Tag Archives: Jane Smiley

#BookReview ‘A Dangerous Business’ by Jane Smiley #historical #mystery

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Gold Rush California 1851. In Monterey, young women are going missing. Assumed to be whores, the authorities take no notice. So two prostitutes Eliza and Jean decide to investigate the disappearances. The principal suspects are their clients. A Dangerous Business by Jane Smiley is a book I didn’t want to put down, not in the way a thriller makes you want to read one more page but with a curiosity about Eliza’s prospects. Jane SmileyInspired by Edgar Allen Poe’s fictional detective Dupin – which Jean insists is pronounced ‘DuPANN’ – they begin to look for clues, looking at their surroundings more cautiously than ever before. Eliza re-reads Poe, ‘What struck her the most about Dupin was that he could look at all sorts of injury and destruction and still keep thinking in what you might call a cold and logical way.’ At times they investigate more by instinct than clue, but Smiley keeps us interested in Eliza. She is the heart of the book. She tells the story as she seeks clues in between doing business with her clients.
Life in Monterey is free and wild. People come and go without notice, ships arrive and leave, ranchers build houses in wild country, which means plenty of customers for Eliza at Mrs Parks’ establishment. The two women are unsure how many other girls are presumed to have left town but are really dead. After they find a body hidden beneath bushes, Eliza suspects everyone. The friends explore remote tracks up the hillsides on rented horses and this experience is to prove useful.
Both women are taking in a pause in their lives, rootless, with no reason to return home, they are earning a living while deciding what to do next and where to go. Eliza swings between finding the occasional client attractive and then wondering if he is the murderer. Jean, who works in a brothel for the female trade, occasionally dresses as a man and passes convincingly on the street in her disguise. She toys with the idea of a life on the stage in San Francisco. Smiley is an expert at building character layer on layer. She is also good at letting the girls’ imaginations run wild though this is not a crime story with threat and danger around every corner.
More a historical mystery than a crime novel, A Dangerous Business is a different subject for Smiley. But at the heart of the novel are her observations of women’s lives, the experience of women on the edge of civilization in Gold Rush California and what it means to be a woman alone at this time.
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 THOUSAND ACRES
SOME LUCK [LAST HUNDRED YEARS #1]
EARLY WARNING [LAST HUNDRED YEARS #2]
GOLDEN AGE  [LAST HUNDRED YEARS #3]

If you like this, try:-
‘Frog Music’ by Emma Donoghue
‘The Dance Tree’ by Karen Millwood Hargrave
‘At The Edge of The Orchard’ by Tracy Chevalier

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview A DANGEROUS BUSINESS by Jane Smiley https://wp.me/p2ZHJe-6sa via @SandraDanby

COMING SOON… THE NEXT BOOK I REVIEW WILL BE:- Rory Clements

#BookReview ‘Golden Age’ by Jane Smiley #historical #familylife

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When I go on holiday I see a lot of people around the pool reading ‘family sagas’, usually a historical setting, based on one or two families, with characters that lock you in. That’s what the ‘Last Hundred Years’ trilogy by Jane Smiley is like. In the first book, Some Luck, I studied the family tree at the front. It started with the two key figures, Walter and Rosanna Langdon. The names in the future generations, stretching to the bottom of the page meant nothing. I was interested in Walter and Rosanna’s story. In Golden Age, the final instalment, I became locked into the story of those names at the bottom of the family tree, the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the Langdons. Jane SmileyThe story opens with an arrival, a newcomer to the family introducing himself. No-one can see forsee at that time what role will be played by Charlie Wickett and how his appearance reverberates through the Langdon generations. The story is a fascinating journey through American history including Richie becoming a congressman, his twin brother Michael, the Machiavellian one of the family, makes his fortune and loses it again on Wall Street. Walter’s great-grandson Guthrie fights in Iraq and comes home damaged. Guthrie’s sister Felicity studies environmental science and worries for the fate of the family farm, managed by her father Jesse. Jesse feels threatened by the huge agricultural conglomerates buying up his neighbours, by the development of technology which fails to counter the negative effects of soil erosion.
Throughout this trilogy, I read with a knowledge of world events and how they might possibly cross the paths of the Langdon family. This added to my curiosity. Smiley finishes the story in 2019 with a few guesses at what history has in store for us. I was sad to finish this book. This is a trilogy to read and re-read, and it will stand the test of time.
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
SOME LUCK [LAST HUNDRED YEARS #1]
EARLY WARNING  [LAST HUNDRED YEARS #2]

If you like this, try:-
‘A Little Life’ by Hanya Yanagihara
‘The Goldfinch’ by Donna Tartt
‘The Last Runaway’ by Tracy Chevalier

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview GOLDEN AGE by Jane Smiley via @SandraDanby http://wp.me/p5gEM4-2gp

#BookReview ‘Early Warning’ by Jane Smiley #historical #familylife

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Early Warning opens with a funeral, Frank Langdon, the patriarch. A funeral is a great introduction to the characters, a reminder of Some Luck, the first part of this trilogy. This, the second instalment by Jane Smiley of the life of Frank and Rosanna Langdon’s family, focuses on their children and grandchildren. And it is a sprawling family. Not just who they are but WHO they are, their relationships, their quirks, their oddities. Jane SmileySmiley is an excellent observer of human behaviour, she reminds me of Jane Austen’s interpretation of family connections, secrets, tensions and disguised emotions. And it is all written in such an unassuming, subtle way. The death of a parent is a landmark in anyone’s life, a reminder of mortality, and in this book we see the maturing of the five Langdon children – ambitious, tricksy Frank; farmer Joe; home-maker Lilian; academic Henry; and youngest Claire. Smiley has a way of writing these characters from birth to maturity, through changing times, the social and political upheavals of Sixties and Seventies America, without losing the essence of personality. And what a cast it is to handle. Not once did I lose the thread of who was who, except with the appearance towards the end of a character called Charlie. I examined the family tree at the front of the book, no Charlie. The mystery is answered at the end, and sets up part three of the trilogy, Golden Age.
Frank and Andy’s troubled marriage produces troubled children: Janet who becomes entwined in a dodgy religious sect, argumentative twins Michael and Ritchie. Joe has to manage not only the family farm but also the additional land inherited by his wife. The Cold War affects grain prices and he considers whether to borrow money to plant seed when the crop may not earn enough to fulfil the loan. Lillian and Arthur’s son Tim goes off to Vietnam, meanwhile Arthur continues to cope with the emotional stress of his Government intelligence job and what comes with it, the prior knowledge of horrible secrets, dirty tricks and bribes. Henry confronts his sexuality, but will he tell his conservative family? Claire, the youngest, marries a doctor who wants to control her life, and that of their sons, in a protective instinct which becomes overwhelming.
It is impossible to summarize a plot which strides the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, the Civil Rights movement and AIDS, but Smiley handles the transition – with one year for each chapter – with ease.
This is a big book [over 700 pages] but few big books are this easy and pleasurable to read. Jane Smiley has already won the Pulitzer, with this trilogy she enters the territory of ‘greatest living’ American author.
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 THOUSAND ACRES
SOME LUCK [LAST HUNDRED YEARS #1]
GOLDEN AGE  [LAST HUNDRED YEARS #3]

If you like this, try:-
‘A Town Called Solace’ by Mary Lawson
‘A Spool of Blue Thread’ by Anne Tyler
‘Gilead’ by Marilynne Robinson

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview EARLY WARNING by Jane Smiley http://wp.me/p5gEM4-217 via @SandraDanby

#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