Woman on Fire

 Woman on Fire by Lisa Barr is another fabulous novel about the artwork confiscated by the Nazis during World War II.  

Using  fictional characters , Barr sets up the situation that a young ambitious journalist becomes embroiled in an international art scandal as she searches for the missing Woman on Fire portrait painted by a new impressionist artist during the war.  

Jules Roth the young journalist pushes her way into the newsroom of Dan Mansfield, editor for the paper.  He hires her to help him find a famous painting,  missing since the war, for his long time friend, Elias Baum, a famous shoe designer.  Baum was a small child when his mother posed for the artist.  Elias remembers the day the Nazis came, took the painting and then killed his mother.  All these years later he wants retrieve the painting for his family.  

There is another person who also thinks the painting belongs to them, Marguerite de Laurent, a provocative and powerful art gallery owner.  She grew up working for her grandfather’s art gallery and he always spoke about the Woman on Fire painting and its importance to him.  She feels she is the rightful owner and wants the painting for her art collection.  She will go to great lengths to get it and is used to getting everything she wants.  This is an entertaining mystery novel set around the premise of being the first to find the painting and Jules is determined to prove her prowess as a reporter and get there first.

There are many twist and turns as the characters struggle to find and hold onto the painting .  

Ella Minnow Pea

 OK I realize this is another middle school or maybe young adult book, but this is a great story.  I love this book!  I read it when it first was published and enjoyed it just for its writing style and the uniqueness of the plot.  But now when I reread it for my book group, I was amazed at how timely and relevant it still is.

This is the story of a small,  fictional island of Nollop, off the state of South Carolina.  Ella Minnow Pea lives on the island, her name is a play on the in the alphabet, “L M N O P “ .  The island is named after Nevin Nollop who wrote the famous pangram, “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog”.

On this island because they worship Nollop, when a letter under the statue of Nollop drops and breaks they town leaders decide it is Nollop speaking to them from the beyond.  They pass a law that each letter that drops from the statue must not be spoken or written anymore.  As the story continues author Mark Dunn drops letters from the story script.  The book written all in correspondence between Ella and others gets more and more interesting to read as letters cannot be used at the risk of public embarrassment in the stocks or banishment from the island.

So much fun to read!

Ella Minnow Pea is a girl living happily on the fictional island of Nollop off the coast of South Carolina. Nollop was named after Nevin Nollop, author of the immortal pangram,* "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." Now Ella finds herself acting to save her friends, family, and fellow citizens from the encroaching totalitarianism of the island's Council, which has banned the use of certain letters of the alphabet as they fall from a memorial statue of Nevin Nollop. As the letters progressively drop from the statue they also disappear from the novel. The result is both a hilarious and moving story of one girl's fight for freedom of expression, as well as a linguistic tour de force sure to delight word lovers everywhere.

*pangram: a sentence or phrase that includes all the letters of the alphabet

The Dearly Beloved

 Cara Wall has written a very complicated and intense novel about so many topics.

Definitely not a novel I would normally pick up and read.. but it did turn out to be a great book discussion book. 

There were a few too many themes for the characters to balance in their lives ..but it was rich with topics to discuss in the group... 

It is about two ministers and their wives. It follows their relationships and interactions through dating and marriage from college to careers. It is the question of faith , love, friendship, parenting, and those are only a few . It definitely got my attention...

Charles and Lily and James and Nan are the main characters. It took me a little while to remember who was who and who was mated with which.  But then you see that each of the men have different relationships to their faith and each of the wives are opposites.  Lily lost her faith after her parents were killed in a car accident when she was a child.  Nan grew up the child of a minister and spent her youth joining her father as he ministered to his congregation. Charles found his faith after a college lecture and James grew up with an angry alcoholic father who treated him terribly.  

As the story progresses each of the characters face certain obstacles and experiences that help them grow as people, learning empathy and how approach their beliefs and those of their spouse.

It turned out to be a very complex and compulsive read. 

The Keeper of Lost Things

 Ruth Hogan has created an entertaining plot line in The Keeper of Lost Things.  I am sure so many of us have been walking along and spot something on the ground and wonder how someone could have lost it.  Many times it seems that they would have noticed and retrieved it right way or missed it and come back retracing their foot steps to find the item.

Interestingly as I was reading this book, I read in the Talmud that the rule is if you find a lost object you need to take care of it and bring it to the public square until you find the owner, or until you determine that the owner has despaired of finding it again and then you can keep it .

In this book we meet four people who are also lost and as they find each other their lives improve and they find happiness.  Anthony lost the love of his life many years ago and also the religious charm she gave him.  To fill the void he has been collecting lost objects hopping one to reunite the objects with their owners. Laura comes to work for Anthony and inherits the library full of lost items.  She has left a disgust marriage and is a little lost herself.  Eunice found an object and does not know who it belongs to … as all their lives run along in parallel we lean more about each character.  

It is a sweet story of loss and the finding of  love in many different ways.  My favorite character is Sunshine, a young girl with Down syndrome who is looking for friends and love.  She is a delightful breath of fresh air in the book and has some of the best quotes.

Stitches

 Moving into graphic novels when visiting my father…. Stitches by David Small is a memoir written and drawn by the children’s illustrator.  Using the comic medium to share the scary story of a troubled childhood that leads to an early diagnosis of cancer and then to running away from home at 16 years old This is the story of his life.  

The child of a a family physician who vented his anger on a punching bag in the basement and a mother who was stingy with both the family pocketbook and her emotions. She kept her feelings hidden and was excessively strict.

Small was a sickly child who loved to read and draw.  His father gave him large amounts of radiation to cure him. At fourteen he has surgery on his neck but is never told it is to remove a cancerous growth.

Drawn in haunting black and white comic illustrations, there is a threatening feeling to the work.  Drawing the viewpoint from above looking down on the child makes him seem even smaller and vulnerable.

The Main Character

Check out this author Jaclyn Gordis, she has a very vivid immagination.  Her novel The Chateau was an interesting twisting plot with a mysterious thread running through it. Now Gordis has captured the imagination again with this new novel, The Main Character.  

Have you ever wondered if there are things about those closest to you that you do not know? How would you react if their secrets came out and affected your life? This mysterious novel shows how characters react to the secrets as they come to light.  

One of the interesting themes in this novel is sibling rivalry, a topic close to my heart. Always in competition with a younger smarter sister, always wondering who Mom loved best.  This is a novel that examines how the relationship between siblings can fester and grow into love and or resentment.  How a parent responds to each child can have an affect on both children and their relationship.  Reader, you may want to watch your back after reading this story, you never know what your sibling might be planning.

Following in the footsteps of Agatha Christie, we meet our characters on the famous train ride along Italy’s Mediterranean coast, the renovated Orient Express. Rory is the main character in Ginevra Ex’s new novel.  Ginevra Ex is a prolific author who studies people and writes mystery novels based on their lives.  She learned early on in her career to write what you know sells the most books, but she cannot bring herself to really delve into her own life for a book. 

Rory is the newest character that Ex is writing about.  She has interviewed her for hours about her life and also the people closest to Rory, her brother, Caroline, her best friend, and her ex fiance, Nate.  When they all turn up on the train Rory begins to wonder if real life will start to imitate fiction and that Ginevra is manipulating her life into a mystery novel.  She is concerned that this may lead to someone’s death.

Riding the train and stopping at various tourist locations builds suspense.  Learning about each character’s lives through alternating chapters, we become privy to the secrets each person is hiding and how that information will affect the group.  Even the author Ginevra Ex has an agenda and secrets she is haboring.

On a more serious note this book also discusses the topic of the refusnicks, Jewish refugees from the Soviet Union who escaped and came to America.  The author bases the character of Rory’s father, Ansel, on her father and his parents' experience.  The author’s father was born in Ukraine and his identification card stated he was Jewish. He took the perilous parth to freedom in 1976.  The author describes life in the Soviet Union and refusnicks situation beautifully.  She also paints the picture of the scenery of Italy’s Mediteranian coast with a rich palette. 

The Lioness of Boston

 The Lioness of Boston is a fascinating historical novel about the life of Isabella Stewart Gardner, Bella or Mrs Jack.  

Emily Franklin has captured Boston and its snowy winters and hot summers beautifully.  If she has done so well with describing the city I have assume that her retelling of Bella Gardner's life is also percise and accurate also.  

This is a sort of slow moving novel, but then I guess that is how the real life of any famous person really is. There is so much to learn and it is an intriguing story but nothing earth shattering happens that moves a plot along quickly or with any suspense.  It is interesting to see that she was a woman who did not fit into the rules upper class society expected of her.  She was always looking to stretch the box that women were supposed to live in.  She had trouble making friends, though she did make good friends with those who also found themselves struggling with the behaviors expected of them in their social circles.  So she became good friends with artists and writers and even scientists who were on the fringes.

Her husband tolerated her antics and amazingly they stayed married throughout their lives.  He even assisted her and encouraged many of her purchases and ideas.  The most fun for me was reading about Boston at the turn of the last century and the  artists and artwork.  I took extra time while reading to look up many of the artists and their paintings.  

I also went to Emerson College when it was housed on Beacon Street.  We went to classes in 130 Beacon Street.  The cafeteria and the administrative offices were all at 150 Beacon Street. then I read that Isabella requested that her house number 152 never be used again after she moved out.  After Gardner moved to the Fenway where her house is now a museum, Eben Sumner Draper was the next owner and then Alvan Tufts Fuller also lived in the house.  Both men were later governors of Massachusetts.  It became known as the Governors Mansion.

Last Summer at the Golden Hotel

 I cannot believe I have already reviewed this novel by Elise Friedland, Last Summer at the Golden Hotel.  

This novel a fun look back at the history of the Catskill Mountains, a piece of especially Jewish nostalgia. This novel can be read for the simple entertainment and/or for a deeper dive into the family dynamics and drama. 

The Golden Hotel has been a family run business for generations.  Two families have come together every summer to open the hotel to the guests who return on a regular basis expecting a certain standard of service that is renown in the Catskills.  This book is based on the historical hotels that attracted so many families who summered in the Catskills from New York City.  The families would drive up and mothers and children would stay while fathers would commute back and forth to the city between work and leisure.  

But times have changed and the hotels are not as popular as they once were. The clientele is not returning and those who are seeing the decline of the facilities. The owners cannot keep the hotel running.  There are of course also secrets that have been kept over the years and relationships are on edge.  it is time to sell and move on.  But not everyone is in agreement about how to move forward.

The issues of the generational divide and the hard decisions to live in the past or to embrace the future.  How to memorialize the past and not lose the memories of fun times had.  This plot also examines family secrets and how much you know about people even when you live with them.

I interviewed the author about this book and we had a wonderful exchange about her reasons for writing this book and how she met a member of the Grossinger family, from the Grossinger Hotel, one of the most famous of the Catskill establishments.

The Stolen Lady

 The Stolen Lady written by Laura Morelli explores another little known topic of World War II.

Morelli builds a beautiful novel around the artwork hidden during the war to save it from Nazi hands.

I have read and reviewed a few different books here about the Mona Lisa painting.  Like her famous smile the story of the Mona Lisa and who she was has been a unresolved mystery for years.  This book introduces us to who the famous unknown lady might have been and how her painting ended up in the Louvre in Paris, then how it was saved from the Nazis, as they took Paris and tried to steal the art.

In alternating chapters the story of Lisa Gherardini, and her maid servant, Bellini Sardi who accompanies Lisa as she marries a prosperous silk merchant.  We see the closed world of women at this time in society. As we learn about the government of Medici that Lisa's husband follows the Florentines are preparing to  rise up against the Medici and a young monk convinces Bellini to join their efforts.  

Then in the later story, at the dawn of WWII, Anne Guichard, is a young archivist employed at the Louvre.  Anne joins the effort helping move artwork including the Mona Lisa to the Castle of Chambord, where the Louvre’s most precious artworks are being transferred to ensure their safety.   

This book was fast paced with intrigue and suspense, but also so interesting in the historical events it covers and so much new information to me.

Mastering the Art of French Murder

Warm, right out of the oven, Mastering the Art of French Murder, is the the amazingly perfect entertaining mystery for anyone viewer of the Great British Baking Show.  Written by Colleen Cambridge, it brings the reader right into the tent, under the lights and behind the cameras.

As I read this delightfully delicious mystery, I could hear the voices of the real TV show in my head.  I could picture the tent and the chefs all trying to bake or prepare the recipes for the contest, and the heat of the competition was palatable .

Such a clever idea to use the British Baking Show as a backdrop for a murder mystery, I cannot believe I did not think of it myself..  As we read this novel, we are introduced to each of the cooking contestants, learning a little of their background and how and why they wanted to enter the contest.  

Each chapter releases a little more of their stories and then some background connections to each other or to the mansion that houses this baking show set.  The only thing missing from this fun, delectable are some recipes that you could sink your teeth into after finishing the book and solving the mystery.