BOOK CLUB CLASSICS!

 Maya’s Notebook: A Novel by Isabel Allende

Release date: 2013 / 400 pages

Synopsis(from Amazon): This contemporary coming-of-age story centers upon Maya Vidal, a remarkable teenager abandoned by her parents. Maya grew up in a rambling old house in Berkeley with her grandmother Nini, whose formidable strength helped her build a new life after emigrating from Chile in 1973 with a young son, and her grandfather Popo, a gentle African-American astronomer.  When Popo dies, Maya goes off the rails. 

Review:   Out of the four or five novels I’ve read by Isabelle Allende, Maya’s Notebook is at the top of my list of favorites.  However, Allende’s latest diverges from her usual milieu in a number of striking ways.  The novel is based during the present time and the narrative circumnavigates throughout the twenty year life of the protagonist, Maya Vidal.  When the novel opens, Maya has been sent to Chile in order to protect her from a nefarious gang of hooligans and international criminals.  However, the reader does not discover why or how twenty-year-old American-born Maya is in danger.  This revelation of past wrongs comes slowly, intertwined with her new, restorative present life in Chile.

The strengths of Allende’s latest novel are not surprising — she is a world-class storyteller and we fall in love with Maya and the other characters immediately.  The lush imagery of Chile — and of Maya’s childhood in Berkeley, California — make the fact that this is in translation irrelevant. As with the other novels I’ve read, I will not soon forget Maya, her grandparents, her adopted dog, or her adopted country.  Allende’s writing seeps into the reader’s pores and transforms the experience of reading into a tropical, magical reprieve from reality.  I’m always sad to turn the last page of an Allende novel.

However, if I had been Allende’s editor (imagine that job!), I might have suggested that Maya’s troubles and tribulations need not be quite so dramatic, quite so “Las Vegas.”  The grief that hurls Maya into dissolution is understandable and authentic.  But the trouble Maya finds herself in eventually seems to reflect every nightmarish “made for t.v.” movie imaginable, and while the writing is stunning and Maya herself credible as a character, the piling on of tragedy and catastrophe is a bit “overkill.”  We who love Allende do not need heightened “Las Vegas” drama and suspense and would prefer to spend our time in her more magical imaginings — dark is fine, but “news at eleven” is unnecessary.

However, I return to the first sentence of this review to conclude — Maya’s Notebook is one of my favorite Allende novels and I look forward to her next

Wednesday, April 24th: Twisting the Lens

Thursday, April 25th: 5 Minutes For Books

Monday, April 29th: A Dream Within a Dream

Tuesday, April 30th: Tiffany’s Bookshelf

Thursday, May 2nd: A Bookish Affair

Monday, May 6th: Jenn’s Bookshelves

Tuesday, May 7th: Drey’s Library

Wednesday, May 8th: A Bookworm’s World

Thursday, May 9th: Speaking of Books

Monday, May 13th: Olduvai Reads

Tuesday, May 14th: Kritters Ramblings

Wednesday, May 15th: Savvy Verse & Wit

Thursday, May 16th: What She Read … - joint review

Monday, May 20th: Book Club Classics!

Tuesday, May 21st: Man of La Book

Wednesday, May 22nd: From the TBR Pile

Thursday, May 23rd: Cerebral Girl in a Redneck World

Thursday, May 30th: Peppermint PhD

The Abundance: A Novel by Amit Majmudar

Release date: 272 pp / 2013

Synopsis (from Amazon):When Mala and Ronak learn that their mother has only a few months to live, they are reluctantly pulled back into the midwestern world of their Indian immigrant parents–a diaspora of prosperous doctors and engineers who have successfully managed to keep faith with the old world while claiming the prizes of the new. More successfully than their children–equally ill at ease with Holi and Christmas, bhaji and barbecue, they are mysteries to their parents and themselves. In the short time between diagnosis and deterioration, Mala sets about learning everything she can about her mother’s art of Indian cooking. Perfecting the naan and the raita, the two confront their deepest divisions and failures and learn to speak as well as cook.

Review: Somehow, despite issues I was having with an old email account that prevented publishers from reaching me with offers of books to review, The Abundance burst onto my iPhone (that only works in town) and beckoned.  For the past year, fiction has left me uninspired and I have turned again and again to nonfiction.  The Abundance has restored my love for the genre and reminded me that truth truly resides in the imagination.  I began to read The Abundance while waiting to be assigned for jury duty and 100 pages later was a bit disappointed I was told to leave the courtroom and return home – this meant leaving the lives of Ab, Mala, and Ronak for the 30 minutes it would take to drive slowly up the snow-shrouded canyon.

The Abundance is about an Indian-American family — the parents moved to America before their children were born and returned to India only to visit family.  I have a special love for stories about Indian-Americans – first realized through Jhumpa Lahiri, but now luminously reinforced by Majmudar.  I am fascinated by the drive to succeed – the ability to succeed – shared by both cultures – but even more transfixed by the struggle to honor ancestors and a sacred culture and way of life, a way of life impossible to authentically realize for individuals born and raised in the U.S.  The clash between ancestral expectation and the stronger bond of paternal and maternal love is endless in its possibilities.

In The Abundance, within the first few pages we learn that the narrator is dying and wishes for one more holiday with her son and daughter and their children before revealing the news.  She had studied to become a doctor, but chose instead to raise her children.  Her husband is a loving, devoted neurologist who is also an award-winning mathematician and devotes many hours to this passion.  Their daughter, Mala, has become a doctor and is married with two children; Ronak, the son, is in finance – math without honor – also married with three sons.  Their mother’s illness brings the family together and showcases Majmudar’s deft skill at creating characters we grow to know so intimately, flawed but redeemable, palpable on the page.  He circles around and embraces universal themes of honor, individuation, loyalty, mortality and love.  How Majmudar is able to “become” a woman facing the last year of her life, to inhabit a mother-daughter relationship, as a man is so unfathomable.  And, best yet, the writing is luminous. For example:

“With cutting boards before us and a meal to be prepared, this is not a self-conscious heart-to-heart, taking place during time we have set aside to have one.  The attention is off the words for once, and that inattention is sunlight. The words grow free and crack the pavement and cover the bricks in green.” 106

I’m afraid I will be keeping this one, but I strongly recommend this as an excellent choice for book clubs.

Making Marriage Simple: Ten Truths for Changing the Relationship You Have into the One You Want by Harville Hendrix and Helen LaKelly Hunt

Release date: 208 pp / 2013

Synopsis (from Amazon): Bestselling authors Harville Hendrix and Helen LaKelly Hunt distill into ten essential truths what they’ve learned about how to create a successful and satisfying relationship—both from their decades of “R&D” in the marriage lab of their workshops, and from their own relationship journey. Harville and Helen have spent their careers helping couples transform their marriages through research, workshops, and counseling. But marriage—even for marriage experts—is never easy, and a number of years ago they found themselves on the brink of divorce. Harville and Helen put themselves back through the exercises they’d coached so many other couples through, saving their marriage and helping them achieve a true partnership.

Review: Oprah Winfrey considers meeting Harville Hendrix in 1988 her “big lightbulb moment on relationships.” Other fans of Imago Relationship Therapy will be thrilled that Hendrix and his wife have distilled their ground-breaking philosophy into a series of lessons and exercises to help strengthen any marriage in Making Marriage Simple. Hendrix, a former minster, professor, and therapist, appeared on Oprah’s show nineteen times, promoting his belief that we are subconsciously drawn to partners who share characteristics of our parents in order to heal childhood wounds. In Imago therapy, marriage is a spiritual partnership with the intent to change how we see each other, ourselves and the world.

Hendrix and his wife turn these lofty aspirations into concrete exercises to help couples transform entrenched conflicts into “teachable moments.” Each exercise is paired with ten relationship truths (i.e. “Conflict is Growth Trying to Happen”) and can be done solo or with a spouse.

Hendrix and Hunt hope to create a Relationship Revolution that will not only affect individual marriages, but societal ills as well. They believe 90% of the conflicts within marriages are the result of unresolved issues from childhood that can be healed within the safe space of a loving, trusting partnership that views conflict as the opportunity for growth. Even individuals with therapy-averse partners will find value not only in the Imago philosophy, but in determining whether their partner tends to deal with stress as a “turtle” or a “hailstorm” and learn ways to better support their partner as well as meet their own needs.

Thank you to Shelf Awareness for asking me to read and review this!

Tiger Babies Strike Back: How I Was Raised by a Tiger Mom but Could Not Be Turned to the Dark Side by Kim Wong Keltner

Release date: 2013 / 272 pages

Synopsis(from Amazon): An answer to Amy Chua’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, author Kim Wong Keltner’s Tiger Babies Strike Back takes the control-freak beast by the tail with a humorous and honest look at the issues facing women today—Chinese-American and otherwise. Keltner, the author of the novels Buddha Baby and I Want Candy, mines her own past in an attempt to dispel the myth that all Chinese women are Tiger Mothers. Keltner strikes back at Chua’s argument through topics, including “East Meets West in the Board Room and the Bedroom,” and “I Was Raised by a Tiger Mom and All I Got Was this Lousy T-Shirt: A Rebuttal to Chua.” Through personal anecdotes and tough-love advice, Keltner’s witty and forthright opinions evoke an Asian-American Sex and the City, while showing how our families shape our personal worlds.

Review:  I must begin this review with the disclosure that I really enjoyed Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.  Although I am not a parent, as a high school teacher for fifteen years, I was intimately knowledge of American parenting and was often dismayed by the effects of my generation’s “Free Range” parenting style.  So when TLC contacted me to review Keltner’s rebuttal to Chua’s memoir, I was intrigued.

Initially I struggled with the genre-shifting nature of Tiger Babies – the first part was basically a diatribe against the author’s mother, with chapters like “Tiger Mom, I’m Just Not That Into You.”  I think unless serious abuse is involve, memoirs that rail against parents may be therapeutic for the author to write, but tend to be hard to take as a reader.  Often Keltner employed humor – and clearly has a close relationship with her mother now that she has a child of her own – but the tenor of the initial sections felt petty at times and more suited to a therapist’s office.

But at about the halfway point, I realized that I had started to really enjoy Tiger Babies and the last few sections flew by.  What changed?  Keltner became a mother herself and realized just how much sacrifice, second-guessing, and doubt is involved in parenthood.  She also saw her mother transform into a warm, loving grandmother – and moving away from her hometown provided a bit of distance emotionally as well as geographically.  I truly enjoyed Keltner by the end and appreciated that she allowed her readers to witness her journey to maturity and motherhood.

Tiger Mother was a hit with book clubs last year and Tiger Babies might be an interesting follow up.

Like to win my copy?  Drop me a comment below!

Tuesday, April 30th: Book Dilettante

Wednesday, May 1st: Susan Heim on Parenting

Monday, May 6th: Dreaming in Books

Wednesday, May 8th: guiltless reading

Monday, May 13th: Book Club Classics!

Wednesday, May 15th: Book Hooked Blog

Thursday, May 16th: Peaceful Parenting

Monday, May 20th: Family Volley

Wednesday, May 22nd: Overstuffed

Monday, May 27th: Bloggin’ ‘Bout Books

Wednesday, May 29th: Suko’s Notebook