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.

Roanoke: Solving the Mystery of the Lost Colony

Lee Miller's title pretty much says it all. Miller sets out to understand how an entire colony could have disappeared, the questions that his intrigued generations of historians, archaeologists, and others.

Does she solve the mystery? I actually have no idea. I tried so hard to finish this book. I am deeply interested in history and have dragged my husband hither-and-yon to dozens of sites of questionable (or major) historical significance. So it wasn't for a lack of interest in the topics. Mostly it was the italics. Miller tells her readers early that she will be using italics to denote any material that is pulled verbatim from an original source. Unfortunately, it meant many of her sentences read something like this. I simply found it too distracting.

Perhaps the more serious charge, though, is that she's written the book in a way that, to me, felt forced. She has tried to heighten the suspense, the drama, the mystery, when a more traditional approach would have been more effective.

Final verdict: Did not finish.

Reliance, Illinois

Mary Volmer's Reliance, Illinois is a mostly forgettable novel. Thirteen-year-old Madelyn Branch (defining feature: a massive port wine stain covering half of her body), moves to Reliance with her mother, Rebecca, who for reasons of establishing a marriageable reputation, is transformed into Madelyn's elder sister. (I should add here that the novel is set in 1874.) Madelyn is permitted, just, to reside with the new Mr. and Mrs. Dryfus, but wounded by her mother's lies, Madelyn soon accepts a position with the mysterious Miss Rose, whose forays into women's suffrage are fodder for scandal.

I didn't care much about the characters or most of the plot. I found the storyline baffling at times - I never did fully understand the scandal around the mayoral election - and it felt like the story often flitted between characters and events without much continuity. Samuel Clemens made a guest appearance - the single memorable event in the book, which I'll get to in a moment - but then disappears as quickly and unexpectedly as he arrived. I've rarely disagreed more with the book jacket quote, in this case: "Reliance, Illinois has it all - mystery, politics, war, love, death, and art." The mystery and the politics both felt contrived, and the war was long over. All-in-all, it was pretty meh.

Except.

Except for the one memorable event, when Samuel Clemens expounded on voting rights, thusly: "Give men of education, merit, and property - give such men five, maybe ten votes to every one of your ignorant Joes. As of now, Joe can be made to vote for any cause by anyone who can persuade him through fear or profit to make his mark on the line, even if that cause does damage to him and his family."

Amen, brother.

Never have true - or scarier - words been spoken, further proof, if we needed it, that the more things change, the more they stay the same. 

According to the author's notes, Clemens views on voting rights came from a variety of sources, including The Autobiography of Mark Twain. Whether he spoke these exact words, or Volmer crafted them, I cannot say, but, Mr. Clemens, I feel your pain.

Strange Stones: Dispatches from East and West

What better reading material for a trip to Asia than a collection of short stories about the craziness of life in Asia (and particularly in China)? Peter Hessler's Strange Stones is just that. Although many of the stories are a decade old, they still resonate today, particularly those that have anything to do with driving and traffic.

I mean, of course a large tourist park is bisected by a single-late road and of course a van parks on the road - at the curve, no less - and then the tourist trolley barrels through and hits the van, blocking the road and subsequently sending the legions of scooters on the grass (there is no sidewalk in this tourist park) and the pedestrians can but pray they don't end up in the (highly polluted) drink as they are wedged into a narrower and narrower strip between the scooters and the reservoir. I'm sorry, I digress; that's my life in Indonesia this week, not Hessler's in China. As another aside, perhaps it was because I was reading Strange Stones that I had to keep reminding myself many times that I was not in China.

The long and the short is that this is fine travel writing. I was slightly partial to the one story set in Japan, a follow-up with Jake Adelstein, author of Tokyo Vice, and also anything involving traffic, if only because it makes me feel better about my own experiences like the one above. A couple of the stories explore life in Colorado, Hessler's home after a decade-plus in China, and are well written but seem just a teensy bit out of place.

Hessler's writing style reminds me a bit of Paul Theroux, but funnier. Many of the stories were laugh out loud funny and all of them were a pleasure to read. Travelers, in particular, will enjoy Hessler's work, but I have no qualms at all recommending Strange Stones to any and everyone.