Sunday Caught My Interest

It has been a nice and quiet weekend: Himself is in Montana flying rockets, Eldest went camping with friends, and Youngest is cramming as much time in with his friends before they separate for college. His best friend left Thursday and the next group to leave (including youngest) leaves in a week and a half. So we have been collecting items, firming up academic schedule, and celebrating that youngest is on the XC roster for the fall (one of ten freshmen – he will have to work hard). Eldest has been a huge help around the house and has even said I can suggest some books for him outside of his normal sci-fi/fantasy. I think I will start him on The Incredible Sadness of Lemon Cake.

Here is what caught my interest this week:

We have been blessed with a fairly cool summer, highs in the 80’s with nights cooling down. It is so pleasant to wake up in the morning to a breeze gently rustling the aspen trees. But I have had my share of hot summer nights including one in Salt Lake where we all retired to the sleeping porch for a little relief. So it was with pleasure that I read the following quote from Enchanted Night by Stepven Millauser in Caroline’s (Beauty is a Sleeping Cat) review of his novella:

A hot summer night in southern Connecticut, tide going out and the moon still rising. Laura Engstrom, fourteen years old, sits up in bed and throws the covers off. Her forehead is damp. her hair feels wet. Through the screen of the two half-open windows she can hear a rasp of the crickets and a dim rush of traffic in the distant thruway. Five past twelve. Do you know where your children are? The room is so hot that the heat is a hand gripping her throat. Got to move, got to do something. Moonlight is streaming in past the edges of the closed and slightly raised venetian blinds. She can’t breathe in this room, in this house.

I have never heard of this author, although he did win the Pulitzer in 1997 for his novel Martin Dressler but that is the beauty of book blogs. Enchanted Night is the story of a handful of residents in a small Connecticut town on a sultry summer night. Reviews say it has a fairy tale quality and Caroline talks about how it is “rooted” in the imagination and fears of childhood so this one is going on the list for himself to bring home from the college library.

Remember J.J. Caucus from Doonesbury – performance artist. I loved the strips that were about her wacky art. Recently published The Family Fang by Kevin Wilson is about Annie and Buster Fang, brother and sister and children of performance artists Caleb and Camille Fang. Due to circumstances brother and sister find themselves once more with their parents and even more performance art. The chapters are told with alternating narration and interspersed with descriptions of past performances. This sounds like an intriguing look at family, parenting, and art. The book was just released and reviews can be found at Jennifer from The Literate Housewife w

May Sinclair is a writer that is on the fringes of memory but I can’t recall anything specific – probably someone my mother has read. May Sinclair was an English author and suffragette who wrote between 1886 and 1921 and wikipedia says that the term “stream of consciousness”  as used in a literary way is attributed to her. It seems she was interested in psychology and Freud and her novel The Life and Death of Harriet Frean is about repression and what it does to you physically as well as psychologically. Harriet Devine writes in her review of the novel, “This is a novel of only 184 pages, into which the entire life of one woman is beautifully, sparely and movingly compressed.” Harriet is the only child of an upper-middle class English family who lives to emulated the example of her parents even after they are dead. Harriet Devine also mentions that the book is a good one for discussion so this one may be a good candidate for book groups. A note to Kindle users: many of May Sinclair’s work is available in the public domain and is available to download for free.

Samuel Lake is a good man, a Methodist preacher in the south, a family man with a wife, Willadee and three children including feisty, outspoken 11 year old Swan. When Samuel loses his congregation and his father-in-law dies, the Lakes move to the family homestead in southern Arkansas with Willadee’s mother. Swan befriends a boy who is going through troubles of his own and while Samuel struggles with his faith, Swan tries to help her new friend. This is the plot of Jenny Wingfield’s debut novel (she does have two screenplays to her name), The Homecoming of Samuel Lake. Reviews of the book can be found at Caribousmom and Rundpinne. I read the first chapter thanks to First Looks at Amazon and has hooked. Especially when the author ended the first chapter with the following: “Folks wanted it to stay the way it was, because once you change one part of a thing, all the other parts begin to shift, and pretty soon you just don’t know what is what anymore.”

Another novel recently released is The Lantern by Deborah Lawrenson which is described as a modern Gothic Novel set in Provence France. Woman meets man, falls in love, they marry. Man has an ex-wife he won’t discuss, they move to his house, all is well, then all is not. To be fair, the author acknowledges her debt to Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca; and this sounds like a nicely done, updated version. Reviews can be found at Fleur Fisher and S Krishna.

Happy Reading!

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