a world that may very well turn on them.