The Inn at Rose Harbor

The Inn at Rose Harbor

Debbie Macomber

When I picked up The Inn at Rose Harbor I was looking forward to reading another book in Debbie Macomber’s Cedar Cove series. I had been surprised to learn that Macomber had toyed with the idea of ending her popular thirteen-book series based in the fictional town of Cedar Cove on Puget Sound. Instead, the New York Times best-selling author listened to her readers and came up with a compromise: she started a new series involving a bed-and-breakfast set in the town. While the old characters will still drop by, the story will now revolve around the bed-and-breakfast’s owner, Jo Marie Rose, and her guests.

In this first instalment, we learn that recently-widowed Jo Marie is struggling with grief. In need of a fresh start, she quits her job in Seattle and buys a bed-and-breakfast in Cedar Cove. After settling in, she welcomes her first guests, Joshua Weaver and Abby Kincaid. Joshua is hoping to reconcile with his dying stepfather, while Abby needs to let go of the guilt she has carried for over twenty years. Using three points of view in alternating chapters, Macomber skillfully traces their healing journeys.

The book was a quick read and I was disappointed to put it down. But I was reassured by its ending: Debbie Macomber left us with the promise of another wonderful story involving two mysterious guests.

- Joanne Guidoccio

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A World Elsewhere

A World Elsewhere

Wayne Johnston

More than a decade ago, on a side street off St. Clair West in Toronto, I came across a box of books marked FREE. When they were all still there the next morning as I was leaving a friend’s apartment, I scooped them up. Among field guides to birds and a few dusty relics was a rather nice copy of Wayne Johnston’s Colony of Unrequited Dreams.

I didn’t know Johnston’s work back then, so it was an unexpected pleasure to find the book an erudite and delightful read. It was also my introduction to Newfoundland’s colourful history, here seen through the eyes of Joey Smallwood, the “last” father of Confederation, who is in a powerful and conflicted relationship with Sheilagh Fielding, a reporter and columnist. Later I read Johnston’s The Custodian of Paradise, in some ways a sequel and also captivating. Johnston has become one of my favourite authors, deft with language and able to create truly interesting characters and story lines with unexpected turns. So it was with great anticipation that I picked up A World Elsewhere.

This time the ferocity of Newfoundland in winter is sharply contrasted with “a world elsewhere,” a world so different that it seems fantastic. Vanderland, the setting for a large part of the book, is a massive castle in North Carolina built by Padgett Vanderluyden, a key character in the book. Van, as he is called, has befriended the main protagonist, Landish Druken, who is attending Princeton instead of staying in St. John’s and following his father’s plan for him to take over as captain of a very successful sealing ship. As over-the-top as Vanderland seems, Johnston actually bases the fairy-tale-like castle on the 250-room, 16,000-square-metre Biltmore House, created in all its eccentric glory on 125,000 acres by Frederick Law Olmstead (of Central Park fame) and Richard Morris Hunt for George Washington Vanderbilt in the late 1880s.

I once heard someone posit that literature teaches more about the world, and about more worlds, than does science. Certainly this book could have been titled “Worlds Elsewhere,” there being a veritable Venn diagram of settings and ways of life. Landish goes from his father’s comfortable house in St. John’s to Princeton, from poor student housing to Van’s plush student accommodations, with a body guard on site and champagne and caviar among the weekly deliveries, and from abject poverty in St. John’s to unheard-of opulence at Vanderland. He goes from the world of unattached men to that of fatherhood when he pays $50 to adopt a baby boy.

Although there are no repeat characters from Johnston’s other stories in this book, the acerbic wit and propensity to pun makes Landish seem to be channelling Fielding from Colony of Unrequited Dreams. It’s all very clever, if a bit tiresome in small sections. Johnston must be a hit at parties—or a brutal opponent in any conversation that gets a bit testy. And the pure, driving ambition of Smallwood shows up in this latest book as well, this time in the character of Van. Also common to both books is the odd relationship of children to parents or their equivalent. There seems to be no such thing as a “natural” parent in Johnston’s writing, nor a “normal” childhood.

Johnson’s facility with language and with his literary references can’t be overstated. Henry James and Edith Wharton make small but powerful appearances in the story. Lewis Carroll feels ever-present. And the cautionary-tale aspects of the story reminded me often of the Brothers Grimm. I won’t spoil the story by elaborating further, since it is most certainly worth a read.

-   Reg Sauvages

Reginald Sauvages, PhD, is the nom de plume of a local bibliophile (read: bookworm) who goes on building bookshelves and buying paperbacks for the beach so sand doesn’t ruin favourite clothbound books, even while owning an e-reader.

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Consider the Lobster

Consider the Lobster

David Foster Wallace

At times profane, often profound, and always entertaining, Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace is a veritable grab bag of essays. With pieces that range from a refreshingly personal account of 9/11 to a lengthy dictionary review to a diatribe on why sports biographies are so bad when they could be so good, to say there is something here for everyone would be an understatement.

Having already read and loved Wallace’s New Yorker short story “All That,” my expectations were high, and this brilliantly crazy collection did not disappoint. Wallace’s voice is persuasive yet honest, he resents “academese” yet blatantly flaunts his proclivity for large words, and he includes essays about both the porn industry and the McCain2000 campaign in the same book. The man is a walking paradox. And that is what makes his writing, and this collection, so much fun.

- Michelle Hunniford

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The Painted Girls

The Painted Girls

By Cathy Marie Buchanan

The inspiration for Degas’s sculpture and paintings is explored through this fictional account of nineteenth-century Paris during “La Belle Époch.” Impeccable research and history provide a background for the compelling story of two sisters, their hopes, their dreams, and, harshly, their realities.

Thrust into poverty by the death of their father and the alcoholism of their mother, with yet another younger sister to support, the two girls search for work however they can find it. Modeling brings in a few extra coins, so desperately needed, but leads Marie down the path to her own devastation. Antoinette too is driven to find money to realize her dreams; this story portrays her love and loss in an all-too-real fashion.

While based in history, the fictional aspects of The Painted Girls are what bring it alive and create a lasting impression. If you appreciate texture and depth in your reading, this book will bring you inside its nineteenth-century world and captivate you.

- Liz Dent

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Telegraph Avenue

Telegraph Avenue by Michael Chabon

The time: summer, 2004. The Place: Northern California, in the adjoining communities of Berkeley and Oakland. In this distinctive setting, Michael Chabon once again summons his incredible gifts for electric prose and sympathetic characters to weave together an immensely entertaining and moving tale.

At the heart of Telegraph Avenue is Brokeland Records, a beloved used vinyl shop in danger of getting wiped out by an incoming big-box superstore. Its co-owners, Archy Stallings and Nat Jaffe (a black man and a white Jewish man, respectively), are forced to face this fresh threat along with the pains and regrets of their shortcomings as husbands, fathers, and sons. In the meantime, their wives Gwen and Aviva, themselves partners in their midwifery business, handle their own challenges and frustrations.

Fragile yet crucial stakes bound to faded hopes and broken promises are stubbornly fought for and held onto throughout a deliciously concocted ode to music, cinephilia, American race relations from the 1970s to the present, nerd culture, Quentin Tarantino, Bruce Lee, teenage longing, and nostalgia. Brimming with genuine emotion, humor, and sincerity, Telegraph Avenue is one beautifully rewarding book—as one can safely expect from Chabon, who has never been anything less than generous to his readers.

- Marc Saint-Cyr

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The Raven Boys

The Raven Boys

Maggie Stiefvater

The Raven Boys is a young adult novel full of magic and suspense. The story is set in a small town where sixteen-year-old Blue has lived all her life. She has been told by the many clairvoyant women in her family that if she kisses her true love he will die. She never really cared until April 24, Saint Mark’s eve, a night during which each year she and her mother watch the spirits of the soon-to-be dead file by in the local graveyard. That night she sees the spirit of a young boy with a raven emblem on his vest. That sight changes the course of her life and the lives of a group of students from Aglionby, a rich private school in the town. Among the students there is a group known as the Raven Boys: Ronan, tough and angry; Adam, a scholarship student; Noah, the watcher; and Gansey, a peacemaker. The Raven boys appear to have it all, or so Blue thinks until through a serious of events she is pulled into their world. By all means possible, she tries to avoid being kissed.

Blue has a strange psychic gift, and with her help the Raven Boys go on a quest to find the mythical King Glendower. They are not the only ones looking for his treasure, and someone has already been murdered because of it. The searchers have to decide if their obsession with walking the ley lines, special lines of energy that can connect the present with the past, will be worth risking their friendship and lives for.

These five teenagers are pushed beyond their limits while jumping headlong into a mystical adventure. The book is well written and fast paced, and I wanted the characters to slay both their inner and outer demons. The Raven Boys has many layers, and these teenagers deal with a lot of issues, such as death and physical abuse. I highly recommend this book.

- Trina Virgin

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The Lighthouse

The Lighthouse

Alison Moore

Alison Moore has written a thought-provoking novel about memories and their ability to affect us throughout our lives. The Lighthouse, which was a finalist for the 2012 Man Booker Prize, follows Futh, a passive-aggressive man, as he travels through Germany on a one-week vacation. Recently divorced, his vacation is a time for him to reflect on his life and how he ended up alone with no wife, a dysfunctional family, and issues with his mother. Futh’s story intertwines with Ester’s. She is an unfaithful wife who only wants to find love, but her husband has none to offer her. Ester and her husband run a local German inn, and Futh finds himself in unexpected circumstances when he is caught between them.

This novel demonstrates how history repeats itself, involuntarily or not. Each character, by reflecting on his or her life, creates a memoir for the reader. An interesting look at life, The Lighthouse shows us how some situations are out of our control. Fate overtakes rhyme and reason in this intriguing book.

- Katie Lowe

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