The Cue Card

We had light snowflakes fall all yesterday if you can believe it and my yard is still covered from earlier in the winter.  It seems the season is just a little mixed up right now — why does it keep snowing? — but still I keep thinking spring is right around the corner, or at least I hope so.   

In book news,  I’m sorry once again to be missing the L.A. Times Festival of Books, which I always want to attend but never seem to make.  It takes place April 21-22 in Los Angeles, if you’re in the area, and features a vast array of authors and discussions. I will also be missing BookExpo America this year, which runs May 30 to June 1 in NYC.  Still I have a steady pile of books already to read so it’s probably okay that I won’t be there to acquire another pile.  Will you be going to either of these, or any other book festivals this spring?  Unfortunately I will not, but in the meantime, I will leave you with a few brief reviews of what I finished lately.

Joe Biden’s 2017 memoir “Promise Me, Dad: A Year of Hope, Hardship, and Purpose”  was a book that was lying around my parents’ house when I visited them recently.  It had been a Christmas gift to my dad, and I snatched it up realizing it’d be a fast read.  The memoir chronicles a year in the life of the former vice president starting from Thanksgiving 2014, when his eldest son (Beau) was being treated for a malignant brain tumor and his survival was uncertain. The illness was kept secret for most of the time at his son’s request.

While dealing with that, Biden was also working full tilt as VP, which he writes about, attending to crises in Ukraine, Iraq and Central America, and going to such funerals as those for the two police officers fatally shot in NYC and the victims of the Charleston church shooting. He purposely sought to remain busy (so as not to fall apart), on top of being there for his son’s procedures at the Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.

The personal parts about his family’s dilemma regarding Beau’s health and his fight against cancer are quite moving and emotional in the book, and his insights into his work as VP are also interesting. He comes off as quite sincere, down to earth, and devoted to his incredibly close family and his life’s work in government and elective office, giving his personal phone number, for example, to a grieving father whose son was killed to call him if he needs someone to talk to. Other parts of the book in which he recounts his accomplishments and expertise were less enticing to read: as if he were saying on a number of occasions look at all the things I’ve done, which came off rather PR-ish.  

Once Beau passes (in May 2015 at age 46), the memoir veers into handling the grief and the VP’s agonizing decision whether to run for the presidency in 2016, which his son wanted him to do.  He had various people working on his bid for it, and seemed well situated, he writes, but then right at the last moment he decides not to run, saying he wasn’t fully committed after the death of his son. 

His whole lead up in the book and emphasis on running for the 2016 presidency — made me wonder a lot about what would have happened if he had run? I didn’t realize he was so close to it at time. Would he have won?  I guess I now bemoan the fact that he didn’t run, even though I wasn’t really focused on him as a candidate at the time (he’d be better than who’s in there now, right?). It seems the book sort of leaves open the door perhaps for him to run in 2020.  Hmm. Did he mean it to be?

Next up, I read Scottish author Gail Honeyman’s 2017 bestselling novel “Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine.”  Am I the last one to read it?  Honestly I didn’t know a thing about it before I started it … other than it was very popular, and in the end — I must say — I found it entertaining and moving and I thoroughly enjoyed it.  Sure, some people are going to pooh-pooh it because it’s now apparently considered part of a genre known as “up lit,” which includes such novels as Rachel Joyce’s “The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry,”  Graeme Simsion’s “The Rosie Project,”  and Jojo Moyes’s “Me Before You.”   Okay so I’ve read all those and am a bit of a sucker for stories with heart.  “Kick me” is likely written on my back. 

But what the heck is “up lit”?  Apparently according to the Guardian newspaper, it took off a couple years ago and includes novels about kindness, compassion and maybe even communities coming together. As author Rachel Joyce explains: “It’s about facing devastation, cruelty, hardship and loneliness and then saying: ‘But there is still this.’ Kindness isn’t just giving somebody something when you have everything. Kindness is having nothing and then holding out your hand.”

Holy smokes, what did I know, but perhaps it sounds a bit goofier than it really is.  As for Eleanor Oliphant, it’s a story about a 30-year-old, anti-social, lonely girl in Glasgow, Scotland, whose chance friendship with a new IT guy at work (Raymond) and an elderly collapsed man they assist from the street to a hospital (Sammy) — help her confront the demons of her past.  The story is both funny and quite dark too.   The poor girl has had a seriously rough childhood, went through the foster care system, and is left with a scar across one side of her face. She goes home after each workweek not talking to a soul from Friday to Monday except her plant, Polly, and a bottle of vodka.  (Though is there anything wrong with that? just saying …) Yet these two blokes end up, in lovely ways, bringing her out of her shell. 

Apparently the author created the story after reading an article about loneliness on young people. Gail Honeyman is no slouch as a debut author  and executes the story in masterful ways.  The novel has been longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction and Reese Witherspoon’s company apparently has bought the film rights. Now which actress would make a good Eleanor Oliphant?  It has to be a 30-year-old-ish girl, lost, damaged, clueless but smart, direct with no filters in what she says, and with a slim chance of being saved. Hmm I’m drawing a bit of a blank at the moment but perhaps Evan Rachel Wood might suffice or maybe one of the Olsen twins. Who’s your pick? 

Last up, I listened to the audiobook of Supreme Court Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s 2013 memoir “My Beloved World,”  which I had always been curious about. I recently seem to have gotten into the justices’ stories after watching the documentary of “RBG” (Ruth Bader Ginsburg) at the Sundance film festival.  These women on the court are like astronauts, are they not? They start from humble beginnings yet accomplish so much.  

Sotomayor’s memoir focuses quite a bit on her youth — as a Puerto Rican American who found out quite early on that she had Type 1 diabetes and would need to give herself insulin shots for the rest of her life.  She grew up in a housing project in the Bronx part of NYC with a younger brother.  Her father was an alcoholic who died when she was 9 and her mother, who was distant to her during those years, worked as a nurse. It was her grandmother who she spent time with her who gave her love and support and Sonia excelled at school, graduating valedictorian of her Catholic high school. 

It’s quite an incredible story how she went on to a full scholarship at Princeton (graduating in 1976) and then Yale Law School (1979) and to her life as a lawyer and then judge.  I found her telling to be quite earnest and straightforward chronologically and her life to be marked by a great degree of self-reliance, hard work, integrity, and determination. She was often in situations she knew nothing about and would have to learn about them from scratch to succeed. Time and again, she would rise to the challenge. 

I liked hearing about the personal side of her life and family life — how she came to marry her childhood sweetheart and why that marriage didn’t work out; her relations with her mother; and the closeness of her cousin and grandmother and the pain of eventually losing them. But there were other parts (maybe the law and career parts) that I thought were a bit too dry and methodical. (Perhaps it might have been more interesting if I were a lawyer.) Some of it read like a tale from a life of self-improvement.

So while I didn’t find it the most thrilling of memoirs (it stops before her Supreme Court nomination), I still was impressed by what she was able to accomplish and her integrity and work ethic.  I now realize that her life was shaped a good deal by her diabetes and her Puerto Rican heritage.  It made me wonder what she thought of the recovery efforts in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria on Puerto Rico. Yikes. 

What about you … have you read any of these and if so, what did you think?

Greetings, I wasn’t able to go to one of the Marches for Our Lives on Saturday, but I want to salute all the students (and parents) who participated and are leading the way on demanding action against gun violence. I was impressed, inspired, and moved by the students’ stories and I’m a big supporter of the cause: Go! I’m hopeful that this next generation will spur changes to enact sensible gun control (against bump stocks, AR-15s, and high capacity gun magazines — no, not trying to take away all the tooting guns) where nothing else has worked in the past. Is it any wonder that countries around the globe with less guns, less histories with guns, and just basic gun control have nowhere near the gun violence as the U.S. I would’ve gone to a March if I could have, but I’m out in the sticks of SoCal at the moment visiting my dear parents.

It’s been nice to be here, where spring is underway and there’s a bit of green foliage to behold despite the usually very dry, desert environs. A bit of rain has helped out this past week and month and things are in bloom. I can smell blossoms from the orange trees as I pass by and the trees are full with fruit: all kinds of citrus, and avocados too. It’s a nice novelty as back home everything is still under a layer of snow. Fresh OJ is quite a treat to me here and even the warmth of the sun.

This past week I finished off two more novels in the family/domestic drama genre. I don’t have a set plan to read these types of stories but somehow they seem to lure or find me. The first one I read falls into the mental illness fiction category (think perhaps “Girl, Interrupted” or Adam Haslett’s recent “Imagine Me Gone”) and the second one (I listened to as an audiobook) fell into the marital infidelity genre, which includes … oh just about a ton of novels. Both though had a freshness about them that seemed worth pursuing, and both were by debut novelists. So without further ado, here they are:

Mira T. Lee’s novel “Everything Here Is Beautiful” received quite the hype when it came out in January, with such authors as Celeste Ng, Ruth Ozeki, Rufi Thorpe, and Imbolo Mbue praising it highly. The cover too is quite alluring and I was curious to snag it from the library as I had a close friend who struggled with mental health issues.

It’s a story about two Chinese American sisters, whose mother dies when they are young adults and they are left to face their future. The older one, Miranda, is responsible and the protector of the younger one, Lucia, who is very bright, lively, and popular, but also headstrong and impetuous. She marries an Israeli East Village shop owner and writes for a newspaper. All is well for a while until she wants a baby, which her husband doesn’t, and the mental illness she thought was cured returns.

So launches this semi-sprawling novel, mainly about Lucia, her chronic mental illness that comes in episodes, and those around her who love her and try to help. Lucia later, after her marriage ends, hooks up with Manny, an undocumented Ecuadoran immigrant  in Westchester County, New York, has a baby, and moves to Ecuador, close to his family. While her sister, Miranda, moves to Switzerland with her doctor boyfriend. Ecuador proves a warm and stabilizing place for Lucia, Manny and their baby but all is not smooth sailing, and her sister is called on over the years to try to help with Lucia’s lapses. The realistic ending, which I can’t say more about, brings the situation — the problems that so many people face — all down home.

It’s a read that started off slowly for me as I was getting a handle on the characters and the narrative that alternates among the sisters and partners, but then it picked up towards the end. I liked how the story highlighted the heartache, exhausting efforts, and trouble mental illness can cause not only to the person suffering from it, but also to the people who love them.

I also liked the book’s various viewpoints and location changes, but I guess I was expecting a bit more of an interaction between the sisters and their bond (perhaps due to how the book’s marketed); mostly they are separated in the story and there wasn’t enough I felt about or from Miranda. Still the novel affected me. It’s quite an involved read, not necessarily dense but there’s a lot squeezed into it, which takes considerable focus. Still it’s well written and the author is obviously talented. I wasn’t sure if it was a biographical tale taken from the author’s own life, but she seemed to put a lot into it.

Next up, I finished the audiobook of Julia Pierpont’s 2015 novel “Among the Ten Thousand Things,” about a family in NYC whose two kids (ages 11 and 15) inadvertently discover a box of hundreds of lascivious emails their father had written to his former mistress, which she had mailed to their house to get back at him. Yikes. This is the beginning of the unraveling of their family, ending their lives as they once knew it.

It’s essentially a story about their daily lives thereafter, the turns they take, and how the husband’s affair affects everyone in the family — including himself, who’s a well-known conceptual artist, the wife who gave up her career as a ballet dancer to be a mom, and their two kids who are coming of age and face their own struggles.

Surprisingly, midway through — in Part 2 of a 4 part story — the author tells what happens to their lives, the conclusion, and then backs up and returns in Part 3 and 4 to tell their present existence. It’s quite a tactic that threw me for a bit of a loop. I had to revisit it a couple times. Suspense apparently isn’t the point of the story, it’s more the characters lives and how they go on incrementally.

I would like to say it worked, but I think the story lost some steam for me. In places I think it lagged or meandered and I didn’t really like any of the characters much or the place each of them are at: such as the father who thinks the bygone affair is overblown and he should be forgiven, or the mother who seems sort of inert, or the son with his video games and teenage behavior. Maybe the young, shy daughter Kay who writes amusing Seinfeld fan fiction is the best of the lot.

Despite not loving the novel, I thought the author showed talent in her writing of their domestic situation, including some perceptive details and observations along the way. I wouldn’t be opposed to checking out her next novel.

What about you — have you read either of these books, and if so, what did you think — and what is happening in your neck of the woods?

Is everyone starting to get spring fever, or is it just me? Well the season officially begins this week so get ready. Wahoo. Presently we have light snowflakes coming down here, but I can tell things are changing and warming up. In the photo at left is the little river valley we live near. I walk our dog along there and she swims in the river all summer. It’s a nice area and sometimes I’ll see a woodpecker, bald eagle, coyote, or an owl along the way.

This week I’m headed to visit my parents in California and I’m sure it’ll feel like a slice of heaven flying into Palm Springs. It usually does, with the San Jacinto Mountains in the background. I get about six days in SoCal so I’m thinking I’ll get a lot of reading done on my spring break, or at least I’m planning to. The novel I’m partially into right now — Mira T. Lee’s debut “Everything Here Is Beautiful” — is not entirely captivating me just yet, but I’m hoping that will change.

Meanwhile I finished A.J. Finn’s psychological thriller “The Woman in the Window.” I started it as an audiobook but somewhere along the line the library copy ran out on me — but just then by some miracle the library print edition became available to me so I finished reading it. It was quite a coincidence since some 532 people here are on the wait list to get their paws on one of the 70 copies the library has of it.  (Hmm shouldn’t they be reading something more important like “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House”? Ha. Actually that book has 482 library holds on it here. Glad to see people are paying attention.)

Surely people need an escape and “The Woman in the Window”  has been immensely popular ever since it came out in January amid all the hype. Apparently the movie rights to it were bought even before the book’s publication date: holy smokes. Not to mention the author (writing under a pseudonym) was offered a $2 million, two-book deal for it at the publishing house — William Morrow –where he worked as a book editor. No word yet on who will play the novel’s kooky main character, though I’ll put in a word for Jennifer Jason Leigh, ha. She’d be perfect for it, if not for being a bit too old; this character is around 38 years of age. Hmm. But perhaps I could change that for the film version?

Someone on Goodreads said “The Woman in the Window” is like a cross between Ruth Ware’s thriller “Woman in Cabin 10” and Paula Hawkins’s “The Girl on the Train.” Since I haven’t read Ware’s book, I’ll substitute in Dennis Lehane’s “Shutter Island,” which was a particularly crazy read. Whatever the comparison, it’s among the genre of psychological thrillers that has certainly exploded in popularity over the past 10 years. I’m not a glutton for all these kinds of books — and missing people murders — but I get to a few of them for their page-turning qualities.

This one has a pretty nutty narrator (Anna Fox), a 38-year-old child psychologist who’s separated from her husband and daughter and has been holed up inside their Manhattan townhouse the past 10 months with a severe case of agoraphobia. She’s a pill-popping wino (she likes her Merlot), who watches old classic movies and spies on her neighbors across the park … that is until one day she sees a crime happen that she reports, but no one believes her. Her world then begins to unravel. Is she right, is she wrong — is she losing her mind? What really happened?

Oh this is a fast, twisty one. I was so gullible too, the author could’ve pointed me to a cliff and I probably would’ve fallen off it, LOL. Anna Fox drove me a bit batty at times with her ineptness and the boozy haze she’s under, but on the whole I thought the thriller was well done and entertaining — it plays out much like the classic films it pays homage to such as Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rear Window.” It’s neat in that way — and I probably should brush up on my viewing of “Rear Window” and “Gaslight” after reading this. As I said, I didn’t foresee the twists along the way or the whodunit — perhaps I should have — but instead I gullibly went along guessing between those the plot pointed me to, which proved oh so wrong. Shame on me.

What about you — have you read this one, and what is going on in your neck of the woods?

March seems to be passing by quickly so I better get on the ball. I’ve been slow to write reviews. Perhaps I’m having a bit of a writer’s block or just procrastinating. Do you ever get this — where the writing doesn’t flow or you just stall completely? Oh it’s dreadful. Meanwhile the big snow piles here are beginning to melt and warmer temps this coming week should make ponds of water all over the place. It’ll be messy for sure. Time for the galoshes. At least I’ll be able to take some photos now; during the cold temps the iPhone would just turn itself off, but now it’ll have no more excuses — and neither will I. So here are my reviews of what I finished recently.

Tayari Jones’s new novel “An American Marriage” has certainly been one of the “It” books this season. It seems to be everywhere from Oprah’s Book Club pick — to various blogs — as well as the New York Times’s book podcast. I decided not to wait for a library copy but went ahead and bought it at a bookstore, which is a rarity for me — a splurge or sorts, but I knew it’d be a good, quick read, and for the most part the book did not disappoint, even with all the hype.

For those who don’t know, it’s a novel about an African American couple that has been married a little over a year when their lives are torn apart when the husband is arrested and convicted in Louisiana of a crime he did not commit. Part of the novel is told in letters between them while the husband is in prison and the rest is about what happens to their marriage when he gets out years later. The whole injustice of it tears at them as well as the loss of their lives together and the uncertainty of how much and long they can endure. Meanwhile parents, in-laws, and old friends and loves come into play.

Oh it’s quite well done. And what I liked about it too is that although the story focuses mainly on their marriage — there’s the underlying subtext of being black in America today — with the disproportionate incarceration rates and the racial injustices that occur. You get a sense of this and feel its ramifications in the story as well as the class tensions that simmer between the characters. The wife is a successful artist (with wealthy parents) who has a line of dolls on the market, while the husband is a textbook sales rep (with small-town folks) who loses everything when he’s imprisoned.

The story picks up as it goes along. And you feel from each of the characters’ perspectives: the husband (Roy), the wife (Celestial) and her close neighborhood friend Andre. All of them get damaged and share some blame. And none of them are without faults and you might not even like them, but you see the personal toll the situation takes on them. I was impressed by the author — her well-crafted novel is mainly a romantic drama but is infused with a bit more too.

Next up, I finished the audiobook of Robin Sloan’s 2012 debut novel “Mr. Penumbra’s 24-hour Bookstore.” Oh I know so many readers loved this rollicking, fun tale and I so wanted to too, but somewhere along the line I got a bit derailed. It’s true I liked the start of it — about this hole in the wall bookstore in San Francisco and this geeky programmer Clay who takes a job there working nights and discovers it’s not a typical bookstore but has some sort of secret book club going on … where the books are part of some vast code, a code the book borrowers have been trying to crack for centuries.

Okay, okay I was in on this, but then the storyline veers off into techno as Clay and a motley crew of geeks he assembles tries to break the code using computers — and a bit of madcap adventure ensues with a nerdy heist, gadgets and a secret society.

It’s not that I minded the madcap part of it — I enjoyed much of that, but I guess I didn’t care enough about breaking the code and solving the mystery part of the plot. Some of it might have gone whizzing by me, or else I got Googled out along the way. It’s too bad because I quite liked the author’s quirky second novel — “Sourdough” — last year, though he’s known for Mr. Penumbra’s tale more.

He’s an author who definitely likes secret societies and underground mysteries and has an amusing sensibility. He likes to geek around with technology too. All of which is cool, but for some reason this story didn’t resonant with me as much as his second novel did — but still Mr. Sloan is quite a quirky, smart author so I’m sure to keep following what he puts out next.

Last up, I also finished the audiobook of Betty Smith’s 1943 classic “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.” This was my first time with the novel and why I had never visited it before I can’t tell you — it just didn’t cross my path as a youngster, nor did the 1945 movie of it.

It’s quite a lengthy book and took me weeks of walking miles with my dog to finish it. I feel like I became part of the Nolan family as it chronicles quite closely Francie’s story growing up in Brooklyn, N.Y., with her parents Katie and Johnny and her younger brother Neeley over a long period of time — starting when Francie’s young in 1912 to when she leaves for college. Perhaps she seemed a bit to me like a young Laura Ingalls Wilder but of Irish American descent living in Brooklyn, N.Y., instead of on the prairie. Or maybe not?

I liked the coming of age aspects of the book and that it shows a slice of life of what it was like in the first two decades of the 20th century — it’s an interesting social history of those days. The family and Francie face a lot of adversity from poverty and their father’s alcoholism and yet they persevere and find a way to make ends meet time and again. She also doesn’t have friends but makes do with books and her own imagination.

It seems Francie learns quite a bit along the way, which is admirable, along with her love of her family and its extended members. (Thanks Aunt Sissy for being unconventional.) The telling is at times sentimental but their lives aren’t easy. I probably would’ve liked it more if I had read it in my youth — as it captures a young person’s mind-set and coming of age quite well and the struggles of a family.

What about you — have you read these novels and if so, what did you think?

It’s been a bit of a slow reading month for me perhaps because my mind has been distracted on other things, notably getting done some home renovations, officiating a tennis tournament, and absorbing the very troubling news out of the States on the latest school shooting in Parkland, Fla., and why there isn’t sensible gun control on semiautomatic rifles and who can get them. My big hope is that there will be a breakthrough on getting something accomplished, thanks to the Parkland students leading the way. Enough is indeed enough.

Meanwhile it’s been freezing here. For as mild as winter was in November and most of December, it’s been hitting hard this month with temps often in the single digits if not 0 degrees Fahrenheit, making it apparently the coldest February in nearly 25 years here. Hmm, what the heck? Surely I’m dreaming of spring days now, though it’s still quite a ways off. The only one who likes this cold is my trusty book assistant, pictured at left.

Luckily some of the Olympics has been a good reprieve this week. The women’s hockey game between Canada and the U.S. was as usual very close and exciting; it came down to the wire, needing a second OT shoot-out to decide the Gold medal. My insides were torn apart for both teams. And I was totally stoked to see the U.S. team of Jessie Diggins and Kikkan Randall win Gold in the cross-country team sprint (the country’s first medal ever in a women’s cross-country event). Wow it was an all-out rush and mega effort down the home stretch. And watching the downhill skiing action wasn’t too shabby either. So thanks for these antidotes. And now, I’ll leave you with reviews of what I finished this past week.

Oh yes, it was about time I got around to “The Power.” This novel by Naomi Alderman won the Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction and made a lot of Best Of Lists last year, including at the New York Times.

Gracious, I had no idea what I was getting into — I just thought it was a speculative tale about teenage girls around the globe who develop the ability to send an electrical charge from their body that alters the balance of power between the sexes and on Earth — which indeed it is — but whoa, there’s a lot more to it than that. This is no simple Hunger Games action tale. This lively novel is stuffed to the gills — both thematically and satirically with an array of storylines and characters — and you’ll need to be on your toes to drink it all in.

I began listening to it as an audiobook, and though the production was top-notch, I yearned midway through for the print version so I could better follow its various directions and people. Basically its storyline chronicles the early days of matriarchy’s rise around the world through the experiences of four characters whose tribulations alternate the book’s chapters.

There’s Tunde, a Nigerian photojournalist who begins to document the global phenomena; and Margo, a U.S. politician who tries to hide her power and win over her electorate; as well Allie, an abused foster child who escapes to a convent and reinvents herself as healer Mother Eve; and my favorite, Roxy Monke, who’s the daughter of a London crime boss that finds she has a particularly potent electrical charge. These four become quite intriguing to follow and offer various perspectives that converge on the newly declared nation of “Bessapara,” previously Moldova, where the former sex-trafficking capital of the world becomes a staging ground for the new world order.

Oh my, at first I didn’t know what to make of all of what was going on and was a bit overwhelmed by the storylines that stray and converge periodically, like Whaa? It’s a bit complex narratively, and make no mistake: it’s a violent tale that does not involve a feminist utopia with a lot of peace, love and understanding. Instead there’s rampant brutality and war and the newly discovered female power is abused.

The story’s got some humor to it (thankfully), and politics, religion and sex too (with a bit of zap) to it — not to mention payback against abusive men. Early on, I almost set aside the novel as a DNF (for its sporadic-ness?) but then held on and got hooked on the character of Roxy Monke somewhere along the way, and Tunde too. Both face some rough misfortunes and journey far and wide, which kept me closely tuned in. The inventive ending surprised and amused me too, but I will leave that to you to find out on your own.

Surely Naomi Alderman drank from the kool-aid acid test in creating this novel and seems at the height of her powers. It’s a tale that’s busting from the seams with subversive ideas and satirical wisdom. It might not have held me as much as Emily St. John Mandel’s novel “Station Eleven” did, but I came to like Roxy Monke quite a bit and admire Alderman’s obviously immense talent. Her characters and vision quite literally lit up the stratosphere.

Next up, I finished reading Xhenet Aliu’s debut novel “Brass,” which is set in Waterbury, Conn., and is about the lives of a mother (Elsie) and her daughter (Luljeta), told in alternating chapters taking place when they’re both coming of age in their late teens. It’s a story that captures a once-bustling factory town — back when the brass mills were still open — full of immigrant workers that’s turned into a dead-end place (when the story starts in 1996) where people are stuck with little prospects and can’t seem to leave.

Elsie, a granddaughter of Lithuanian immigrants, is a waitress at the Betsy Ross diner when she falls in love as a teen with an Albanian line cook who comes to the States chasing dreams, but when she finds out she’s unexpectedly  pregnant she must grapple with trying to hold on to him and wondering if his heart is back with the love he left behind in Europe. Flash forward 17 years, and her daughter Luljeta makes a fateful decision to find the father she never knew on the day she gets beaten up at school and receives a rejection letter from NYU.

You get the picture of these alternating storylines, which kept my interest. The novel includes some sharp writing particularly of these protagonists trying to escape their fates in this dead-end town, though I seemed to like the chapters about the mother’s teen life more than the daughter’s, perhaps because there seemed more depth and emphasis on hers. Also I was looking for a bit more from the novel’s ending and could’ve used a little more on the mother and daughter’s relationship other than what’s reflected from their separate teen lives. Still you get the gist of what’s handed down between them from their circumstances and of their dreams lost. There’s plenty to ponder by the end and I felt the story’s many emotions.

What about you — have you read either of these and if so, what did you think?