The Trouble with You: A Novel
by Ellen Feldman
1950s Soap Opera Writer During The Red Scare (1/22/2024)
In Ellen Feldman’s timely new novel The Trouble With You, Fanny Fabricant has barely had a chance to welcome her beloved and happily-returned WWII veteran husband home when a sudden event radically alters her anticipated life course. Raised to be an excellent suburban housewife, she finds herself instead job hunting as a single mother in a postwar world where women were leaving the workforce, not entering it. Aided by her intrepid Aunt Rose, Fanny lands a coveted secretarial spot on a national radio show, where she begins to rebuild her life as an independent woman at a time when her peers are constrained by what their parents, their husbands and their country tell them they are allowed to have.
There is a lot at stake in Fanny’s world, with politics beginning to impact many workplaces. While navigating an increasingly complicated work environment, she is also raising a young daughter and gently dipping her toe back into the dating pool of the early 1950s, where she finds that most men have conventional expectations.
Faced with a moral dilemma and the chance to help a desperate family friend support himself, Fanny begins “fronting” for a blacklisted writer in what leads to a successful working/writing partnership. As this life-changing new career transforms both Fanny’s professional and personal lives, it transports the reader back in time to the early Cold War years when the American entertainment world was rocked by allegations of Communist influence.
As a lens into an earlier time with parallels to today, The Trouble With You delivers a moving look at the direct impact of paranoia and misinformation on individuals. In Fanny, author Ellen Feldman has created a riveting heroine who makes choices which feel authentic and true in a time when traditional gender roles are just beginning to expand. Fanny finds independence, a career and even love despite the inevitable conflict between tradition and a new reality. Not only is she a character well worth spending time with, her story is an inspiring and thoughtful exploration of the evolving nature of female ambition.
Book clubs will find much to discuss and ponder. Highly recommended.
If I Forget You
by Thomas Christopher Greene
Lasting Love, Long-Held Secrets (5/29/2016)
If I Forget You is a lovely, well-written novel of reunited former loves which will take the reader on a sentimental journey to a time in the recent past when socioeconomic and religious differences were still major roadblocks in a relationship. Filled with flashbacks to the time when Henry Gold, a Jewish poet-professor at New York University, and Margot Fuller, a wealthy WASP with an overbearing father, were in love at a small liberal arts college, the novel's begins with a chance encounter on a New York City street between the star-crossed lovers who now carry scars and baggage from their lives apart. In this simple yet multi-layered story, Greene uses gorgeous language to deliver a poignant, thought-provoking reflection on how long-held secrets can have a devastating effect.
Recommended for fans of domestic fiction such as Us by David Nicholls and Life Drawing by Robin Black.
The War Reporter
by Martin Fletcher
Bosnian Conflict from a Reporter's POV (9/6/2015)
A well-told story from a unique perspective; especially recommended for fans of Girl at War. The reader is quickly drawn into Tom's world.
The War Reporter is a fascinating look at the very real dangers faced in reporting from the front lines, while also telescoping the war's impact in a before and after look at the Bosnian conflict. The novel follows Tom Layne first as he carefully navigates the reporter's role in covering the conflict, which a colleague tellingly describes as "the Unspellables versus the Unpronouncables", and later in a followup visit twelve years later. In his first assignment to the area Tom, his best friend Nick, and their translator Nina face unspeakable danger with tragic consequences. In his followup assignment, now suffering from PTSD and filled with regret, Tom's efforts to discover who encouraged ethnic cleansing and other heinous war crimes are packed with suspense. From his moving reunion with Nina to his realization of the importance of love Tom is finally able to gain redemption and closure.
A side note: I did object to Mr. Fletcher's repeated use of the archaic term harelip in a number of scenes. The more accurate terms of cleft lip/cleft lip and palate would have been not only kinder, but more illustrative to the context.
The Well
by Catherine Chanter
Thought-provoking look at a future with no water (3/18/2015)
The Well is a well-written dystopian novel which unfolds in a style reminiscent of Girl on The Train, in two sets of flashbacks, one recent and one further in the past. Set in a water-scarce England of the future, The Well focuses on Ruth, an ordinary woman who finds herself pushed to her limit by the quandary of having the only farm where rain falls in a drought-scarred land. The reader is swept up in Ruth's story and the mystery which unfolds. Book clubs will find many themes to ponder and discuss.
The Memory of All That: George Gershwin, Kay Swift, and My Family's Legacy of Infidelities
by Katharine Weber
Riveting and Sad Memoir (7/15/2011)
The rich and famous truly ARE different. In this charmingly told, evocative page-turner, Weber recounts the complex truth-is-stranger-than-fiction tale of her parents' and grandparents' marriages and extra-marital relationships. The author unblinkingly examines both the good and the extremely difficult times in the intense relationship between her grandmother Kay Swift and her married grandmother's long-time lover George Gershwin, as well as what it was like to live as a member of an illustrious yet troubled American Jewish family.
A Lesson in Secrets: A Maisie Dobbs Novel
by Jacqueline Winspear
Pacifists and the Gathering Storm (3/16/2011)
In this moderately good between-the-wars series installment, it's now the summer of 1932, and intrepid psychologist and investigator Maisie Dobbs has just been recruited by the British Secret Service. On assignment at Cambridge University, Maisie continues to filter and consider the enormous sociological changes happening in England and in the world at that time, while solving a serviceable mystery involving the questionable loyalties of eccentric academia. Her career now flourishing and headed in a new direction, loyal readers may wonder where Maisie's personal relationships are headed.
The False Friend
by Myla Goldberg
The Consequences of Bullying (8/29/2010)
In 'The False Friend', one morning on the way to her Chicago job Celia Dunst has a flashback to a tragic event 21 years earlier which resulted in the disappearance of her best friend Djuna Pearson. Galvanized by the need to confirm her long-repressed memories of the incident and her role in it, Celia searches for evidence in a visit back to her hometown in upstate New York. There the horrible truth about the Queen Bee-bullying behavior she participated in during her 11th year is revealed through Roshoman-style different perspectives from her family, childhood friends and Djuna’s mother.
How did the Celia at age 11 turn into the Celia at age 32? A gracefully-told story of gaining closure and facing hard truths, 'The False Friend' takes a thought-provoking and believable look at bullying behavior in young girls—at the consequences of trauma suffered by the target of bullying and also at the dynamics which lead to the behavior itself.
As the mother of two daughters now in their older teens, I was riveted by 'The False Friend'.
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