It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

This meme is hosted by Sheila at Book Journey.

Books I completed this past few weeks are:

The Art of Hearing Heartbeats by Jan-Philipp Sendker
The Anti-Romantic Child by Priscilla Gilman
The American Heiress by Daisy Goodwin
The Voluntourist by Ken Budd
In Hovering Flight by Joyce Hinnefeld
An Uncommon Education by Elizabeth Percer

Bookmarks are still living in the middle of:

Let the Great World Spin by Colm McCann
Triangles by Ellen Hopkins
Passing Love by Jacqueline Luckett
The Flight of Emma Hardy by Margot Livesey

Reviews posted this week:

Lost in Shangri-La by Mitchell Zuckoff
Make It Stay by Joan Frank
The Anti-Romantic Child by Priscilla Gilman
Gossip by Beth Gutcheon
A Wedding in Haiti by Julia Alvarez

Books still needing to have reviews written (as opposed to the ones that are simply awaiting posting):

When Captain Flint Was Still a Good Man by Nick Dybek
The Tiger's Wife by Tea Obreht
Alice Bliss by Laura Harrington
The Art of Hearing Heartbeats by Jan-Philipp Sendker
The American Heiress by Daisy Goodwin
The Voluntourist by Ken Budd
In Hovering Flight by Joyce Hinnefeld
An Uncommon Education by Elizabeth Percer

Monday Mailbox

It's so lovely when getting the mail (already an appealing prospect--mainly because I turf the bills right to my husband's pile) provides what you know will be hours of enjoyment. And the mailbox last week didn't disappoint. This past week's mailbox arrivals:

And Laughter Fell From the Sky by Jyotsna Sreenivasan came from TLC Book Tours and William Morrow for a blog tour.
The story of a complicated love governed by cultural expectations, a dutiful Indian-American woman and an Indian-American man who has been nothing like the person he was expected to be meet again and fall for each other. It's always fascinating to see how our families and our cultures mold our futures and our characters and this definitely sounds like it will come up against those intriguing but artificially constructed boundaries.

The Voluntourist by Ken Budd came from TLC Book Tours and William Morrow for a blog tour.
A writer reeling from his father's sudden and completely unexpected death comes to the conclusion that like his father, who was influential and important in so many peoples' lives, he wants to make a difference in the world. But he can only do it for a couple of weeks at a time as he works around his paying job. I'm excited to read about the six different experiences Budd had as he learned more about himself and the world we share.

The Color of Tea by Hannah Tunnicliffe came from TLC Book Tours and Scribner for a blog tour.
A woman in Macau whose life seems to be coming apart slowly opens a cafe that quickly becomes a wonderful meeting place for all different sorts of women. I do love foodie fiction and this one has the potential to make me hunger for a trip to China and the delicacies of tea shops.

Abdication by Juliet Nicolson came from Atria Books.
Centered around three young people whose worlds orbit that of the King and Wallis Simpson in the year between His Royal Highness' ascension to the throne and his abdication, this is wildly appealing to me.

As always, if you'd like to see the marvelous goodies in other people's mailboxes, make sure to visit Reviews by Martha's Bookshelf as she is hosting this month's Mailbox Monday and have fun seeing how we are all doing our part to keep the USPS and delivery services viable.

Giveaway note: Wendy Wax's Ocean Beach

Everyone loves to win stuff, right? I get giddy with excitement when I win stuff (not that this happens all that frequently to me). But when the win is for a book, well, it's like Christmas and my birthday have come at once. If you feel that same way and you're looking forward to camping out on your own patch of sand with some new beach reading, you need to enter this contest. Tomorrow, Monday, June 4, is the last day to enter to win a copy of Wendy Wax's upcoming novel, Ocean Beach. She's offering three advance reader copies which will be sent to the winners before the novel hits stores on June 26th. To enter go to http://www.writerspace.com/contests/ and scroll down to Wendy’s name. Good luck and let me know if you're one of the lucky three!

Review: A Wedding in Haiti by Julia Alvarez

Travelogue, memoir, love story, social and political commentary, history. Categorizing Julia Alvarez's new work is nearly impossible. It can't be contained in simply one category; there's too much to it to be merely one thing and not another. The one thing that it is for sure though, is a wonderful read.

Alvarez and her husband Bill own a coffee farm called Alta Gracia in her native Dominican Republic. They travel between the farm and their home in Vermont but given their distance from the farm for much of the year most of the day to day running of the farm is left to the workers who live there year round. These workers include many Haitians, some legally in the Dominican Republic and some there illegally. Piti is one of the Haitian workers at Alta Gracia and Alvarez fell for his charm the first time she and Bill met him, coming to view Piti as one of her family, her child. And so one night she made him a promise: that when he married, she would come to the wedding. When Piti calls 8 years later and announces his imminent wedding in Haiti, Alvarez tries but cannot say no to the promise she made so many years earlier and so she and husband Bill start off to the Dominican Republic to ultimately make their way to a remote part of Haiti so they can fulfill the promise to Piti and be there when he marries his Eseline.

As Alvarez tells of the roundabout way they have to travel to Haiti from the neighboring Dominican Republic, she recounts the tense and loaded history between these two countries. And in sharing her impressions of Piti and Eseline's relationship and their upcoming wedding, she also lays bare her own relationship with Bill and touches on her aging parents' grand love story as well as on her concerns for them, both of whom are ill and frail, suffering from dementia.

The trip to Haiti and the wedding itself are chronicled with a loving hand, Alvarez seeing the wonder in the people and the place despite the desperate poverty. Much as she fell for Piti, she falls for his several month old daughter Ludy and enjoys the traditions and hospitality of Piti and Eseline's extended families. The return trip to Alta Gracia is a rough and complicated one but that does nothing to erase the good feelings and interest in Haiti that the trip has stirred in Alvarez. So when the devastating earthquake decimates so much of Haiti less than a year later, it is completely natural that Alvarez feels compelled to return to Haiti to go check on Piti's family and see firsthand the destruction and loss heaped on this already desperately poor country.

Complex and personal, Alvarez writes movingly of general information as well as of the intimately familiar. She invites the reader into the relationships she has with her husband, with surrogate son Piti, with her parents, and with Eseline, even though the latter relationship is not easy. She does not shy away from hard truths, politically, when discussing the NGO's in Haiti after the earthquake, or when presenting her own foibles. She embraces and confronts the different realities of both Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Her snapshot-laden travelogue is intriguing and loaded with issues of social justice. But it is also brimming with an unexpected hope for the recovery of this remarkable country and the people who make their life in it.

Thanks to Algonquin Books for sending me a copy of the book for review.

Review: Gossip by Beth Gutcheon

Sometimes a title and a cover don't do a book justice. In the case of Beth Gutcheon's novel, Gossip, this is especially true. The cover treatment and title suggest a lighter, frothier tale than the one told here. This stunningly, meticulously constructed novel is actually shot through with a dark and troubling undercurrent.

Lovie French owns an exclusive dress shop in New York. Her clientele is wealthy and discriminating and they rely on Lovie as much for her discretion as for her fashion sense. And she is nominally of the world of the women she dresses, having attended the same tony boarding school they all did, albeit as a scholarship student, and maintaining her closest friendships from that time in her life as well. Lovie is, in fact, the original thread that connects outrageous gossip columnist Dinah and old family respectable Avis, two polar opposites who accept each other on sufferance only because of their similar relationships with Lovie.

Spanning several decades in New York City, from the bohemian sixties to our post 9/11 world, Lovie's tale weaves backward and forward through time offering glimpses into the privileged life, ever evolving friendships, and the changes in the world over that sixty year span. From the roots of the animosity between Dinah and Avis to the riveting climax, we follow these three women through the relationships of their lives: marriage, divorce, parenthood, work, and enduring friendship. Their closeness waxes and wanes through the years as they withhold and keep secrets from each other but they never lose their connection, no matter how stretched or frayed it might be at times. And when Dinah's beloved son Nicky, Lovie's cherished godson, and Avis' daughter Grace fall in love and marry, the connection between these three women is cemented even further.

Told mainly from Lovie's perspective, the reader has to question her reliability as a narrator. While relating some pieces of her own life, she is certainly more focused on the lives of her friends, the domestic dramas and disappointments of their worlds. Her circumspection about her own long-standing affair with a married man and her rise in the fashion world are seemingly less interesting for her recounting purposes than the public dramas of her friends and they allow Lovie to highlight and reinforce her decades old second-class citizen who doesn't fit in feelings. There's just a dash of schadenfreude in her telling. As she unfolds the story, explaining why the novel opens with Dinah in the back room of her shop for privacy, she drops delicate hints about where the story must ultimately lead. There is a barely there ominous undertone throughout the novel and the reader's sense of foreboding increases as the story progresses.

This is a book of the small and everyday and the ways in which these tiny moments can come together to create a shocking whole. Gutcheon has captured this segment of New York society, the wealthy, the privileged, the glitterati so well, showing the undercurrents, the banality, and the trials of the lives of its members. She has created very different and yet equally interesting characters in all of the women. Each of them is fully fleshed out and real feeling. The writing throughout is precise and every word is freighted with deliberate intention which helps to slowly, almost imperceptibly, ratchet up the narrative tension. Readers may be lulled by a sense of not much happening but in fact this is not the case. There is an inexorable march to the stunning conclusion. Well worth the time spent between its covers, this book will get under your skin and into your head until you have finally turned that last page.

Thanks to Leyane at William Morrow for sending me a copy of the book to review.

Waiting on Wednesday

This meme is hosted by Breaking the Spine and is meant to highlight some great pre-publication books we all can't wait to get our grubby little mitts on.

Seating Arrangements by Maggie Shipstead. The book is being released by Knopf on June 12, 2012.

Amazon says this about the book: Maggie Shipstead’s Seating Arrangements is a stunning debut, an irresistible social satire that is also an unforgettable meditation on the persistence of hope, the yearning for connection, and the promise of enduring love.

Winn Van Meter is heading for his family’s retreat on the pristine New England island of Waskeke. Normally a haven of calm, for the next three days this sanctuary will be overrun by tipsy revelers as Winn prepares for the marriage of his daughter Daphne to the affable young scion Greyson Duff. Winn’s wife, Biddy, has planned the wedding with military precision, but arrangements are sideswept by a storm of salacious misbehavior and intractable lust: Daphne’s sister, Livia, who has recently had her heart broken by Teddy Fenn, the son of her father’s oldest rival, is an eager target for the seductive wiles of Greyson’s best man; Winn, instead of reveling in his patriarchal duties, is tormented by his long-standing crush on Daphne’s beguiling bridesmaid Agatha; and the bride and groom find themselves presiding over a spectacle of misplaced desire, marital infidelity, and monumental loss of faith in the rituals of American life.

Hilarious, keenly intelligent, and commandingly well written, Shipstead’s deceptively frothy first novel is a piercing rumination on desire, on love and its obligations, and on the dangers of leading an inauthentic life, heralding the debut of an exciting new literary voice.

Why I hate children's sports

My kids have all reached the age where any sports they choose to participate in require try-outs. I myself lived through try-outs as a child (although I think our time trials were more of a placement tool than anything since to my knowledge no one was cut). Try-outs stink. And managing your child's disappointment with the results is even worse. I prepared W. for potentially crushing disappointment over high school tennis because he's a decent player but not great before finding out that the coach wasn't going to cut anyone (bless her!). Telling R. that she didn't get chosen for a solo or small group dance was hard and telling her that she wasn't placed in the more advanced classes with her friends was even harder. But we worked through it. Neither of us may have been happy about it but I didn't have any reason to climb up in arms over the results. Not like the soccer debacle for T. this week. I've written a letter to the coach and I know I can't send it as it stands. But I really want to. Really, really want to. And since I'm sure you want to read it as it is, unedited and before I reduce it to milqetoast and pablum so I don't offend anyone, here it is mainly for your reading pleasure but also so I can rage away in full without offending people who could blackball the kid from the sport in future around here.

Dear Coach,

I am writing because the more I reflect on our conversation last night, the more I am bothered by it. Certainly there was disappointment here over T. being only one of two boys who tried out Tuesday and yesterday to be placed on the B team but if that’s where he belongs, that’s where he belongs. I do, however, feel like I need to address several things.

First of all, you’ve completely misread my child if, as you suggested, you think pushing him hard would cause him to lose his love for the game. I’ve known him for 10+ years now compared to your fewer than 3 hours (and I’m giving you the benefit of a doubt on that 3 hour window given that you spent all of Tuesday mixing my child up with another child) and can tell you unequivocally that he does in fact need to be pushed or he will goof off. This “concern,” if you will, knowing it to be based in anything but fact as I do, is simply a ridiculous and transparent excuse. T. and I would both have preferred to hear the truth, painful as it may have been. I appreciate that you were trying to soften the blow but there are more honest ways of doing so. Telling us that he has potential but his ball handling skills are not quite there yet would have been far more palatable to hear than an uninformed let-him-down-easy lie. And yes, I repeated your “concern” to him this morning when I relayed your decision to him. Even he, at 10 years old, took umbrage at your assumption and dismissed it as incorrect, reminding me that Coach A. pushed him hard last year and he improved as a result even as he acknowledged that many of the kids out there this week were head and shoulders better than he was.

Assuming that you truly believe this “concern” (and for the record, I don’t believe you do), there’s more wrong with it than me simply disagreeing with you about my child’s innate personality. Making a comment like this implies that whoever the coach is for the B team will not be pushing my child to play well. If we wanted a program that did not have high expectations for its players or did not want to make their players the best soccer players they are capable of being, we could have chosen to play on a much more low key level elsewhere. But T. wanted to learn to be a better soccer player and to rise to a higher level. Please note that this is his desire. You also told me, almost in the same breath, that the two teams, A and B, would be practicing together frequently. If this is the case, will you only be pushing half of the boys on the pitch during those practices? Because based on your comment to me, the B team coach certainly won’t be pushing the boys or my child shouldn’t be on any team per your “concern” lest it burn him out on the game. Makes your “concern” sound pretty ludicrous now, doesn’t it?

In your comments to the parents on the sidelines yesterday and to the boys on the pitch, you were also less than honest and that bothers me a lot. You told the boys that no one had been called and you told the parents that calls would be going out last night. Now, in talking to another parent before you came over to us, she mentioned having received a call on Tuesday night telling her that her son was on the team. If I, on the sideline, found this out completely unsolicited, don’t you think that the boys also knew that calls had gone out to some and not others? What purpose was served by telling them no one had been called? All you’ve managed to do is cause me to have to have a discussion with T. about honesty and why lying is never the correct option. Based on my knowledge of some calls already having been made, I had started preparing T. for the probability of being on the B team before we even left the parking lot Thursday evening. Parents and children are not stupid so please don’t lie to us.

You also said that at this age it was as important to you to see how the boys worked together as it was to see what ball skills they had. So I am pleased to note that, without knowing which other boy at the tryout was also placed on the B team, you most likely chose to keep a child who didn’t pass to another player even once during your practice game despite his teammates being open, children who only came to one of the two required try-outs, and a child who spent a lot of time in the back field yelling at his teammates about what they were doing incorrectly over my child. I shudder to think what unsportsmanlike conduct I missed about his playing that made him less appealing as part of your team than these children. If you sense a little sarcasm in that statement, I am sorry. You should sense a lot. Again, if your criterion for selection to the A team is going to be solely skills based, then be honest about it rather than mouthing platitudes that you don’t intend to honor.

And finally, while this last might seem small and insignificant, it is what set us off on the wrong foot on the call last night right from the get-go. You did apologize for the lateness of the hour (and yes, it was quite late to be receiving a phone call) but you ruined your apology by mentioning that you had had a lot of calls to make and that you were also having to help out and call another team. So, not only was my child last on the list to call for his age-group but he fell behind an age-group that is not even your responsibility. That was simply charming to hear. In short, you may have been concerned about T.’s continued love for the game but after last night this mother is completely disillusioned with the process, the organization, the integrity of the coaches, and frankly the game as a whole. Disappointment is a part of life but insincerity and lying should not be.

Love and Kisses,

One seriously peeved tiger mama

Am I being too sensitive? I know stuff like this will only get worse as he gets older but I feel like no one ever calls the coaches on it and I think someone should. I guess that means that someone should be me. If you disagree with me, I'm curious to hear your reasoning. I will add that I left out the fact that T. is wildly disappointed not to be on the same team as his buddies because I don't think that's a valid complaint. It's a feeling we'll have to help him with but not anything that should impact the selection process. So I'm not totally unreasonanble, ne? ;-)