In The Midst Of Winter

 I enjoy reading Isabel Allende's writing. This time I read In The Midst Of Winter which was published in 2015. After a fender bender car accident in New York City, the lives of three immigrants are linked forever. Robert is the one who hit the other car. He is from Brazil and is teaching at a local university. The person driving the car that was struck is Evelyn Ortega, a young undocumented immigrant from Guatemala. Robert gives Evelyn his card with his home address. Later that evening she arrives at his house upset. She stutters and English is not her first language, so he calls the woman who lives in the basement, Lucia, to come up and help him decipher what Evelyn is trying to say. Lucia is a lecturer at his university and she is from Chile. Robert and Lucia decide to help Evelyn with her problem. Along with solving the problem in New York, we learn about their lives growing up in Guatemala, Chile and Brazil. We learn why they immigrated. The story is simply mesmerizing.

 

 

Tell Tale

Jeffrey Archer is the author of the short story collection known as Tell Tale. Two of the stories in this collection were based on a Reader's Digest request to write a story with exactly 100 words in an hour or less. He did a good job on those two stories. A common theme among the stories is irony. I don't want to give away any spoilers. In one story a teacher in England, who visited Dachau as a child, brings his class on the same trip and learns a horrifying fact about his grandfather. In another story a police detective investigates a murder of a mayor in a nearby Italian town. All the people in the town confess to murdering this mayor. It isn't until he gives up the investigation that he learns who actually killed the mayor. These are all good stories. This is a book worth reading.

 

 

The Weird Sisters

Eleanor Brown is an award winning author who wrote The Weird Sisters. Their father is a professor at a college specializing in Shakespeare. He names his three daughters after characters in Shakespeare writings. They live in a college town an hour from New York City. Rose, the eldest daughter, lives in her home town. When she finds out her mother has breast cancer she moves into her family home. Gradually all the daughters move back home. Much of the book is spent analyzing why they left or stayed in their hometown. More time is spent exploring their petty jealousies. I enjoyed the book but I'm not sure I would any of those women as a sister.

 

 

A Clergyman's Daughter

I was in the mood to reread 1984 by George Orwell. So I looked at my library and didn't find that but I did find The Clergyman's Daughter. This book is old, discolored and tattered. This book is so old it still has that envelope with dates indicating when the book was borrowed. October 2, 1982 was the oldest date but it was published in 1935. The story is about a young woman working relentlessly to help her father with his church and his meals. He doesn't appreciate a single thing he does. He is stingy with money. At one time he had a bit of money but gradually lost it by making poor investments. He is grouchy and rude to his parishioners. His daughter, Dorothy, is forever trying to smooth his rough edges.  She is up past midnight working to make costumes for a church play when suddenly she goes missing. A vile woman in the neighborhood who is always telling evil stories about people in the village makes up a story that Dorothy was seen leaving town with a local bachelor who had three bastard children. This isn't true but it created a huge scandal. The clergyman angrily refused to talk to the press so only the false story was in the newspapers. Actually she lost her memory. She was out on the road far from town when she met 3 other people. Together they applied for jobs picking hops. When the hop picking season ended her memory returned. With her wages she wrote letters to her father begging for money to return home. He refused to respond. Eventually she ended up homeless and begging in Trafalgar Square. Eventually she was found my her father's cousin and taken in to work at a school where she was treated unfairly. Eventually a man from  her village arrived. The evil woman who told lies was sued for libel by a banker in town. The evil woman left town. Dorothy returned home to resume her duties with her father. Life for women in the 1800's was tough.

 

 

The Restless Wave

John McCain and Mark Salter are the authors of The Restless Wave: Good Times, Just Causes, Great Fights and Other Appreciations. The book is about the last ten years of his life when he was working in the Senate and running for President against Barack Obama. I don't agree with everything he says politically. I really admired him for standing up to Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld against the use of enhanced interrogation techniques. Enhanced interrogation techniques is a euphemism for torture. Keeping people awake until they hallucinate, keeping them cold or naked, water boarding, and making them keep their bodies in painful positions is torture. He got a lot of push back for his opinion. He was told he would have blood on his hands. Another thing I  liked about him is that he fought for democracy and for human rights. Also, he is willing to admit when he has made a mistake.

 

  

Mighty Red

I found another book written by one of my favorite authors, Louise Erdrich. This one is called The Mighty Red. The story takes place in a North Dakota town along the Red River. This is sugar beet country. One of the main characters is Crystal. During sugar beet season in the fall, the drives semi-trucks of sugar beets to the plant. She has a daughter just graduating from high school named Kismet. The story is about a love triangle with Kismet, Gary (a beet farmer's son), and Hugh (a nerdy home schooled dreamer). The story is also about the soil degradation due to the chemicals used on beet fields. Besides degrading the rich North Dakota soil the chemicals are harmful to bugs, birds, and humans. I totally loved this book.

 

 

 

  

Love Forms

Love Forms is a novel written by Claire Adams. Most of the novel takes place on the island of Trinidad. Later we go on to Venezuela and the United Kingdom.  I enjoyed reading the descriptions of Trinidad and Venezuela. The author wrote lovingly about the towns, big and small, and the beaches and the hills and the roads. The story was sad. Dawn, a sixteen year old girl in Trinidad is the best swimmer among her friends. Her family is wealthier than others and because of that she has few friends. Then comes the daughter of a traveling businessman and suddenly she has a friend. They attend the Mardi Gras parade together. Dawn takes a tourist to the beach to impress her friend. Later, finding out she is pregnant, she is shamed by her parents and her two elder brothers. Her father arranges an illegal trip to Venezuela to live with the nuns until the baby is born. He doesn't share how the journey will go so she is scared as she gets into various cars with strange men. She has to wear a black pillow case over her head in the boat on the way to Venezuela so that officials won't see her teeth or the shine of her eyeballs in the dark. Later, as an adult, she works as a physician in London while caring for her two sons. Once her marriage fails she decides to try and find her daughter. The author does a better job with descriptions of the land than the descriptions of the relationships between people.