At the Edge of the Orchard

The Goodenough parents, James and Sadie, are singularly ill-suited to one another, which has tragic consequences for a family trying to scratch out a life in frontier Ohio. As the family tears itself apart, their youngest son, Robert, heads West, always West, further and further West, taking nothing with him but his father's unbounded, possibly irrational, love for trees. After working his way West through countless of the usual ways (stable boy? check. ranch hand? check. gold miner? check.), Robert becomes a tree agent, collecting and shipping specimens to England's landed elite, while drifting in and out of the life of Molly, a camp cook and sometimes prostitute fleeing her own Eastern horrors.

Too much historical fiction uses war as its backdrop, as a prop to move the story along. Often these are very good books: I Shall Be Near You (American Civil War), The Summer Before the War (World War I), or All the Light We Cannot See (World War II). All are excellent books, and yet at the end of the day, the war looms as large or larger than any character any of these authors could have created. One of the glorious things about Tracy Chevalier's At the Edge of the Orchard is that it stands alone, separate of larger events. The setting, in fact, is primarily the middle of nowhere, both in time (1830s-1850s) and place (Black Swamp, Ohio). The California gold rush makes an appearance, but its the characters in Orchard, as well as Chevalier's original and compelling plot, that drive this book forward.

Not only are the characters and plot praise-worthy, so is the prose. This is a novel told from - and written in - four highly distinct perspectives. Chevalier has taken care to give each character a unique voice, one that is perfectly suited to the temperament she has created throughout the novel. In short, At the Edge of the Orchard is a story whose core is revealed slowly, the layers gradually unpeeling, like an onion: pungent, rich, and raw. 

Eve of a Hundred Midnights: The Star-Crossed Love Story of Two WWII Correspondents and Their Epic Escape Across the Pacific

This is an amazing read. Melville and Annalee Jacoby are 25-year-old journalists who will stop at nothing to tell the store of the war in the Pacific in the early days of World War II. Part biography, part war story, part travelogue, Eve of a Hundred Midnights is a rare combination that I could hardly set down once I'd begun to read.

Initially interested in China, and the plight of the Chinese as Japan intensifies its multi-year war against them, Mel Jacoby narrowly escapes the Japanese first in China and then in Indochina before settling into Manila on the eve of the Pearl Harbor (and SE Asia) bombardments. He and his bride of just a few weeks take what is literally the last boat out of Manila and join MacArthur and his troops at Corregidor, from whence they must again make a harrowing escape.

What I loved about this book is that not only was it well-written, and not only did it tell a compelling story about the Jacobys, but also Bill Lascher has done a phenomenal job of making sense of the war in China, as well as the early days of the war in the Pacific. From the invasion of Manchuria to the incident at the Marco Polo bridge, and then certainly the events in Indochina and beyond, these were great, complicated geopolitical events that too many authors choose to gloss over for the sake of not dragging readers too deep into the weeds. (James Bradley's Flyboys is similarly in-depth, and came to mind many times as I read Lascher's work.) I also appreciated the nuanced way in which he captured the zeitgeist in Manila, which was so conflicted between anger at the U.S. over delayed independence and pride, for lack of a better term, in being a protectorate. And their faith, oh the misplaced faith that so tore at Melville and Annalee...

Eve of a Hundred Midnights is a fascinating portrait of World War II journalism and journalists. It also has the rare quality of reading like travel writing, so that the reader is whisked through Asia and the South Pacific alongside the Jacobys.

Water to the Angels: William Mulholland, His Monumental Aqueduct, and the Rise of Los Angeles

Dry as dust. That pretty much sums up not only the water situation in Los Angeles 100+ years ago (and again recently, save for the recent rains), but Les Standiford's account of one man's personal mission to bring water to the city and ensure its future viability and prosperity.

Now, before I go any further, I must acknowledge that I did not finish Water to the Angels. In fact, I made it only about one-third of the way through before I allowed myself to give up for good. Normally a voracious reader once I begin a book, I've been plugging away at this one one or two pages at a time for roughly a month. Why? I believe much of the dryness comes from a lack compelling narrative, a lack of character development, and a lack of colorful language (not the unprintable kind, just the kind that livens up the recounting of a meeting that occurred 112 years ago).

I have no doubt that there is a good story in how Los Angeles got its water. Cumulatively, the reviewers on Amazon have given this book 4.5 stars. So it might just be me. Clearly, every historical event must stand on its own, but when I consider the really excellent non-fiction I've read in the recent past (The Fall of the House of Dixie, for example, or A Good Place to Hide), this one just doesn't hold a candle.

Whistling in the Dark

I am late, late, late with this post. I finished Lesley Kagen's Whistling in the Dark several weeks ago, right before a vacation (sans laptop) and then we came home to a major power outage (so again sans laptop) and I'm just now getting around to this. The big question, as I sit down to type this, is has that time mellowed my views of this book? Perhaps, but if so it's largely because many of the details have become hazy. (Oh, the perils of not recording my thoughts immediately!)

Whistling in the Dark is the story of Sally and Troo O'Malley, whose family is about as dysfunctional as they come in small-town, 1950s Wisconsin. (I think it was Wisconsin - I must admit, that's one of those details that's grown fuzzy. But it was definitely a small town in 1959.) The family didn't start out that way, but after Sally and Troo's father died in a car accident, things tumbled out of control, and now their mother is in the hospital, their stepfather is perpetually drunk (and usually in the arms of a paramour), and their older sister is more interested in her boyfriend than her babysitting responsibilities. All of which would be bad enough, but a murderer is on the loose and Sally just knows she's next on his list. And also his identity...or it may just be her over-active imagination.

As I work my mind back over the novel, I have to acknowledge that there was nothing particularly terrible or particularly offensive about Whistling in the Dark. No, it wasn't the writing or the characters or the plot, and yet, it was all of those things. The sum of the parts was simply too much. There were too many coincidences, too many pieces that fit together just perfectly, and too many events that were simply too far out there for me to completely buy what Kagen was selling. What's more, Whistling in the Dark defies easy categorization. It's not serious fiction to make you ponder the big questions in life (think The Summer Before the War), it's not a lighthearted "beach read" a la Gwen Bristow, and it doesn't completely capture the zeitgeist in the way The Truth According to Us does. It's not bad, but it's not memorable, either.