American Princess: A Novel of First Daughter Alice Roosevelt

“I can be President of the United States, or I can control Alice. I cannot possibly do both.” 

I was familiar with one of Teddy Roosevelt’s more memorable lines, as well as his own back story (death of his wife and mother on the same day, subsequent abandonment of his two-day-old baby, followed by remarriage to a woman who wasn’t exactly crazy about her rambunctious step-daughter, and even Alice’s Pacific tour), but American Princess provides a far more in-depth look at Alice Roosevelt, from her days living in the White House to her days visiting it during the Kennedy years.

This is historical fiction at its finest, with the characters finely drawn from letters, diaries, newspaper clippings, interviews, and other source materials that allowed Stephanie Marie Thornton to create a detailed portrait of the life, loves, and legacy of Alice Roosevelt Longworth. (For what it’s worth, I previously knew about the womanizing husband, but not Aurora Borah Alice.) 

Thornton's work is fast-paced and lively, not unlike Roosevelt Longworth herself, it seems, and she manages to imbue all of the characters with a complexity that is undoubtedly true-to-life. (Case in point, I found Teddy himself much more sympathetic in this work than in any previous book I've read about him.) American Princess is beautifully written, and the scandals and hijinx are as readable as any tabloid, while being the heart and soul of a work with a true literary feel. This is historical fiction, but - and I mean this is all the best ways - it's sometimes difficult to discern where the truth stops and the fiction begins.

Five stars.

Tune In Tokyo:The Gaijin Diaries

Tim Anderson is a gay southerner who finds himself drifting after college and decides the cure for his ennui is a stint in Japan. A former English major, Tune-In Tokyo is the resulting memoir documenting his time teaching English in and around Tokyo.

This is not the finest book about Japan I’ve ever read, but it provides a unique perspective on life there, and particularly on the business of the ubiquitous English schools. (I know of ex-pats who’ve made a veritable fortune teaching English, so the demand is certainly there!) Anderson has no desire to go full-native, a la Jake Adelston and Tokyo Vice, but anyone who is familiar with the in, outs, and many quirks of Tokyo will find much to relate to in Anderson's work. 

3.5 stars

The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek

I picked up Kim Michele Richardson's The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek because I had heard of the blue people of Kentucky, whose skin was blue as the result of a rare genetic condition (methemoglobinemia, as I learned in this book). I was intrigued that Richardson's protagonist had this disorder, and was not disappointed.

So. 

Cussy Mary Carter is the last of her (blue) people, widely feared and ostracized, though accepted for her role of carrying books to the isolated homesteads that dot the hills of Kentucky. She is a librarian with the Kentucky Pack Horse Library Project, one of FDR's New Deal programs. Through her route, she comes to know her patrons - fire watchers, coal miners, moonshiners, the teacher of a one-room school, a chicken thief, and a mysterious stranger recently returned from building the Hoover Dam. All share a similar hardscrabble existence, scratching out a living, some literally, from the deep coal pits, where bosses have less regard for men than for mules (there are definitely echoes of The Devil Is Here in These Hills). 

The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek is incredibly well-researched, well-written, and beautifully constructed. Richardson captures the essence of Appalachia and the Great Depression; perhaps more impressively, in Cussy, she captures the loneliness and fear of being the last of her kind and creates a main character who the reader can't help but root for as she carries her books and hope into the hollows.

Five stars.

My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor was a 37-year-old brain scientist when she experienced a massive stroke to her left hemisphere in 1996. Remarkably, after years of intensive rehab, she fully recovered, and has written My Stroke of Insight to provide, well, insight, into the experience of both the stroke itself as well as the recovery.

The opening pages are slow going; even after a half-dozen neuroscience reads, I still find the detailing of neural activity centers dense and often dry. However, once Taylor transitions from the science to the memoir (i.e., what it felt like to have the stroke and how she recovered), my reading enjoyment rapidly increased. There was not much here that I found terribly new (a signal to me that perhaps I'm free to lay off the neuroscience, at least until the next big breakthrough in the understanding of the brain), but Taylor did reinforce that the traditionally-held limits on brain plasticity are only that - traditionally-held limits, and that her own brain plasticity far exceeded what she might have expected...and as a 37-year-old.

I also appreciated her articulation of the types of tasks that came more easily versus those that were a sapped her strength and energy. The closing chapters focused primarily on aspects of mindfulness, and I admit to skimming those in the same way that I skimmed the opening neuroscience. This is not a bad book by any means, but it is one that a personal interest in the subject matter is, IMHO, crucial to fully appreciating.

Three-and-a-half stars.

Almost Sisters

Like the Unhoneymooners, Almost Sisters is a work of fiction that has me questioning everything I thought I knew about my taste in books. Generally, my preferences run to non-fiction and historical fiction, with a bit of mystery writing and a dash of the classics. Almost Sisters is decidedly none of these - it even has, horror of horrors, more fantasy Con and gaming references than I could shake a stick at - and yet I really, really enjoyed it. It ended before I was ready, and I wondered if Joshilyn Jackson had set it up for a sequel.

Leia Birch Briggs is 38, single, and famous in the world of comic book illustrators, where she is one of the best. Almost Sisters opens with her discovering that, after a few too many tequilas at one recent ComicCon, she is also pregnant by a Batman whose features she can only vaguely recall. He was black, though, of that she is certain, which means she'll have to tell her conservative, southern family that not only is she pregnant with a stranger's child, but the baby will be biracial.

Her plan to share the news goes awry when her stepsister's marriage implodes on the same day that her 90-year-old grandmother's Lewy body dementia becomes very, very public to mroe or less the entire town of Birchville, Alabama. Leia's grandmother is Birchie, and she is the reigning Birch, the last Birch residing in the town her forebear's founded. The combination of events sends Leia directly to Birchville in the company of her 13-year-old niece, Lavender, where together they must convince Birchie and her equally elderly BFF to decamp for assisted living.

And then mayhem ensues. Lavender meddles in Leia's life. Leia meddles in Lavender's life (and by extension that of her stepsister and brother-in-law). And Birchie and Wattie share secrets they will stop at nothing to keep. The skeletons in the closet aren't all metaphorical.

Five stars.

Monster of God: The Man-Eating Predator in the Jungles of History and the Mind

I have said before that I aspire to be David Quammen when I grow up. Despite the fact that Monster of God was not my favorite Quammen book, I still feel that way. As ever, Quammen combines world travels, science, and an unabashed loved for the English language . His language is rich - ovoid, sessile, extirpated, such terms pepper his chapters and enrich his readers. So, too, does his ability to mine centuries of thought and literature for relevant themes, incorporating Beowulf into a section on Romanian bears and passages from the Bible as he discourses on the lions.

Monster of God sees Quammen travel the globe looking for human-nature interactions between homo sapiens and the largest remaining top-of-the-food-chain predators on earth. Those range from the salt water crocodiles of northern Australia to the lions of India and the Amur tigers of the Russian far east. In each stop, Quammen takes the time to understand the history, the biology, the cultural imperatives, and the end game. Here's a hint, the end game doesn't look good, certainly not for these Alpha animals, and not particularly for the homo sapiens, either. His approach is thoughtful and thorough, and he leaves his readers with more questions than answers, always a hallmark of good writing, IMO. (In this sense I was reminded of the eminently fascinating, but equally depressing Chesapeake Requiem.)

At times, Monster of God hues wordy. I didn't go back and check the number of pages compared to other works (Song of the Dodo, Spillover, Boilerplate Rhino), but it felt longer to me. That said, anyone who appreciates really good writing should appreciate this work -- all the more so if travel or science feature among the reader's passions.

Four stars.

The Unlikely Adventures of the Shergill Sisters

The Unlikely Adventures of the Shergill Sisters interested me initially for its setting, India, as I'm continuing in my quest to read books with a variety of characters and stories.

So. The three Shergill sisters - eldest Rajni, a school principal in London; middle sister Jezmeen, an aspiring actress who has flitted from one bit role to another; and youngest Shirina who has recently married a wealthy Australian Sikh and decamped to Melbourne - are forced to make a pilgrimage to India to spread their mother's ashes. The pilgrimage has been planned almost to the moment, with the goal of bringing together three very different women. Unfortunately, the timing could not be worse, with all three women embarking on the trip in the midst of her own personal crisis.

Too, their mother's death has been fraught; the circumstances around her final days have divided the sisters as never before. Balli Kaur Jaswal has also taken pains to slowly unravel the secret and mysteries of their childhood, most critically the previous trip that then-16-year-old Rajni took to India with her mother, and which resulted in her mother never being able to return to India again.

At it's heart, The Unlikely Adventures of the Shergill Sisters is about the bonds between family and the idea that even in families, there's much more below the surface than meets the eye. I enjoyed this story and Jaswal's writing. I sometimes felt the story lines were a bit too dragged out - I did tire of the hints, some subtle, some direct, about the previous debacle in India as well as Shirina's crisis. The story is excellent, but the story telling occasionally left something to be desired.

Three-and-a-half stars.