Regrets and depression seem to have overwhelmed the main character, Nora. She’s lost her job, a car ran over her cat, she thinks she has failed at everything, and she says she wants to die. But does she really. Through a series of parallel universe experiences she gets to try out many different lives based on her long list of regrets. None really work because none of them exemplify her real self. She thinks she might like this new life or that new life, but none fulfill her, reflect her true self. She learns that money, fame, riches are not necessarily the answer. But what is the answer? What is the best way to live?
Several months after Maclear’s father (who was a famous journalist) dies, she decides to take a DNA test to find out more about her family health and personality history, mainly because of the stories about a particular grandmother. She wonders if certain traits she and her sons have might possibly be inherited. The results of the test are a shock. Her father, the father she adored, who raised her and adored her, is not her biological father. At first, she thinks perhaps it was a sperm donor, but then she discovers this is not the case. Through the DNA test and her detective work, she finds two biological half-brothers (she was an only child before this discovery) who are willing to communicate with her, send her photos, etc. She tries relentlessly to acquire more information from her mother, who is often unforthcoming or tells her contradictory information. Then her mother gets dementia.
This is also a story of plants, of gardening. Both she and her mother are amateur botanists and expert gardeners. When nothing else works in their mother-daughter relationship, their love of plants and gardening holds them together. Even with dementia, her mother knows plants. Their other joint endeavor is ink drawings and love of art.
Additionally, this is the story of family, family secrets, inter-racial marriage, and challenging relationships. Kyo’s mother is Japanese living originally in England and later in Canada who often struggled with her status as a Japanese immigrant. Her “real” father, the one who raised her, was of British and Irish descent; her biological father was a Jewish formula one race car driver.
Want to know how the top 1 percent, the super wealthy live and control nearly everything in the US? Read this book. In a mere 117 pages, McDonell explains his own life and that of fellow 1 percenters. He details his early life, the private school he attended, the family connections, summers taking sailing lessons in the Hamptons, and vacations using private jets to places like the Galapagos Islands. At 18, he was able to get his first novel published in part because of his family connections to a famous publisher. Eventually, he left this life behind to become a foreign correspondent in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In this book he details how the super wealthy hoard wealth, pass it from one generation to another, and how outsiders, the poor and those not white, are kept out. Here are a few quotes from the book:
“I began to see how, in the United States of America and elsewhere, success almost always, and predominantly, depends upon wealth–and frequently comes at the expense of the less wealthy.”
“We in the one percent like to believe in meritocracy, even fairness.” At this point he lists several of famous people who rose to wealth and power from poorer circumstance and explains how this is used to make the “one percenters feel good, they distract from the possibility of a more humane distribution of wealth.”
Why do the one percenters behave as they often do? He interviews several whom he knows through his private school connections. “The fear they share was loss of wealth. Without ever saying so, they were very much afraid of losing their country houses, the barn converted for their kids sleepovers, the space for the grand piano, the green houses, pied-a-terre where their mother-in-law stayed without interfering in everyone’s business, the airport lounge that allowed them to enjoy pleasures among their own, in quiet. They were afraid of supermarket processed cheese, preferred organic stuff which they believed would keep them alive longer….they were afraid of losing their Prada bags…the cashmere….They feared losing wealth not for its own sake but because it was justified, in their own minds, by intelligence, hard work, determination—that is by character.” They truly seem to believe they are smarter and harder working than other people.
Before reading this book, I thought of French society as relatively egalitarian. Apparently, it is not if this book mirrors reality. One main character Renee, 54, lives and works as a concierge in a high class building containing eight, large, luxury apartments which the residents own. As she tells her story, she notes that this is her 27th year at this job. She describes herself as “short, ugly, plump”. She rarely says anything nice about herself or any of the residents. She notes she is uneducated, insignificant. She has one friend, Manuela, a cleaning woman originally from Portugal. Renee thinks it is her duty, her lot in life, to pretend to be something she is really not, a person totally lacking in intellectual and artistic acumen. She runs the television to make the residents think she watches mindless melodramas when she is actually reading Tolstoy as well as all sorts of literature and Marx, history, well every genre. After all, her cat is named Leo for a reason. She goes to art galleries, listens to all sorts of classical music, is basically an intellectual in the true meaning of the word, but works very hard to hide this, because she thinks she must stick to her station in life as she sees it. This works until one resident dies and a wealthy Japanese man buys the deceased man’s apartment. Both he, who notes her cat is named Leo, and a young girl, the other main character who lives in one of the apartments and plans to commit suicide and set their apartment on fire, suspect Renee is not as she appears to be. I do not want to give it all away, but this is a book with many life lessons, including that adage about not judging a book by its cover.
This is a book for those who believe in the power of books to transform life, who are fans of Alice Hoffman, and who like time travel. It also about how a charismatic man can ruin the lives of many, especially women, by controlling everything around him through fear and coercion. In his Community books and contact with the rest of the world are banned. Mia is a young woman who sneaks into a local library and finds Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter”. She realizes the life she is living in the Community is like the lives in the book. Through this book she manages to attain the courage to escape such a man, the man who destroyed her mother, Ivy. She makes her way back in time to the period in the book, has a love affair with Hawthorne, and finally escapes the horrible man who tracks her everywhere she goes.
If you like murder mysteries, this is a book for you. I do not normally read them, found the blurb intriguing and started it. Once I started, I did want to know what happened. I learned a lot about New Zealand, the diversity of wealthy people who live there, and the lush climate in some places. A wealthy South Indian woman suddenly disappears along with 250,000 in cash. Ten years later no one still knows what happened to her and then suddenly someone finds her Jaguar hidden in dense woods with her skeleton in it. Her devoted son has believed all this time she ran away from a horrible marriage (he cannot stand his mean dad) and is still alive. Now the son is a famous, wealthy writer and determined to find out who killed her. This is the story of her life, a horrible marriage, a wealthy neighborhood where nothing seems as it really is, and the son’s quest to find who killed his mother.
The author of this book, Guadelupe Rivera, is the daughter of Diego Rivera by the woman to whom he was married before he married Frida. Diego went on a trip to Russia and his then wife, the author’s mother, became attached to her previous boyfriend, the poet Jorge Cuesta. She and Diego divorced and then he married Frida. Eventually, the two couples became friendly and at one point they all lived in the same house.
Thirteen years after Diego married Frida, the author moved in with them. This book details her life living with Frida and her father, how Frida learned to cook, how she decorated the Blue House in Coyoacan, the fiestas, the food, the adventures. The book includes photos and recipes of Frida and Diego’s favorite foods, photos of the house, and places the author visited with Frida. It is also a story of many of Mexico’s famous people at the time.
I own several books about Frida but this one is the most revealing and intimate in many ways. If you like Mexican food and find the life and art of Frida and Diego of interest, read this book.
Note: It was also written by the journalist Pierre Marie-Colle with photos by Ignacio Urquiza.
Judith Heumann contracted polio as a child and was subsequently confined to a wheel chair. Doctors suggested to her parents that they send her off to live in a place for the disabled. Having escaped Nazi Germany, her parents were horrified and refused. There were no laws protecting disabled people when she was a child. Her parents, especially her mother, fought for her to go to regular school. This is how her story begins as she tells it. The rest is the story of her activist life.
When the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 was passed, it took months for Section 504 regulations to be signed into law. At this time the author was a young woman living in the SF Bay area. She lead a days long sit-in at the federal building in San Francisco. When this did not work, she went to DC. The entire book is her account of her life as an activist for the rights of disabled persons, beginning with her childhood, her becoming a certified teacher after attending college, and her endless activism for Section 504 and the ADA.
This is an important book for anyone interested in the history of civil rights for the disabled.
For decades I have been a bit obsessed with Argentina and its history. When the horrible events described in this recent novel occurred during the military dictatorship in the 1970s, I closely watched news and read books about it. Later, I hosted an exchange student from Argentina and visited him and his family. Therefore, when I saw this novel on the new books shelf of the local library, I checked it out.
At a polo match in New York, a wealthy Argentinian diplomat and his wife and daughter meet a woman from his college days. She says things about him and his past that upset him and cause his daughter, Paloma, to wonder about her dad’s past, about which she knows little. When they go to Argentina on a trip related to his diplomatic duties, Paloma decides to investigate. She meets a local university student whose parents had disappeared (as thousands did) during the military dictatorship. He is part of an activist group searching into the disappearance of close family members during the dictatorship. He decides to help her with her research into her dad’s past. This creates a chain of events that upsets everything she knows and endangers her life.
If you want to read a heartbreaking love story, learn more about a brutal period in Argentinian history and some Argentinian customs and lore, this is the book for you. I went back and reread some of it twice.
writingontherim 