Orphan Train a Novel - Christina Baker Kline

 A young girl, Vivian, aka, Dorothy, aka Nimah, is sent from her fractured family life in New York in the late 1800s to Minnesota on an orphan train where she is shuttled from one family to another until she finds a life as an adult.  At 91 years old she meets an orphan teen in the foster care, Molly, who comes to Vivian's home to work off community service.  Their stories of growing up contrast and compares the care or lack thereof they receive in their different orphan care systems.  I found this to be a heartbreaking story of trauma for losing parents, no matter how poorly they parented, the loneliness of not having a family connection and the perseverance of the individual spirit.  

Published:  2013  Read September 2024  Genre: Historical fiction

The Hidden Life of Cecily Larson - Ellen Baker

What a marvelous read!  Since the realization in the public of the power of DNA to reveal secrets, more authors are incorporating it into their stories.  This book is about a family and family relationships, and what happens when the truth comes to light through DNA.  Baker is a good storyteller, alternating between two families lives and their past that brings them together in the present.  It's a story of hope and forgiveness augmented by the science of DNA.

Published: 2024   Read: July 2024   Genre: Historical fiction

The Prospectors - Ariel Djanikian

 This is a book of historical fiction, based on the Bush/Berry family who became millionaires from their claims on the Eldorado in Alaska.  The author takes us back and forth from the present day, with descendants of the family attempting to make reparations to the native Alaskans exploited by the family, to the story of Clarence Berry and his wife, Ethel, and her sister, Alice during their establishment of the claims.  It took me several chapters to get into the story.  I particularly didn't like Alice, who eventually married Clarence's brother, Henry to cement the family ties.  As the story unfolded, my feelings were justified as I learned of her scheming and its outcome.  

I really enjoyed the book overall and recommend it as background on the 1800's gold rush to Alaska and the long reach of fortunes made at the expense of others.

Published: 2023  Read: February 2023  Genre: Historical fiction

Tom's Lake - Ann Patchett

 

I indulged in actually buying a couple of new books for Christmas, this was the first one that I read.  I've read Ann's books before; The Magician's Assistant, This is the Story of a Happy Marriage and a long time ago, Bel Canto.

This story is about a mother and her three grown daughters who beg her to tell her the story of her life before she met and married their father.  They'd known she had dated a "movie star" and wanted to hear the details.  It is a gentle balance of children seeing their parents as people and parents shielding the children, even as adults, from some pieces of their past.  

I enjoy Patchett's writing although I found this one almost too nostalgic at times.  A good read for the holidays.

Published: 2023   Read: December 2023  Genre: Fiction

Signal Fires - Dani Shapiro

 I'd previously read Dani Shapiro's story of her adoption and chose this at the airport to read during the ride home.  I finished it in the 3 hour flight and layover.  It's the story of a family unwittingly caught in a tragedy and its affects on their lives and the lives of those in their neighborhood.  She uses the popular (and annoying, IMHO) device of skipping from character to character and from timeframe to timeframe. That aside, once the stories merge we see the long range impact of a moment's mistake.  A sad book and a commentary on how intertwined our lives can be with those on the fringe of our days.

Published:          Read: November 2023   Genre: Fiction

When the World Didn't End - Guinevere Turner

 Using the journals she kept from her childhood, Turner revisits growing up in a cult that worshipped its leader who declared the world would end in 1975.  Shuttled between communal homes across the U.S. hoping for a seat near the "Queen"- the cult's mother - she's constantly judging herself unworthy and racked with guilt over the slightest criticism.  Shipped to her mother and mother's boyfriend who leave the cult, she's torn from everything she knows and thrust into the World, which she's been taught is evil.  The true evil is her stepfather and mother.  A bizarre and sad story that highlights how children are shaped by their caregivers and yet survive by their own will and belief in themselves. 

Published: 2023  Read: October 2023  Genre: Memoir

Home Safe - Mitchell Consky

 This is my favorite book I've read in 2023.  It is  memoir by a young man whose father is diagnosed during the pandemic with aggressive liver cancer.  Their family comes together to care for him at the end of life at home, many of them healthcare professionals impacted by being essential workers.  Throughout, they demonstrate so much love and caring for each other.

It made me reflect that we all still have a single shared experience that we can relate to: the losses suffered in a million different ways during two years of panic, fear, confusion and isolation during Covid.  It made me think we need a national day of recognition to honor the individuals and experiences we lost due to the pandemic.  It made me think that this is something we can share with each other instead of the vitriol and divisiveness that is separating us.

Quotes:

"[Caregivers] ...caring for yourself when you want to save someone else is easier said than done."

"[on not being able to hug during the pandemic] Hugs are like the universal language for saying 'You're going to be okay'...The word 'embrace' has a Latin origin brace deriving from the word braccia which in the combination braccia coro circumdare means  'puts one's arms around'.

"Life is a series of compromises.  He told her its not about picking sides as much as it's about choosing to participate in the inevitable struggles life throws at you.  Giving up when life gets hard, that's what you want to avoid."

[On parents] "The love that they gave me stayed with me long after they died.  The love I give you will stay with you too.  Because that love is immortal.  That love will bring us together no matters what's happening in the world. No matter the circumstances that keep us apart."

Published: 2022  Read: September 2023  Genre: Biography

Before Your Memory Fades - Toshikazu Kawaguchi

 This was a lovely, touching read, cleverly asking what we would do if we could go back in the past, yet not be able to change anything in the present?  In short vignettes, Kawaguchi introduces us to four individuals attempting to reconcile a hurt in their lives and the lives of their loved ones.  Each chapter is a surprise, a gentle unveiling of getting beyond that pain and moving on into the future.  This is the third book in the series.  

The setting is a coffee shop where one can go back to the past "before the coffee gets cold" in the cup poured for the time traveler.  Throughout the story, the characters are deciding how they would respond to the dichotomies posed in the book "What if the world was ending tomorrow? One Hundred Questions".  Each question asks the reader to make a decision about a situation with the end of the world in mind, forcing an answer we would likely avoid in real life. 

My mind has a problem keeping track of characters with unfamiliar names, in this case Japanese ones, but I caught on eventually.  I don't know if I'll read the other books but I enjoyed discovering this one.

Quotes:

"Burnout syndrome is considered by some to be a type of depression.  But while depression begins with the stress of fatigue or a large shock like an accident or a loss, burnout syndrome originates with the thought that all of one's efforts are in vain.  It strikes right at a time when life is not turning out as expected, despite devotedly pouring one's soul into a certain activity, usually one's work."

"Inside every person is an inherent capability to make it through any kind of difficulty.  Everyone has that energy.  But sometimes when that energy flows via our anxiety valve, the flow can be restricted.  The greater that anxiety, the greater the strength needed to open the valve and release the energy.  That strength is empowered by hope.  You could say that hope is the power to believe in the future."

"Something I strongly believe is that we mustn't allow the death of a person to be the cause of unhappiness.  The reason for that is simple: if we let everyone who dies be a cause for unhappiness, that would mean people are being born to become unhappy.  But the opposite in fact is true.  People are always born for the sake of happiness."

Published: 2022   Read: December 2022  Genre: Fiction, Philosophy

Uprooted - Peter J Boni

 Sub-title: Family trauma, unknown origins, and the secretive history of artificial insemination

This was a great read.  The author discovered in his 50's that he was conceived via artificial insemination, something that was being experimented with in the 1940s when he was born. He goes on a quest to find his birth father and in the process records the history of AI and its unregulated use over decades.  

Quotes:

"Year's before, I had taken a Myers-Briggs personality test...the leadership profile, ENTJ: Extroverted, Intuitive, Thinking, Judging....only 2% of the population has this profile."

"Isabella [Queen of Spain] became one of the most powerful and influential European monarchs...During her reign, the International Federation of Chess, the governing authority of the game, restructured the rules.  While the king remained the most important, the queen (modeled after Queen Isabella), moved freely in any direction and became the most powerful piece on the board."

"Based on [June 1941 survey of 30,000 doctors] ...estimated that artificial insemination accounted for as many as 10,000 births, with approximately two-thirds resulting from artificial insemination by husband and one-third from an artificial insemination by donor."

"In England, in post-war 1945, Dr. Mary Bardon documented...successful artificial insemination by donor and later revealed as many as 1,500 donor-conceived children in the U.K. ...she subsequently disclosed that one anonymous donor, her husband and fellow fertility researcher Bertold Wiesner, accounted for six hundred of those children. (Wiesner occupies the number-one Wikipedia spot for having fathered the most children)." 

"The American Society for Reproductive Medicine...publishes Fertility and Sterility...recommends a series of practice standards to be followed by its fertility practitioners... "

"The Uniform Anatomical Gift Act, drafted in 1968, and the 1984 National Organ Transplant Act have established standards for organ and tissue donation in the US.  Yet, there is no such governing body establishing laws and standards in the life-giving multi-billion-dollar reproduction industry.  ..[it is] totally unaddressed by US federal law."

" Professional fertility specialists generally belong to the Society of Assisted Reproductive Technology (SART).  By 1988, the Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendment (CLIA) required all clinical laboratory testing on humans in the U.S. to adhere to stringent standards."  

"First, a guideline is not enforceable; a law is.  Second, the free market distribution of not only sperm but also egg and embryo enables a multitude of unknowing siblings to be conceived from the same donor." 

 

Published: 2022  Read: July 2022  Genre: Memoir

Ancestor Trouble - Maud Newton

 Sub-title: A Reckoning and a Reconciliation
This was a fascinating read!  The author weaves stories of her lives into the history of genealogy and her family.  It's a rolling journey connecting epigenetics, genograms, forced sterilization, neuroscience, DNA, kinship and even spiritual practices that reflect our family ties over the generations.   

Quotes:

p. 50 "As of 2019, 23andMe's data set for sub-Saharan African ancestry relies on only 1,980 reference individuals...1,634 Central and South Asian...Europeans..6,328."

p. 51 "...African Ancestry, a Black-owned site with more than 30,000 Indigenous African DNA samples."

[Note: invalid comparison I noted to author and she replied she would review and correct]

p. 66 "...any genomic predictions that were removed from the outward-facing, customer perspective are still available to 23andMe - and its investors."

p.67 "Daniela Hernandez...Splinter..Ancestry has been collecting ancestral data about its users for decades."

p. 68 "empathy gene...has never been incorporated into 23andMe's own results (GG at Rs53576)"

p.143 "[Craig] Venter conceded in his 2007 memoir, A Life Decoded, Genes are not the whole story."

p.185 "Emotional recurrences in families...I often think family patterns are the primary existential conundrum we all have incommon, apart from death and basic needs like food and shelter.."

p. 187 "Touched by Fire, Kay Redfield Jamison...the particular type of family tree that populates Jamison's book is called a genogram (or sometimes a genosociogram).  These graphs can be useful for mapping traits through families but are similar to those used for pedigrees generated by the Eugenic Record Office...in 1910."

p. 234 "...so many of us spend our lives struggling with or against our ancestors' dreams without knowing precisely how or why."

Published: 2022  Read: May 2022  Genre: Memoir

Kitchens of the Great Midwest - J. Ryan Stradal

This was a different style of telling the story of a person's life; Eva, a young woman with a once in a lifetime palette, is revealed through her relationships throughout her life, from her father Lars in her childhood, through her adopted parents, her cousin Braque, her mother Cindy and others.  It's a bit disorienting as each chapter introduces another character and the transitions are abrupt.  The theme is food and its importance in linking people through life.  A quirky read.

Quotes and Notes

p 30 - He was already thinking about the good and the bad and the deep human necessity of it all, and how anybody ever got anything done without family and how someone could give that up in the amount of time it takes to seal an envelope with the same saliva once used to seal a marriage.

Recipes - for peanut butter bars and french onion soup

 Published:  2015  Read: December 2021  Genre: Fiction

Rules for Visiting - Jessica Francis Kane

 The reviews on this one were good and I liked the concept - a woman reaches out to connect in person with her friends from the past in the age of instant communication.  It missed the mark.  The heroine, May, is strange; a detached, disconnected, landscape gardener.  The author interweaves descriptions of the personalities of various North American trees into the narrative to illustrate the choices of personalities we can adopt.  I think that what was she was trying to do.  The back story of May's life was so obscure that when it was revealed it was anticlimactic.  Some thoughtful observations kept me reading but in the end, the book fell flat

Quotes:

"Friends are God's apology for relations (Hugh Kingsmith)"

"...the Dunbar number--the maximum number of people with whom any individual can maintain stable relationships--and how, despite predictions, it hadn't gotten any bigger in the age of social media."

"A house is a physical thing that is build with wood and bricks, furnished with furniture and carpets, while a home takes time and is built with memories." 

"Perhaps a best friend is someone who...holds the story of your life in mind.  Sometimes in music a melodic line is so beautiful the notes feel inevitable; you can anticipate the next note through a long rest.  Maybe that is friendship.  A best friend holds your story in mind so notes don't have to be repeated." 

Published: 2019  Read: April 2020  Genre: Fiction 

 

The Signature of All Things - Elizabeth Gilbert

This was for the most part a delightful read.  Alma is the only daughter of a self-made man of the late 1700's and early1800s.  He serves on a ship to atone for a crime and travels the world, picking up skills that allows him to make his fortune and build a plantation in Pennsylvania that provides medicinal plants, among other ventures.  Alma grows up in this privileged world, exploring their estate and becomes and expert in plants and horticulture, specifically the miniature world of mosses.

Her parents take in a beautiful orphan girl and declare they treat each other as sisters, a relationship that colors the rest of both of their lives.  The family story evolves against the scientific discoveries of the period, in particular Darwin's evolution of the species.  The title of the book refers to the belief that every thing that exists bears the signature of a creator.

Alma finds love, loses it, and strikes out on her own in the world, writing a parallel theory of life to Darwin's, based on her studies of mosses and her life experiences.  The story gets off on a tangent about two thirds of the way but winds up satisfactorily reflecting on the lives of women of the period, family relationships and the natural world.

Quotes:

"Those who are ill-prepared to endure the battle for survival should perhaps never have attempted living in the first place.  The only unforgivable crime is to cut short the experiment of one's own life before its natural end.  To do so is a weakness and a pity--for the experiment of life will cut itself off soon enough, in all our cases, and one may just as well have the courage and the curiosity to stay in the battle until one's eventual and inevitable demise.  Anything less than a fight for endurance is cowardly.  Anything less than a fight for endurance is a refusal of the great covenant of life."

"[reflecting on her theory of life] "For here was the hole in Alma's theory; she could not, for the life of her, understand the evolutionary advantages of altruism and self-sacrifice.  If the natural world was indeed the sphere of amoral and constant struggle for survival that it appeared to be, and if out-competing one's rivals was the key to  dominance, adaptation, and endurance--then what was one supposed to make [of these traits]? 

[discussing her dilemma with a spiritualist] "There is no evolutionary need, you see, for us to have such acute sensitivities of intellect and emotion.  There is no practical need for the minds that we have.  We don't need a mind that can invent religions or argue over our origins.  We don't need ethics, morality, dignity, or sacrifice.  We don't need affection or love, certainly not to the degree that we feel it.  If anything, our sensibilities can be a liability, for they can cause us to suffer distress.  So I do not believe that the process of natural selection gave us these minds--even though I do believe that it did give us these bodies, and most of our abilities.  We have them because there is a supreme intelligence in the universe, which wishes for communion with us...it wants union with us, more than anything."

"I know that just because people can hear each other across the divide does not mean they can necessarily understand each other."

"..I have never felt the need to invent a world beyond this world, for this world has always seemed large and beautiful enough for me." 

Published: 2014  Read: 2019   Genre: Fiction

July's People - Nadine Gordimer

I'm catching up on my summer reading posts after having travelled a bit from May through July.

I picked this book up at Liard Hot Springs in Canada on our return trip from Alaska this year.
It's the story of a white family, mother, father, son and daughter, who are sheltered in the bush home of their former servant in South Africa.  It's a terrifying look at the stark differences in living and family relationships between the haves and have nots.  The central character, Maureen Smales, lived a life of middle class anywhere, with her husband a two children.  The uprisings in South Africa force them to flee to safety and they are taken in by July, their long time house servant.  Their life changes dramatically living in his village of mud huts without running water or the other accoutrements they've taken for granted.  The shift in authority between them reveals the assumptions and expectations burned into their interactions.  An interesting read.

Published: 1982   Read: July 2019  Genre: Fiction

Me Before You - Jojo Moyes

This book is the story of a young man, William, injured in the prime of his life and confined to a wheelchair as a paraplegic.  Louisa, a young woman, fumbling through life from one failed attempt to grow up to another, hires on to be his caretaker.  She learns over time that she's there to convince him not to end his life.  Their relationship starts out contentious with William's bitterness shocking the sheltered, inexperienced Louis.  She comes to have affection for him as he is and to respect his wishes.

The reviews and movie describe this as a romance story.  If that was the intent, it misses the mark.  Louisa's fumbling and lack of any desires of her own, make her as pitiful as William.  There are no heroes in this novel.  Not recommended.

Published:  2012  Read: December 2017  Genre: Fiction

Shelter - Jun Yun

This was a painful, depressing book to read and I didn't like it because of that.  One of my reading group's chose it for this month's read.  It is the story of a family; a young husband and wife and 4 year old son and the husband's parents.  The son and his parents are distant because of the father's violence and the mother's acquiesence.  A violent crime forces them together.  Their lives go from awful to miserable to unbearable.  There is no redemption in this book, just the harsh reality of lives destroyed and continuing to damage the next generation.  Ugh.

Published:  2016  Read: October 2016  Genre: Fiction

Aberration of Starlight - Gilbert Sorentino

This was a difficult book to read, I would have enjoyed it more if I had read the reviews ahead of time.  It's the story of four people, a young boy, Billy; his mother Marie; her father John and a travelling salesman Tom Thebus.  They are visiting the Jersey shore for the summer, staying in a boarding house.  Their experience of the same events is told from each of their points of view, using different narrative styles--dialogue question and answer, internal reflection, letter writing.

It's a clever way of telling a story but  I didn't realize it was the *same* story until the third time it was told by a different person. I was confused with the timeframes and further distracted by the different writing styles.  The book makes an interesting commentary on how we each experience reality and how our individual pasts color those perceptions.

There was really no end to the story, though it did progress from the youngest person's view (Billy's) through to the oldest (his grandfather, John).  I'd recommend it as an example of different writing technique but it's not a pleasurable read.

Published: 1980  Read: August 2016  Genre: Fiction

ISBN: 1-56478-439-8

The Black Veil - Rick Moody

I picked this up in an RV park on our travels to Alaska this summer, swapping it for one that I had already read.

The author tells his life story in a stream of conscious fashion with long rambling sentences with many, multiple phrases.  He weaves in the writing of Nathaniel Hawthorne's (The Scarlett Letter, Twice Told Tales) and others, drawing parallels to his family from Hawthorne's short story, The Minister's Black Veil."  It's a convoluted means of tracing family tendencies through generations in an attempt to explain his own life and writing.  It could be considered very pretentious or strikingly original.  Either way, I wouldn't read more of his writing.

Published: 2002  Read: June 2016  Genre: memoir, auto-biography

Dear American Airlines - Jonathan Miles

A quick read that I picked up at the used bookstore.  The protagonist is a former alcoholic poet, now translator, who is on the way to redeem himself by walking his daughter down the aisle at her wedding when his flight is cancelled and he is stuck in O'Hare overnight.  Out of frustration, he writes a letter to AA revealing a life of great plans and poor execution, joys and disappointments (mainly in himself) and a quest for meaning and sustained hope.

It's funny and relatable, having spent unintended time waiting in airports over the years.  An enjoyable read.

Published:  2008  Read: May 2016  Genre: fiction, humor

The Hummingbird - Stephen Kiernan

Finally, a wonderful read!  It's been a slow year without much sure-fire reads.  This book was very satisfying.

This is the story of a hospice nurse who goes to care for an elderly history professor who is dying of cancer.  Her caring spirit is tested by his sarcastic, negative banter.  When she returns home after work, she must deal with a husband suffering from PTSD after having served in Iraq multiple tours.
She breaks down the barriers built by the professor by reading his unpublished manuscript that describes the bombing of the Oregon coast by a Japanese pilot during WWII and the subsequent relationship of the town and the pilot in the post war aftermath.

Her compassion is absolutely inspiring.  The author lets us know how she feels yet contrasts it with how she reacts, both to the professor and her husband.  There are lessons to be learned here.  Highly recommended read, my pick for best so far this year.

Published: 2015  Read: May 2016  Genre: Fiction