Everything I Never Told You

 

By Celeste Ng

Marilyn and James met in college. Marilyn was studying to become a doctor and James was a professor. They started dating and Marilyn became pregnant. They got married at city hall, against Marilyn's mother's objections. Doris Walker did not want her daughter marrying an Asian American man.

Being pregnant, Marilyn quit college and became a mom instead. Secretly, though, she still dreamed of going back to school and getting her medical degree. So when her two children reached grade school age, Marilyn moved away and enrolled in college again. But she wasn't gone long, because she soon discovered she was pregnant. So back to being a wife and mother and finally giving up on her dream.

When Lydia, James and Marilyn's second child, was sixteen she died of drowning. It was eventually ruled a suicide, as there was no indication of foul play. This was a terrible blow to James and Marilyn and to their two other children, Nath, the oldest and Hannah, the youngest. Nath and Lydia had been very close and Nath was the only one in the family who knew Lydia was unhappy. Because Marilyn, thwarted of her dream, had transferred it to Lydia. She talked herself into believing that Lydia's dream was to become a doctor. But Lydia was just going through the motions, studying hard only to please her mother, not actually caring about the career her mother was pushing on her.

And there's Nath. A studious teenage boy who has a dream too: he wants to be an astronaut. But his father wants his son to be the guy he wasn't when he was in school: a popular jock. But Nath is not a jock and he is not popular and his father thinks his dream of becoming an astronaut is stupid. 

Meanwhile, Hannah. The invisible child. As her parents' dreams for the two older kids occupies so much of their time, Hannah gets overlooked. Just a grade schooler, she lives on the edges of the family, idolizing her older brother and sister, loving her mother and father, and staying under the radar.

It's a complicated family relationship and Lydia's death and James' unfaithfulness has thrown everything into chaos.  

This was an OK read. I found Marilyn's and James' blindness to how their  expectations of their children are ruining their relationship with the kids very strange, given how smart they think they are. I also got rather bored with the story and really just wanted to finish it, get it over with. And there is a lot of stuff about how James and his two Asian-looking kids are treated like outsiders by the locals.

Here is a review by Kirkus Reviews.

Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

 

By Gail Honeyman

Eleanor Oliphant is a single woman of nearly thirty. She works in an office and has been there for nine years. She's a bit of an odd duck and has no close friends at work. Or any friends at all. 

As a child, she nearly died in a house fire and has a scar on her face that some people find distressing or off-putting. But she is a fairly practical person and her solitude doesn't bother her much. Or rather, she deals with it on the weekends by drinking vodka by herself in her apartment. Her only company is a houseplant she calls Polly.

Three things happen that begin to chip away at her solitude, all three involving men. First, she develops a crush on a singer, Johnnie. Second, a new employee at work, Raymond, seems to like her and invites her to have lunch. Third, while out one day, she and Raymond see an elderly man collapse on the street. They stay with the man, Sammy, until the medics arrive. They also accompany Sammy to the hospital. Eleanor and Raymond become acquainted with Sammy's family and attend a welcome home party in Sammy's honor after he gets out of the hospital. And Raymond also introduces Eleanor to his mother who is quite elderly and suffering from arthritis. 

Eleanor is not romantically interested in Raymond. She has constructed an improbable fantasy around the singer, Johnnie. The good thing is that it has given her the motivation to update her look with new clothes, makeup and a new hairdo. As a result, her coworkers have also warmed up a bit to her and she has been offered a promotion and a small raise. She is finally starting to live a little. Then she goes to see Johnnie perform and something about it causes her to realize that she was just fooling herself. She goes on a bender, drinking herself into stupor. Raymond comes to check up on her and cleans her up. Clearly, she needs professional help. So she starts seeing a therapist and the walls she built around the fire that left her scarred slowly start to come down and she faces the truth she had hidden from since she was just a kid. 

This book is ride. Eleanor is a funny sad lonely woman. Her story is so tragic, so very sad. But she is hilarious at times, in the first part of the story, the part the author calls the Good Days, her observations are so amusing. I really enjoyed her take on things. But the last section, the Bad Days, was not amusing. I cried so much, reading her sad struggle with abuse and depression, how the system failed her as a child, her loneliness, her trauma, her suffering overlooked or unseen. 

When Raymond took her to his mom's house for a visit, Eleanor recognized all she had missed in life as a child:

"I placed the laundry basket on the ground and took the peg bag ... and hung it on the line. The washing was dry and smelled of summer. I heard the syncopated thud of a football being kicked against a wall, and girls chanting as a skipping rope skimmed the ground. The distant chimes of the ice-cream van were now almost audible. Someone's back door slammed, and a man's voice shouted a furious reprimand at—one hoped—a dog. There was birdsong, a descant over the sounds of a television drifting through an open window. Everything felt safe, everything felt normal. How different Raymond's life had been from mine—a proper family, a mother and a father and a sister, nestled among other proper families. How different it was still; every Sunday, here, this."

Eventually Eleanor realizes that her crush on Johnnie is merely that. Watching him onstage, it bursts upon her that she has been lost in a fantasy, a lovely fantasy, but a fantasy nonetheless:

"I didn't know the man onstage before me, didn't know the first thing about him. It was all just fantasy. Could anything be more pathetic—me, a grown woman? I'd told myself a sad little fairy tale, thinking I could fix everything, undo the past, that he and I would live happily ever after and Mummy wouldn't be angry anymore. I was Eleanor, sad little Eleanor Oliphant, with my pathetic job, my vodka and my dinners for one, and I always would be.  Nothing and no one —certainly not this singer ...—could change that. There was no hope, things couldn't be put right. I couldn't be put right. The past could neither be escaped nor undone. After all these weeks of delusion, I recognized, breathless, the pure, brutal truth of it. I felt despair and nausea mingled inside me, and then that familiar black, black mood came down fast." 

But the book has its lighter side, Eleanor's little comments on the people around her:

• "Heather [a social worker] used to do that too; I assume it's part of the job, checking to make sure I'm not storing my own urine in demijohns or kidnapping magpies and sewing them into pillowcases." 
•  "Sexual union between lovers should be a sacred, private thing. It should not be a topic for discussion with strangers over a display of edible underwear."
• "I have often noticed that people who routinely wear sportswear are the least likely sort to participate in athletic activity."
• "The streets were all named after poets ... who wrote about urns and flowers and wandering clouds. Based on past experience, I'd be more likely to end up living in Dante Lane or Poe Crescent."

Here is a review by Kirkus Reviews.

 

Little Fires Everywhere

 

By Celeste Ng

Mia Warren has a complicated past, a past her teen daughter Pearl knows nothing about. 

All their life together, Mia has been on the run, running from who knows what. Now she and Pearl have settled into a new town, one Mia has promised will be their permanent home. This is a lie, although Mia did not know it at the time. Because the past catches up with Mia and once again they are running away. But this doesn't happen until the end of the story. 

So Pearl finds herself getting to know the family of the woman who is their landlord. Elena Richardson is an upper class woman with a four teen kids and a family history dating back to the early days of her home town, a suburb of Cleveland, Shaker Heights. The duplex that Mia and Pearl move into came to Elena as an inheritance from her mother. 

Mia and Pearl have never had much in the way of money and seeing how the Richardson family lives is a new experience for Pearl. She becomes really close to the two teen boys, Moody and Trip. Moody becomes her best friend and Trip becomes her lover, much to Moody's distress. 

Meanwhile, Elena's youngest daughter, Izzy, finds a refuge from her mother's constant criticism by helping Mia with her art work. Mia is a talented photographer who is still in the struggling artist phase of her career. Some day she will likely be a famous, well-paid photographer, but now she and Pearl live on her work as a waitress and, later, as housekeeper for the Richardsons. 

Mia makes friends with a young Chinese woman, Bebe, who lost track of her baby after she abandoned the baby at a fire station. Mia overhears a friend of Elena's talking about the baby she is adopting who was abandoned at a fire station and she lets Bebe know. When Elena discovers it was Mia who tipped Bebe off, she takes it personally and decides to dig into Mia's past.

Elena's anger is more that just distress at her friend's problems. Part of it is resentment of Mia, whose lifestyle reminds Elena of her own ambitions as a young woman. But Elena's digging upsets everyone and she herself pays the greatest price when her youngest daughter sets the family home on fire and disappears. This happens in the very beginning of the novel, so this is not a spoiler.

So the big mystery is what is Mia's dark secret about her past. Turns out it isn't a dark secret and it isn't even a big scandal. She just changed her mind about something and made her parents angry, adding to their disappointment in her chosen career as an artist/photographer. 

Towards the last quarter of the novel, I was getting bored with it and pretty much skipped through a lot of it. I didn't find Mia's failure to honor her contract shocking. I did find her cavalier treatment of her parents and theirs of her rather off putting. And the rootless lifestyle she put her daughter Pearl through, never staying long enough in one place to really become part of the community. Her solution to her problems is to pack up and disappear once again, taking Pearl along, no choice in the matter. 

Here is a review by Kirkus Reviews.

My Name Is Lucy Barton

 

By Elizabeth Strout

Lucy Barton is a young mother who became ill and had to spend many weeks in the hospital, trying to get her health back. Her mother comes to the city to be with her daughter at this time and stays by her side until it is apparent that Lucy is on the mend.

While there, she and Lucy share some memories of their time together. Lucy wants to have a closer relationship with her mother. But her mother just does not seem capable of being the mother her daughter would like to have. Unspoken questions cloud their relationship, including questions about Lucy's father and possible abuse. 

When the mother sees that Lucy is no longer in danger of dying, she leaves, still unable to tell her daughter that she loves her and leaving unanswered the questions Lucy has from the past. But even so, she has shown her love by being there until she was certain Lucy was getting well.

I cannot say I enjoyed this book. I kept waiting for the plot but it was just trips down memory lane for Lucy and her mom. In, fact, a couple weeks later, and I can barely recall any of it. I did finish it and was glad I did. 

Here is a review of the novel by Fiction Writers Review.

The Book of the Pig

 

By Jack Denton Smith, photos by Ozzie Sweet

I would call this book a brief introduction to the domesticated pig. It has lots of photos, but all in black and white, a strike against it, in my opinion.

It discusses the origins of the domesticated pig and its temperament and the benefits it provides for humanity and not just as delicious food. It also gives brief descriptions of the various commercial breeds of swine.

Clearly the author really appreciates and admires pigs which he claims are not the messy smelly critters they have been portrayed to be. He even says pigs are the smartest domesticated animal, smarter even than dogs, citing a five-year research program at the University of Kentucky which found that:

"...pigs not only are the smartest of all farm animals, but also are more intelligent than dogs, mastering any trick of feat accomplished by canines in much shorter time."

The author also quotes naturalist W.H. Hudson on the innate quality of swine:

"The pig is not suspicious, or shrinkingly submissive, like horses, cattle and sheep; nor an impudent devil-may-care like the goat; nor hostile like the goose; nor condescending like the cat; nor a flattering parasite like the dog. The pig views us as fellow citizens and brothers, and takes it for granted that we understand his language." 

 

So the book is a good, short introduction to the humble farm animal, the pig. But at only sixty-three pages it is only an introduction. It definitely paints pigs in a much kinder light than they are usually portrayed. It's just too bad none of the many photos are in color.  That would have really improved what is basically a picture book. Although the blurb on the inside flap of the book cover calls it a "photo essay."