Hi. I hope everyone is doing well. We had a bit of snow here on Monday, but the freeze has left and now very mild weather is ahead. We went from -40 to +40 degrees in a couple weeks time, which is quite a change and means more outdoors time for me and the dogs, yay. The sky in the photo might look like there’s a fire, but it’s only the sunset and the prospects of warm weather ahead. We’ve started taking the bird feeders around the house down at night because deer have been eating them dry. If you can believe it, papa deer is able to stand on his hind legs, balance, and eat from the bird tray in the photo. The deer are also able to empty the other feeders. Squirrels are less of a problem here, but we are on the lookout.
Not much else is new, but we had a couple notable anniversaries this week. First my husband and I passed our one year anniversary since we moved out of the city for the countryside, which has been fantastic. We love it so much more here. We still have more upgrades to do, but we’ll do them over time as we can. Also today marks eight weeks since my knee replacement surgery and I’m doing well. I go to physical therapy once a week and practice the exercises daily as well as I can pedal an indoor bike. So little by little, I’m returning to normal activities, but just not tennis playing yet, which is okay.
Last week I posed the question about when is it time to DNF a book and you all had great answers about your own rules of thumb for it. So I will pose another book-ish question, which is: Are you a “monogamous reader” — reading a book at a time — or do you prefer to have multiple books going at once? And how many do you usually read at a time? I admit I have generally been a monogamous reader all my life. Once I’m hooked in a book, I like to focus on that one till it’s done. Though I usually have one print read going and one audiobook going at a time. Just recently, along with a fiction read, I’m able to have a nonfiction read going on the side. So perhaps I’m trying to leave monogamous reading behind. What about you?
And now I’ll leave you with a couple reviews about what I finished lately.
Western Lane by Chetna Maroo / Farrar Straus & Giroux / 160 pages / 2023
4.2 stars. I found the writing outstanding in this debut novel set outside London about a British-Indian father and his daughters Gopi, 11, Khush, 13, and Mona, 15, who have just lost their mother as it opens. To occupy them, their father gets them training in squash playing at their nearby rec center Western Lane, though Gopi who narrates the story is the only one who really excels. Her father puts her through a rigorous squash regimen and she begins playing with 13-year-old Ged, whom she begins to like.
However, it’s all very restricted and repressed as the girls, whose Gujarati relatives are lurking and have let the father know they are willing to take and raise a daughter since his wife’s death, live under a tight decorum of rules. But it all begins to weigh on Gopi, her sisters, and the father, and fractures in their family begin to emerge. Towards the end, Gopi trains for a squash tournament that could bring them back together.
Western Lane is a moving coming-of-age story of Gopi’s reckoning and an internal family drama. As an avid tennis player I loved how it brought the sport of squash into Gopi’s drama over the loss of her mother, like a metaphor of her life then. When you’re on the court, “you are alone. That’s how it’s supposed to be. You are supposed to find your own way out,” says Gopi. This novel is a winner and I will watch for whatever Chetna Maroo writes next. This was my first audiobook of the year narrated expertly by British actress Maya Saroya.
The Berry Pickers by Amanda Peters / Harper / 320 pages / 2023
3.75 stars. The story follows the lives of two siblings from Nova Scotia whose indigenous family comes to Maine each berry season to work and pick in the fields. It’s not really a mystery early in the story that as a young child, age 4, the girl goes missing and is raised elsewhere, not fully comprehending her origins. No one knows what happened to her, but her brother, two years older, lives with the loss and guilt over last seeing her. The story, which alternates chapters between Norma and Joe, explores how their lives play out over a few decades in different places and under different circumstances.
The story felt sincere, heartfelt, and agonizing over how the indigenous family is not whole afterwards and how it suffers from various tragedies over the years as well as how the two main characters’ lives face hardships. There’s quite a bit of sadness and longing to it, and the debut author does well to make the two character’s different lives and places feel authentic (it’s quite a visual telling), though there was still just a touch to me that felt a bit contrived and melodramatic. The story’s also sort of predictable. Still it’s an interesting portrayal of their lives, what happened to them in different families, and it kept me turning the pages.
The novel was a pick by my book club, which will be discussing it in February. It seems to include many issues in it about ethnicity, race, and how and where a person is raised, so I think it’ll make for a good discussion.
That’s all for now. What about you — have you read these books and if so, what did you think?
