Tag Archives: American authors

#BookReview ‘Some Luck’ by Jane Smiley #historical #familylife

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It is 1920, the eve of Walter Langdon’s 25th birthday and he is walking the fields of his Iowa farm. The first two pages of Some Luck by Jane Smiley are a wonderful description of him watching a pair of owls nesting in a big elm tree. And so starts the first book in the ‘Last Hundred Years’ trilogy about the Langdon family. Chapter-by-chapter it tells of the family’s life, their farm, the ups and downs of daily life, births and deaths, and always the land.  Jane SmileyAt first it feels as if not much is happening. Smiley is so good at the detail: of Walter farming, Rosanna doing the laundry, babies being born, growing into toddlers and then pupils walking the track to the tiny school where they are taught with their neighbours in one classroom, all ages together. Steadily the chapters, and years, march on. The eldest child Frankie goes away to college and then to war, becoming a sniper in Africa and Europe. His younger brother Joe shows no inclination to leave the farm. Lillian, ‘God’s own gift’, the beautiful daughter, meets a man and goes to Washington DC. And so more babies arrive into the Langdon’s household, and the family’s life expands from Iowa as this next generation lives in a world
I came to this book fresh after reading A Thousand Acres and eager for more. Reading Jane Smiley is a little like reading a novel by Colm Tóibín. Both writers excel at the detail, building the story slowly, like layers of frost thickening on a window in winter which starts off looking cloudy and finishes as an intricate design. As a reader, I trust both authors to deliver in the end. Will I be reading the next two books in the trilogy? Definitely. Some Luck is a book to be read over a quiet winter weekend, hunkered down on the sofa with an endless supply of mugs of hot chocolate. Don’t read it in short snatches, it deserves more than that and it will get beneath
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE ABOUT THIS BOOK AT AMAZON

Click the title below to read my reviews of other novels by Jane Smiley:-
A DANGEROUS BUSINESS
A THOUSAND ACRES
EARLY WARNING [LAST HUNDRED YEARS #2]
GOLDEN AGE  [LAST HUNDRED YEARS #3]

If you like this, try:-
‘Life Class’ by Pat Barker
‘Rush Oh!’ by Shirley Barrett
‘The Museum of You’ by Carys Bray

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview SOME LUCK by Jane Smiley http://wp.me/p5gEM4-1m7 via @SandraDanby

#BookReview ‘A Thousand Acres’ by Jane Smiley #contemporary #family

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This is one of those books that I should have read years ago. I don’t know why I didn’t, and I wish I had. the latest book by Jane Smiley, Some Luck, is the first of a new trilogy and is currently sitting on my Kindle waiting to be read. But first, I felt I should read that book I wish I’d read years ago: A Thousand Acres. You know: the one that won the Pulitzer, the one that mirrors King Lear, etc etc. Jane SmileyThe setting is Iowa, remote farmland. The first page took me straight to that wonderful description of In Cold Blood, Truman Capote’s description of Kansas, more remote farmland. ‘The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call ‘out there’.’
Being a farmer’s daughter, I was soon immersed in the detail of the Cook family’s daily life on their Iowa farm ‘out there’: the drainage of the land, spreading manure, moisture levels, the hogs, the purchase of a new tractor, yields, profit and loss.
Smiley had my attention straight away. Overlaid over the groundwork of farming are the daily lives of the family members: Larry, the aging father, and the two daughters, Rose and Ginny and their husbands, who stayed on the farm. A peripheral character is Caroline, the third daughter, the one who got away, now a lawyer, who visits her father but doesn’t interact much with her sisters. Both farming sisters are used to tragedy: Rose is recovering from breast cancer, Ginny has suffered five miscarriages. But they get on with life, because that’s the pragmatic approach to life they were taught.
Then two things happen and everything changes. Out of the blue, Larry says he is leaving the thousand acre farm to Rose and Ginny, nothing to Caroline. And the son of a neighbouring farmer, who had gone to Canada to avoid the Vietnam draft, returns. From this point, the family slowly unravels as the traumatic past stories are told alongside the unfolding modern-day traumas, set against the empty Iowa horizon and a neighbourhood where there are no secrets.
I couldn’t put this book down although it is in no way a page-turning thriller. It’s all about the characters: I wanted to know what happened to them in the past as children that turned them into the adults they are now. Is family everything? Will they stay together and keep the thousand acres together? There is a new generation of Cook children, Rose has two daughters. Will the thousand acres be preserved for them to inherit, or will they escape the empty landscape of rural Iowa as Caroline did?
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE ABOUT THIS BOOK AT AMAZON

Click the title below to read my reviews of other novels by Jane Smiley:-
A DANGEROUS BUSINESS
SOME LUCK [LAST HUNDRED YEARS #1]
EARLY WARNING [LAST HUNDRED YEARS #2]
GOLDEN AGE  [LAST HUNDRED YEARS #3]

If you like this, try:-
‘Housekeeping’ by Marilynne Robinson
‘Love is Blind’ by William Boyd
‘Poor Caroline’ by Winifred Holtby

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview A THOUSAND ACRES by Jane Smiley via @SandraDanby http://wp.me/p5gEM4-1kk

#BookReview ‘If I Knew You Were Going to be This Beautiful..’ by Judy Chicurel #contemporary

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The early ‘70s, Comanche Beach, Long Island. An American rural seaside community where the teens hang about and young men return home from Vietnam. Jobs are scarce, the young are leaving for the city, and teenager Katie loves a veteran who seems disconnected from the world. This novel by Judy Chicurel has the longest title I’ve ever come across. The full title is If I Knew You Were Going to be This Beautiful, I Never Would Have Let You Go. I’m intrigued whether it was the author’s choice or the publisher’s. I can just hear the conversations about front cover design. Judy ChicurelKatie has finished school and is hanging around town for the summer, drinking egg cream sodas at Eddy’s during the day, spending lazy nights at the lounge in The Starlight Hotel. As she and her friends worry about ‘doing it’ and hickeys and mascara, their love interest is split into boys and soldiers. The girls continue to have crushes on the best-looking guys with bleached hair and suntanned arms, but they struggle to connect with these flawed men [mentally and physically flawed] who have seen American and Vietnamese blood bloom in rivers so it looks like lilies. “I see this, like… this giant… blossom, the biggest blossom I’ve ever seen, right on the river, like this unbelievably beautiful flower just floating on the river, getting bigger and bigger, like it was taking over the river, right?” Like the river was a big, fucking, flowing flower!”
The narrative spine of the book is Katie’s longing for Luke, a crush on an older boy who goes away to fight and comes back a man, solitary, silent. As her friends get pregnant and marry, Katie continues to long for Luke to look at her, to speak to her. This is a tender picture of growing up, becoming an adult, slowly like Katie or suddenly like Luke. Cut into Katie’s narrative are the stories of the people around her, all come together to draw a picture of a decaying seaside community in 1972 at a time when America struggled to cope with returning veterans maimed in mind and limb. A well-written debut. I will watch out for the next novel by Judy Chicurel.

If you like this, try:-
‘A Sudden Light’ by Garth Stein
‘Vinegar Girl’ by Anne Tyler
‘Summertime’ by Vanessa Lafaye

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview IF I KNEW YOU WERE… by Judy Chicurel http://wp.me/p5gEM4-1gL via @SandraDanby

#BookReview ‘The Signature of all Things’ by @GilbertLiz #historical

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I’ve never read Eat Pray Love, never seen the film, and didn’t know what to expect from The Signature of all Things by Elizabeth Gilbert, not having read any reviews. I don’t know why, but I half expected not to like it. Very unfair of me, and completely wrong. Elizabeth GilbertFirst it’s a historical novel, not what I anticipated at all, starting with 18th century luckster, thief and botanist Henry Whittaker and later moving onto his daughter Alma. Born near Kew Gardens in London, son of a poor horticulturalist, Henry lifts himself out of poverty thanks to Jesuit’s bark, the newly-discovered treatment for malaria. He makes one fortune at home in Kew, stealing plants from Kew Gardens and selling them to wealthy protectors, he makes another fortune in the Far East by commercially cultivating Jesuit’s bark, and makes a third fortune in America where he imports medicinal plants from around the world, then raises native American plants and exports them abroad, so the holds of his ships never sail empty.
The opening paragraph of the book tells us of the birth of Henry’s daughter Alma, and then she is not mentioned again until part two. Alma is born to Henry and his Dutch wife Beatrix when they are settled into Philadelphia, he becomes the richest man in town and the third richest in the western hemisphere. The Dutch connection is important, but how important is not discovered until much later in the book. The Whittakers do not have much time for society and society doesn’t much like them, finding their manners a little coarse and their pedigree poor.
Alma grows up, encouraged to question everything, note everything down, and at an early age she will not let go of a question until she has an answer. “She wanted to understand the world, and she made a habit of chasing down information to its last hiding place, as though the fate of nations were at stake in every instance. She demanded to know why a pony was not a baby horse. She demanded to know why sparks were born when she drew her hand across her sheets on a hot summer’s night.” Henry encourages this precociousness, Beatrix schools her in Dutch pragmatism.
Plants are the background to the story of this family, plants are their life, their business, and fill their appreciation every day. As a nine-year old, Alma learns one summer to tell the time by the opening and closing of the flowers. At 7am the dandelions bloom, at 3pm they fold. She must be home with her hands washed when the globeflower closes and the evening primrose begins to open.
Alma is the heart and soul of this novel, a pragmatic and at times challenging woman. Despite this, I quickly warmed to her and her life’s investigation of mosses. Moss, and Alma’s inability to stop asking questions, leads her around the globe in a story that entranced me. I didn’t know where it would lead next.

If you like this, try:-
‘Barkskins’ by Annie Proulx
‘A Sudden Light’ by Garth Stein
‘Summertime’ by Vanessa Lafaye

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview THE SIGNATURE OF ALL THINGS by @GilbertLiz via @SandraDanby http://wp.me/p5gEM4-DG