Book Talk: SOMEONE ELSE'S LOVE STORY, by Joshilyn Jackson

Someone Else's Love Story: A Novel
Joshilyn Jackson(Twitter)(Facebook)
William Morrow (November 2013), Hardcover (ISBN 0062105655 / 9780062105653)
Fiction, 320 pages
Source: ARC from publisher
She Reads Book Club selection (November 2013)

I'm not adding a lot of "women's fiction" to the shelves of TBR Purgatory lately. It seems to have lost some freshness for me, and I've wanted some time away from that book-club-friendly space where character relationships and plot development braid together and feed each other. And as a one-time Southerner, I've long been wary of the quirkiness that's frequently stirred into both of those elements when a novel is set in that region. But I've enjoyed previous novels by Joshilyn Jackson even though they fall into both of those camps, so I hoped to set aside those issues when I got the chance to read her newest one, Someone Else's Love Story.

Jackson got me past any misgivings I had about the material here by surprising me over and over again. Because I'd like you to experience those surprises yourself if you decide to read Someone Else's Love Story, I'll leave the details vague, but I will say this wasn't the story I expected it to be.

The intense, mildly absurd attempted convenience-store robbery that opens the novel connects the search for a young boy's unlikely father with a father's struggle to accept the shocking loss of his small daughter via questions about destiny and will. The novel's narration shifts not just between characters, but also in perspective--Shandi speaks for herself, while William's chapters are written in the third person--and the choice reinforces just how differently they deal with the world, and with how the world has brought them together.

I'm not entirely sure who the "someone else" of the title is meant to be, and I'm not sure Jackson's characters are, either. And I really think that's what made this work for me. Someone Else's Love Story was a particularly satisfying read for me because it proved to be something other than the story that I thought it would be.

Rating: 3.75 of 5

Book description, from the publisher's website:

For single mom Shandi Pierce, life is a juggling act. She's finishing college; raising her delightful three-year-old genius son, Nathan, aka Natty Bumppo; and keeping the peace between her eternally warring, long-divorced Christian mother and Jewish father. She's got enough to deal with before she gets caught in the middle of a stickup in a gas station mini-mart and falls in love with a great wall of a man named William Ashe, who steps between the armed robber and her son to shield the child from danger. Shandi doesn't know that her blond god has his own baggage. When he looked down the barrel of the gun in the gas station he believed it was destiny: it's been exactly one year since a tragic act of physics shattered his universe. But William doesn't define destiny the way other people do. A brilliant geneticist who believes in science and numbers, destiny to him is about choice. 

Now, William and Shandi are about to meet their so-called destinies head-on, making choices that will reveal unexpected truths about love, life, and the world they think they know.

From Chapter One:

"I fell in love with William Ashe at gunpoint, in a Circle K. It was on a Friday afternoon at the tail end of a Georgia summer so ungodly hot the air felt like it had all been boiled red. We were both staring down the barrel of an ancient, creaky .32 that could kill us just as dead as a really nice gun could. I thought then that I had landed in my own worst dream, not a love story. Love stories start with a kiss or a meet-cute, not with someone getting shot in a gas station minimart. Well, no, two people, because that lady cop took a bullet first. But there we were, William gone still as a pond rock, me holding a green glass bottle of Coca-Cola and shaking so hard it was like a seizure. Both of us were caught under the black eye of that pistol. And yet seventeen seconds later, before I so much as knew his name, I'd fallen dizzy-down in love with him."

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Book Talk: THE GIRL YOU LEFT BEHIND, by Jojo Moyes

The Girl You Left Behind

Jojo Moyes (Twitter) (Facebook)

Pamela Dornan Books (August 2013), hardcover (ISBN 0670026611 / 9780670026616)

Fiction (historical), 384 pages

Source: Publisher

Reason for reading: She Reads Book Club October selection

Opening lines:

“I was dreaming of food. Crisp baguettes, the flesh of the bread a virginal white, still steaming from the oven, and ripe cheese, its borders creeping toward the edge of the plate. Grapes and plums, stacked high in bowls, dusky and fragrant, their scent filling the air. I was about to reach out and take one, when my sister stopped me. ‘Get off,’ I murmured. ‘I’m hungry.’

“‘Sophie. Wake up.’

“I could taste that cheese. I was going to have a mouthful of Reblochon, smear it on a hunk of that warm bread, then pop a grape into my mouth. I could already taste the intense sweetness, smell the rich aroma.

“But there it was, my sister’s hand on my wrist, stopping me. The plates were disappearing, the scents fading. I reached out to them but they began to pop, like soap bubbles.”

Book description, from the publisher’s website:France, 1916:  Artist Edouard Lefevre leaves his young wife, Sophie, to fight at the front. When their small town falls to the Germans in the midst of World War I, Edouard’s portrait of Sophie draws the eye of the new Kommandant. As the officer’s dangerous obsession deepens, Sophie will risk everything—her family, her reputation, and her life—to see her husband again. 

Almost a century later, Sophie’s portrait is given to Liv Halston by her young husband shortly before his sudden death. A chance encounter reveals the painting’s true worth, and a battle begins for who its legitimate owner is—putting Liv’s belief in what is right to the ultimate test.

Comments: Almost everyone I know who read Jojo Moyes’ last novel, Me Before You, loved it. I haven’t read it, other than an excerpt from the week it was the Fiction selection at the DearReader.com e-mail book club, which I have to confess didn’t leave me panting to read more. (Please don’t hate me.) Therefore, I was probably less enthusiastic than most members of the She Reads Book Club when Moyes’ latest, The Girl You Left Behind, was made our October selection, and I admit I approached it with some degree of prejudice. When I said last week that there are times I feel flat-out bored with fiction, this was the kind of fiction I had in mind.

And here’s where I admit that my prejudices were unfair, and that I’m glad to say I was wrong. The Girl You Left Behind wasn’t what I expected, and I was pleasantly surprised by that. Moyes has crafted an unusual dual-narrative blend of historical fiction and legal thriller that grapples with some of moral and ethical questions arising from the effects of war and keeps the modern-day romantic thread from overwhelming the rest of the story. Since I frankly considered that thread the weakest and most predictable element of the novel, I appreciated that.

Moyes’ great strength here is the development of her protagonists. Sophie and Liv, her two primary characters separated by nearly a century and connected by nothing more tangible than a painting, emerge as women facing down very different difficult circumstances each in her own way. Neither always makes the best choices, but the choices they do make feel true to both character and context. The narrative switches between past and present at well-timed intervals that kept me engaged as a reader, while my interest in the characters and the high quality of Moyes’ writing helped divert me from some predictable plotting.

The Girl You Left Behind wasn’t a “love” for me, but it was definitely a “like more than I thought I would,” and I consider that a pretty good response. That said, please check out what other She Reads bloggers had to say, because you’ll probably find quite a few who liked it more than I did.

Rating: 3.5 of 5

   

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She Reads Book Club: THE FIREBIRD, by Susanna Kearsley

The Firebird
Susanna Kearsley (Facebook) (Twitter)
Sourcebooks Landmark (2013), Paperback original (ISBN 140227663X / 9781402276637)
Fiction, 544 pages
Source: Publisher
Reason for Reading: She Reads Book Club selection

Opening lines:

“He sent his mind in search of me that morning.

“I was on the Tube, a half a minute out of Holland Park and in that muzzy not-awake-yet state that always bridged the time between my breakfast cup of coffee and the one that I’d have shortly at my desk. I nearly didn’t notice when his thoughts touched mine. It was a rare thing these days; rarer still that I would let him in, but my own thoughts were drifting and I knew that his were, too. In fact, from what I saw of where he was—the angle of the ceiling and the dimly shadowed walls—I guessed that he was likely still in bed, just waking up himself.

“I didn’t need to push him out. Already he was drawing back, apologizing. Sorry. Not a spoken word, but still I heard the faint regretful tone of his familiar voice. And then he wasn’t there.”

Book description, from the publisher’s website
Two Women.
One Mysterious Relic.
Separated By Centuries. 

Nicola Marter was born with a gift so rare and dangerous, she kept it buried deep. When she encounters a desperate woman trying to sell a small wooden carving called "The Firebird," claiming it belonged to Russia's Empress Catherine, it's a problem. There's no proof. 

But Nicola's held the object. She knows the woman is telling the truth.

Comments: There have been times that I've pushed up against a posting deadline for a blog tour or online discussion, and written a review before I finished reading the book. There have been a few times--not many!--when I didn't get around to reading the book at all, and posted a "feature" instead. I think this may be the first time I've posted about a book that I have chosen not to finish.

One of the (great) things about book clubs is that they can provide opportunities to read in genres that we might not explore on our own. Susanna Kearsley's novel The Firebird is the July selection for the She Reads Book Club; it's a blend of historical mystery and contemporary fiction with strong elements of romance and a seasoning of paranormal. The leads in the present-day story, Nicola and Rob, are telepaths, and they are trying to discover the true provenance of an artifact--a carving called "The Firebird," based on Russian folklore--by psychically tracing the women of the family who possessed it back through nearly three centuries, via their intense mental connection.

The Firebird is, in all honesty, a book I doubt I would have picked up on my own. I gave it about 150 pages before I set it aside, and I think that was a fair shot for a novel that I reasonably suspected would turn out to be "not my thing" in the end. I wasn't uninterested in the dynamic between Nicola and Rob, but I couldn't get into the story they were trying to uncover--their expositional "conversations" about historical context didn't help--and, eventually, I just didn't feel the desire to stick with the whole thing for nearly 400 pages more. I appreciated the opportunity to give it a try, though. Readers whose "thing" it is will probably appreciate The Firebird much more, and you can find their thoughts via She Reads’ July book introduction post.

Rating: DNF

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(Book Club) Book Talk: ORPHAN TRAIN, by Christina Baker Kline

Orphan Train: A Novel (book trailer)
Christina Baker Kline (Facebook) (Twitter) (Goodreads)
William Morrow Paperbacks (April 2013), paperback original (ISBN 0061950726 / 9780061950728)
Fiction (historical), 304 pages
Source: Publisher, for review consideration
Reason for Reading: SheReads Book Club selection, May 2013

Opening lines (Prologue): “I believe in ghosts. They’re the ones who haunt us, the ones who have left us behind. Many times in my life I have felt them around me, observing, witnessing, when no one in the living world knew or cared what happened.

“I am ninety-one years old, and almost everyone who was once in my life is now a ghost.

“Sometimes these spirits have been more real to me than people, more real than God. They fill silence with their weight, like bread dough, dense and rising under cloth. My gram, with her kind eyes and talcum-dusted skin. My da, sober, laughing. My mam, singing a tune. The bitterness and alcohol and depression are stripped away from these phantom incarnations, and they console and protect me in death as they never did in life.”

Book description, from the publisher’s website:

Bird's eye panorama of Manhattan & New York City, 1873 (via Wikipedia)

Between 1854 and 1929, so-called “orphan” trains ran regularly from the cities of the East Coast to the farmlands of the Midwest, carrying thousands of abandoned children whose fates would be determined by pure luck. Would they be adopted by a kind and loving family, or would they face a childhood and adolescence of hard labor and servitude?

As a young Irish immigrant, Vivian Daly was one such child, sent by rail from New York City to an uncertain future a world away. Returning east later in life, Vivian leads a quiet, peaceful existence on the coast of Maine, the memories of her upbringing rendered a hazy blur. But in her attic, hidden in trunks, are vestiges of a turbulent past.

Seventeen-year-old Molly Ayer knows that a community-service position helping an elderly widow clean out her attic is the only thing keeping her out of juvenile hall. But as Molly helps Vivian sort through her keepsakes and possessions, she discovers that she and Vivian aren't as different as they appear. A Penobscot Indian who has spent her youth in and out of foster homes, Molly is also an outsider being raised by strangers, and she, too, has unanswered questions about the past.

Comments: I first became aware of the “orphan trains” when I read Laura Moriarty’s historical novel The Chaperone last year. The trains ran between the East Coast and the Midwest between 1854 and 1929, with the mission of finding hope and homes in small-town America for children who’d been orphaned or otherwise left to fend for themselves in the overcrowded, impoverished streets of the city. Organized by the Children’s Aid Society, the trains--a well-intentioned, if controversial, program with a mixed success record--were one the United States’ earliest foster-care initiatives.

In Orphan Train, Christina Baker Kline looks to this history to inform the story of two girls’ experience with foster care, eighty years apart. in 1928, Niamh Power, the only surviving daughter of an Irish immigrant family lost in a New York City tenement fire, is delivered to Children’s Aid by neighbors and placed on a train headed west. The train makes several stops along the way, and the children--a diminishing number at each stop--are presented to the locals; some will leave with new families, while others may end up as farm or domestic labor. Niamh is taken in by the Byrnes, a Minnesota couple who give her work in their small clothing business, a mattress on the floor in the hallway, and a new name, Dorothy; the placement ends when the Great Depression starts, and the girl’s luck goes from bad to worse until she ends up with the kindly Nielsens, where her name is changed one more time--to Vivian, after their own lost child.

Niamh/Vivian’s story is set in parallel with that of Molly, a modern-day seventeen-year-old who’s close to aging out of the Maine foster-care system. When Molly’s future is jeopardized by a reckless act--she steals a copy of Jane Eyre from the public library--a deal is struck; she can avoid the juvenile-justice system by doing fifty hours of community service. Thanks to her boyfriend, she finds an assignment helping an elderly woman sort through decades of belongings. The woman is Vivian, and despite the many years that separate them, their common frame of reference in foster care leads to the development of a real connection between her and Molly.

While Molly’s story is secondary to Vivian’s, Kline succeeds in making both of them distinct and intriguing characters, and although the last few chapters of the novel feel a bit rushed, the relationship that grows between them feels genuine. Although the behavior of some of the supporting characters can come across as clichéd at times, they don’t feel flat or overly stereotypical; Kline seems to write even the villains of her piece with some degree of sympathy. Orphan Train is engrossing and engaging, blending little-known history into a novel with contemporary resonance.

Rating: 3.75/5

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