Half Broke Horses by Jeannette Walls

In Half Broke Horses, Jeannette Walls tells the story of Lily Casey Smith, her grandmother.  Walls calls the book "a true-life novel".  In the author's note she explains that she verified as many facts about Lily's life as she could, but there were places where people's stories could not be verified.  Thus, she decides it must be a novel.


Lily Casey Smith was born in West Texas in 1901.  Her father was a not-very-good farmer, squandering money on fanciful schemes.  His main occupation was training carriage horses.  Her mother was a "lady" who sat around doing not much while Lily helped her father and took care of the younger children.  Needing money, and a way off the farm, Lily left home at age 15 to teach in Northern Arizona.  She had an amazing number of adventures, set-backs, happiness and sadness.  Her life straddled the transition from the horse & buggy era to the automobile and airplane.


Told in first person, the prose is spare but dramatic.  Lily tells you her story in her own voice.  Walls does remember her grandmother, and says she tried to keep her way of speaking.  Once you start Lily's story, you do not want to put it down.  It would work well for a book club.  Now I want to read Well's first book, The Glass Castle, which is her own memoir.

Bent Road by Lori Roy

How would you like to move with your husband and three children from urban Detroit to rural Kansas, where he grew up?  When you get there, your mother-in-law exerts control over all the family, including telling you how to cook.  The local priest assigns families pews based on their level of contribution to the church.

 In 1965, Arthur Scott moves his family from Detroit back to Kansas when his teenage daughter begins receiving phone calls from African-American boys. Celia and the two younger children have difficulty adjusting to the move.  Celia can't figure out why the family does not discuss Arthur's older sister, Evie, who died young.  Not until a local girl disappears and then is found dead does the truth come out.
  
Roy's writing is haunting, telling the story from the viewpoint of the various family members.  The inner feelings of each family member reflect the dislocation they feel at the move, and at the central mystery - what happened to Eve 25 years ago.

Info from Indiebound.

I look for this book to be an award winner.

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (2010)

This book won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.  I found out after I had returned it.  I guess I'll have another look at it sometime.  Perhaps because I didn't read it straight through, I lost the thread.  

I returned this one unfinished.  I was enjoying it, but left it too long to read something else.  It became too difficult to figure out who each person was.  Then I ran into a section that was powerpoint slides from the viewpoint of a teenage girl.  It is reviewed as different - not my usual thing.  Worth checking out, but read all at once.

The False Friend by Myla Goldberg

This is a story of how memory betrays us.

Celia, a young professional, suddenly remembers what really happened to her friend when they were nine years old.  Djuna had disappeared into a brown car as the five friends walked a forbidden route home from school.  Celia travels home, tells her parents, and begins looking up the former friends to tell them what really happened.  But no one believes her account.  All insist that Djuna was picked up by a brown car and disappeared forever.

An intense, tight story of how a traumatic event affects us.  Goldberg is author of The Bee Season.

The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde

Read The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde for our book discussion group at the library.  Fforde is a Welsh author who writes these funny satires of literary controversies and current events. Thursday Next is a Literatec agent in an England obsessed with literature, investigating crimes against literature.  Thursday is dispatched to investigate  the theft of the original manuscript of Martin Chuzzlewit by Charles Dickens.   Why anyone would steal Chuzzlewit, no one knows. When the manuscript of Jane Eyre is stolen, all England is up in arms.  Then arch-villian Archeron Hades, who has stolen the manuscript, kidnaps Jane from the book.

Humorous and full of literary and cultural allusions, such as  it's a well-told story, and will make you laugh out loud.  Thursday's boss is called Braxton Hicks.  One of her co-workers is Victor Allusion. 

"Daffodils" (1804)
I WANDER'D lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o'er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd,

A host, of golden daffodils;

Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze. Continuous as the stars that shine

And twinkle on the Milky Way,

They stretch'd in never-ending line

Along the margin of a bay:

Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance. The waves beside them danced; but they

Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:

A poet could not but be gay,

In such a jocund company:

I gazed -- and gazed -- but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought: For oft, when on my couch I lie

In vacant or in pensive mood,

They flash upon that inward eye

Which is the bliss of solitude;

And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.
By William Wordsworth (1770-1850).

The Fifth Witness (2011) by Michael Connelly

Just finished this morning before coming to work, The Fifth Witness by Michael Connelly.  It is his latest in the Lincoln Lawyer series.

Due to fewer criminal cases, Mickey Haller has branched out into defending against foreclosures.  When one of his foreclosure clients is arrested for murder, Mickey and team take the case.  As they dig into the background of the victim, they expose the seamier side of the foreclosure business.

Very fast moving, dramatic in and out of the courtroom.  As Mickey says, "You never ask your client if he did it," but by the end, we know.

Don't miss the movie, The Lincoln Lawyer, with Matthew McConaughey, Marisa Tomei and Ryan Phillippe.

The Madonnas of Echo Park by Brando Skyhorse

This book is another one I chose because it was on several best of 2010 lists, and has possibilities as a reading group choice.  Echo Park is an area of Los Angeles where many people from Mexico and native born Americans of Mexican ancestry lived.  Skyhorse, of Mexican ancestry himself, tells the interlocking stories of different Echo Park natives.  Their individual stories of mistreatment, poverty, hopes, dreams, tragedies and happiness combine to create a whole picture of Echo Park society.

A key event in the history of Echo Park was the razing of the Chavez Ravine neighborhood to build Dodger Stadium.  This affected everyone living there at the time and since.  People moved into the surrounding area, but those displaced did not forget their original homes, no matter how humble.

I had difficulty following the relationships between the people.  Each person speaks in the first person, and they jump right in with no explanation of who they are.  It's an effective way to give voice to the storytellers, but I had to go back a few times to pinpoint who was whose mother, grandmother, husband, wife, daughter.

This book fulfills the need to experience other people's reality through fiction -- see previous post.

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (2010)

Why read?  Sometimes for escape, sometimes to experience a different existence from my own, sometimes for the emotions & understanding of self and others evoked by the story.  I selected this book because it was on many of the top 10 book lists of 2010 and I am looking at a number of these books as possible reading group books.

I just started reading this book, and am struck by the insight into the psychology of the two main characters:  Sasha and Bennie.  They each have deep seated emotional problems, for which they are seeking therapy.  I've just read the first Sasha section and the first Bennie section, and I feel for them, experiencing their personal problems through their own eyes.  The writing is straightforward, but, so far, the story is told tenderly, with sympathy for Sasha and Bennie.

This struck me so much, that I thought I would write as I move through the novel to tell how it affects me as the story unfolds.

Woman of a Thousand Secrets by Barbara Wood

Woman of a Thousand Secrets by Barbara Wood (2008).

I bought this book to take on a trip to the Yucatan Peninsula because it is the story of a young woman sent to the Yucatan to seek her parentage among the Maya and Mexica peoples of the pre-Columbian era.  Wood writes historical fiction, often set in prehistorical times.  This book, however, is not her best work.

Laden with overburdened prose, the story lurches along.  Tonina is sent away by her adoptive grandparents to search for a mysterious red flower that would cure her ill grandfather, if he were ill.  It is a ruse to send her to the mainland to seek out her real parentage.  She was found floating on the sea in a willow basket, and taken home to the island by the fisherman who found her.

Upon reaching the mainland, Tonina travels toward the west, south and east, gathering a group of fellow travelers as they go.  Eventually, they are a great crowd traveling through the jungle.  Included in the group is the ball player Kaan, who is a noble of another tribe (not Maya).  Kaan and Tonina seem destined to be together, but the author frustratingly keeps them apart, mostly due to the typical romantic misunderstanding. 

"He met her eyes with a turbulent expression, his thoughts and emotions in turmoil.  The way she had guided him into the water, the play of a smile about her mouth, the wet cotton tunic clinging to the contours of her breasts, the nipples alluringly hard -- [italics in book]

"But Tonina was not his destiny.  Their paths had been joined only temporarily.  Greater duties demanded his attention--the consortium in Mayapan, then Teotihuacan and Jade Sky's soul." p.228.

If you like this type of overwrought prose, a silly romance with a ridiculous secret, and illogical plot twists, go ahead.  Otherwise, skip it.

Detroit Electric Scheme by D.E. Johnson

 The Detroit Electric Scheme: a Mystery by  D. E. Johnson (2010)

This powerful mystery takes place in 1910 Detroit and encompasses murder, corruption, police brutality and illegal immigration.  Will Anderson, son of the Detroit Electric Car Company owner, finds his romantic rival murdered in a "roof press" in the Detroit Electric auto plant.  Panicking, he runs, and hides his bloody clothes, and drinks until he passes out in his apartment.  The police are definitely interested.  Then he receives a  letter offering the return of his bloody clothes. Will enlists the help of his across the hall neighbor - a pianist & singer - to try to find the real murderer.  Eventually it becomes clear that a sinister conspiracy is framing Will for this murder and others.

Will is also dealing with his own demons and trying to help his former fiancee, Elizabeth, who has become addicted to heroin.  He helps Elizabeth at his own peril, her father accusing him of kidnapping.

The story is fast-paced, bringing to life the early days of the Detroit  automobile industry, with an intriguing plot and likable but flawed character.  Michigan author D.E. Johnson will speak at the Grace A. Dow Memorial Library in May.