wednesday july 11
Shortly before the outbreak of Word War II, 16-year-old Paul Christopher resides in Berlin with his American father, Hubbard, and his beautiful German mother, Lori, a baroness. It’s a time of great tension for Jews and non-Germans in Berlin, especially for the Hubbards. They have helped Jewish families escape the Reich to Denmark on their small sailboat. The secret police, directed by an SS officer named Stutzer, are watching them.
The danger for the family increases after Paul meets Rima, a Jewish girl, and he falls in love. Their relationship possesses a fatalistic gravity far beyond their adolescent years. As the threat of arrest increases, Paul’s parents send him home to New York City for safety. But Paul can think only of Rima's safety, and he returns to Germany.
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I recently joined a book club where the members are all (we would admit this) women of a certain age. While we were making our list of must-reads, scribbling down titles of great books we always wished we had read, we discovered that not everyone in the group had read Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman.
Well, that was that. Half the room leaned forward and said in chorus, “Oh, you’ve got to read it!”
There’s something about living through an era of social change that makes you want to tell people about it and gives you an enormous camaraderie with other people who went through it, too. (Any social change—this summer, ask someone older what life was like before air conditioning, for example.)
If someone can do that telling as vividly and hilariously as Atwood does in this 1969 classic of the early women’s movement, you’ve just got to pay attention.
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sunday july 08
Schaffert’s
Devils in the Sugar Shop is sophisticated chick lit set in present day Omaha, Nebraska. The story is centered around a group of women who, try as they might, just can’t seem to get it right. DeeDee is the proprietress of a very tasteful adult oriented store called the Sugar Shop. Ashley is a failed writer of erotic fiction. Artist and bookstore owners are also among the occupations of the group. Add stalker to the list, but just whom that happens to be is a delicious mystery deeply embedded in the novel.
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friday july 06
I love a good mystery novel. Likewise, a piece of science fiction, especially one with an anthropological bent, really makes me want to curl up and read all night. Books that straddle the gap between these two genres: pure bliss.
I recently found Paloma, a new book in the Retrieval Artist series by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. I was so happy to see a new one is out, because I tore through the other four in the series last summer, reveling in the mystery plots centered around humanity's interaction with various species of aliens and the ensuing political and legal conflicts.
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Looking for a nostalgic, humorous, summertime story? Then I highly recommend reading (or listening to) Richard Peck’s
A Long Way from Chicago. Every August, for six years, Joey and Mary Alice Dowdel leave the big city of Chicago to stay for a week with their grandmother in a small town in Illinois. Their visit is always eventful!
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wednesday july 04
I’ve been blogging mystery and suspense novels for the past few weeks. This one’s a mystery, too, but a delightfully charming period mystery quite unlike those other titles.
Kate Ross’s series debut, Cut to the Quick¸ introduced Julian Kestrel, a London dandy of the 1820s. Invited to a country house to be the best man at a wedding, he finds that the groom’s aristocratic family is being blackmailed into accepting a former stable hand’s daughter as the bride.
More startling still, Julian finds the body of an unidentified young woman in the bed of his guest room. When his own manservant (a former cutpurse) is accused of her murder, Julian steps in to find the real culprit, and of course discovers that the murder and the blackmail are linked.
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sunday july 01
The Fourth of July is here, so set off some fireworks by cooking a pot of hot, spicy chili!
Authors Michael and Jane Stern have served up a mouth-watering book of chili recipes called Chili Nation. The husband and wife duo, best known for their book Roadfood (and website by the same name), take chili lovers on a coast-to-coast trip from Alabama (Chili a la Whistle Stop) to Wyoming (Code 10 Chili) and every state in between.
The Sterns believe that chili is this country’s one truly shared national food because it can be found on every table and crosses all cultural and ethnic lines. Indeed, the recipes they have selected represent America in all its diversity and local flavors.
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