Where the River Ends by Charles Martin - Doss Michaels takes his wife Abbie on a canoe trip down the St. Marys River that runs between Georgia and Florida. Abbie is dying of cancer, and this trip is one of her ten bucket list items. Doss is a painter and former river guide who grew up poor, but he meets model Abigail Grace Eliot Coleman (later a designer), daughter of a senator, when he saves her from a mugging in Charleston. The story alternates between events of their trip down the river, and their past. They sneak away for the river trip because the senator thinks Abbie belongs in hospice, and spend much of it trying to evade being seen by others. Amazingly, they manage on this trip to accomplish all but one of the ten bucket list items (and even that last one happens later). I did feel that some of the bucket list items (pages 26-27, ride an antique carousel, do a loopity-loop in an old plane, sip wine on the beach, go skinny-dipping, swim with the dolphins, wet a lien, pose, dance with my husband, laugh so hard it hurts, and "ride the river all the way from Moniac") were pretty unusual, and I felt the plot was rather contrived to make them happen. Nevertheless, I enjoyed Charles Martin's sweetly romantic story and the descriptions of the river.
Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout - re-read for local book club, as we were reading and discussing its sequel, Olive, Again, the next month.
Midwives by Chris Bohjalian - consulted with a midwife, an ob-gyn, and Vermont state medical examiner, deputy state's attorney, and criminal defense attorney. Also read Spiritual Midwifery by Ina May Gaskin and A Midwife's Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. Inspired apparently by Lexie Dickerson (his daughter) coming home from daycare "entranced by the word vulva." (p. 373 - acknowledgements).
Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng - realistic fiction, mno book club - A dysfunctional-family drama set in a "perfect" wealthy community made for an interesting book club discussion, particularly about motherhood and about planned communities like Shaker Heights, a real town where the book is set. I really hated Elena Richardson by the end. She's a manipulative woman with four children, three of whom are quite self-centered. However, I had to admire how Elena used her journalistic research skills to ferret out information to hurt her tenant Mia, and Mia's daughter Pearl. It was also interesting that the television series based on the book apparently assumes Mia and Pearl are black (there are lots of other differences between book and series). I didn't come to that conclusion at all, as their race is not specified in the book. Apparently author Celeste Ng was okay with that, explaining in an interview that:
“In the initial drafts of the book, I wanted to make Mia a woman of color. I knew that I wanted to look at race, but I knew that there was going to be this Asian American baby, and I felt like making her an Asian American woman, which was a perspective I knew I could write, would be a little too neat. Like, of course the Asian woman will side with the Asian mother. But I didn’t feel like I was the right person to write a black woman’s experience. I didn’t want to pretend like I knew what that was like. So, I thought of her as a white woman, but I didn’t mark her racially."
© Amanda Pape - 2020
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