416 (2014 #44). Torn Away

by Jennifer Brown

Jersey Cameron is a typical sixteen-year-old from a blended family in a Missouri town.  She has a five-year-old often-annoying half-sister, Marin, who her mother has just taken to a dance lesson, and Jersey is home alone when a tornado strikes.

The first couple days after the twister are harrowing.  Jersey doesn't know where any of her family are, so she sticks close to her ravaged home.  Later she learns her mother and sister died, and her stepfather is too devastated to care for her.  He sends her first to her birth father's family, a bunch of stereotypical hicks.  That doesn't work out, so she's sent on to the maternal grandparents she's never met.

Through Jersey's thoughts and observations during and after the storm, author Jennifer Brown (who also writes women's fiction under the name Jennifer Scott) makes the reader see and feel the heartbreak and devastation of the tornado.  Especially poignant are the little pictures and captions Jersey draws of Marin on gum wrappers from gum in Marin's Mom-castoff purse.

The purse is one of the few things to survive the storm, along with a porcelain kitten, one of many Jersey would receive in the mail on her birthday that she assumed were sent by her estranged father.  You can probably guess who really sent them.

The book ends on a hopeful note.  The book is suggested for ages 12 and up, and I certainly think it's appropriate for middle school and high school - as well as adults.

© Amanda Pape - 2014

[I received an advance reading copy from the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program.  It will be passed on to someone else to enjoy.]

415 (2014 #43). Sea Glass

by Anita Shreve,
read by Kyra Sedgwick

Sea Glass begins in June 1929, when 20-year-old Honora Willard Beecher and her new husband, 24-year-old traveling salesman Sexton, are moving into an old dilapidated house on the New Hampshire coast just outside a mill town, fixing it up in lieu of rent.  When the house is put up for sale, Sexton finagles a way to buy it.  Then October comes, and the stock market crashes.

The reader learns more about the five main characters in chapters told from their points of view.  Honora has had a rough life, losing her father and her youngest brother in the Halifax explosion.  Sexton is an amazingly good salesman - maybe too good.  McDermott is a 20-year-old Irish immigrant working in the mills, losing his hearing from the noise, helping to support his orphaned siblings, and meeting with other men considering forming a union.  He befriends 11-year-old Francis (named Alphonse in some editions), a French immigrant also working in the mills and contributing to his family's income.  Vivian is a 28-year-old wealthy, bored, decadent socialite who comes to the coast for the summers.

In the early chapters, these people's lives start to intersect subtly, building to the chapters where they (and a few more minor characters) all come together to provide support for an upcoming strike at the mill.  There's both romance and tragedy in the story.  It was interesting to learn more about the labor movement in this period of American history, particularly as it affected the workers who went on strike, and the violence sometimes associated with it.

The title of the novel comes from the sea glass that Honora collects.  Sea glass has its sharp edges smoothed by the action of the waves and sand, and that serves as a metaphor for what happens in the book.

Actress Kyra Sedgwick does an awesome job reading this audiobook, with just that right emotion and nuances at all the right times.

I picked up this audiobook at my local public library because it was historical fiction and because it was short - I can listen to one audiobook CD a day during my commute and I had five days available before the start of my vacation.  I did not look that closely at the cover and was surprised to discover afterwards that it was an abridgment.  The abridgment (not by the author) was well done in that the novel flowed well, but it makes me wonder what I might have missed (apparently something about the house being a former convent, for one thing). I'm tempted to read the print book now!

I was also pleasantly surprised to learn, in the introduction by Anita Shreve, that this was her third book set in a certain old New England beach house (modeled after a real one), just in a different era.  I'm familiar with The Pilot's Wife, set in contemporary times, but I'm very curious to read Fortune's Rocks, set in 1899.

© Amanda Pape - 2014

[The audiobook was borrowed from and returned to my local public library.]

414 (2014 #42). In Search of the Little Prince

written and illustrated by Bimba Landmann

Subtitled "The Story of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry," this is a picture book biography about the author of the French classic The Little Prince.

The book was originally published in Italian, as Italy is the home of the author/illustrator, Bimba Landmann.  Her soft illustrations are fanciful yet serious.  There are a number of actual photographs of and quotations from Saint-Exupéry in the book.  The amount of text on each page makes this book more appropriate for grades 3-5.

© Amanda Pape - 2014


[This unbound galley proof was sent to me in exchange for an unbiased review by the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program.]

413 (2014 #41). Mrs. Poe

written by Lynn Cullen,
read by Eliza Foss

Mrs. Poe really isn't about the wife of poet and author Edgar Allen Poe.  Instead, the main character and narrator of the story is Frances Sargent Osgood, a poet herself, who may or may not have had a relationship with Poe that went beyond the flirtatious exchange of poems printed in the journal Poe edited.

The story begins in the winter of 1845, when Poe is at the height of his fame with the publication of "The Raven" (printed in full to start the book), and concludes two years later.  Osgood's philandering artist husband has left her alone to support herself and their two daughters, and Poe's attention ultimately helps her career.

Interestingly, in an interview, author Lynn Cullen says she was in similar circumstances just before writing this book, as her husband was temporarily debilitated from a bout with encephalitis (a possible cause of Poe's mysterious death) and she was worried about how she would support her family.

Lynn Cullen did a very good job researching her setting - New York City in the mid-1840s - and that aspect of the book is excellent.  What appears to be a lot of name-dropping cameo appearances of other authors and famous people of the day may seem annoying, but it's very likely that Osgood, Poe, and his wife Virginia (a cousin whom he married when he was 26 and she 13, who suffered from tuberculosis) did meet these people in the literary circles in the city.

The author's note at the end was helpful in telling the reader what happened to many of the major characters AFTER the story ended.  However, I would have like a little more clarification on what happened IN the book - what was true, what was not.  For example, according to Lynn Cullen's website, Frances Osgood did live with Eliza and John Russell Bartlett for a while, but I would have liked to have seen that fact in the author's note, as well as more detail on the sources she used in her writing.  The lack of such information means a lot of readers will assume that the events in the story are all true, when they are not.

Actress Eliza Foss "was featured in Audiofile magazine as one of 'audio's hottest romance narrators,'" and she certainly provides a dramatic reading of this book.  She gives Poe a slight Southern accent, fitting in that he grew up in Virginia.

I'm not fond of the romance genre, nor of Gothic horror/mystery, and this book has a little too much of both for my liking.  It is historical fiction, and that redeemed it for me.  Any time a work of historical fiction gets me to want to research the people and places it's about, it's a success.  Just keep in mind as you read it that is IS fiction and not fact.

© Amanda Pape - 2014

[The audiobook, and a print copy for reference, were borrowed from and returned to my local public library.]

412 (2014 #40). The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street

by Susan Jane Gilman

It's 1983, and ice-cream magnate Lillian Dunkle is looking back on the past 70 years of her life while awaiting the outcome of tax evasion charges and a personal lawsuit.

In 1913, 5-6-year-old Malka Treynovsky, loud and curious, immigrates with her Jewish parents - who'd originally planned to go to Cape Town - and three older sisters from Russia to New York City.  Just three months after arriving at their Orchard Street tenement, her father having abandoned the family, Malka is run over by a horse and is crippled for life.  Malka's mother is overwhelmed and leaves her at the hospital.  Salvatore Dinello, the immigrant Italian ices peddler whose horse ran over Malka, feels compelled to take her home.

The Dinellos expect Malka to earn her keep, and every day she helps make the ices - and later, the ice cream the family sells.  Malka ingratiates herself with the family (although not always in the best way), eventually being baptized as Lillian Maria Dinello.

Lillian is not especially pretty, but she's very smart, and the Dinellos send her to college.  She tutors privately on the side, and meets illiterate, stuttering Albert Dunkle - another Jewish immigrant who is a whiz with machines.  They eventually marry, and between Bert's invention of the soft-serve machine and Lillian's marketing magic (and a bit of luck), they grow an ice cream franchising empire.  Yet Lillian continues to be haunted with feelings of abandonment and insecurity, which makes her vulnerable in some situations and abrasive in others.

Lillian isn't the most likable of characters, but her story is a great one.  Susan Jane Gilman did extensive research on both immigrant life in the tenements of New York in the 1910s and 1920s, as well as on ice cream.  The Carvel Ice Cream Company was her inspiration, and she even worked there for a while to get a feel for the industry.

I love the cover; the dropped and melting ice cream cone looks like an unhappy clown.  Unlike the cone, this book is hard to drop - you will be tempted - as you must do with ice cream - to finish it all in one sitting.  I think my book club might like this book too.

© Amanda Pape - 2014

[I received a hardbound final copy from the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program.  I plan to hang on to the book for a while for a future re-read.]