Napoleon of Notting Hill

Napoleon of Notting Hill by G K Chesterton

A comical futurist fantasy, first published in 1904, about a tradition-loving suburban London community of the 1980s at war with its modernizing neighbors. Chesterton's splendid storytelling gifts, his love of medievalism and heroism, and his sympathies for the plight of small nations trying to remain independent are strongly in evidence. 7 illustrations by W. Graham Robertson. New Introduction by Martin Gardner.
-FantastcFiction.com

It's 1984 as the book opens in boring old England, dominated by peace and tranquility but soon to be farcically, then really, erupted in a civil war over street improvements and suburban London borough rights of way.  May the best bureacrat, and sword player win!
I give this 3 stars *** because it is so dated, and 4 **** fo.r creative genius
-Ken

The Aviator's Wife

The Aviator's Wife by Melanie Benjamin

 

In the spirit of Loving Frank and The Paris Wife, acclaimed novelist Melanie Benjamin pulls back the curtain on the marriage of one of America's most extraordinary couples: Charles Lindbergh and Anne Morrow Lindbergh.

For much of her life, Anne Morrow, the shy daughter of the U.S. ambassador to Mexico, has stood in the shadows of those around her, including her millionaire father and vibrant older sister, who often steals the spotlight. Then Anne, a college senior with hidden literary aspirations, travels to Mexico City to spend Christmas with her family. There she meets Colonel Charles Lindbergh, fresh off his celebrated 1927 solo flight across the Atlantic. Enthralled by Charles's assurance and fame, Anne is certain the celebrated aviator has scarcely noticed her. But she is wrong.

Charles sees in Anne a kindred spirit, a fellow adventurer, and her world will be changed forever. The two marry in a headline-making wedding. Hounded by adoring crowds and hunted by an insatiable press, Charles shields himself and his new bride from prying eyes, leaving Anne to feel her life falling back into the shadows. In the years that follow, despite her own major achievements - she becomes the first licensed female glider pilot in the United States - Anne is viewed merely as the aviator's wife. The fairy-tale life she once longed for will bring heartbreak and hardships, ultimately pushing her to reconcile her need for love and her desire for independence, and to embrace, at last, life's infinite possibilities for change and happiness.

Drawing on the rich history of the twentieth century - from the late twenties to the mid-sixties - and featuring cameos from such notable characters as Joseph Kennedy and Amelia Earhart, The Aviator's Wife is a vividly imagined novel of a complicated marriage - revealing both its dizzying highs and its devastating lows. With stunning power and grace, Melanie Benjamin provides new insight into what made this remarkable relationship endure.
-FantasticFiction.com

 

Melanie Benjamin's novel is a very moving tale filled with the joys...and the sorrows of the woman who was Anne Morrow Lindbergh, a very talented and exceptional woman in her own right who was completely overshadowed by her husband, Charles Lindbergh.  As a result, she never was allowed to receive the recognition that was due her.  A five star book*****.

-MONA

East of the Sun

East of the Sun by Julia Gregson

Autumn 1928. The Kaisar-i-Hind is en route to Bombay. In Cabin D38, Viva Holloway, an inexperienced chaperone, is beginning to feel as though she's made a mistake. Her advert in The Lady has resulted in three unsettling young charges to be escorted to India. Rose, a beautiful, dangerously naive English girl, is about to be married to the cavalry officer she has met a handful of times. Victoria, her bridesmaid, is determined to lose her virginity en route before finding a husband of her own. And overshadowing all three, the dangerously malevolent presence of Guy Glover. But nothing frightens Viva as much as her real reasons for the voyage: firstly to lead an independent life, husband-less life as a writer, and secondly, to confront her own explosive past. Three potential Memsahibs with a multitude of reasons for leaving their homeland - but the cargo of hopes and secrets they carry can do little to prepare them for what lies ahead in India. From the parties of the wealthy Bombay socialites, to the ragged orphans on Tamarind Street, EAST OF THE SUN is an utterly engaging novel that will captivate readers everywhere.
-FantasticFiction.com

 

Set in the late 1920's at a time when single young British women went to India as part of the Fishing Fleet (hoping to meet and marry young British officers) and not become one of the "returned empties", this novel is beautifully written and hard to put down.  I found it excellent!....five stars*****.

-MONA

Family Resemblance

Family Resemblance by Tanya Maria Barrientos

When Nita DeLeon's mother died, she took with her a deep family secret. Now, almost twenty-five years later, Nita begins sifting through family history-and discovers a letter from her Aunt Pancha hidden in an address book, a letter that offers new insight into her parents' lives in Guatemala. As Nita uncovers the truth, she gains comfort in a man who helps her heal the wounds of the past-and finds hope for a more meaningful future...

-FantasticFiction.com

 

I found this novel to be heartrending, insightful, entertaining....superb!  It truly deserves five stars*****

-Mona

Sister

Sister by Rosamund Lupton

'My sister would never have killed herself.' When Beatrice hears that her little sister, Tess, is missing, she returns home to London on the first flight available. But Bee is unprepared for the terrifying truths she must face about her younger sibling when Tess's broken body is discovered in the snow. The police, Bee's friends, her fiancé and even her mother accept the fact that Tess committed suicide. But nobody knows a sister like a sister, and Bee is convinced that something more sinister is responsible for Tess's untimely death. So she embarks on a dangerous journey to discover the truth, no matter the cost.

-FantasticFiction

I found this book, tragic as it was, to be completely riveting.  Nothing can break the bond between sisters. This one rates five stars*****

-Mona

Sally Hemings

Sally Hemings by Barbara Chase-Riboud

 

One of the greatest love stories in American history is also one of the most controversial. Thomas Jefferson had a mistress for 38 years whom he loved and lived with until he died--the beautiful and elusive Sally Hemings. But it was not simply that Jefferson had a mistress that provoked such a scandal in both his time and ours. It was that Sally Hemings was a quadroon slave and that Jefferson fathered a slave family whose descendants are alive today. In this moving novel, originally published in 1979 and having sold over two million copies worldwide, Barbara Chase-Riboud re-creates one of America's most powerful love stories, based on the documents and evidence of the day, and gives us a poignant, tragic, and unforgettable meditation on the history of race and sex in America.

-FantasticFiction.com

 

I found this book to be an excellent novelization of the life of Sally Hemings and her relationship with Thomas Jefferson. 

I would rate this book with five stars*****.

-Mona

The Bat

The Bat by Jo Nesbo 

 

Harry Hole is sent to Sydney to investigate the murder of Inger Holter, a young Norwegian girl, who was working in a bar. Initially sidelined as an outsider, Harry becomes central to the Australian police investigation when they start to notice a number of unsolved rape and murder cases around the country. The victims were usually young blondes. Inger had a number of admirers, each with his own share of secrets, but there is no obvious suspect, and the pattern of the other crimes seems impossible to crack. Then a circus performer is brutally murdered followed by yet another young woman. Harry is in a race against time to stop highly intelligent killer, who is bent on total destruction.
-FantasticFiction.com

 

Jo Nesbø is a musician, songwriter, economist and author. The Bat, his first crime novel featuring Harry Hole, was published in Norway in 1997 and was an instant hit, winning the Glass Key Award for best Nordic crime novel (an accolade shared with Peter Høeg, Henning Mankell and Stieg Larsson).  

I would rate this book with four stars. ****

-Mona

The Invention of Wings

The Invention of Wings by Sue Monk Kidd

 

 

From the celebrated author of The Secret Life of Bees, a magnificent novel about two unforgettable American women

Writing at the height of her narrative and imaginative gifts, Sue Monk Kidd presents a masterpiece of hope, daring, the quest for freedom, and the desire to have a voice in the world.

Hetty “Handful" Grimke, an urban slave in early nineteenth century Charleston, yearns for life beyond the suffocating walls that enclose her within the wealthy Grimke household. The Grimke's daughter, Sarah, has known from an early age she is meant to do something large in the world, but she is hemmed in by the limits imposed on women.

Kidd's sweeping novel is set in motion on Sarah's eleventh birthday, when she is given ownership of ten year old Handful, who is to be her handmaid.We follow their remarkable journeys over the next thirty five years, as both strive for a life of their own, dramatically shaping each other's destinies and forming a complex relationship marked by guilt, defiance, estrangement and the uneasy ways of love.
As the stories build to a riveting climax, Handful will endure loss and sorrow, finding courage and a sense of self in the process. Sarah will experience crushed hopes, betrayal, unrequited love, and ostracism before leaving Charleston to find her place alongside her fearless younger sister, Angelina, as one of the early pioneers in the abolition and women's rights movements.

Inspired by the historical figure of Sarah Grimke, Kidd goes beyond the record to flesh out the rich interior lives of all of her characters, both real and invented, including Handful's cunning mother, Charlotte, who courts danger in her search for something better.
This exquisitely written novel is a triumph of storytelling that looks with unswerving eyes at a devastating wound in American history, through women whose struggles for liberation, empowerment, and expression will leave no reader unmoved.
-FantasticFiction.com

 

The Invention of Wings is a very insightful novel about the horrors of slavery and the lives of a few of those who fought against it.  I would rate it with five stars.

-Mona

Long Knife

Long Knife, by James Alexander Thom

This is no dime western novel full of  1950's style 'Me Indian, you Paleface' stuff.  This is not a sensual and grotesquely violent depiction of a west more filthy and amoral than good. Nor is this some dry biography filled with only the kind of military marching about that I love.

But let me describe the book to you in the author's own words from his ending note, with which I heartily agree: "The tale you have just read is as much history as novel. It is true to the documented facts of the events it describes." From the almost miraculous battles won to the mysterious love of Clark's life accuracy and live drama is the author's achieved goal.

May these few words from the very beginning of this majestic, amazing and totally awesome story assist you in making a decision to read it for yourself. The story of a real life American, and his family, one that puts Fenimore Cooper's 'Deerslayer' to shame: 'Clark's Point, Indiana territory, 1809. The old general felt it coming at sunset on that fine cool evening while he sat on the porch of his log house on the bluff overlooking the Ohio: a greater melancholy than any he had faced in the thirty years of his decline." The book begins and ends in the last decades of  George Rogers Clark's life.  The rest is spent living out the story of his conquering of almost the entire Northwest Territory over the early years of the American revolution with a few hundred Woodsmen, and his own wit, physical and spiritual strength.

Reading fiction, and non-fiction like this, is one major reason Mona and I must head out on the road in two months to find the places, and memories they hold, of events long or not so long gone.  We all who call ourselves Americans walk in the moccasin steps of men and women like George Clark, and his younger brother of 'Lewis & Clark Expedition' fame, William. And we will have access by Alpine Coach to the entire North American continent to do our exploring because the Clark's of America, and the Mackenzie's of Canada started us all off by turning footpaths into highways.

A brief history of Clark from the website for the park at Louisville, Ky, where his retirement cabin site is preserved:
http://www.fallsoftheohio.org/george_rogers_clark.html

-Ken

Girl in Hyacinth Blue

Girl in Hyacinth Blue by Susan Vreeland

 

In Susan Vreeland's gentle and beautiful  book, the ownership of a supposed Vermeer painting is traced back to the moment of its inspiration; and as the painting moves through each owner's hands, what was long hidden or forgotten or repressed quietly surfaces. Like Vermeer's paintings, this novel illuminates the poignantly dear moments in people's lives. Tied together by a collective admiration, even love, for the painting, Vreeland's characters remind us how beauty transforms and why we reach for it, what lasts and what in our lives is singular and forgettable.

-FantasticFiction.com

 

This book has an interesting way of taking the reader gradually back through time as each generation of the Vermeer painting is revealed.

-Mona

The Shadow Catcher

The Shadow Catcher by Marianne Wiggins

 

The Shadow Catcher dramatically inhabits the space where past and present intersect, seamlessly interweaving narratives from two different eras: the first fraught passion between turn-of-the-twentieth-century icon Edward Curtis (1868-1952) and his muse-wife, Clara; and a twenty-first-century journey of redemption.

Narrated in the first person by a reimagined writer named Marianne Wiggins, the novel begins in Hollywood, where top producers are eager to sentimentalize the complicated life of Edward Curtis as a sunny biopic: "It's got the outdoors. It's got adventure. It's got the do-good element." Yet, contrary to Curtis's esteemed public reputation as servant to his nation, the artist was an absent husband and disappearing father. Jump to the next generation, when Marianne's own father, John Wiggins (1920-1970), would live and die in equal thrall to the impulse of wanderlust.

Were the two men running from or running to? Dodging the false beacons of memory and legend, Marianne amasses disparate clues -- photographs and hospital records, newspaper clippings and a rare white turquoise bracelet -- to recover those moments that went unrecorded, "to hear the words only the silent ones can speak." The Shadow Catcher, fueled by the great American passions for love and land and family, chases the silhouettes of our collective history into the bright light of the present.

-FantasticFiction.com

 

This interesting novel about the life of Edward S. Curtis, photographer of the American West, makes one question what is real, what is myth?  Do we believe what we see or what we THINK we see, what we remember of what we WANT to remember.

-Mona

Robot Visions

Robot Visions by Isaac Asimov

Isaac Asimov began writing his 'robot' stories, and having some published, in the late 1930's when he was still in high school. At a time when all robots were depicted as frightening and destructive he chose to humanize them, yet recognized that humans would always be at least somewhat afraid of their mechanical cousins.

Asimov writes in the last chapter of this collection of some of his finest stories that as he progressed in his writing through many decades he found himself  developing stories that were about robots and men who were becoming more and more alike. Humans who wanted long lasting robotic body parts, and robots, as in the story Bicentennial Man, who just wanted to be human enough to die.

Two award winning movies have been made from some of Asimov's robot short stories.  I Robot, starring Will Smith, and Bicentennial Man, with Robin Williams in the lead.  Both highly appreciated by Isaac Asimov himself, though the screenplays had to be greatly changed to develop a two hour movie from a couple-dozen page novella.

This book was particularly enjoyable for me as Asimov has chosen to list chronologically the stories of his robot venue most depicting their evolution over time.  This book becomes a history of the fictional U. S. Robot and Mechanical Men Company who, throughout the life of Asimov's stories, becomes the galactic monopoly for production of robots and thinking machines (computers)

It continues to fascinate me that Isaac wrote of these concepts in many cases decades before a working computer smaller than a house was created, or a robot able to do even one meaningful task was built.  In fact, it is said that Isaac Asimov coined the very word ROBOT which is now a wired, or wireless, part of almost every complex machine we use in daily life. Think SIRI in your or your friends new I-Phone.

-Ken

Blind Your Ponies

Blind Your Ponies by Stanley Gordon West

 

Hope is hard to come by in the hard-luck town of Willow Creek. Sam Pickett and five young men are about to change that.

Sam Pickett never expected to settle in this dried-up shell of a town on the western edge of the world. He's come here to hide from the violence and madness that have shattered his life, but what he finds is what he least expects. There's a spirit that endures in Willow Creek, Montana. It seems that every inhabitant of this forgotten outpost has a story, a reason for taking a detour to this place--or a reason for staying.

As the coach of the hapless high school basketball team (zero wins, ninety-three losses), Sam can't help but be moved by the bravery he witnesses in the everyday lives of people--including his own young players--bearing their sorrows and broken dreams. How do they carry on, believing in a future that seems to be based on the flimsiest of promises? Drawing on the strength of the boys on the team, sharing the hope they display despite insurmountable odds, Sam finally begins to see a future worth living.

Author Stanley Gordon West has filled the town of Willow Creek with characters so vividly cast that they become real as relatives, and their stories--so full of humor and passion, loss and determination--illuminate a path into the human heart.

-FantasticFiction.com

 

Blind Your Ponies by Stanley Gordon West is one of the best books I've read in awhile.  It will make you laugh....and cry.  It will make you angry in places....and make you want to jump for joy in others.  Willow Creek, Montana (which really does exist) is a place we MUST  visit in our travels.  I want to see for myself the place that inspired these boys to the grit and determination they needed in the 1991 Montana state basketball championships.  I also want to read more of Stanley Gordon West's books!

-Mona

My Reading Life

My Reading Life by Pat Conroy

Patrick Conroy is one of Mona's favorite authors.  She read this, his most recent compilation of essays and short stories having to do with books, persons and events that impacted his writing career, and told me I needed to.  She tells me that about lots of her books.  This is one I'm so glad I took her advice on.

From his abusive yet loving dad, to his Scarlett O'hara - obsessed mother and from a year on Daufuskie Island when it was poor and only black to his totally exclusive home today on private Fripp Island Pat Conroy has read and written up several libraries full of books.

His favorite novel?  Tolstoy's War and Peace.

His favorite poet? James Dickey.

His favorite... but don't let me just toss results from my reading at you.  This book deserves to be read by any lover of Conroy.  Not for the names of his influencers; for why the names are so influencing. And you don't want to miss learning about his first English teacher.  That's a story every teacher should read!

-Ken

Slow Man

Slow Man by J. M. Coetzee

 

A masterful new novel from one of the greatest writers alive. Paul Rayment is on the threshold of a comfortable old age when a calamitous cycling accident results in the amputation of a leg. Humiliated, his body truncated, his life circumscribed, he turns away from his friends. He hires a nurse named Marijana, with whom he has a European childhood in common: hers in Croatia, his in France. Tactfully and efficiently she ministers to his needs. But his feelings for her, and for her handsome teenage son, are complicated by the sudden arrival on his doorstep of the celebrated Australian novelist Elizabeth Costello, who threatens to take over the direction of his life and the affairs of his heart. Unflinching in its vision of suffering and generous in its portrayal of the spirit of care, Slow Man is a masterful work of fiction by one of the world's greatest writers.
FantasticFiction.com

 

This fascinating novel offers a profound meditation on what makes us human, on what it means to grow older and reflect on how we have lived our lives.  It's a story about love and mortality.

-Mona