"Nature Girl" by Carl Hiaasen

It's quite rare for me to read book after book by the same author (unless that author is Georgette Heyer - you may have noticed...) but in the last couple of months, I have become very fond of the writing of Carl Hiaasen. He has a real talent for the comedic and sarcastic style that so many authors wish they could pull off and he creates characters that are easy to relate to and care about.

In "Nature Girl" he introduces us to several of these, most notable of which are Honey Santana, a single mom living in a Florida trailer park with her son Fry, a clever and overly mature for his age teenager. In most homes, computers are protected so that children don't have access to specific websites but in this trailer, it's the other way round - Fry has put control on the computer to limit his mother's use of it because Honey is more than a little wacko and when she gets obsesses about something, she is apt to do something pretty stupid.
Which is just what happens when an unfeeling douche of a telesales guy calls Honey and Fry in the middle of dinner to sell them something they don't want, at a price they can't afford. The call spirals into a fight and Honey snaps and starts putting together a plan to get back at the sales guy.
So starts an adventures on Dismal Key in the Everglades which involves (in no particular order):

• A Seminole Indian bearing the name of Sammy Tigertail and weighed down by a heavy identity crisis. 
• A college girl gone wild. 
• A semi-famous mistress of a murderer with a body that drives men wild. 
• A hapless telesales guy who has lost his job and is about to lose his wife. 
• A divorced man named Perry Skinner whose ex-wife Honey is a real basket case (...). 
• A bunch of born-again christians. 
• A disgusting and deranged sexist fish monger. 

Chasing each other around the small island, they all have personalities that are to some extent outside of the normal and when they are mixed, a true mayhem of misunderstandings and calamities break lose making for a hilarious story about forgiveness and about how sometimes, the most best people are the ones we call crazy.

10 Reasons to Love "Mennonite In A Little Black Dress"

There are a lot (a lot!) of reasons to love "Mennonite in a Little Black Dress" by Rhoda Janzen but here I will pick out ten in the hope that this will convince to read this brilliant book:

1) Janzen grew up in a Mennonite community, left it to become an academic and then went back home to cook and write a fantastic memoir when her hapless husband Nick left her for a guy named Bob that he met on gay.com. She rocks.

2) This quote from page 24: "I hope it's clear by now that the Mennonites wouldn't want me. The only reason they're nice to me is that my dad is famous, my mom makes great pie, and I babysat their kids when I was twelve."

3) Her take on men (from page 62): "Hannah's husband was fabulous. Among Phil's many excellent qualities was the expression of zero interest in leaving his wife for a guy he had met on Gay.com."

4) She manages to make Germanic food such as Platz, Borscht and persimmon cookies sound oddly attractive and I did actually buy persimmons to try the recipes at the back of the book. Thanks Rhoda's mom!

5) Her musings on modern womanhood (page 166): "Consider how impossible it is, for example, to aspire to the role of virtuous woman when professional commitments dramatically interfere with jam delivery to oldsters."

6) Her musings on what makes a man sexy (page 203): "In my opinion, sexiness comes down to three things: chemistry, sense of humour, and treatment of waitstaff at restaurants."

7) Her observations on the sorority that she is faculty adviser to (page 210): "One twelve-degree evening in February, when there was eight inches of snow under a layer of slippery drizzle, my sorority gals celebrated their fellowship by donning denim minis, pink tights, and stilettos."

8) Her explanation of the difference between Amish and Mennonite (page 226): "But the Amish cut away from the Mennonites in 1693 because the rest of us were too liberal. That's rich, no? A liberal Mennonite is an oxymoron if ever there was one."

9) The way she manages her mother who is a typical, practical Mennonite woman who at times approaches life in a different way: "If your mother takes a frozen uncooked chicken in her suitcase to Hawaii, all bets are off. You just go with the flow."

10) The fact that she manages to tell a tragic story about a woman who looks after and takes care of her mentally frail husband who then leaves her when she herself is at her most fragile without letting the grief and the unfairness take over. Instead she turns it into a story about life,  hope and looking towards the future, she is an inspiration.

"The Lonely Polygamist" by Barry Udall

Sometimes a man wants to come to home from a hard day's work to a little peace and quiet. I imagine. Golden Richards does not have that luxury, ever. With three households, four wives and a large number of children, peace is a highly rated commodity last seen three marriages and a large number of children ago. Mayhem, chaos, screaming and living room races are the order of the day, yet in the midst of all of this life, Golden Richards is a lonely man. A lonely polygamist. 

If you have read "The 19th Wife" by David Ebershoff or "The Chosen One" by Carol Lynch Williams you might have a pretty bad perception of polygamists and mormons. And polygamist mormons. If you want a different take on things, you need to read "The Lonely Polygamist" by Barry Udall where the focus is not on the children of polygamist families as in the two other books but on the husband, the one who is often blamed as the bad guy. 

There is nothing bad about Golden. Nothing at all. He is a good, lovely, loveable man but he is also completely incompetent when it comes to decision-making. As the captain of the family, he is useless. Thankfully he has four wives to lean one, although they all wish that he would lean a little less and lead a little more... But seeing as he doesn't, they run the family, deciding how, what, when and where at the weekly Summit of the Wives. If it wasn't for the fact that it is Golden's construction company that brings in the money to fund food and soon to be hand-me-down clothes for the many children, they would do just fine without him. And most of the time they have to because Golden's business means that he has to drive far to work on projects - to their knowledge, he is building a care home for the elderly in the Nevada desert. In reality he is building a brothel. And this is just one of the many worries, that Golden struggles with and that make him so terribly lonely. 

Golden has a constant feeling that he is not doing well enough. He is struggling to finance the lifestyle with the three households and the many many children, he is struggling to live up to the expectations from the church's Elders, he is struggling to get along with his manager, he is struggling not to lust after his manager's wife and he is struggling to reconcile with his past. His life is a house of cards and a tornado is fast approaching. 
So caught up is he in his own trouble that he doesn't notice that of others. His wife Rose-of-Sharon is growing more and more depressed, their son Rusty is being swept away in a current of hormones and his difficulties finding his feet as a teenager is being interpreted as lack of good behaviour. Trish, the most recent wife, is finding it hard to adjust to life as a fourth wife and having to share her husband with other women. The tension builds and builds around the hapless Golden who entirely fails to notice anything but his own troubles. 

It is a stunning book. I read and read and ready and couldn't stop - I was entirely caught up in the lives of the people in this polygamist family. Trish really struck a chord with me as she beat her doubts and emotions into submission to give herself room to live up to expectations.

The way that Udall portrays the polygamist lifestyle somewhat underplays the difficulties and frustrations that it holds and it does come across as slightly more idyllic than I imagine it really is. This is forgivable though because it is necessary to tell the story. It is a love story but it is not about falling in love, it is not about loving because of - it is about loving despite!
It is a about the love not between a man and a woman but the love that binds a family together even though they don't necessarily agree. And as such it is beautiful and enjoyable. As such it also has a strong message: that the love portrayed in countless romantic movies and book is not the only form of love and that we can be happy even though our lives do not conform to the general idea about the perfect life. 

Read it if: You're not afraid to confront your own prejudices. You want to challenge your own perceptions of what the right way of living is. 

Review: "Black Water Rising"

There's something really special about reading a good thrilling book. One with a bit of crime, a bit of mystery and lots of thriller-elements - you know a book that makes you turn the pages faster and faster because you need, NEED, to know what happens next. 

"Black Water Rising" by Attica Locke is not one of those books. It wants to be, yes, but it's not. I picked it up last Saturday when the weather here in South London was gorgeous and really warm for a September day. My plan was to spend the entire afternoon on the balcony with a good book and I did. The book was not very good though. Actually it was really a disappointment, especially as it has had so much praise. 

The plot is good, it has a lot going for it. The main character is a young-ish lawyer by the name of Jay - he has a strong, intelligent wife, a lazy secretary and a traumatic past. On his wife Bernie's birthday, their romantic evening on the river is ruined when they fish a young, terrified woman out of the water. Although Jay is adamant not to become involved in what becomes an increasingly mysterious and threatening situation, he slowly but surely gets dragged in. Not just into the case of the young woman from the river but also in a union strike which his father-in-law, the reverend, is championing. The case of the young woman is by no means straight-forward and it brings out memories from Jay's politically active past which ended in disaster. 

So far so good. It all sounds really interesting. But somehow, somewhere, it all goes horribly wrong and it just becomes dull. Really, really dull. I'm not sure exactly what it is but I think it's quite possibly down to the main character. Jay painfully un-exciting. There is nothing, nothing, there to make me care about him. Actually that goes for most of the characters - the only exceptions being Jay's wife Bernie and her sister Evelyn who is a minor character. 

It was a struggle to finish this one, it didn't become interesting at any point and the characters never came to life. What a waste of a good plot and a sunny afternoon. 

Read it if: You can't fall asleep. 

The Boring Lives of Others

Some of you might remember "Privileges" by Jonathan Dee which I reviewed a while ago and today, time has come to review his novel "Palladio". I had looked so much forward to reading this book because "Privileges" was so amazing and I have to say that I thoroughly enjoyed Dee's writing. His writing is incredibly skilled and he can do things with words that few authors manage. He is an artist and his ability to tell a story is great. 

The story that Dee tells in "Palladio" is a story of star-crossed fates, maybe even star-crossed lovers. Molly grows up in suburbia in a dysfunctional home where love is sadly lacking and in depression, frustration and an attempt to find love, she does something that leads her to be ostracized not just from the town but from her family as well. She feels to Berkeley, where she meets John, a young, impressionable man who falls head over heels in love with her. When Molly one day disappears without any clue to why or where she is, she leaves behind a wound in John's soul that never quite heals. 
Years later, John is successful in the fickle world of advertising when the enfant terrible, the prodigy of the advertising world, Mal Osbourne, tempts him to leave New York in pursuit of art and adventure. John takes the leap to Virginia and becomes an important piece of the puzzle that is Osbourne's empire. But then one day, out of the blue, his and Molly's paths cross again. 

Despite all of his talent, his beautiful artistry, "Palladio" did not work for me. For a very specific reason.  The two main characters, Molly and John, are annoying, frustrating and I found them impossible to empathize with. John is a gutless whiner who takes no responsibility for his life and just lets it happen to him without taken active part. He is an anti-hero but not a lovable one. Molly is to be pitied. If John is not a pilot in his own airplane of life, she is not even an air hostess, hardly even a passenger. Throughout most of the book she is depressed and she lets the depression guide her life, lets it take control and steer her away from anything that might call on her passion, her will to live not just survive. It is impossible to feel any love, any  empathy, any interest in these two. 

The story is fantastic, it's a really good story, but the characters leave me cold. I can't help wishing that Dee had told the story from the angle of Mal Osbourne instead. This maverick of a man, a dreamer with little to no interest in his fellow men, is so much more interesting even if he is not more likeable. The story would still have been difficult to empathise with but at least it would have had the advantage of a dramatic protagonist. 

Read it if: You think your life sucks or you think you're a boring person -  Molly and John will put this into perspective!

Review: "The Sisters Brothers" by Patrick DeWitt

There are so many reasons to pick up "The Sisters Brothers" by Patrick DeWitt. The title which is cool and awoke my imagination, the cover art that is like a punch in the face in a bookshop (in the best way possible) and the author's headshot in which he looks exactly like a literary author should. 

Another good reason to pick up "The Sister Brothers" is that it is a bloody good book. It is a piece of intelligent, literary Western fiction taking place in 1850's Oregon and when you read it, you can smell the dust in the air and feel the electricity of the gold rush. 
Eli and Charlie Sisters are the brothers, not just any brothers, they are the Sisters brothers. The murderous Sisters brothers whose paths few dare to cross. They are riding South from their Oregon shack on a mission to find Hermann Kermit Warm and ... well... kill him. It is a mission and as professional assassins, this is what they do for a living so initially, it is just another job. 
However, as they travel the dusty roads, Eli starts considering the life they are living. Though he is murderous and doesn't feel any guilt killing people who he deems to have "deserved it", he is also a gentle giant who dreams of opening up a clothing shop and marrying a nice girl. 
His brother Charlie is not gentle, not by any meaning of the word. He is ruthless and on the hunt for more money, more power and more whiskey. 


On their travels they meet a strange cast of interesting characters - from men hunting gold in the riverbeds to whores with an alcohol problem and a dentist who has failed at everything else. It is a tour through another time, a cool and collected Western that takes aim and hits you right in the imagination. It is a great book. A pretty fast read but one that you will find hard to put down because it is utterly fascinating. 
I found myself really rooting for Eli - even though he is a bit of a psychopath (nowhere near as bad as his brother though), he is also quiet a reflected individual. He thinks about right and wrong, about life and living and surviving. It is hard not to identify with him, not to find him lovable when he makes a big deal out of brushing his teeth. 


It is no wonder that "The Sisters Brothers" was shortlisted for the 2011 Man Booker Prize because this is a winning novel, a really different (again, in the best way possible) book that makes an impression. It is clever, well-written, exciting - basically it is a good book!


Read it if: Your favourite cartoon figures are the Dalton Brothers from Lucky Luke. You usually like the novels that get nominated for the Man Booker Prize. You want to try something different that will leave you feeling rewarded at the end. 

Review: "Untold Story" by Monica Ali

There is something about book based on real persons... By using figures that are essentially real, they inhabit a strange land inbetween fiction and non-fiction and I have always found this grey-zone really interesting. One of the books that I found does this really well is "Life Mask" by Emma Donoghue about the actress Eliza Farren and the sculptress Anne Damer - it had me heading straight for the National Portrait Gallery to see sculptures.


"Untold Story" by Monica Ali is pure fiction but it is based on Princess Diana. The Diana. Princess of Wales. And to be honest, I had no idea to how to handle this. Is it wrong, is it right? Is it disrespectful or is  she making use of the artistic right of an author?
In "Untold Story", Ali speculates what would have happened if Diana if she had survived the car crash in Paris and had instead staged her own death to flee to a small town in America to live a normal life. Lydia is the name that Princess Diana takes on as she lives what is a typical life, working at a dog shelter and spending time with her girlfriends who think that she has fled from a powerful husband. It is American surburbia at its finest that has replaced the role of Kensington Palace.


As the story evolves we get the story from Lydia herself and from her former secretary who is the only person she has trusted with her secret. It is the story of a women so fed up with the difficulties of life in the spotlight that she is willing to give up everything, including her children, to start over. It is a choice that comes at a price, a high price and when a British paparazzi surfaces in this oh-so-normal American backwater (incidentally also called Kensington), it could all have been for nothing.

It is an interesting read - the story itself somehow does not come across as dramatic. It is very well-written but the beautiful literary style is very much at odds with the content. Because as much as I enjoyed reading Ali's well-crafted sentences and stylistically superior prose, I did not enjoy the use of Diana's name. The story could have been told just as well had it been based on a fictional character and I have to admit that I found the book an invasion of privacy. This feeling of partaking of something not quite right ruined the reading experience for me and the insensitivity in using the Diana icon overshadows what could have been a good read.

Review: "Seventh Heaven" by Alice Hoffman

I can't remember the first time I read "Seventh Heaven" by Alice Hoffman but I have a feeling that it must be approximately 13 years ago. It was definitely when I was in my early teens and I loved loved loved Alice Hoffman. She was my favourite writer. Every week I would go to the school library or convince my parents to take me to the library in our village and the best days were when I borrowed an Alice Hoffman novel. 
Alice Hoffman does magical small-town America in a way that no other writer can. She imbues the small everyday things with a magical, beautiful qualities and remind us that even the most ordinary things are sometimes more magical than what we call miracles.


"Seventh Heaven" was one of my favourite books at the time and the other day I decided to revisit it and see if the magic would still work on me and it did. Though I was not as enthralled as I was when I first read it, I still thoroughly enjoyed the story. 


"Seventh Heaven" takes place over a year from the summer of 1959 to the summer of 1960 and this timing has been chosen for a reason - it symbolizes the end of an era and the arrival of a new time. 
Nora Silk is a divorcee and single mother of baby James and eight-year-old Billy. She has been left by her charlatan of a husband and in an attempt to give her boys a stable, traditional, middle class upbringing, she moves from New York to the New Jersey suburbs to a newly built neighborhood. This is small-town America in the 1950s, full of white picket fences, newly mowed lawns, kids with clean teeth and ironed clothes and mothers who cook, clean and gossip. To them, the newcomer is a disturbance, an unwelcome interruption in the Stepford Wives-ish, surburban paradise so of course they shun her. Nora's insistence on fitting in, her attempts at making friends and making Billy part of the community are all in vain as she is increasingly isolated by her cold neighbors. 


The turning point comes when Nora begins to remember her roots and stops attempting to be like the other women, when she recalls the wisdoms of her grandfather, things start to change. Not only for Nora but also for the people around her. The prom-queen-wannabe Rickie Shapiro and her valedictorian-to-be brother; Jackie McCarthy the bad boy and aspiring criminal; Donna Durgins overweight and unhappy housewife and not least policemen Joe Hennessy and schoolboy Ace McCarthy. 
Their lives weave in and out of each and they are all changed by the magic Silk family just as Nora and her children are changing as they adjust to life in suburbia.


Read it if: You are nostalgic after 1950s, headbands and white picket fences. You grew up in suburbia. You like the movie "American Beauty". 

Review: "Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady" by Florence King

One of the strongest American stereotypes most be the Southern Belle. If you have ever read "Gone With the Wind" by Margaret Mitchell, you know exactly what I mean. It is a way of life, an identity oozing overpowering feminine charm and delicately wrapped female vile. It is the exact opposite as being one of the boys.


"Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady" is Florence King's tale of growing up in a Southern family, ruled by the soft and well-manicured yet steely hand of her grandmother. Granny has aspirations to be a grand lady and she dreams of raising a Southern belle - however, her own daughter is more of a man than a woman really, loving baseball and suits, so when a granddaughter comes into the world, Granny does everything in her power to turn her into a real lady. Growing up in a bohemian household with Granny, mama and a book-loving Englishman for a father means that Florence has a childhood far away from the norm. From day one the three main adults in her life has three very different agendas and Florence has to find her own identity from a young age.


I read about "Confessions..." at one of the blogs I follow and loved the sound of it. I wasn't really sure what to expect but from the first line of the first page, I loved it. Absolutely loved it. Florence King has a talent for observing the awkward and funny, the little humorous gems of an extraordinary life. Her observations on the American female of the 1950s are both disturbing and hilarious - I was appalled and fascinated at the fact that all of the other girls in her sorority at college took a marriage prep class. Homework involved washing their boyfriends socks!


To describe these girls who are forever worrying that no-one will marry them and depend on guys to give them self-esteem and self-worth, Florence and her father comes up with the word "malkin". A fantastic word that I will definitely keep in my vocabulary. Is is bound to come in handy.
Florence herself was far from a malkin - though she looked like the perfect young Southern lady, inside her there was a real academic mind hungering for books as well as a sexual creature hungering for, well, sex. The story follows her battles to study French (she ends up studying history instead) and to lose her virginity without falling pregnant. Quite rebellious pursuits in the South in the 1950s but Florence has courage and is not afraid to go after the things in life as she wants.


The book is written with intelligence and personality, it is full of anecdotes and scattered words of wisdom and it poses questions about femininity and the role of a woman that are as relevant as they were in the 1950s. Because what defines you as a lady? They way you look or sound? A ring on your finger or who you sleep with? It is probably a question that each of us have to answer for ourself just as Florence King did. And as she herself says in the book - she may have gone to bed with both men and women but she never ever smoked on the street.

Review: "The Privileges" by Jonathan Dee

We've all been there I guess - fallen head over heels in lust with a book title, the cover art or a book image. I do it all the time, actually I think I am pretty bad when it comes to this. I will obsess about some little detail to the extent where I expect such impossible things from a book that it can't fail to fail.

Conscious of this, I was worried that I had put "The Privileges" by Jonathan Dee on a pedestal, setting it up for a fall and so when I turned the last page, I was quite surprised that it had lived up to my (great) expectations! 

The title itself is what did it for me in the beginning. It sounds like a high-end, intellectual version of the Manhattan from "Gossip Girl" and the cover is stunning in both its detail and simplicity. The golden and white colors drew me in. 

The story starts on a hot day in Pittsburgh where Adam and Cynthia are taking the plunge and getting married as the first couple in their circle of friends. They are only 22 years old and a golden couple with all of their lives and all life's possibilities ahead of them. The wedding itself takes up the first chapter and it is worth reading the book just for this one chapter. They are in love in a soulmate-meant-to-be way and though they both have messy families, they are so sure of each other and of their love. Fast-forward a few years and they are now living in New York. Cynthia is a stay-at-home mum almost succumbing to the mind-numbingness of being in her mid-twenties and stuck at home with two kids, April and Jonas. Adam is working his way up in finance - he is not the brightest or cleverest of men but his love for Cynthia and for their family fuels his fire to become a success. 

Cynthia is so closes to drowning in the domesticity that has taken over her life while her girlfriends are having careers and stilettos and martinis that it seems to waken some sleeping dragon in Adam who cooks up a scheme to give her the life style of her dreams. 

As you read one, their story unfolds. With each page they become richer and richer, going from a humble apartment to a life of privates schools, private clubs, even private jets. But even with this lifestyle comes pitfalls and worries that all the money in the world is no solution for. In sickness and in health, Adam and Cynthia and their love are the center in this tale of morals, values and ethics. The family is the foundation upon which they build their lives. 

I got so caught up in this story, especially in April and Jonas. I would have loved for Dee to follow them further, explore how and when these children become adults and what shapes their lives. Following the story of Cynthia and Adam as they obtain what most people can only dream of, yet live for the love that we are all searching for, was a real treat. A clever, beautiful gem of a book. 

Read it if: You like your books clever and well-written. If you like beautiful sentences. If you are not the type to become envious of immense wealth and true love. 

Willa wants to Read... Great American Literature!

I am sure you know the feeling that there are books that we really should have read but that we haven't managed to read yet. Those ones that are on the top of the TBR... My TBR seems to have quite a lot of those Great American Novels on it. Not sure why but they seem to pile up on the TBR without ever getting read by me... So here is a little list to remind myself that I need to set time aside to read them.
If you have read any of them and can recommend them, please leave a comment and tell me what you think of the book in question.

"A Farewell to Arms" by Ernest Hemingway
From amazon.com: In 1918 Ernest Hemingway went to war, to the 'war to end all wars'. He volunteered for ambulance service in Italy, was wounded and twice decorated. Out of his experiences came A Farewell to Arms. In an unforgettable depiction of war, Hemingway recreates the fear, the comradeship, the courage of his young American volunteers and the men and women he encounters along the way with conviction and brutal honesty. A love story of immense drama and uncompromising passion, A Farewell to Arms is a testament to Hemingway's unique and unflinching view of the world and the people around him.

"To The Lighthouse" by Virginia Woolf
From Wikipedia: A landmark novel of high modernism, the text, centring on the Ramsay family and their visits to the Isle of Skye in Scotland between 1910 and 1920, skilfully manipulates temporality and psychological exploration.



"Revolutionary Road" by Richard Yates
From amazon.com: Frank is mired in a well-paying but boring office job and April is a housewife still mourning the demise of her hoped-for acting career. Determined to identify themselves as superior to the mediocre sprawl of suburbanites who surround them, they decide to move to France where they will be better able to develop their true artistic sensibilities, free of the consumerist demands of capitalist America. As their relationship deteriorates into an endless cycle of squabbling, jealousy and recriminations, their trip and their dreams of self-fulfillment are thrown into jeopardy.