The Storied Life A J Fikrey

 Gabrielle Zevin has written a delightful sweet story about a bookstore owner. The Storied Life of A J Fikrey, follows the widower book seller as he adjusts to the loss of his wife, the love of his life.  He had fallen in love and moved to Alice Island where she grew up and they opened a bookstore there. 

It is a ferry ride away from the mainland and relies on the tourist trade for their largest profits. Now he is depressed, drowning his sorrows in liquor and hoping to retire with the sale of a first edition Edgar Allen Poe book he found at a garage sale.  

Then the book is stolen and a baby girl is left in his store.  These two events completely change the course of his life. He must stay and continue to run the bookstore.  He cannot bring himself to send the little two year old girl over to the foster system.  He decides to keep her and bring her up as his own.  

All these changes in his life also change him.  He becomes a much more pleasant person.  Making friends, loving Maya, the child.  He even will be open to finding love again.  OF course there is a side story of his sister in aw who is in a terrible marriage.  The police chief becomes a reader and friend, he also had a bad marriage.

Such a wonderful examination of relationships, how to be a friend, a parent and  a good lover.  How to take care of yourself and change to the best you.

The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store

 

This month I read a book that was written by the author, James McBride, who explains that he is the child of a black Reverend father and a white Jewish mother, whose family sat shiva for her when she married.

His first book was The Color of Water, which told the story of his upbringing as a mixed race child in a large family.  This time McBride brings us a novel which looks the horrible truths about race and prejudice squarely in the face.  He adds some beautiful prose that brings humor and offers the reader hope.

This novel takes the story of the Jewish immigrant in the 1920s who came to the United States and settled in the South, opening a grocery or dry goods store.  These Jews lived shoulder to shoulder with their Black neighbors.  This is the story of one little town, Pottstown, PA that is home to Moshe Ludlow and his wife, Chona, who live above the Heaven and Earth Grocery store.  Chona grew up in the store and continues to run the store after her marriage,  Moshe manages the Jewish Theater and brings in both klezmer music and then books the popular Black performer swing artist , Chick Webb.  The Jewish families are move off the Chicken Hill neighborhood to the center of town, changing the dynamics of the area.   Chona refuses to leave and the author explains,”Chona, for her part, saw them not as Negroes but as neighbors”

So Moshe and Chona stay and live side by side with their neighbors, when Chona is asked to hide Dodo, young black child who is deaf and thought to be dumb, after being in an accident with his mother.  Now the authorities are looking to take him away to an institution and Chona agrees to hide him.  She becomes quite attached to him and puts her own life at risk to save his.  

Chona had never been one to play by the rules of American society. She did not experience the world as most people did. To her, the world was not a china closet where you admire this and don’t touch that. Rather, she saw it as a place where every act of living was a chance for tikkun olam, to improve the world. The tiny woman with the bad foot was all soul.”

When things go wrong and Dodo is taken away the townspeople and Moshe work together to get Dodo back from the horrific conditions in the state hospital.  The various characters in the book overcome the class and color divide to rescue Dodo.

This is a story of race, religion and color blindness.  It is the story of the immigtrant Jews from the shtels of Europe and their effort to find the American dream.  It is the story of coming together,  finding our common ground and seeing that despite all our differences we can live side by side.

McBride says in an interview, “What I tried to do in this book is show how people simply excused a lot of those differences, set them aside for the moment, and got to the business of finding the meal that would feed us all. I just wanted to show in this book that we have gotten along very well. We have got to stick together and deal with the reality of where we are. We’re in deep water, and we will end up in deeper water if we don’t pay attention.”

This novel shares a message that  is so relevant for the times we are now living in.   

Pomona Afton Can So Solve a Murder

 Pomona Afton Can So Solve a Murder by Bellamy Rose turned out to be a fun entertaining romantic mystery novel.   I had downloaded it and was not sure I would read it.  Then looking trough my pile for something quick and light I thought ok give it a quick try.

It did not disappoint.  If you like a romance novel this is fits the genre and adds a mystery to the plot.  Pomona is a spoiled brat.  At the age of 20 something, she lives in a hotel that her family owns.  She has all the money, clothes and wait staff she could every want.  She does not work, left college and just parties and posts online.  She is an influencer, sharing her lifestyle to viewers for ratings.  

Then her Grandmother is murdered and all te money and luxury living is pulled out from under her.  She has to go out and live like the average person in New York.  Her childhood nanny sets her up as the roommate with her son, Gabe.  Gabe helps Pom get a job in the coffeeshop he manages.  

Pom starts to learn what it is like to really be a caring human being. She learns to actually care about other people, not just take advantage of those around her for her own gain.

Of course Pom and Gabe start to work together to find out who killed her grandmother.  There is light suspense, romance and humor.  A good book for a snowy day or a beach read.

Murder Takes a Vacation

 Laura Lippman gave me a great surprise with her newest book, Murder Takes a Vacation.

A fun entertaining mystery novel that brings the reader a new and greater perspective on Mrs Blossom who has been a small side character in previous books as assistant to Tess Monaghan.  

We meet the quiet, unassuming Mrs Blossom is feeling unsettled after following her daughter to Arizona when she was widowed ten years ago.  When her son-in-law announces he is taking a job and his family to Tokyo, she decides to move back to Baltimore.  

One day she finds a winning lottery ticket in a parking lot and her life is changed.  With the vast windfall she decides to take a cruise and bring her friend Elinor along.  The plan is made to meet at the cruise and Mrs Blossom will fly ahead to tour Paris for a few days before the cruise. Of course things start to become questionable almost immediately.  She meets the handsome Alan at the airport and he says he will assist her through the flight and to her hotel.  Just as she is feeling a spark of romance, Alan turns up dead.  Then another younger gentleman shows up on the scene, Danny.  He is very courteous, making Mrs Blossom feel better when she hears about Alan's death.  Surprisingly Danny also is on the same cruise she and Elinor have booked.  

Mrs Blossom tries to figure out who killed Alan and find answers to more mysterious facts that begin to appear as the ship cruises down the Seine.  We find out that Mrs Blossom who as an elderly full figured woman, was an assistant to another Laura Lippman character,  PI Tess Monaghan.  Mrs Blossom was good at her job because , she says, people don't notice older, heavy women.  She was invisible. She has always been able to use that too her advantage.  This time it seems she is being followed and her life may be in danger.  

A fun twisty mystery that keeps youo guessing all the way to the end.

The Goddess of Warsaw

 Lisa Barr one of my favorite authors has done it again.  The Goddess of Warsaw does not disappoint even though you may feel you have read too many Holocaust and WWII books.  Ok that was what I was feeling and I should not project that on you.  I was going to take a quick flip through this book and return it to the library when I got totally sucked right in.

This is the story of Bina Blonoski is a conglomeration of te women who lived through the Warsaw Ghetto and the Holocaust.  She is the fictional character who represents the powerful woman who wanted to fight back and not sit by while the Nazis were killing the Jews of Poland.

Bina, her husband Jakub and his brother Alexander are living in the Ghetto and become involved with a group that is planning the uprising. Jakub is a writer and wants to record the story of their lives in the Ghetto for future generations to see what happened in Poland in 1943.  Bina and Alexander follow the leader of the resistance, Zelda to fight back wen the Nazis enter the Ghetto to kill or take the remaining people to concentration camps.  

We follow lives of the people in the Ghetto, learn about where they came from and background of their lives before the war.  Then we follow Bina as she survives the war and becomes the famous Hollywood actress, Lena Browning.  Author Barr gives the reader a picture of how the years of living through hell can affect a person for life.  When she learns about Operation Paperclip, her past comes back to haunt her and the assassin, spy that is locked deep inside comes back to her as she deals out a justice of her own.

So well written and engaging you will not want to put it down.

The Love Elixer of Augusta Stern

 This cute novel, The Love Elixir of Augusta Stern by Lynda Coen Loigman could be shelved in the Romance section of the library.  It is a fun lighthearted novel about losing love and finding it again a a senior citizen.

Augusta Stern is turning eighty years old and is relocating to a senior housing development in Florida at the suggestion of her daughter.  Surprisingly one morning as se goes out to swim her laps, she runs into someone from her past.

Irving Rivkin was the delivery boy for her father's pharmacy so many years ago, and he was the boy woh broke her heart.  Of course old feelings reemerge and Augusta finds herself trying to figure out what went wrong so many years ago.  Did she make a mistake or did she just read the situation wrong?

During the intervening years, Augusta followed in her father's footsteps becoming a pharmacist.  But back in her twenties, she was intrigued by her Great Aunt Esther, who was a healer.  When customers were healed by thhe pharmacist's medications, they would secretly visit Aunt Esther for a different kind of healing.  Augusta secretly tried to find out what unorthodox methods her aunt was using to help people.  When she tries to use one of Esther's powerful elixirs herself disastrous results, she promises never to use them again.

Now she and Irving are elderly and Augusta wonders if it is too late to find love and happiness.

You must suspend your need for realistic storytelling and give into thhe possibility of fantasy and magical realisim.

The Talented Mrs Mandelbaum

Amazing a Jewish crime boss and a woman no less!  What a great concept for a book. The Talented Mrs Mandelbaum is that book.  Written and throughly researched by Margalit Fox.  The extension of that title is The Rise and Fall of an American Organized Crime Boss.  

This was an interesting book teing the story of how Mrs Mandelbaum was able to get away with being a n organized crime boss, who ruled over may men who would bring her products she could mark up and sell.  They also would distribute items Mrs Mandelbaum sold and needed delivered.

This all took place at a time in American history when it was much easier to go undetected and get away with crime.  Fredericka Mandelbaum came to the US in steerage and set up a haberdashery in the Lower Eastside of New York.  She was a mother to four children and was soon widowed.  She became a well known philanthropist and well known in high society circles.  She was known for being very loyal to the thieves with whom she did business. Wen tey got in trouble she would bail them out and she became friends with them.

She managed her business and was successful for thirty years.  It is a fascinating story of how she ruled New York and was also a social butterfly.