Tuesday, July 30, 2019

In the Kitchen With Grandma

Always fun to cook with Grandma.  Build life long memories by cooking with your children and grandchildren.  This is a very cleverly written cookbook.  The recipes are written with an ingredient list and then divided into chores the child can do on their own, then parts of the recipe that the child needs to do with Grandma, and then parts Grandma may have to do on her own.  That way the children are apart of the process but cannot get hurt.

It is always more fun to eat something you have helped prepare.  This will encourage children to try foods they may not have if they just sat down to the table.

The recipes seem easy.  The food choices seem kid friendly.

This cookbook is written by Lydia E Harris

Thursday, July 25, 2019

A Spy in Exile

Jonathan de Shalit has followed up his first thriller, Traitor, with a new suspense novel continuing the life of Ya'ara Stein after she is forced out of the Mossad.  Building on the intrigue and secretiveness in the life of a spy we continue to learn more about Ya'ara and her missions.

This time Ya'ara has decided to go back to a normal everyday existence as a film student when she is called back for a secret mission.  Just as she is working to settle into a normal routine and accept that her life as a Mossad agent was not meant to be, the Prime Minister calls her into his office to make her an offer she does not want to refuse.  He is offering her a classified position.  No one can know who she is working for.  She will be given assignments that are deadly, dangerous and highly controversial.  She may have to work without a safety net and also not tell anyone who she is answering to.  But she is in charge and hires six recruits who she will train and they will work with her on assignments.  Tripping back and forth between 1945 and current day, we follow Ya'ara and meet some of the men in her life.  They are there to help her, sooth her when she is upset, but she does not get too close to anyone.  There is a distance she keeps that protects her from her hidden emotions that are hinted at once in a while.  She can be a cold hearted killer, and a calculating agent who is out to make sure her enemies get what she has determined they deserve.

An added interesting aspect of the story is that even though it mainly takes place in Israel and Germany, there is a chapter about Ya'ara coming to Lincoln, New Hampshire.  She has flown to the United States and is walking the Appalachian Trail.  Up from the South she walks and enters New Hampshire.  She thinks, "The northern states through which the trail passed, Vermont and New Hampshire, seemed friendlier.  She knew that could change in an instant, but she was surrounded by warmth and serenity, and she gave in to that warmth, wrapped herself in it."  After hiking for many kilometers, she reached Lincoln where a gas station attendant recommended a restaurant.  "...the Gypsy Cafe.  She found it easily. It was hard not to spot its storefront, which was painted a deep blue and decorated with myriad other colors, too. ..The menu was awfully eclectic. Food from a wide variety of places around the world., one dish per country."

So much added fun when you read about somewhere you know in a book.  Otherwise this was a hard book for me to connect with.  Thriller fiction is not a genre I usually read.  This was not hard to follow or too violent, but I did not get attached to the characters and as a reader you did not really become connected to the story or backstory enough to agree with Ya'ara's need to kill the people she targeted.




Wednesday, July 17, 2019

The Spies of Shilling Lane

I picked up this book not realizing it was written by the of The Chillbury Ladies Choir.   That was a fabulous novel and this new novel does not disappoint.  Jennifer Ryan is a creative and entertaining author.

The Spies of Shilling Lane is a totally unexpected treat.  Written about a time in history that was horrific and troubling, Ryan manages to find humor and love and relationships.  This is really a story about a mother, daughter relationship.  Growing up Phyllis Braithwaite lived under the tyrannical authority of her Aunt, her parents had died when she was six years old.  This had shaped the woman she became.  Not knowing anything different she married and ran her home and raised her daughter with those same principles.  Now her husband has left her and her daughter, with whom her relationship has grown colder and colder over the years, has gone off to London.

When the ladies of the small village she lives in turn their backs on her she goes off to London to find her daughter, Betty.  With a long held family secret to reveal to her daughter, the brusque, determined Mrs. Braithwaite searches out Betty at her home and place of business to find there are more questions than answers. Through a series of mishaps that take Mrs. Braithwaite and Betty's landlord the shy, cowardly, Mr. Norris on a series of adventures involving secrets, danger and death, they search for Betty. 

Writing about London during World War II and the Blitz, Ryan takes the reader into the meetings of fascist sympathizers and into bomb shelters.  She does not compromise the chaos and fear of the war but does create an entertaining and sometimes funny plot to keep the focus in the novel on the mother/ daughter relationship which is really central to the book.  Also the idea that people can change and look at themselves and discover they do not like what they see.

Over and over again Phyllis asks herself, "How do you measure the success of your life?"
When you are living a quiet life in the country you may not question this, but when you are living under constant threat of death you wonder if you are living your best life.

Phyllis says, "If a woman knew the moment of her death, would she live her life any differently? More wisely, undoubtedly.  More frivolously, perhaps.  But would she more full-hearted, less selfish?"

That is the crux of the novel.  Measuring the success of your life, not through hard work, making  money but through relationships, friends and family.  At each step of the way through the danger and chance of dying, the characters weigh their lives and hope to live to have a chance at making the best choices. 

Saturday, July 13, 2019

Good Riddance

A love letter to Elinor Lipman :

Elinor, you are perhaps the funniest of all the authors I read.  All your books are relevant to my life .  I feel like we could be friends.  I can relate to the way you think and the nuances of everyday life you are able to turn into comic novels.

In your newest novel about Daphne Maritch, who at a young impressionable age marries a man who is using her to gain his inheritance there are so many comedic events.  First I love that you set the stage to start in a small New Hampshire town, where Daphne grows up the daughter of the High School English teacher, the former June Winter and her husband the school principal, Thomas Maritch.  When she finds out that her husband is cheating on her and never really loved her, she initiates a divorce and moves into a small apartment in Manhattan.  Her father, now a widower, decides to also move to the big city, a lifelong dream. 

Enter the supporting characters, across the hall neighbor, Jeremy and down the hall neighbor, Geneva.  Geneva, finding a yearbook that Daphne had put in the recycling bin of the apartment building starts to investigate Daphne's past and her mother's special relationship to the high school graduating class of '68.  Lipman uses the yearbook to set in motion the complex interactions between all these characters.  Conversations between a grown daughter and her newly dating father. 
A widowed man and his new dating lifestyle.  A newly divorced young woman figuring out" friends with benefits" or real love in the fast paced city life.  While all of them are chasing the yearbook and the rights to use it for a documentary, a podcast or a play.

Again Elinor you have written a clever funny plot, while also bringing into sharp focus so many of the current issues that people are thinking about, discussing with friends and trying to balance.
You can laugh at the characters in the book while you take a look at yourself and how you relate to their problems.

Tuesday, July 9, 2019

The Liar in the Library

Simon Brett is a well known mystery writer.  He received the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2012 Malice Domestic Convention. As the acknowledged master of the modern whodunit, he is the writer responsible for the Charles Paris, Mrs Pargeter, Fethering and Blotto & Twinks series of crime novels.    He is also the current president of the prestigious Detection Club in the UK.

He has created an entertaining amateur detective in his  character,  Jude and her accomplice Carole, two women of a certain age who live in the small village of Fethering.  Jude and Carole live next door to each other and though this seems to be the 15th novel in the series, it is the first one I have read.  But I was able to enjoy the storyline without needing to have read any of the others.

I really do not know why I did not study library science and become a librarian.  When I see a book with the word library int he title, I cannot resist taking a look.  A mystery about a murder in the library would just have to be entertaining.  This book does not disappoint.  Though it is a short developing plot and kind of repetitive , it still kept me interested in finding out who the killer was.

A guest author comes to the Fethering library to promote his new book.  At the end of the evening where there were plenty of people hanging around drinking wine, with a belligerent guests who drank a bit too much, there is a dead body.  With a a few suspects on the kist to interview, Jude is suspect number one, so she is quite anxious to find the real murderer.  She and Carole set out to talk to everyone involved with the dead person and find out who had a more realistic motive so that she can steer the police away from herself.






Saturday, July 6, 2019

The Flight Portfolio

Once again an enjoyable novel can teach us a valuable lesson.  First there is the history lesson that I had never known.  Then there is the morality question that one must face while reading this novel.

Julie Oringer has again written a beautiful sweeping novel of a time period in history that has so many unspoken incredible stories to be told.  This is the story of Varian Fry, a journalist from New York, who goes over to France after they are captured by the Germans in 1940.

Fry flies to Marseille as a representative of the Emergency Rescue Committee, an organization created to assist in the escape of artists and writers to immigrate to the States.  The ERC has sent Fry with a list of artists they have decided are the most talented and the loss would be great if they were killed during the war.  As Fry works in the Marseille office to arrange the visas and papers for these famous artists to travel out of the country, many other citizens in danger come to ask for help. 
With limited resources there are only so many people he can help.  Whose life is more valuable becomes a constant refrain.

In one discussion with an artist who Fry is hiding as he waits for the necessary papers to help him escape, the artist gives him a German proverb to explain the dilemma.  Zilberman said to Varian, "You are like the boy in the German proverb, the one who carries the pail of milk.  Oh, it goes like this: Who's most important, the farmer who feeds the cow, the cow who makes the milk, or the girl who milks the cow?  None of them.  The most important person is the boy who carries the milk to market.  One wrong step, and the work of all the others is lost in an instant."

Oringer has taken the facts and woven an intriguing, fast paced, captivating novel around the facts of Varian Fry and the many people was able to rescue.  She has added fictional characters and imagined the details that could have happened to fill out the story of Fry and his experiences. 

This is an incredible story based in fact about Varian Fry, who grew up in Ridgewood, NJ, graduated from Harvard and was a New York journalist and editor.  He risked everything to help artists and writers escape the Nazis after France was invaded.  He was able to save among others, Hannah Arendt, Franz Werfel, Andre Breton, Max Ernst, and Marc Chagall.  Many years later, in 1994, he was honored as the first American to be "Righteous Among The Nations"