Hi all. Does it feel like spring where you are? It probably is. It’s even feeling a bit like spring up here. Most of the snow has melted away once again, and we are enjoying balmy temps. We might even go for a bike ride this weekend, which is a bit unheard of here in March. And the month is flying by, isn’t it?
We are gearing up for our road trip to California in April, just about two weeks away. It’s hard to believe. I’m getting together a few audiobooks for the trip, which include mostly historical nonfiction ones for my husband. Sorry to say, I will be leaving fiction behind for a while on the journey, then fling open my beach bag of novels once we get there, lol. Is it almost time for the beach?
Good news is I saw a pileated woodpecker this past Wednesday when the dogs and I were at a wooded park near the river. They are fun to see, but we don’t get to see them often. Their red heads make them easy to spot. I didn’t take this particular photo as I couldn’t get a good shot of him bobbing around, but I recorded the bird’s sound, which my Merlin Bird app recognized as the pileated woodpecker. Apparently the bird is the largest woodpecker species in North America and likes to eat carpenter ants, among other things. Its strong bill can chip large holes into trees searching for insects. Do you have these birds where you are?
And now you can see my “library loot” for this week. I still have several remainders from the weeks prior. Ann Napolitano’s novel Hello Beautiful just came in for me. I need to jump on it quickly since it’s long, but I think I’m going to start Ron Rash’s novel The Caretaker next. It looks like a quick, good read set in a small Appalachian town during the Korean War years. I read the author’s 2008 novel Serena, which was turned into a movie with Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper, but I think the new one looks a bit better.
And now I’ll leave you with a review of what I finished lately.
Absolution by Alice McDermott / FSG / 336 pages / 2023
4.4 stars. This is a story about a woman named Tricia looking back on her life and her friendship with a woman, Charlene, whom she meets in Saigon in 1963. Tricia is corresponding decades later with the woman’s daughter Rainey and telling her things that happened there.
In the ’60s, Tricia and Charlene are “helpmeets” to their husbands’ careers in Vietnam early in the war, giving parties and supporting them. Newly arrived and married Tricia, 23, meets Charlene at a garden party when her baby throws up on Tricia’s dress. From this incident, Charlene comes up with a plan to sell Barbie dolls to help fundraise for toys and things for children in the local hospitals.
Soon Tricia is part of Charlene’s “cabal” to try to do good around Saigon, helping with the Barbie sales and traveling to a leper colony to measure the people for new clothes there. It turns out Charlene, a mother of three, is a “dynamo” of altruistic schemes, trading on the black market, pushing people around, hanging at the country club, popping pills, and doing what needs to be done for her causes. Meanwhile Tricia and her husband are trying to start a family, but she’s having trouble with miscarriages. These worlds collide sometime down the line.
This might not sound like much, but in Alice McDermott’s hands with all the things at play she turns it into gold. A lot of things going on mix: with the Vietnam backdrop, early feminism, faith, war, morality, friendship, children. The novel’s structure too is pretty cool as it looks back and is also in the present. There’s a nostalgia looking back and a naivete of one’s life at age 23 amidst a war zone.
I think Alice McDermott said she was wondering about the wives in Graham Greene’s 1955 novel The Quiet American — what their lives were like — and came up with this novel. The time and place came alive for me with these characters in the 1960s. I have not read McDermott before, but I picked up her novel Charming Billy once when it came out in 1997. I’d like to read more of her books, which mostly have Irish Catholic characters and themes from McDermott’s background.
That’s all for now. What about you — have you read any of these authors and what did you think? Have a great weekend.