Book Reviews

My first novel by this author. Very entertaining! Olive Kitteridge, a widow, is a retired school teacher in the seaside town of Crosby, Maine. The book starts out with Olive, a grandmother by now, going to a baby shower for her friend’s daughter. I do find it hard to believe that Olive has never been to a baby shower before, or have any idea of what happens at one. Events conspire to get her out of an embarrassing situation. We’ll leave it at that.

Olive seems to be entirely lacking in social skills. Maybe living in small town America has something to do with it. Her son Christopher lives in New York City with his wife, her two children and Olive’s grandson, their first child. Olive longs to be close to her family but doesn’t seem to have the skills to make this happen. She has not met her grandson, but she has met a man, the widower Jack Kennison who retired to Crosby with his recently deceased wife Betsy some years ago. Jack taught history at Harvard but he loves Olive’s lack of social skills. Olive says exactly what she thinks. Jack suggests to Olive that the reason she has not met her grandson is that she has not asked her son and family to visit. She replies that they don’t need an invitation, but when the two decide to marry, she does invite them, now with a second baby for the weekend. She plans to tell them just before they leave, and have Jack come over to meet them. The best laid plans can go awry when dealing with the dysfunctional! As the story proceeds, Olive’s honesty about her feelings is remarkable and illustrative of a journey we all may take, if we live long enough.

Really enjoyed this book, and will definitely read more of Ms. Strout’s work

My first novel by this author was an historical one, very good, about Cicero. The narrator was his slave Tiro, who developed a type of shorthand so that he could record his masters’ speeches. So I was surprised to find that Mr. Harris’ new novel takes place in the future. It isn’t a very bright future though. This story takes place in England several hundred years hence, after ‘Armageddon’, the name given to the collapse of civilization as we know it today, which happens around 2025, as best I can decipher. All that is left of our current day civilization is glass, plastic bits and useless cell phones. A great deal is made of the fact that many of these devices show the emblem of an apple with a bite taken out of it. The church has seized power again. People who did not starve sought the stone churches built before the industrial age because they were the only shelter available. Civilization seems to be stuck somewhere around the dark ages. Father Christopher Fairfax begins his journey on horseback to a small village in Wessex, where Pastor Lacy, a resident of thirty years, has just died. His purpose is to perform the funeral and return to the Bishop at Exeter but heavy rains cause a mudslide across the road and Fairfax is forced to remain in the village overnight. During the period between the first and second sleep (before electricity, most humans slept in two periods each night, with a period of wakefulness in between), Fairfax discovers that Pastor Lacy has heretical books on the study of the ancients. All curiosity regarding the lives of those who brought on the Apocalypse and their way of life is strictly forbidden by the church. Not only was Lacy searching for knowledge of the ancients, the author of some of the books, Dr. Shadwell, had received a letter from the old pastor and was in town at the time of Lacy’s death. Christopher becomes involved in the search for what the pastor had discovered regarding the ancients.

A very interesting perspective on how precarious our dependence on technology has become.

Published 2019, 354 pages

Finnie and Paddy have won the proverbial lottery when Paddy is invited to become partner in a law firm, and Finnie lands a job in the same village as a full time deacon. It seems too good to be true….

The couple has been married for a year when their fortunes take a drastic turn for the better, or so they think. Finnie keeps having wisps of doubts, trying to figure out how they’ve landed in such a cush setting. It’s hard to say too much about the story without giving away the plot. But early on, it turns out the couple has not been honest with each from the beginning. Both of them had lived in Canada for a time, but they never met there. However it was a connection when they first started dating that made them think they had something in common. From now on, whenever I hear that phrase my alarm bells will be going off.

The partnership’s location is a village called Simmerton, a place so dark it barely sees light on a cloudless day. It settles into a narrow valley between pine trees growing so thick it’s impossible to walk through them. The law firm consists of a married couple, Lovatt and Tuft Dudgeon, older lawyers who want Paddy to take on much of the work, and a couple of assistants. Maybe they want to retire, or just take it easy for a while in their golden years. Finnie’s deacon work will have a lot to do with a non-profit adoption agency the Dudgeons set up after Lovatt’s first wife and their two children died in a fire at the big house. It turns out Paddy himself is adopted so that most likely played into their choice for new partner.

Soon after they move into their new cottage Paddy and Finn and invited for dinner at the big house, although the real big house was the one that burned to the ground, and the Dudgeons live in a much smaller cottage on the property. As they walk up the drive that night Finnie is sure she sees someone stalking in the trees, but Paddy calms her fears. Just another barn owl or rabbit bustling about. But the dinner turns out to make a critical point in both of their lives and what comes after is anything but lucky.

Published 2019

It’s hard to know where to begin with this book. The two main characters, Fatima and Hassan, live in the Sultan’s palace, the Alhambra, and were his slave and his royal mapmaker, respectively. Fatima, perhaps the most beautiful girl in the world, had been born in the palace to a slave who died shortly after giving birth. Her father was unknown but it was of no matter, her beauty alone was birthright enough. At the point of the story she is a teenager and the Sultan’s concubine. Although a love story of sorts, Hassan prefers the intimacy of other men otherwise Fatima could not have trusted him or been safe when she sneaked into his room at the palace. But the Sultan’s power has waned, emissaries from the Spanish Inquisition arrive, and to Fatima’s horror, she reveals to the evil woman Luz, that Hassan not only makes maps, but has the magical ability to create doors, tunnels, and rooms where none existed before. Or perhaps he only is able to see what others cannot. Once Luz hears about these remarkable gifts, she labels Hassan as a witch who must be tortured and killed. She offers Fatima a life of opulence if she will turn over her friend. But with Hassan’s map making skills, the two of them escape, if only briefly and once having tasted freedom Fatima is unwilling to give it up, nor can she give up her friend, whom she finds she loves more than anyone else on earth.

There are jinns and priests, monsters and magic in this tale, a love story of sorts about friendship and what can come of it.

Published 2019, 249 pages

Martha Storm is headed to the Sandshift library where she volunteers. It’s Valentine’s Day and she’s spent the whole day preparing for a book signing event. Although she herself thinks the hoopla around Valentine’s Day is a lot of nonsense, she dutifully bakes heart shaped cookies, purchases wine and fluted glasses, then trundles it all to the library in time for the event, only to find the word ‘cancelled’ written on the poster advertising it. Martha is prepared to be furious, and rightly so – someone owed her the courtesy of a call, but she finds a parcel outside which grabs her attention for the time being and for a long time to come. The parcel is a book with a note attached which is addressed to her. It was left there by a used book seller from a nearby town. Inside is an inscription to her from Zelda, her grandmother, but the date is three years after her grandmother’s death. Martha is advised by her younger sister Lilian to let the matter drop, but Martha can’t do it. Zelda was the one bright spot in an otherwise painful childhood, the one who stood up to her controlling father and acquiescent mother. While Martha and Zelda were making up stories to entertain each other, her father Thomas was recommending that she and her sister read only the encyclopedia set he had purchased for them. The tension between her father and grandmother escalated for several years until Zelda’s death when Martha was still a young girl. As her parents grew older her mother needed help caring for her father, and Martha devoted herself to the task, then spent her young adulthood caring for both parents until they died. It was a lonely task, her sister Lilian not helping much, by then she had married and had children of her own. Martha had given up her own life to care for her parents and now made a life for herself in helping others. She put to rest the writing that she and her grandmother were so fond of in her youth, and forgot about it. But this book, the one found on the library steps on Valentine’s Day, was a collection of those very stories. And the possibility that her grandmother might still be alive proved irresistible to her. Martha sets out to discover how the book came to her, how it came to be, and most of all to find her much loved grandmother. Along the way she comes to terms with disappointment, makes new friends and wrestles with decisions she made in the past which have come to be a way of life, maybe not the life she wants for herself now