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#myreadsmonday The Heart by Maylis de Kerangal

The Heart, by Maylis de Kerangal, takes place over the 24 hours after a terrible car accident and follows the lives that are touched as a result.  You briefly meet the young surfer Simon, just nineteen years old, prior to the accident. The perspectives of his parents, the surgeons, the transplant advocate, nurses, Simon’s girlfriend and the heart recipient all have a voice in this story. This deeply intimate glimpse into the world of  heart transplantation is filled with gorgeous, contemplative wordsmithing. This is one of those books where you’ll stop and re-read a passage just for the pleasure of experiencing the words working together on the page.

The Heart is an interesting mix of crafted language. The book is filled with long, heartfelt, rambling sentences, yet it is surgical in its concise medical descriptions. It leaves plenty of space for thoughts and emotions, both yours and the characters’, to find their way through the pages. I felt like I was under a spell as I read this book.

The story is a luminous portrayal of the sacred nature of organ transplantation; it’s a story of grief, generosity, love, hope, and survival. One life has ended, but that one ending will affect many others and give them a chance at new beginnings.

This book was translated from French into English by Sam Taylor, and was the winner of the French-American Foundation Translation Prize. There’s often a sense one gets when reading a translated novel that, well, something is lost in the translation. I did not have that sense when reading this book.

The Heart will stay with you; it will give you pause and leave you to consider your own mortality whilst simultaneously giving you hope for humanity. Yes, there are awful, sad things that happen; but in the end, life goes on. The heart continues to beat.

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#myreadsmonday The Rules of Magic by Alice Hoffman

Anyone who has read Alice Hoffman’s Practical Magic could easily imagine that the Aunts Frances and Jet had lived in their Magnolia Street home since the beginning of time. We now know that’s not the case. In Hoffman’s newest novel, The Rules of Magic, we are treated to the origin story of Frances and Jet, which opens in New York City in the 1960s. A prequel, not a sequel.

The Rules of Magic casts an enchanting spell, yet it’s not all a happy fairy tale. There is tragedy, sacrifice, and the ever-looming threat of the Owens family curse.  This is a book about love, loss, and living, set against a backdrop of magical realism.

The three siblings, Frances, Bridget, and Vincent (yes, there’s a brother in there!) spend one summer with the current Aunt-in-Residence on Magnolia Street, Aunt Isabelle. Their stories move forward in time and explore the way one’s life can be touched by love and the loss of love. We see the steps that Franny and Jet take, complete with familiars and a healthy dose of herbal lore,  as they become the Aunts of Practical Magic fame.

I loved following the chronicles of these siblings as they navigated their lives set against the backdrop of the tumultuous 1960s. There’s heartache and hope, disappointment and fulfillment, and a lovely plot twist. Ultimately this book is about the power of love. The last sentence of the novel is, “Know that the only remedy for love is to love more.” I think that says it all.

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#myreadsmonday Red Clocks by Leni Zumas

I’ve heard people refer to Red Clocks as “The Handmaid’s Tale for a new generation” and I can see why these comparisons are being drawn. Red Clocks is a brilliant novel. It’s a concise, moving portrait of the lives of five different women struggling to find their places in the misogynistic world they inhabit. Five women, with five different lives, five different stories, but they are all connected by the trials of their sex. I don’t want to give too much away about the story, but in this very believable not-too-distant future, abortion is illegal, as well as in-vitro fertilization and adoption by single women. Legislation has given rights to unborn fetus’ that were previously only known to living and breathing Americans.

Lest you think this is all a story of doom and gloom, there is hope in these women’s tales. There is a quiet power found in the way they navigate their narrow existences. You’ll cheer for them, cry for them, want more for them, and wish them well on their journeys. You’ll get to the end and want to know more. Promotional materials for this novel ask “What is a woman for?” Leni Zumas both asks and answers this question in this terrifying and yet inspiring novel.

 

 

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#myreadsmonday The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin

If you knew when you were going to die, what would you do with that information, and how might it affect the way you live your life?

This is the heady topic Chloe Benjamin tackles in her latest novel, The Immortalists. Her book opens with the four Gold children, Varya, Daniel, Klara, and Simon, as they visit a fortune teller and are each told the date they will die. Starting with the story of Simon, the baby of the family, we are led through their individual narratives and into their adult lives. We see how they handle their given death dates, and how the knowledge colors and weighs on their life story.

The novel spans 5 decades, and takes us through the Gold’s life as an ever-shrinking family. Were the predictions from the fortune teller true or mumbo-jumbo? Does that really matter? It’s fascinating to see these characters struggle, each in their own personal way, with having that date looming over them. Benjamin has written an incredible family saga that tackles the oftentimes twisted bonds of familial love and the questions of what is destiny versus what is choice.

Friends know I’m a sucker for books set in New York City, and I’ll admit that was what initially drew me to this novel. The story does start out in New York, but quickly shifts to San Francisco and beyond. This is a book that will make you think! A phrase that came to mind when reading this book was, “it’s not the years in your life that count, it’s the life in your years that matter”. This book explores that phrase in four different ways. And for the record, no, I would not want to know the date I’m going to die. Would you?

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#myreadsmonday Coming to My Senses: The Making of a Counterculture Cook by Alice Waters

Did you know that Alice Waters was just 27 years old, with no formal culinary training, when she opened Chez Panisse in Berkeley, CA in 1971? You’ll learn that plus a lot more about this iconic Chef in her lovely new memoir, Coming to My Senses: The Making of a Counterculture Cook. Waters takes us on a journey through her early life right up to the day the doors opened at 1517 Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley. You’ll have the chance to connect the dots from her repressive early childhood, wilder high school days, activist college life, and into her bohemian early 20s. It was then that Alice Waters met many of the friends and colleagues who helped shape and in some cases quite literally build her dream of a restaurant into existence.

I love looking at old photographs, and it was a delight to see so many photographs from Waters’ life shared throughout the memoir. She also shares excerpts from letters, giving us an intimate glimpse of who she was as a young woman.

Waters has led an extraordinary life, and the experiences she catalogs in the formative years pre-Chez Panisse are filled with humorous anecdotes about food, fascinating stories about film, and you’ll even hear about the time she missed out on dinner with John Lennon! Waters also reveals the origins of her love of garlic, and lays out the connections which helped create the Garlic Festival at Chez Panisse. Overall the book is a fascinating catalog of both the successes and failures that led her down the road to opening Chez Panisse.

My favorite part of the book, old photos aside, is the narrative which leads to the explanation of the naming of Chez Panisse. Could you imagine Alice Waters being famous for a restaurant called Le Metro? That was her original idea! I’m grateful for her friends who served as a sounding board when it came to names; I couldn’t imagine Chez Panisse by any other name.

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#myreadsmonday : The Inaugural Post

I work in a library, which is pretty much a dream job for someone like me who loves to read. I have access to a regularly refreshed supply of reading materials, and it’s all for free! Our patrons know I’m a rather voracious bookworm, so I’m often asked for book recommendations. I love being able to put a great book in someone’s hands. It feels wonderful when someone returns a book and tells me how much they enjoyed it!

A friend suggested that as part of Amy On The Town I talk about what books I’m reading, which brings us to today’s post. #myreadsmonday. Every Monday I’m going to write about a book that I’ve either recently finished or something I’m in the middle of reading.

This week I want to write about social climbers.  I have a crazy fascination with books about women who are trying to fit in to a class way above their own, desperately hoping they can fake-it-until-they-make-it and be accepted by the elite set they are working so hard to emulate. There’s always a delicious amount of awkward striving and the stories often end with the character’s ambitions going down in flames. It’s a weird sub-genre obsession, I readily admit it!

On New Year’s Day I tore through The Last Mrs. Parrish by Liv Constantine. I couldn’t put this book down! The Last Mrs. Parrish starts out looking like a dark take on the social climber theme I love, but has an excellent twist that makes the book super satisfying in the end! If you start reading it and catch yourself thinking, “this chick is evil, I can’t keep reading all this awful stuff!”, stick with it, and see how everything unfolds. The tagline on the book says it all, I think: “Some women get everything. Some women get everything they deserve.” Amber Patterson’s story-line may seem infuriating, but Daphne Parrish makes everything worthwhile. There’s more to this book than meets the eye.

If you get through The Last Mrs. Parrish and want more social climber stories, I suggest you check out Everybody Rise by Stephanie Clifford, The Luckiest Girl Alive by Jessica Knoll, and for a more classic feel, Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier, and of course Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray.