A Walk To Remember by Nicholas Sparks

A Walk to Remember is account of a man in his fifties remembering his first love.

He's a high schooler as his story opens.  An average student, he likes to hang out with his friends.

Jamie Sullivan is the Baptist minsiter's daughter, a young woman who isn't popular with the other students.  To them, she seems so serious, and is always walking around with her Bible.

Jamie runs for student council president, and he wins.  One of his duties as student council president is to help decorate for the school dance, clean up afterward, and attend.  He needs a date.  He starts calling all the girls he knows, and soon finds that everyone already has a date to the dance.  He calls Jamie Sullivan and she agrees.

This sets in motion a series of events that make up the novel.

It's a wonderfully easy and quick read.  It's well written and very entertaining.  It is very sentimental, and the characterization is not as sharply drawn as that in The Secret Place.  The publication date on my book was 1999, so this isn't a new book.

I'll Be Seeing You by Suzanne Hayes and Loretta Nyhan

This is an epistolary novel, and it's very likely to appeal to folks who are also fans of The Postmistress by Sarah Blake and The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society.

Two women become pen pals because their husbands are overseas, serving in the Army and the Navy in World War II.

Glory is 24 and has only been married a few years.  She has a toddler and she's pregnant.  She lives in New England.

Rita is Italian, lives in Des Moines, and she's a little over 40.  Her husband is a professor and a biology researcher, and he volunteered even though, because of his age, he was too old to be drafted. Her son also volunteered and he's a sailor in the Pacific.  She's originally from Chicago.

The two women share their anxieties, frustration and loneliness.  Through letters, they grow close.

Under Rita's tutelage, Glory becomes a great gardener.  They comfort each other as they navigate tough family issues.

The story covers 1942 to 1945, and it's very eventful.  It's a heartwarming story of female friendship, and I enjoyed it.

And, the friends exchange recipes.  The first one is for beer bread (never heard of it before, but yes, you make it with beer).

The Secret Place by Tana French

I really loved this novel, and I highly recommend it.

Holly Mackey is a teenager, a boarder at St. Kilda's, a tony girl's prep school in Dublin.  Her dad is a detective on the Dublin Murder Squad, and his name is Frank Mackey.  (Readers of Tana French's other mystery novels will remember him; her other novels are In The Woods, The Likeness, Faithful Place, and Broken Harbor.)

The novel's story begins when she brings a photo to the police, and specifically, to Detective Stephen Moran.  The photo came from a bulletin board in the top floor hallway of St. Kilda's called The Secret Place.  It's a place where the students can share secrets, anonymously.

A year earlier, a student from the neighboring school for boys, St. Colm's, had been found murdered on the grounds of St. Kilda's.  All the students of both schools were interviewed, but the  police investigation has come to a dead end.

Now, someone has placed a photo of the dead boy on the Secret Place bulletin board, with letters cut out from newspaper or magazine, in the style of a ransom note, which spell out, "I know who killed him."

Detective Stephen Moran's career has also stalled.  He got a break early in his career, permitting him to become the youngest detective in the Cold Cases unit, but he's now been spinning his wheels there for several years; he wants to work for the Murder Squad, but sees no opportunity to get himself noticed.  Then Holly brings him the photo of the murdered boy she's taken down from the Secret Place.

Moran know that there's is one detective on the Murder Squad who doesn't have a partner because her partner recently retired,   He knows that this is his one big chance.  If he can get himself assigned to this case, and he can solve the crime, there's a strong chance he might get promoted to the Murder Squad.  If he can't solve the case, his time in the Cold Cases area will probably stretch out until his retirement.

There's just one more snag.  The detective who worked the case earlier, Conway, is a woman, who's tough, smart, combative and hugely unpopular.  Can he solve the case?  Can he get along with Conway long enough to do so?

This novel is really about teenage girls, and what's unique about this stage of mental and social development.  It's also about the tense relationship between Conway and Moran, and the mind games that they employ as they attempt to winkle the truth out of the teenage girls they're interviewing.

What makes this novel so wonderful are the sharply drawn characters.  This was also true of Faithful Place, the other novel by French that I've read.  And the dialogue.  French has a wonderful talent for capturing dialogue.  French carefully unfolds the details of the plot, Conway and Moran's relationship, and the girls' relationships.

It's a long book, with chapters that alternate telling the story of the girls, and telling the story of how Moran skillfully navigates distrustful Conway, the interrogations, and finally, Frank Mackey.  I tried to read the book in three days, and the first 200 pages just flew by, but I found I just couldn't do it. Expect to spend a week, and give this wonderful book the time it deserves.

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12/7/2018

The "Dublin Murder Squad" novels:
 this

1. In the woods

2. The likeness

3. Faithful Place

4. Broken Harbor

5. The secret place

6. The trespasser

Her latest novel, The Witch Elm (a standalone), came out in October.

The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah

In the historical fiction novel The Nightingale, a French woman named Vianne Mauriac faces the start of the Second World War with great fear. First, her husband is drafted by the French army. After France falls and is partitioned, a German officer is "billeted" at her family home, meaning that he comes to live with her. Then her sister, who is just 19, leaves to join the Resistance. Vianne manages to survive in a world where civil order increasingly breaks down, food is harder and harder to get, and the oppressive practices of the occupying German forces become more dangerous for civilians.

This book is, in some ways, a departure for Hannah, who's written women's fiction in the past. However, at its heart, The Nightingale is about loss and forgiveness, and about the healing of families torn apart by loss and bereavement.

This book was an easy and very entertaining book to read, even though it's 448 pages.  The sentences are short.  Although the opening of the book, the exposition, initially moves along at a seemingly slow pace, it soons picks up and becomes a very dramatic and suspenseful novel, full of close and too-close calls.  The combination of the suspense of the novel, the heroic subject matter, and the short sentences make it a perfect book group book.

One review I read opined that Hannah does not quite have the style for a subject matter this serious (https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/kristin-hannah/the-nightingale-hannah).  I too, felt a lack when the relationships of the two sisters to the men they loved were explored.  The language and the content seemed similar to that of a romance novel.  But, this issue could be viewed the other way: that by presenting these men-women relationships in a very familiar way, Hannah succeeded in making history accessible to many more readers.

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Circling the Sun by Paula McClain

McClain is the author of The Paris Wife, a fictionalized biography of Hadley Hemingway, Ernest Hemingway's first wife.  This book was hugely popular, especially with book groups.  It combined history, bohemian/artistic achievement and glamor, and marriage drama.  I'm not sure what to call what I'm calling "marriage drama."  

Something I read opined that with its publication, McClain succeeded in creating a new genre.  Another example would be Melanie Benjamin's The Aviator's Wife, which was also a very popular book group book. Circling the Sun is McClain's follow-up, and it's a fictionalized biography of Beryl Markham, pioneering female pilot from Kenya. I never read The Paris Wife, but I read more than half of The Aviator's Wife and I think Circling the Sun much more entertaining.

Beryl Markham was English; her father was a racehorse trainer. She suffered an early trauma: when she was very small, her mother moved back to England with her older brother.

In McClain's novel, Markham becomes close to a nearby African tribe, and makes friends with an African boy who becomes her lifelong friend and her partner in her horse training business.  As a child she was a tomboy; she loved to run.  One day, her joy in running led to her being attacked by a lion.

As she reached adulthood, her father became overwhelmed by debts exacerbated by currency fluctuations.  He sold up and moved to Capetown.  Losing the farm was hard for her. Her father offered to take her to Cape Town but strongly suggested she get married instead.  This set in motion a long list of events, including her getting her horse-training license at the tender age of 18, the first woman of any age to do so.

She mingled with the Happy Valley set in Nairobi, the folks who figured in The White Mischief story.  In fact, when the Prince of Wales famously visited Nairobi, she was there with her husband, Mansfield Markham.

I found this novel entertaining, lively, eventful and easy to read.  Many of the chapters were short.  I felt that McClain chose as her subject someone who was a pioneer and someone with an eventful and interesting life. 

However, as I suspected, McClain seems to have bowdlerized her subject.  This bothers me, and I can't quite put my finger on why.  After all, it's an entertainment; it's not history nor does McClain present it as history.  I guess I think that McClain presents Markham as having fewer lovers and more friends than her Wikipedia entry would suggest (I have no independent knowledge of the facts of Markham's life), and I believe that McClain did that to make Markham seem a more admirable character.  To me, that implies that succeeding in a man's world (by which I mean the world of horse racing) and writing West with the Night (a book which Hemingway seems to have greatly admired) are not sufficient to make her an admirable woman.

On the other hand, I admire McClain for having written The Paris Wife which interested so many people.  It's not just that you can't argue with success; it's that ( assume many readers were introduced to characters, places and ideas they would not have otherwise encountered.  And, if all a successful book club is, is an excuse to bring people together, that itself is an achievement and a worthy one.

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Reading now: Circling the Sun by Paula McClain and The Secret Place by Tana French

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I'm about a third of the way into reading Circling the Sun and I'm almost finished with The Secret Place - perhaps 100 more pages.  I'd recommend both books.

Circling the Sun is a fictional biography of Beryl Markham, who wrote West with the Night, a well-regarded book I haven't read.  Perhaps I will now.

And, a friend gave me Rebecca Mead's My Life in Middlemarch.  I read "The Prelude," and I hope I will find time to read the rest of the book.  I'm reminded that Rebecca Mead already wrote about Eliot as the chronicler of resignation and acceptance when she wrote a piece for The New Yorker about the fact that a quote commonly ascribed to Eliot, about starting over, was never uttered by her.

I also started James R. Benn's The Blind Goddess.  This is part of the Billy Benn historical murder mystery series.  I didn't know what to expect, and this book is not the latest book in the series or the first one.  But I felt that, while a reader who had read the other books might enjoy a whole host of associations that I could not, I really felt that it was very engaging from the first pages.  I haven't gotten very far at all; perhaps as far as page 20.