River Run Book Club: October 2011

Heavy snow south of the White Mountains caused several of our members to stay close to home. In Campton, it was a beautiful sunny day. The grounds of the Colonel Spencer Inn were white with the fresh snowfall. Contrasting were golden leaves and apples still on the trees. All was reflected in the pond across the street with mountain views in the background.

Book discussed was Richard Harvell's first novel...."The Bells". Some of us loved the book and Harvell's descriptive writing....others enjoyed the book....and one did not like it at all. I understand that a couple people who were not able to be there found it to be so-so. Of course, we had an excellent discussion. We all relate differently to books.

We voted on the book for our January 29, meeting. Majority voted for "The Wives of Henry Oades: a Novel" by Johanna Moran.

Our December 4, meeting will be held at Pembrook at 12:00 Noon. Book to be discussed is Octavia Butler's "Kindred". This is our holiday meeting. Each member is to bring a wrapped book for the Yankee Swap. We discussed if this should be a newly published book. Decision was that it could be any book....as long as it was a "Good Read".

There was a lengthy discussion about how we might make a holiday contribution to the community. First suggestion was for childrens books to be contributed to a Vermont Library that suffered flood damage. It was then pointed out that there are needs closer to home. Joy suggested that we do something to aid women in need.

Mary Jo is going to check with the Whole Village to see if we can contribute toilet articles (shampoo, hand cream, tooth paste, and beauty supplies) to the women's shelter or safe houses. She would also ask if they need adult and childrens books. Marilyn is going to check with the local Food Pantry in Campton to see what foods or supplies are needed. It was suggested that this should be a year round project....not just for the holidays. At each meeting, we can gather non-perishable foods. Each member can take a turn delivering the food to her local food pantry. All thought that this would be a good idea.

Hot chili and corn bread were a hit on this winter like day. And of course delicious deserts..... Thank you to all who provided our feast!

Mary Jo submitted the following book suggestions:

1. The Wives of Henry Oades by Johanna Moran-367 p. February 2010 -

From Publishers Weekly

An English accountant and his two wives are the subject of this intriguing and evocative debut novel based on a real-life 19th-century California bigamy case. A loving husband and attentive father, Henry Oades assures his wife, Margaret, that his posting to New Zealand will be temporary and the family makes the difficult journey. But during a Maori uprising, Margaret and her four children are kidnapped and the Oades's house is torched. Convinced his family is dead, Henry relocates to California and marries Nancy, a sad 20-year-old pregnant widow. When Margaret and the children escape, eventually making their way to California and Henry's doorstep, he does the decent thing by being a husband to both wives and father to all their offspring, a situation deemed indecent by the Berkeley Daughters of Decency. Moran presents Henry's story as if making a case in court, facts methodically revealed with just enough detail for the reader to form an independent opinion. But it's Margaret surviving the wilderness, Nancy overcoming grief and the two women bonding that give the book its heart and should make this a book group winner. (Mar.)

2. My Name is Mary Sutter by Robin Oliveira- 384 p. March 2011

From Publishers Weekly

The Civil War offers a 20-year-old midwife who dreams of becoming a doctor the medical experience she craves, plus hard work and heartbreak, in this rich debut that takes readers from a small upstate New York doctor's office to a Union hospital overflowing with the wounded and dying. Though she's too young for the nursing corps, Mary Sutter goes to Washington, anyway, and, after a chance meeting with a presidential secretary, is led to the Union Hotel Hospital, where she assists chief surgeon William Stipp and becomes so integral to Stipp's work she ignores her mother's pleas to return home to deliver her sister's baby. From a variety of perspectives—Mary, Stipp, their families, and social, political, and military leaders—the novel offers readers a picture of a time of medical hardship, crisis, and opportunity. Oliveira depicts the amputation of a leg, the delivery of a baby, and soldierly life; these are among the fine details that set this novel above the gauzier variety of Civil War fiction. The focus on often horrific medicine and the women who practiced it against all odds makes for compelling reading.

3. Fortune's Rocks by Anita Shreve- 453 p. 1999

From Publishers Weekly

The time is the turn of the last century, the setting a rocky New Hampshire coastline resort area nicknamed "Fortune's Rocks." Olympia Biddeford, age 15, is walking the beach, feeling the first stirrings of her womanhood. The strong-willed daughter of an upstanding Boston couple, she soon "learns of desire" as she begins a passionate affair with a married writer, John Haskell, three times her age. From the moment they meet (he is a visiting friend of her father's), they experience a sexual spark Olympia feels "liquid" in his presence. Soon, they fall into sinful trysting. Shreve (The Pilot's Wife) serves up these opening events with breathless immediacy. Once the plot gets a chance to develop Olympia gets pregnant, gives up child, fights to get child back it settles down considerably, turning into a modernized The Scarlet Letter, a tale of a woman attaining feminist independence by living outside her period's societal mores. Reading, Brown (of TV's The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd) clearly has the most fun at the beginning, where the story's real heat and flushed excitement pours out. Listeners, too, may grow colder as the plot loses its torrid, forbidden edge.

4. Ahab's Wife by Sena Jeter Naslund- 668 p. May 2009

From Publishers Weekly

"Captain Ahab was neither my first husband nor my last," says Una Spenser, the eponymous narrator, in the first sentence of this deliciously old-fashioned bildungsroman, adventure story and romance. Naslund's inspiration, based on one reference in Moby-Dick, may not satisfy aficonados of Melville's dense, richly symbolic masterpiece, but it should please most other readers with its suspenseful, affecting, historically accurate and seductive narrative. At age 12, Una escapes her religiously obsessed father in rural Kentucky to live with relatives in a lighthouse off New Bedford, Mass. When she is 16 disguised as a boy she runs off to sea aboard a whaler, which sinks after being rammed by its quarry. Una and two young men who love her are the only survivors of a group set adrift in an open boat, but the dark secret of their cannibalism will leave its mark. Rescued, Una is wed to one of the young men by the captain of the Pequod, handsome, commanding Ahab, who has not as yet met the white whale that will be his destiny. These events recounted in stately prose nicely dotted with literary allusions take the reader only through the first quarter of the book. Una's later marriage to Ahab a passionate and intellectually satisfying relationship the loss of her mother and her newborn son in one night, and her life as a rich woman in Nantucket are further developments in a plot teeming with arresting events and provocative ideas. Una is an enchanting protagonist: intellectually curious, sensitive, imaginative and kind. But Naslund also endows her with restlessness, rash impetuosity and a refreshing skepticism about traditional religion, qualities that humanize what verges on an idealized personality, and that motivate Una's search for spiritual sustenance. Unitarianism and Universalism are two of the religions she investigates; other "dark issues of our time" include slavery, and the position of women. Social and cultural details texture the lengthy, episodic, discursive narrative. Una's search for identity brings her friendship with such real life figures as writer Margaret Fuller and astronomer Maria Mitchell, and with such colorful fictional characters as an escaped slave and a dwarf bounty hunter. Even Halley's Comet makes an appearance. Provocatively, Naslund (The Disobedience of Water) suggests a new source of Ahab's demented rage to kill the whale who has "unmasted" him. Some elements of the novel jar, especially Naslund's tendency to pay rhapsodic tributes to Una's questing spirit; a surfeit of noble, large-souled and amazingly generous characters; and the symmetrical neatness of the plot. In the last third of the book, readers may become weary of Una's spiritual reflections and the minutiae of her daily routine. But these are small faults in a splendid novel that amply fulfills its ambitious purpose offering a sweeping, yet intimate picture of a remarkable woman who both typifies and transcends her times.

5. The Postmistress by Sarah Blake- 384 p. February 2011

From Publishers Weekly

Weaving together the stories of three very different women loosely tied to each other, debut novelist Blake takes readers back and forth between small town America and war-torn Europe in 1940. Single, 40-year-old postmistress Iris James and young newlywed Emma Trask are both new arrivals to Franklin, Mass., on Cape Cod. While Iris and Emma go about their daily lives, they follow American reporter Frankie Bard on the radio as she delivers powerful and personal accounts from the London Blitz and elsewhere in Europe. While Trask waits for the return of her husband—a volunteer doctor stationed in England—James comes across a letter with valuable information that she chooses to hide. Blake captures two different worlds—a naïve nation in denial and, across the ocean, a continent wracked with terror—with a deft sense of character and plot, and a perfect willingness to take on big, complex questions, such as the merits of truth and truth-telling in wartime.