I’ve become an Ann Patchett fan after reading Whistler, a story within a story. The main story unfolds on two timelines as the adult Daphne Fuller, by chance, reconnects with her former stepfather, Eddie, in New York City 40 years after he left her mother’s marriage. The loving relationship is rekindled as they recall their lives together and the almost fatal car accident when Daphne was 9 years old. While they are trapped in a badly damaged Chevy station wagon, Eddie tells Daphne about a horse named Whistler that saves an injured rider’s life. It is a rich, complex tapestry involving multiple generations, memories, and life-changing drama.
The first Ann Patchett book I read was Bel Canto (2001), about a hostage crisis in South America, which is also highly recommended. Patchett knows how to tell a story and keep you asking for more.
Fantasy, time travel, satire, and a polarizing, unlikable main character (Natalie), a social influencer, in a first-person narrative. She lives on a ranch called Yesteryear in Idaho. The author uses Natalie to portray a negative view of Evangelicals as shallow fundamentalist, check-the-box Christian Nationalists. Everything in the book is about extremes. Natalie is not just educated; she goes to Harvard. She doesn’t just have a social media presence; she has millions of followers. She not only has children; she has at least a half dozen in two eras of her life. Not only does she marry (poorly) into money, but they are very wealthy and have political power.
I did not like the book for the first several chapters. I grew more interested as I realized we are invited to watch a woman who has it all together drift into mental illness. There is no joy in learning about mental illness, but the way Caro Claire Burke portrays what is happening to our narrator is rather clever. Nothing is as it seems or appears on social media, and it gets worse. If Burke is trying to comment on our cancel culture, post-facts politics, tradwifes, and gender role dyslexia, she has done a great job. Natilie wakes up in 1855, and the ranch life staged for Instagram suddenly becomes real. She “feels frozen in the pages of a children’s nursery rhyme.” At one stage of Natilie’s life, her mother says to her, “You think kindness is a side virtue. It’s not, it is the whole thing.” Good advice that comes too late. At the end of the book (a bit of a spoiler alert), we see the march of her children toward a life Natalie never had, and the return of her college roommate for a final revenge.
Growing Young: Six Essential Strategies to Help Young People Discover and Love Your Church; Kara Powell, Jake Mulder, and Brad Griffin
This book was a book club selection to help our club members better understand what it takes to attract young families to our congregation. Growing Young is a gift to the Christian community. Just looking at the index was encouraging and helped me read what the authors have carefully researched and experienced. Let me share a few quotes that caused much discussion in our club: — “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” It is not enough to develop a strategy to attract young people; it requires a cultural change in the church. — “When interview participants describe their church, they are eight times more likely to mention that diversity of beliefs in their church than similarities.”
I highly recommend Growing Young to any church that sees a need to change and is looking for ideas about what to do and why.
The first book in The Circle Series, Black, by Ted Dekker, details the dual reality of Thomas Hunter through his dreams. I appreciate the Christian symbolism created by Dekker, but don’t especially like the plot, which requires the reader to suspend disbelief. The story is a fantasy thriller about a man who leaves one world during his dreams and does the same in the alternative world. To keep it interesting, there is a deadly virus in the hands of evil people who want to master this world (or is it another world?). Only Hunter can stop them, but to accomplish that, he must travel between worlds. Then we have “The Birth of Evil,” which is cleverly woven into the story as an allegory for original sin.
The end of the book is less than satisfying, with the story left to continue in the next book of the Circle Series.
Private is first in a series called “Private” by James Patterson and Maxine Paetro, featuring Jack Morgan, a former CIA agent turned private detective with a worldwide agency of the same name. I doubt I will read many of the dozen or more books in the series. Private is fast-paced, with short chapters, and filled with formula law-enforcement slang, beautiful young women, and danger in every direction. Jack is the brave, glib war hero who seems to have an answer for every difficult situation. The book cover tells you where Jack will be traveling, and the bullet hole is a clue to the drama he will face. The character development is shallow, but there is never a dull moment in the lives of Jack and his colleagues.
This was my first Kristin Hannah book, but it will not be my last. Winter Garden was difficult for me to read, but rewarding to complete. The story is about the Whitson family, who operated an apple orchard business in Leavenworth, Washington, a town I have visited many times. Evan Whitson married a very reserved Russian woman, Anya, and they have two daughters, who never feel loved by their mother. Anya is a distant, cold, and forbidding mother, but a devoted wife.
Just before his passing, Evan asks his daughter to promise to make their mother finish a Russian fairy tale she never completed. The Russian fairy tale is about the life of a young woman living in Stalinist Leningrad. The tale is about Anya’s life during the Siege of Leningrad by the Natzis in WW2 and the brutal violence that claimed the lives of 1.5 million Russians between 1941 and 1944. Leningrad is now Saint Petersburg, another place I have been fortunate enough to visit. As Anya tells her adult children about the pain and sorrow of the siege, I was drawn into the narrative to the point that I could read only two pages per day. Hannah describes the trauma of not only Anya and her family but the entirety of the Russian experience.
I’m a fan of the pseudonymous author Elena Ferrante, whom I have identified as a Favorite elsewhere in this website. Nevertheless, I must say The Lost Daughter is not among her best works. Maybe I was expecting more after reading the Neapolitan Novels, which set a high standard. This short novel fails to capture the attention and imagination of readers like Ferrante’s other works. The first-person narrator, Leda, is an unappealing, selfish woman.
She is well-educated and has a successful career as an English teacher in Italy. Her own adult daughters live in Canada with their father, but she maintains contact with them by phone. The drama of the story is mostly in Leda’s head as she interacts with a vacationing family on a beach along the Ionian coast near Naples. She becomes obsessed with the family, finds a doll belonging to a daughter, and then inexplicably refuses to return it to the child. Her actions become more complex and cringeworthy. The ending offers no insight or reveals anything we should have seen coming.
Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War; Tony Horwitz
Midnight Rising is a book club assignment that our members, including me, enjoyed. It is a historical nonfiction account of John Brown’s life and death, the raid on Harpers Ferry, and the political consequences that led to the Civil War. The book is written in a novel style, but is carefully researched and annotated. I listened to the Audible version, which included an interview with author Tony Horwitz. The book has won several awards.
John Brown does not come off as a hero but rather as a delusional figure who suffered from a martyr complex. His 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry may have helped the cause of abolition, but it also cost Brown, his sons, and many others their lives. Brown should have taken a clue from Fredrick Douglas, who wisely refused to support Brown’s attempt to spark a slave rebellion in the South.
Fourth Wing, a new genre for me, caught my eye at a Barnes & Noble display table lined with cards, posters, jewelry, and clothing. The display reminded me of the Harry Potter craze in the last century. Castles, dragons, magic, and a war college set in an unidentified time and place. I picked up one of the three books in Rebecca Yarros’ Empyrean Series, and I was hooked within a few pages. The genre, often described as “romantasy,” adult fiction, and magical fantasy, isn’t for young readers. After Violet Sorrengail enters Basgaith War College, the book never comes to a calm place where the reader can go into neutral for a few pages.
Starting on the first day of war college, in a universe unlike our own, student mortality thins the ranks of future riders of flying dragons who spend three years training to defend the nation of Navaree. There are only two ways out of Basgaith College: graduate or die. In the midst of the brutal training and drama, students find a diversion in sex, mostly between first-years and upperclassmen, explaining the “romantasy” genre label. I still haven’t decided whether to continue with the series. The book deserves the attention, acclaim, and many awards received over the past few years.
