(Book Club) Book Talk: ORPHAN TRAIN, by Christina Baker Kline

Orphan Train: A Novel (book trailer)
Christina Baker Kline (Facebook) (Twitter) (Goodreads)
William Morrow Paperbacks (April 2013), paperback original (ISBN 0061950726 / 9780061950728)
Fiction (historical), 304 pages
Source: Publisher, for review consideration
Reason for Reading: SheReads Book Club selection, May 2013

Opening lines (Prologue): “I believe in ghosts. They’re the ones who haunt us, the ones who have left us behind. Many times in my life I have felt them around me, observing, witnessing, when no one in the living world knew or cared what happened.

“I am ninety-one years old, and almost everyone who was once in my life is now a ghost.

“Sometimes these spirits have been more real to me than people, more real than God. They fill silence with their weight, like bread dough, dense and rising under cloth. My gram, with her kind eyes and talcum-dusted skin. My da, sober, laughing. My mam, singing a tune. The bitterness and alcohol and depression are stripped away from these phantom incarnations, and they console and protect me in death as they never did in life.”

Book description, from the publisher’s website:

Bird's eye panorama of Manhattan & New York City, 1873 (via Wikipedia)

Between 1854 and 1929, so-called “orphan” trains ran regularly from the cities of the East Coast to the farmlands of the Midwest, carrying thousands of abandoned children whose fates would be determined by pure luck. Would they be adopted by a kind and loving family, or would they face a childhood and adolescence of hard labor and servitude?

As a young Irish immigrant, Vivian Daly was one such child, sent by rail from New York City to an uncertain future a world away. Returning east later in life, Vivian leads a quiet, peaceful existence on the coast of Maine, the memories of her upbringing rendered a hazy blur. But in her attic, hidden in trunks, are vestiges of a turbulent past.

Seventeen-year-old Molly Ayer knows that a community-service position helping an elderly widow clean out her attic is the only thing keeping her out of juvenile hall. But as Molly helps Vivian sort through her keepsakes and possessions, she discovers that she and Vivian aren't as different as they appear. A Penobscot Indian who has spent her youth in and out of foster homes, Molly is also an outsider being raised by strangers, and she, too, has unanswered questions about the past.

Comments: I first became aware of the “orphan trains” when I read Laura Moriarty’s historical novel The Chaperone last year. The trains ran between the East Coast and the Midwest between 1854 and 1929, with the mission of finding hope and homes in small-town America for children who’d been orphaned or otherwise left to fend for themselves in the overcrowded, impoverished streets of the city. Organized by the Children’s Aid Society, the trains--a well-intentioned, if controversial, program with a mixed success record--were one the United States’ earliest foster-care initiatives.

In Orphan Train, Christina Baker Kline looks to this history to inform the story of two girls’ experience with foster care, eighty years apart. in 1928, Niamh Power, the only surviving daughter of an Irish immigrant family lost in a New York City tenement fire, is delivered to Children’s Aid by neighbors and placed on a train headed west. The train makes several stops along the way, and the children--a diminishing number at each stop--are presented to the locals; some will leave with new families, while others may end up as farm or domestic labor. Niamh is taken in by the Byrnes, a Minnesota couple who give her work in their small clothing business, a mattress on the floor in the hallway, and a new name, Dorothy; the placement ends when the Great Depression starts, and the girl’s luck goes from bad to worse until she ends up with the kindly Nielsens, where her name is changed one more time--to Vivian, after their own lost child.

Niamh/Vivian’s story is set in parallel with that of Molly, a modern-day seventeen-year-old who’s close to aging out of the Maine foster-care system. When Molly’s future is jeopardized by a reckless act--she steals a copy of Jane Eyre from the public library--a deal is struck; she can avoid the juvenile-justice system by doing fifty hours of community service. Thanks to her boyfriend, she finds an assignment helping an elderly woman sort through decades of belongings. The woman is Vivian, and despite the many years that separate them, their common frame of reference in foster care leads to the development of a real connection between her and Molly.

While Molly’s story is secondary to Vivian’s, Kline succeeds in making both of them distinct and intriguing characters, and although the last few chapters of the novel feel a bit rushed, the relationship that grows between them feels genuine. Although the behavior of some of the supporting characters can come across as clichéd at times, they don’t feel flat or overly stereotypical; Kline seems to write even the villains of her piece with some degree of sympathy. Orphan Train is engrossing and engaging, blending little-known history into a novel with contemporary resonance.

Rating: 3.75/5

Wordless Wednesday: Washing Dishes

This week's Linked-up Wordless Wednesday prompt is "Washing Dishes." Y'know, sometimes I'd just as soon not...

Guess where we went to get it to go?

My iPhone photos, edited with Snapseed and collaged with PicFrame

Loading InLinkz ...

Posted with Blogsy

Book Talk: THE EDGE OF THE EARTH, by Christina Schwarz

The Edge of the Earth: A Novel
Christina Schwarz
Atria Books (April 2013), hardcover (ISBN 1451683677 / 9781451683677)
Fiction (historical), 288 pages
Source: ARC from publisher
Reason for reading: Intended for review in Shelf Awareness for Readers, but didn't finish reading the book in time to meet my deadline

Opening Lines, from the Prologue: "I'm not going to let on I was born here. People always ask what it was like to grow up in a lighthouse, and then they're disappointed by the answer. I'm not much of a storyteller. Anyway, growing up in a lighthouse isn't all that remarkable when you don't know anything different, and I didn't know anything different until I left Point Lucia at nineteen."

Book Description, from the publisher's website
In 1898, a woman forsakes the comfort of home and family for a love that takes her to a remote lighthouse on the wild coast of California. What she finds at the edge of the earth, hidden between the sea and the fog, will change her life irrevocably. 

Trudy, who can argue Kant over dinner and play a respectable portion of Mozart’s Serenade in G major, has been raised to marry her childhood friend and assume a life of bourgeois comfort in Milwaukee. She knows she should be pleased, but she’s restless instead, yearning for something she lacks even the vocabulary to articulate. When she falls in love with enigmatic and ambitious Oskar, she believes she’s found her escape from the banality of her preordained life.

But escape turns out to be more fraught than Trudy had imagined. Alienated from family and friends, the couple moves across the country to take a job at a lighthouse at Point Lucia, California—an unnervingly isolated outcropping, trapped between the ocean and hundreds of miles of inaccessible wilderness. There they meet the light station’s only inhabitants—the formidable and guarded Crawleys. In this unfamiliar place, Trudy will find that nothing is as she might have predicted, especially after she discovers what hides among the rocks.

Big Sur, California
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Comments: There's something romantic about the image of a lighthouse high on a cliff, casting its beam to guide sailors and protect ships from rough shorelines. However, the reality of keeping that light on was probably far more a matter of hard physical labor than romance, particularly before that lighthouse ran on electricity. Christina Schwarz's historical novel, The Edge of the Earth, explores that reality along the Big Sur coast of California in the early years of the 20th century, building up the drama between the two families who keep the Point Lucia lighthouse without downplaying the work involved in what they do.

The life and work of a lighthouse keeper wasn't one that Trudy envisioned for herself as the educated only daughter of a prosperous Milwaukee family, but falling in love with Oskar Swann--the cousin of the man she's expected to marry--is just the first step toward that unexpected life. Adjusting to the isolation of the Point Lucia lighthouse--the Swanns and the other lighthouse family, the Crawleys, may see no one but each other for months on end--is a challenge for the socially-inclined Trudy. However, the scientific bent of her mind is engaged by her new natural surroundings. Other aspects of her curiosity are stirred by the sense that the Crawleys have secrets, but the physical and emotional energies involved in starting a marriage and a demanding job at the same time and in a strange place at times keep her from exploring either of those interests.

Like her protagonist, Schwarz's interests as a novelist also seem pretty diverse here: history, natural science, relationship and emotional drama, anthropology, and more than a little seasoning of Gothic mystery. With all of these elements packed into under 300 pages and a plot that seemed to change direction several times, The Edge of the Earth felt both overstuffed and underdeveloped to me--and sometimes, both at once--but it thoroughly held my attention. Trudy's appeal as a protagonist and narrator was a big factor in that, and so were the well-chosen details that Schwarz chose to depict her world, establishing a distinctive sense of time and place that anchors the novel.

I wasn't entirely satisfied with The Edge of the Earth  because I'm not sure exactly what it's trying to do, as a novel. It's too brief and too meandering to be epic, but at times it feels like it wants to be. It's an intriguing look at an unfamiliar piece of California history through the eyes of a woman a little ahead of her time, and I'd have liked more of that--with a little less of the family-secrets melodrama.

Rating: 3.75 / 5

Other reviews: BookPage

   

Sunday Salon: right here, right now (May 19, 2013)

Time: Saturday evening, for posting Sunday morning

Place: Home

Eating: There are certain foods I associate with my childhood, and some of them are foods I've rarely found since. There was a certain type of bread we used to get at the bakery called a "tea biscuit"--a little crumbly, a little sweet, something like a scone, but plain. I discovered these Shortcake Biscuits at Trader Joe's this weekend--I don't think they're the exact thing, but taste memory is telling me that they're closer than anything else I've come across. Yum!

Drinking: Plain ol' water right now...

Reading: I just started an ARC for Shelf Awareness that will probably be my only review there till late summer/early fall--I think I mentioned that I was on hiatus and not getting any galleys from them until after our vacation next month. By the time I ask to be put back on the rotation, they'll probably be sending out titles for September.

I finished Orphan Train by Christina Baker Kline a couple of nights ago, and will be posting my thoughts on this She Reads Book Club selection later this week.

She Reads is taking the month of June off, and since I won't have SA deadlines either, I'm feeling a little at loose ends, with several weeks of only reading what I feel like reading ahead of me! It's helping me get into vacation-reading mode already, though...I'm thinking about bringing mostly YA print books, plus plenty of e-books on the iPad.

Listening: We finished the Hitchhiker's Guide trilogy this week, and I'm trying to decide on a next audio for my drives with Spencer. I have a couple of the Harry Potter audiobooks, but if you have any suggestions for good books to read by ear with a thirteen-year-old boy, please share! When he's not in the car with me, I'm still listening to the Roger Ebert memoir and my various podcasts.

Blogging: I may start having time for it again! I've chipped away at some of my feed-reader backlog over the last few days, and I wrote two reviews this weekend. I think I'm still a few weeks away from what I consider my "normal" blogging activity level, but this feels pretty good!

Promoting: Armchair BEA is NEXT WEEK, y'all! Are you signed up yet? Have you seen the daily topics?

Enjoying: Gorgeous spring-weekend weather here in Southern California!

Avoiding: Housecleaning. I think it will catch up with me next weekend...but thanks to Memorial Day and a Monday off, at least I'll have more time for it then!

Anticipating: Star Trek Into Darkness this afternoon at the ArcLight in Sherman Oaks!

How's your weekend going?

Posted with Blogsy

Book Talk: TELEGRAPH AVENUE, by Michael Chabon

Telegraph Avenue: A Novel
Michael Chabon
Harper (September 2012), Hardcover (ISBN 0061493341 / 9780061493348)
Fiction, 480 pages
Source: ARC received at Book Expo America 2013
Reason for reading: #readchabon group read

Opening lines: "A white boy rode flatfoot on a skateboard, towed along, hand to shoulder, by a black boy pedaling a brakeless fixed-gear bike. Dark August morning, deep in the Flatlands. Hiss of tires. Granular unraveling of skateboard wheels against asphalt. Summertime Berkeley giving off her old-lady smell, nine different styles of jasmine and a squirt of he-cat.

"The black boy raised up, let go of the handlebars. The white boy uncoupled the cars of their little train. Crossing his arms, the black boy gripped his T-shirt at the hem and scissored it over his head. He lingered inside the shirt, in no kind of hurry, as they rolled toward the next pool of ebbing streetlight."

Book description, via the publisher's website:
As the summer of 2004 draws to a close, Archy Stallings and Nat Jaffe are still hanging in there—longtime friends, bandmates, and co-regents of Brokeland Records, a kingdom of used vinyl located in the borderlands of Berkeley and Oakland. Their wives, Gwen Shanks and Aviva Roth-Jaffe, are the Berkeley Birth Partners, two semi-legendary midwives who have welcomed more than a thousand newly minted citizens into the dented utopia at whose heart—half tavern, half temple—stands Brokeland.

When ex–NFL quarterback Gibson Goode, the fifth-richest black man in America, announces plans to build his latest Dogpile megastore on a nearby stretch of Telegraph Avenue, Nat and Archy fear it means certain doom for their vulnerable little enterprise. Meanwhile, Aviva and Gwen also find themselves caught up in a battle for their professional existence, one that tests the limits of their friendship. Adding another layer of complication to the couples' already tangled lives is the surprise appearance of Titus Joyner, the teenage son Archy has never acknowledged and the love of fifteen-year-old Julius Jaffe's life.

Comments: You might think that since I posted weekly check-ins about my progress with this book for the #readchabon read-along I did with Kim, it would be easy to tie together bits and pieces from those posts and call it a review of Telegraph Avenue. I might have thought so, too, but I’ve been noodling around with this for about a week. I don’t know that I have much to say about the novel that I didn’t say already, but for posterity’s sake, I do want to get my thoughts collected into one place.

Oakland's Diesel Bookstore transformed into "Brokeland Records" for the September 2012 release of Telegraph Avenue.

The setup of Telegraph Avenue introduces Archy Stallings and Nat Jaffe, co-owners of Brokeland Records, a struggling used-records shop on the titular avenue, a main artery connecting Oakland and Berkeley, California. The store's struggles may be about to get tougher, as an entertainment superstore is poised to move into the neighborhood. Archy's and Nat's wives, Gwen and Aviva, also work together, as midwives in Berkeley Birth Partners, and Nat's son Julius has a new friend with an unexpected connection to Archy. The plot follows these two families and several other characters who orbit Brokeland through a summer of unanticipated events and rash decisions--and almost all of it engaged me, although plot is usually not my primary interest in reading Michael Chabon’s fiction, and I acknowledge that he’s not above contrivance and convolutions in that aspect of his stories.

Sentence composition is one of the reasons I've loved reading Chabon since his first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh; saying he has "a way with words" is completely inadequate. But since I'm so besotted with the way he writes--and if I haven't gone on record before that he is my #1 Author Crush, consider it done now--sometimes it's hard for me to look past the structure to consider the substance of what he's writing.

That said, Chabon seems to be making more (or at least more obvious) attempts at “substance” here than he has previously. It intrigued me that Chabon spent more time with the black characters in Telegraph Avenue than the white ones; it also made me a bit uncomfortable, given that Chabon is white, Jewish, and much more personally familiar with the “Berkeley” side of this story than the “Oakland” side. And when I thought about that reaction, I got a little uncomfortable with my own discomfort.

Getting back to the writing, I can’t go without mentioning the eleven-page-long third section of the novel--a single sentence, mostly written from the viewpoint of a parrot. Yes, it’s undeniably virtuosic writerly trickery, but I was seven pages into it before I even realized that it was all one sentence, and to me, that means it worked. When I finished the section, I commented to my husband:

Me: "This guy just wrote a sentence that was eleven pages long."
Tall Paul: "Is that even legal?"
Me: "It is if you do have a license to do literary tricks like that, and this guy most definitely does."

Aside from the parrot’s-eye-view piece, I appreciated the way that Chabon's explorations into genre during the last decade or so colored this return to more literary fiction. I loved the smart pop-culture references, which cover such a wide range--assorted musical genres, comics, classic science fiction, film theory, television--that even if you don't get them all, your own particular form of nerdery will probably be represented. Granted, I have an abiding weakness for smart pop-cultural references in most of my entertainment anyway, but I particularly like sensing that they're not just tossed in; for the most part, I found them to be well-chosen, functional details that help flesh out scenes and characters.

I’m not sure that Telegraph Avenue is as ambitious a novel as Chabon’s Pulitzer Prize-winner The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, and I don’t think it fully achieves the ambitions it does have. That said, I generally applaud that kind of ambition, and feel a little let down when it doesn't quite stick the landing. But when someone writes the way Chabon does, the letdown isn't quite as rough. At the same time, I think this may be his most down-to-earth novel since the admittedly less ambitious (and my personal favorite) Wonder Boys, and I applaud that as well. There were times I totally loved Telegraph Avenue  times it frustrated me, and a very few times when it bored me...and so I offer one more round of applause to Michael Chabon for thoroughly engaging me in this little Northern California world.

Rating: 4.25 / 5

Wordless Wednesday: Smile!

There's nothing that makes a kid (of any age) smile like Christmas does.

Christmas 2012

Photos edited with Snapseed, collaged with PicFrame

Loading InLinkz ...

Posted with Blogsy

Sunday Salon: Right Here, Right Now--Mother's Day!

Time: Early morning (it's still "early" till 9 AM, right?)

Place: Still in bed, writing on the iPad

Eating: Nothing yet. Staying in this morning--on a kid-free Mother's Day--and thinking about whether I want to do something different for breakfast.

Gratuitous Christmas photos of our kids for Mother's Day!

Drinking: Water that got a little too warm overnight.


Reading: Orphan Train by Christina Baker Kline, this month's She Reads Book Club selection. Also, parts of several other books, but not getting very far with anything. This is the saddest stretch of reading time I've had in ages.

Listening: Spencer and have about an hour left of Life, the Universe, and Everything, so we'll finish it this week. On my own, I've started Roger Ebert's memoir, Life Itself, read by Edward Herrmann, aka Grandpa Gilmore to my fellow fans of those ...Girls. On a related note, I've bought the audio of Lauren Graham's first novel, Someday, Someday, Maybe, and I'm looking forward to having Lorelai herself read it to me soon.

Making: Stacks and piles and bags...we're getting started on a big "clean out the closets (and drawers, and shelves)" project around the house this weekend.

Blogging: Heh. Blogging, what's that? I'm kind of embarrassed to call myself a blogger right now--this is just about as sad a stretch for blogging as it is for reading, although I do plan to get my "official" review of Telegraph Avenue written up today. It'll get better by the end of this month, though, I think, since the audit's winding down...and then I'll go on vacation for ten days during June. I haven't yet decided what I'm doing around here then.

Promoting: Voting in Armchair BEA's first annual Bloggers Choice Book Awards--you have till tomorrow to have your say!

Anticipating: It's just over a month away, so I can start getting excited for our vacation now! We will begin and end with two weekends in Boston, bracketing three days in the White Mountains in New Hampshire and two on the Maine coast. I grew up in Connecticut, and Maine is the only New England state I've never been to. I'm hoping mid-June will be a good time to introduce it all to my family of California natives.

Happy Mother's Day to all the moms--and for those who aren't moms, to your moms, too!

Posted with Blogsy