Night Came with Many Stars by Simon Van Booy

Simon book! Simon book! If you've spent any length of time visiting my blog, you know Simon Van Booy is one of my favorite authors so I'm always extremely excited when he has a new novel or collection of short stories published. Night Came with Many Stars is scheduled to be released on June 8 and I was sent an advance reader by Godine Press thanks to my friendship with Simon. I'd already planned to buy a copy (and I still will — friend exception, you know, to the book-buying ban) but getting an ARC just meant I got to read it sooner. Wahoo for that!

Set in Kentucky, Night Came with Many Stars is a historical/contemporary combo novel. The historical part begins during the Depression, when teenaged Carol is trying to find a way to escape her abusive father and the man he lost her to in a poker game while the contemporary portion begins with a friendship between two boys named Samuel and Eddie that is first shown in the 1980s. Both storylines move forward and you're quickly made aware that you're reading about different generations of the same family. Eventually, they intertwine to tell a multigenerational story of pain and struggle, abuse, the saving graces of friendship and family, and how even those in the worst of circumstances can remake their lives. It's at times harsh (TW: rape) but a lovely, uplifting tale full of heart. 

I feel like talking about any details at all would spoil the reading but there were some particular things that aren't spoilers that I loved, like the fact that one of the characters whistled all the time. That felt particularly homey to me because my father was constantly whistling while he worked, always full of good cheer. It took me back. Also, while I have never lived in Kentucky, the accent felt familiar and very real to me. I must have known people who spoke with that accent at some point, especially dropping the first "y" in "everybody": ever'body. It says in the book that Simon lived in Kentucky for 3 years. I knew he lived there for a while but I didn't realize he'd been there for quite that long. Clearly, he has a great ear for language. I would never have known the author is British from the dialogue or narrative. 

Highly recommended - A 5-star read, an absolutely flawless, moving family saga of pain, resilience, deep friendship, and love. It's my humble opinion that Night Came with Many Stars is Simon's best novel. I had the weird problem of not wanting to put it down yet desiring to drag it out as long as possible at the same time. That's a new one. 

You can pre-order a signed and, if you'd like, personalized copy directly from the publisher at this email:

order@godine.com

My thanks to Simon and Godine Press for the review copy of Night Came with Many Stars! 

Isn't the cover gorgeous? The felted mice were posed with Simon's book for good reason. I just got these two little guys recently and I placed them with the book partly because of the enduring friendship between characters Samuel and Eddie (the bench has a plaque that says "Old Friends") and partly because Simon has a pet mouse, which you can occasionally glimpse if you follow his Instagram account @simonvanbooy . Aren't they adorable? I'm thinking I may just have to name my mice Samuel and Eddie. 

©2021 Nancy Horner. All rights reserved. If you are reading this post at a site other than Bookfoolery or its RSS feed, you are reading a stolen feed. Email bookfoolery@gmail.com for written permission to reproduce text or photos.

As Summers Die by Winston Groom

"Sometimes I don't know why I do anything I do," he said soberly. He looked out of the window and into the fog. Damn, he thought. It was only a week or so till Christmas. A lonely time of the year. He really wanted to fall in love. 

~p. 103

Set in 1960s Louisiana, As Summers Die tells the story of a small-time lawyer named Willie Croft. Willie spends most of his time dealing with minor cases until something big happens near Bienville, Louisiana. Oil has been discovered close to Creoletown, where the black people live. An older woman who owns land that used to belong to a prominent family, the Holts, hires Willie when the Holt family tries to buy her off and then force her out of her property. She holds the deed to the land she lives on, which was given to her by the head of the Holt family. Her children are his progeny, unbeknownst to the family. When they find out, they're incensed.

The rest of the lower-income blacks will probably be bought out or forced off their property if a solution isn't found. Willie calls in an expert in dealing with oil discoveries to help him come up with a plan. But, the Holts will do anything to make sure that at least one deed disappears and the oil profits will be theirs alone.

Recommended - A very good story of racism and greed with some clever legal and business maneuvering. I enjoyed rooting for the underdogs and liked the tension caused by the danger to those who dared to try to outsmart the wealthy Holts. I was a little ground down by the racism and the fact that poor Willie was dangled by the woman he was attracted to but I liked the sense of time and place. That surprised me because I'm not a big fan of Southern fiction, in general.

I would never have thought to read another book by Winston Groom, in spite of the fact that I enjoyed Forrest Gump, so I'm glad As Summers Die was an F2F group selection. I checked out a copy from my local library (yay, libraries!). Originally published in 1980, the book is now only available new in Print on Demand, which is pricey. Much as I enjoyed it, As Summers Die is not a book I'll reread so I'm really happy the library had a copy.

©2019 Nancy Horner. All rights reserved. If you are reading this post at a site other than Bookfoolery or its RSS feed, you are reading a stolen feed. Email bookfoolery@gmail.com for written permission to reproduce text or photos.

Mini reviews - A Brown Man in Russia by Vijay Menon and The Birds of Opulence by Crystal Wilkinson

I don't feel like I have a great deal to say about these two books and I need to do some catch-up, so I'm going to go ahead and give them the mini review treatment.

A Brown Man in Russia: Lessons Learned on the Trans-Siberian is the memoir of a young American of Indian descent who traveled to Russia with two of his friends.

Vijay Menon works in the tech industry and decided early on that he wanted to travel widely. Because he grew up in an affluent family and has had jobs that pay well, he's already traveled quite extensively. The book mostly focuses on the trip to Russia and how he and his friends occasionally got pleasantly lost or had trouble finding their way to their destinations, the people they encountered along the way, and the occasional mistakes they made.

A Brown Man in Russia is very entertaining. In between chapters on their adventures, Menon occasionally will wax philosophical, giving advice or simply describing his world views. You could call it a tiny bit preachy, but I thought it was a little preachy in a good way (probably because we are in agreement, most of the time). There was only one thing I really disliked about this book and that was the vocabulary. It sounds like Menon wrote with a thesaurus on his lap. If he talks the way he writes (which is hard to imagine), his vocabulary is lofty. It just comes off as if he's trying to sound impressive. I opted to overlook that and just enjoy the book, but it occasionally bothered me enough that I marked a passage, for example: the use of "postprandial" and other long words to describe feeling full and satisfied after lunch. Just unnecessary.

I think it's also worth mentioning that this is the second book I've read recently by Glagoslav Publications (a publisher that mostly publishes works in translation) in which pages fell out as I was reading the book. I wrote to ask if anything is being done about the binding issue, since it's happened more than once, and did not hear back from the publicist. I've read books by Glagoslav in the past and not had that problem, so hopefully it was a temporary fluke.

UPDATE: I received a reply about the binding problem and apparently an earlier reply went into my spam box. The publicist has asked for photos of the binding issue to forward to the printer as she considers it a very serious problem. I will do that, ASAP, and presume that the problem will be attended to. Apologies to Glagoslav for not seeing that response before I wrote my review.

Recommended but not a favorite - It's a shame that the writing in A Brown Man in Russia is so pompous because otherwise it's a great little book. I enjoyed reading about the author's adventures and even enjoyed it when he pontificated about his personal beliefs about travel and other topics. The writing style makes for slow reading, but that didn't bother me and I'm glad I read it.

The Birds of Opulence by Crystal Wilkinson was the first selection of the Open Canon Book Club (which has a Facebook site as well as a website, easy to find by googling the name) and I enjoyed it so much that I'll probably end up recommending it to my book group. Opulence is the name of a town but I can't remember whether it's in North Carolina or some other Southern state, since I read it over a month ago. The Birds of Opulence tells the story of several generations of women who live in Opulence, most of them family, the others friends of that family.

There's not much plot to The Birds of Opulence. I would call it a quiet novel, a short but intense family saga. It starts with a woman giving birth in a vegetable patch and then a widowed neighbor giving birth shortly after. The mother who gives birth in the family's garden is disinterested in her child and has trouble even getting out of bed. These glimpses of depression prove to be merely the start of a long life of mental illness that is kept under control by the support of her family.

Gradually, each of the women's stories unfold and the two babies grow and have children of their own. Eventually, the women begin passing away and the book closes with the thoughts of the one man who was always surrounded by the women and there for them, a loving and faithful presence from the time he entered the family.

Highly recommended - The Birds of Opulence is a beautiful, heart-rending, poetic novel of family and mental illness. I was not quite finished with the book when Crystal Wilkinson did a Q/A session with the group, but I saved the entire question/answer session (which was done on Facebook) and returned to it when I finished. I really enjoyed reading what she had to say about the writing process and the characters. I would definitely recommend The Birds of Opulence for discussion.

©2018 Nancy Horner. All rights reserved. If you are reading this post at a site other than Bookfoolery or its RSS feed, you are reading a stolen feed. Email bookfoolery@gmail.com for written permission to reproduce text or photos.

Books 1 and 2 for #Weirdathon - Other Voices, Other Rooms by Truman Capote and Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel

Blogger and my ISP are both behaving fitfully, this morning, so I'm going to try to keep this short for sanity's sake.

I'm calling Other Voices, Other Rooms by Truman Capote my first read for #Weirdathon, even though it originally hit my stacks because it was my book group's March selection and I had no idea (because I've only read Capote's sweet Christmas story) just how wacky a Capote book could be. The group's selection was just lucky timing.

Joel has been living in New Orleans with an aunt, following the death of his mother. When his father's second wife writes a letter saying they'll be happy to take him in, Joel is sent to a decaying and isolated mansion. Before he even arrives, Joel is disappointed to find that nobody has been dispatched to meet him, although he was told he would be met near the town where his father lives, so he has to figure out how to get to the house on his own. And, when he makes it to the house, he's confused. Where is his father? Why won't anyone answer any of his questions? Was that a ghost he saw in the window?

Surrounded by eccentric characters and bored out of his mind, Joel seeks friendship while trying to figure out what on earth has happened to his father.

A couple of our group members brought some helpful information to share. Other Voices, Other Rooms can be a little surreal, at times, and it has more of a snapshot feel than the sense of a well-defined plot, but there were some very strong themes. The book is partly about Capote's own loneliness and longing for a father, but there are several other themes that were not quite as obvious to me. I mostly got the sense of longing for love out of it.

Bizarre characters and beautiful language were the two aspects of this book that made me love it. I often felt like I didn't understand what was happening during a scene but then understood it as it was ending. A lot of what I didn't grasp was nicely explained by people in my group so the discussion was excellent. It's a book worth talking about and I loved its oddities.

Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel is a book that seemingly everyone has read but me. I already owned a copy, purchased in a library sale years ago, so I was happy when not one but several people suggested Like Water for Chocolate when I asked for weird book suggestions.

Tita is in love with Pedro and expecting him to ask for her hand in marriage when her mother informs her that she is never to marry. Instead, Tita will be forced to follow tradition, caring for her mother for the rest of her life. Seeking to be near his beloved, Pedro marries her sister, Rosaura. Tita has learned how to cook from the elderly Nacha, and will eventually take over the cooking duties. But, when Tita's tears over her lost love are mixed into the batter of Rosaura and Pedro's wedding cake, the start of their marriage is ruined. Will Tita and Pedro ever be able to marry or are they doomed to love each other from a distance?

Holy Toledo, there is some serious weirdness going on in Like Water for Chocolate. No wonder so many people recommended it! There's strange magic in Tita's cooking and sexual energy that vibrates between Pedro and Tita, inflaming or repelling those around them via the food. Each chapter begins with a recipe and one of the quirks of this book is the way the author will interrupt her own story with a continuation of the recipe. The storyline bounces around a little, sometimes stepping backward in time so that a deceased character is suddenly alive. I found myself jolted by the changes in time but loved the uniqueness of this strange love story and its crazy ending.

Both highly recommended - I really enjoyed the eccentricities of the characters and the storytelling in both Other Voices, Other Rooms and Like Water for Chocolate. If you're filing away ideas for future #Weirdathon events and you haven't read these titles, definitely add them to your list. They are completely nuts.

©2016 Nancy Horner. All rights reserved. If you are reading this post at a site other than Bookfoolery  or its RSS feed, you are reading a stolen feed. Email bookfoolery@gmail.com for written permission to reproduce text or photos.

The Hurricane Sisters by Dorothea Benton Frank and a Friday cat

The Hurricane Sisters by Dorothea Benton Frank
Copyright 2014
William Morrow  - General fiction/Southern
Source: HarperCollins for review

Brief note about this particular request: I've only read one other Dorothea Benton Frank book, Shem Creek, quite a few years ago. I liked the book and can still recall the setting and general storyline but I didn't love it enough to seek out any of Frank's other books. When this book was offered for review, I chose it specifically for the change of pace.

Brief synopsis:

Elderly Maisie is seen walking down the highway with a llama as The Hurricane Sisters unfolds. Is she nuts or is there more to the story? To find out, we must go back to the beginning, when Maisie's quirky family gathers for her birthday.

At eighty, Maisie is old enough that her daughter has taken away her car and hired a driver, a youngster in his sixties whom Maisie has taken as her lover.  Maisie's daughter Liz, a former model, works hard raising funds for a shelter for abused women and tries not to feel too hurt about the fact that Maisie is always bringing up Liz's long-dead sister, Juliet. Liz's daughter Ashley is an artist, like Juliet, living in her parents' beach house and working in a gallery for $10 an hour. She has visions of marrying a senator, becoming the next Jackie O whilst traveling Europe, where she'll become a famous artist. 

And, that's just the women. On the male side are Liz's workaholic husband, who spends his weekdays in New York City, where he's become entangled with a vixen, Ashley's gay brother and his partner, and Senator Galloway, who is not only full of himself but bad news, in general. What will happen when Liz finds out Clayton is straying? Will Ashley get out of her unhealthy relationship with Senator Galloway or will she go along with whatever he tells her to do, just for the sake of potentially marrying a future president? And, why on earth does Maisie end up walking a llama down the highway?

My thoughts:

The Hurricane Sisters is pure crazy Southern fluff with wacky characters, an interesting setting, some typical dilemmas and a not-so-surprising twist at the end. I did love finding out the deal with the llama but Ashley's relationship just drove me bonkers.  I wanted to swat some sense into her.  However, as in real life, it took a long time before Ashley wised up, with a little help from friends and relatives.

While the writing in The Hurricane Sisters was extremely light, the timing was good. I'd been having trouble focusing on much of anything and (apart from the annoying prevalence of "y'all" in every conversation -- which is just reality in the South), I appreciated the writing for the levity and liked the way all the storylines were wrapped up in the end. I do admit to feeling a little annoyed that everyone was either wealthy and beautiful or desired to be both. That gets a little tiresome. I prefer characters that are realistically flawed, physically as well as emotionally. But, it was the right book for the moment.

Recommended but not a favorite - A very light, beachy read about a quirky family with a serious theme about abuse of women that runs through the book like an undercurrent rather than being thrown in your face. Loved the typically nutty Southern characters.  While beachy reading material is not my normal reading fare, The Hurricane Sisters was the right book for the moment and I don't regret reading it although, in general, it's just average.

Since it's (almost) Friday, a cat photo is required:

Clearly, there's an excellent reason for my aloe vera's spindly looks.

©2014 Nancy Horner. All rights reserved. If you are reading this post at a site other than Bookfoolery  or its RSS feed, you are reading a stolen feed. Email bookfoolery@gmail.com for written permission to reproduce text or photos.