Nora Webster by Colm Toibin

Since I've booked a trip to Ireland, I decided to turn my reading efforts to some Irish literature.  I had previously read Toibin's book, Brooklyn, and liked it but it was set in the US.  This was set in Ireland - in particular Enniscorthy with some visits to surrounding areas.

When the story begins, Nora Webster is newly widowed - left with four children.  Her daughters are away at school - one in college, the other boarding school and her two sons live with her.  The older of the two sons has developed a stammer - clearly emotionally related to the loss of his father.  The book follows about 3 years in Nora's life as she learns to come to terms with her widowhood and single parent status.  She has not worked since marriage but is offered a job at the office where she had worked - this is a small town and everybody knows everybody so the company owners clearly offer her work as they know she needs it.  Unfortunately Nora will be working for an angry woman who she had treated poorly when they were peers years earlier.

Nora also sells the cottage where her family had happily summered for years and instead they rent a trailer every year.  This takes time for the children to accept.  And it's hard for Nora to accept the financial help she receives and the emotional help her children receive from her husband's brother and sister as well as her own two sisters.

But eventually Nora discovers (or rediscovers) her own interests and makes new friends - and even comes to terms with parting with her husband's belongings.

All of this is set against a backdrop of the troubles in Northern Ireland which are also interesting to read about from an Irish perspective.  Personally I also took note of the descriptions of scenery - I will remember to look for certain places that sounded beautiful.

Toibin writes and creates interesting characters.  I definitely recommend his work.

Adult Onset by Ann-Marie MacDonald

This book was fascinating on so many different levels.  First, it all takes place in very familiar places in Toronto so I could literally picture just about every scene.  Second, it is such an interesting exploration of childhood memories and the tricks they play and havoc they cause in later life.  It also is such a captivating study of the relationships between parents and children, and how certain features replay themselves in subsequent generations.  Finally, I like how MacDonald worked in the fiction within fiction, inserting supposed excerpts from the protagonist's own novels.

The action centres around a week in the life of Mary Rose MacKinnon, affectionately known as "Mister".  She is married to the much younger Hilary who is, conveniently from a plot perspective, travelling for most of the week.  She has made a living by writing the first two instalments in a young adult trilogy and is now taking some time to stay at home and mother 4 year old Matthew and 2 year old Maggie.  Maggie's "terrible two" like behaviours trigger latent memories of when Mister was two and her mother was depressed, recovering from the loss of one of several babies she lost (either as miscarriages, stillborns or in this case days after his birth) due to their Rh factor.  The memories manifest themselves first in burning pain in Mister's arm which had been operated upon twice in her childhood due to paediatric bone cysts.  Googling whether the disease can recur in adulthood causes her to reflect on what caused the cysts in the first place and makes her face some ugly truths about both her parents.

As an aside, I liked how the days were counted down by Mister turning on her radio, clearly to Jian Ghomeshi's Q opening of "well hello, happy Tuesday".  In retrospect I wonder if she regrets these references.

I don't want to give away much more of what happens, because I recommend you read this for yourselves, though don't be expecting a lot of action.  This is entirely an exploration of one woman's psyche - the other characters only matter for the impact they have on that.

The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker

When this book was added to my book club list, I dreaded reading it.  I just couldn't see how some sort of fantasy about mystical creatures living in New York in 1899 would appeal to me.  And the book did take some time to get going.  But, now I am glad I read it.  It turned out to be more than a fantasy - it was part love story, part mystery.  And the Golem and the Jinni were purposely imbued with human characteristics so for the most part it was easy to forget they were just creatures of human mystical belief.

The Golem is created in Poland to become the wife of a man immigrating to New York.  Against its creator's advice, he awakens her aboard ship before arriving.  Then he dies and she is left to fend for herself on the ship and in New York (after she walks to land on the bottom of the Hudson River).  Early on she is discovered by an old Rabbi who guesses at her secret and guides her in the ways of being human.

The Jinni is enslaved in the body of a human thousands of years earlier and captured in a copper pot which was passed on for generations.  When a New York based Syrian tinsmith is asked to repair the pot he mistakenly releases the Jinni.  Like the Golem's Rabbi, the tinsmith becomes the Jinni's guide to living life as a human in New York.

The remainder of the book deals with the troubles these two creatures have living as humans.  Of course, they eventually meet, immediately recognize the other is not human and face life together.  Though both are trapped as humans, they are created with very different natures which often clash.  Both also leave a great deal of carnage in their wake - some caused directly by them; some by mishaps of others who come in contact with them.

Another part of the book is unravelling the Jinni's past - he does not immediately recall how he was captured and enslaved as a human and that is eventually revealed to him and the reader.  As is the connection between his origins and the Golem's.

By the end I could not put the book down as I was so intrigued by seeing how the different storylines would come together - and they did, in my view in a very believable way.  So, don't hesitate to read this book like I did - it's worth the initial effort and the time commitment as it's not a short book.

Friendship by Emily Gould

In a word or two - don't bother.  This book deals primarily with the friendship between Bev Tunney and Amy Schein, two thirty year old women in New York who have been friends for years.  Or at least they describe themselves as friends - but Amy is so completely self absorbed I don't know how Bev can even stand her.  In fact, it seems like Bev initiated the friendship, kept it running and was the only one who cared when times got tough.  Not that Bev was perfect either, she could not hold down a job, moved across the country for a guy who ended up cheating on her under her nose (though it took her a long time to figure it out - apparently she had a pattern of trusting people who were only in it for themselves), was estranged from her family and, frankly, I was glad the book didn't last past when she had a baby as I'm sure she would have screwed that up too.

I know real people are flawed and everything, and I don't think fictional characters need to be super-human, but I just didn't like these characters enough to enjoy the book.  For me there were no redeeming qualities.

Ellen in pieces by Caroline Adderson

It's funny, while this book kept my attention, while I was reading it, I didn't think it was that thought provoking.  But then when I finished it, I couldn't stop thinking about it.  First of all, I don't think the description on the book jacket does it justice.  It makes it sound like a middle aged divorcee has a midlife crisis and turns to a much younger man for solace/entertainment/self-validation.  And while that does happen, this book is about so much more.

It deals with Ellen's relationship with her parents, who both die in tragic ways, her daughters, one a troubled ex drug addict, her ex-husband (and his mother), her two closest friends, her sister, her neighbours and even her dog.  The relationships are very complicated and often we see them from both sides as subsequent chapters are written from different perspectives.  In addition to changing narrators, at times new chapters jump ahead by a year or two - it can take a few pages to reorient yourself but I wouldn't say it's overly confusing.

What I found myself thinking about was the end of the book (which I won't give away) and whether it was satisfying.  I concluded it was as the relationships were very human and any loose ends were very realistic.  In all I enjoyed the book and it was a very easy read.

For Today I am a Boy by Kim Fu

This is a really interesting novel about Peter Huang, the only son of Chinese immigrant parents living in small town Ontario.  As the third of four children, Peter is revered by his father merely for being a boy.  But from a young age Peter relates more to his sisters and wants to be one of them.  They periodically indulge his desire to dress in their clothes, and his father, who suspects he is "soft" tries to strengthen him and mocks him for crying more than his sisters.  Peter's father is a philandering tyrant who tries to control his whole family.  One by one his children abandon the home - and only one following the path he decreed for them.  The eldest, Adele, escapes to Europe where she works as a nanny, the second daughter, Helen, studies hard then gets into law school in California where she follows the path expected of her (with the help of anti-depressants and anti-anxiety medications).  Peter becomes a chef and the youngest, Bonnie, turns a life of partying into a job as a stripper.

Peter's sisters and even his parents, guess at his secret, but it is not openly discussed until, in Montreal, as an adult, he meets other LGBT people and realizes he is not totally alone.  This allows him to explore how he really wants to live.

Though there is not a lot of action, this is a moving portrayal of a troubled boy who is totally uncomfortable with the identity foisted upon his at birth.  His internal struggles as well as those with his family and friends make for a fascinating read.  The author approaches the topic with sensitivity and powerful descriptive language.

Intolerable, A Memoir of Extremes

This is a fascinating memoir by Kamal Al-Solaylee, a professor of journalism at Ryerson in Toronto and a former theatre critic for the Globe and Mail.

Al-Solaylee was the eleventh and last child to be born (in 1964) into a well to do family in Aden, Yemen.  His mother was an illiterate child bride, the daughter of a shepherdess; his father a property developer who was partially educated in Britain and maintained close relations with the British colonial officers in Yemen.  The family was modern, concerned with fashion, immersed in the arts, and enamoured with British and American culture.

Everything started to change in the late 1960s when Yemen shrugged off the colonial powers and nationalized all of the property owned by Al-Solaylee's father.  His father relocated the large family to Beirut in what was supposed to be a temporary move until the situation in Aden stabilized.  The author was still a young child and has few memories of the time in Beirut though he does remember they lived above their means and were surrounded by the country's cultural elite.   They spent a lot of time watching Egyptian movies and listening to Egyptian and other pop music.  However, when Beirut became less safe due to the sectarian tensions, the family again relocated to Egypt.

Here the family remained very modern for years, spending beach vacations in Alexandria in bikinis.  The author, now a teenager, also realized he was gay.  Again the family lived beyond their means as their father was never able to re-establish his business and relied on savings he had squirrelled away in the UK.  Slowly the family turned more religious - first the eldest brother and then other brothers turned to the Quran and tried to restrict the movements and dress of the family's many daughters.  Of course, Kamal kept his sexual preferences to himself.

In the 1980s the family was again forced to move as sentiments in Egypt turned against Yemeni immigrants and the family members could not get permits necessary to work.  With no other options they returned to Sana'a, Yemen.  There the family became more and more religious as Kamal yearned to escape.  Which he did, eventually to study in England and then to become a permanent resident and finally citizen of Canada.  In the west he could live as a gay man though he never formally advised his family (he was sure his sisters and maybe even his mother had figured it out).  As Kamal becomes more and more free, his family, especially the women, become more and more trapped by a religious and isolated country.  The gap between them creates tension for Kamal which leads to depression.

In whole this is a fascinating story of how the events of history can have a major impact on a family and even markedly different impacts on different family members.