Good Fortune

 

Good Fortune by C. K. Chau

416 pp

Elizabeth Chen and her sisters Jane, Lydia, Mary, and Kitty live in New York City's Chinatown.  Their mother is a real estate agent and their father runs a restaurant.  Elizabeth's mother sells their beloved community center to a company who plans to change a lot about it.  The two investors are Brendan Lee (the equivalent of Mr. Bingley) and Darcy Wong (the Darcy character).  What ensues is very similar to the novel "Pride and Prejudice" by Jane Austen but with modern twists.  Jane falls in love with Brendan Lee.  His sister and Darcy Wong try to keep him away from her.  Elizabeth and Darcy have sparks, but Darcy's prejudice and Elizabeth's pride get in the way.  In the background is the fear that the buyers will change the community center so much it will no longer work for the people in the neighborhood.  Mr. Collins is part of the book and is not someone there to inherit their father's wealth, but instead works for Catherine  de Bourgh and offers Elizabeth (who is unemployed) a job.  She does not want to take it, but her friend Charlotte does.  Eventually, Elizabeth goes to visit Charlotte.  There she meets Catherine De Bourgh, her daughter, Darcy's sister, etc.  The pride and prejudice eventually get overthrown and Elizabeth and Darcy fall in love.  There are several modernizations, but the basic story line is still there and sometimes gets in the way.

I love Jane Austen, but didn't feel like this kept the spirit while becoming something new.  As a former English major, I may be too picky.  I give the book 3 of 5 stars,

The Cloisters

The Cloisters by Katy Hays 320 pages

I don’t need tarot cards to let me know that Katy Hays has a big future in writing, even if it goes off the rails a bit.

When Ann arrives in New York City, ready for her summer internship at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, she is dismayed that the job no longer exists. Instead she is sent to The Cloisters, a museum that is part of the Met to work there. I had never heard of The Cloisters and spent an entire afternoon online, learning about this medieval museum and garden. I hope to visit there someday.

But back to Hays’s debut novel. The story start rather slowly, not much happening before page 183. It does pick up as the curator, Patrick, and his assistant, Rachel, are obsessed with locating a missing tarot card from a 15-century deck that will seal their careers. They believe that finding that lost card, that is undeniably located somewhere in the museum, will set history on its ear. 

Readers who don’t much about academia and its dark side, I think, will find that aspect of the novel compelling. There are a lot of secrets that haunt the museum, but nothing earth-shattering.

Undoubtedly, this book is well written, but it lacks depth. The setting, the museum and its gardens, provide a creepy aesthetic, but the characters are shallow. “The Cloisters” receives 3 out of 5 stars in Julie’s world.

 

Lucy by the Sea

Lucy by the Sea by Elizabeth Strout 291 pages

It’s 2023, and upon opening this book I’m plunged back into 2020. America and the world were thrust into the midst of the covid pandemic, all of us positive that we were gonna die before it loosened.

I was one of the lucky ones; I was sequestered at home for about six weeks before I was able to go back into my office. Hubs on the other hand was always out as he worked for an “essential” business.

Lucy’s ex-husband, and the father of her two grown daughters, William is a scientist. He understands what is happening more than Lucy. To keep her safe, William borrows a cabin on the coast Maine that he whisks Lucy to in order to avoid the virus. Drama rears its head as Elizabeth and William keep tabs on their offspring, Chrissy and Becca.

This novel centers on the isolation and loneliness and how the fear of merely going to the grocery was so prevalent. As with most Elizabeth Strout novels, “Lucy by the Sea,” is character driven.

Lucy is still mourning the death of her second husband, David, all the while re-adjusting to life with William. They cook, take long walks, keep in touch with their daughters and gasp! Even make a new friend.

Their new friend is Bob Burgess, whom readers will remember from “The Burgess Boys.” When he visits, there is always the minimum six feet apart from each other.

 Readers will also rejoice in the briefly brief appearance of Olive Kitteridge, but I won’t spoil that sighting.

And, as my daddy used to say, “everything always works out.” I spent two evenings reading this novel. It was both too long and too short. Too long in that I did not really reliving those early pandemic days, and too short in that I wanted more. I look forward to reading more about Lucy and William in the future.

“Lucy by The Sea” receives 5 out of 5 stars in Julie’s world.

 

The Steal

The Steal (Book 1in To Catch a Leopard series) by C. W. Gortner and M. J. Rose 135 pages 

I was drawn to this novella because of the cover. The woman reminded me of Grace Kelly and Cary Grant when they made the movie “To Catch a Thief.” However, the movie is not based on this book as it was published in 2021.

When readers first arrive in Cannes for the 1957 film festival, they see the area through Jerome Curtis’ eyes. But he hasn’t come to enjoy the scenery, gawk at the film stars, play in the casinos or to watch the new movies. Instead, Jerome is there to investigate a jewel robbery. A robbery that, if he cannot solve, will cost the company he works for millions of dollars. He is confident that he can solve the case.

The jewels have been stolen right under the nose of their owner, Ania Thorne. Her father is the world-famous jeweler, Virgil Thorne. Ania has studied under him since she was child, and at 29 has also designed iconic pieces and is ready to take over the company’s majority.

Jerome is not the suave, elegant Cary Grant figure; he is more of a Colombo. Immediately he suspects a notorious jewel thief whose moniker is The Leopard because he always leaves a leopard print glove behind. Naturally, there is no such glove at this crime scene, which happens to be the fabled Carlton Hotel.

Jerome and Ania work every lead and every suspension that comes their way, whether it be in Cannes, Paris or New York. Their arrival in New York unearths startling evidence and gets them close to the thief.

Of course, I cannot forget the attraction that leaps between the Ania and Jerome. It’s fun to watch them steer around each other, trying to maintain their professionalism.

I’m looking forward to reading Book 2, “The Bait.” “The Steal" receives 5 out of 5 stars in Julie’s world.  “The Steal” receives 5 out of 5 stars in Julie’s world.

 

 

The Nurse's Secret

The Nurse’s Secret by Amanda Skenandore 368 pages

I was attracted to this novel due to the cover and the setting---New York, 1883. I always enjoy medical stories from the 19^th and early 20^th centuries; they make me appreciate modern medicine. (An aside, for a fabulous historical medical fiction read, pick up a copy of Robin Oliveira’s “My Name is Mary Sutter.”)

Una Kelly is a grifter who is about to become homeless. Her mother died in a fire and her father died of a drug overdose. Una is about to pull a scam and cheat her fence out of deal when the new fence she plans to meet with is found murdered. She does have a run-in with the coppers but manages to elude them.

On the run and nowhere to go, Una spots an article in the newspaper that Bellevue Hospital is recruiting nurses. Bellevue is a training hospital and is renowned for following Florence Nightingale’s nursing principles. Bellevue is the first hospital to do this in the country.

Una defrauds her way into the training program. It’s not like anything she expected, but she finds she has a knack for it. Following the restrictive role, she must play as a nurse is tough on the young woman who is used to doing things her way. She also finds things she has never had before: friends and romance. When murders begin to happen at the hospital, Una sets out to discover who is the guilty party.

This novel is a little light in depth and tension, but it was interesting. While I didn’t find it a page-turner, other reader might. “The Nurse’s Secret” receives 3 out of 5 stars in Julie’s world.

 

The Personal Librarian

The Personal Librarian by Marie Benedict & Victoria Christopher Murray 341 pages

 I love historical fiction. It teaches me things I never knew, and it sends me down rabbit holes, searching for more information. Marie Benedict & Victoria Christopher Murray’s new novel did those two things and more.

Belle Marion Greener is the daughter of Richard T. Greener, the first man to graduate from Harvard, and Genevieve Fleet Greener. The family left Washington, D. C. to escape the racial tensions that had been growing since the end of the Civil War for New York. There Genevieve decided that she and her children---Belle, her brother, and two sisters---would “pass.”  Mr. Greener, an activist, refused and left the family.

The family struggled, until Belle got a job as the personal librarian to financier J. P. Morgan. Belle knew that Morgan would never hire a Black woman, so she changed her name to Belle da Costa Greene, a woman of Portuguese decent, which explained her ‘dusty” complexion. Her job was to help Morgan build the most extensive library of rare books and manuscripts, antiquities and the finest art collection in the world.  

Taking place in the early 1900s, this novel is about the guilt that Belle carried; terrified that someone would discover her secret. After goggling images of her, I could understand why she was so scared.  But the book is also about how a hard working young woman became one of the most powerful and influential women in the art world. She was able to travel alone in New York and in Europe.

I had a little trouble with the first third of the novel as rare works that I had never heard of made me feel rather stupid. But Belle’s story is one of the most interesting period pieces I have read.

Another interesting tidbit on this novel is the collaboration of the white Marie Benedict and the Black Victoria Christopher Murray. Personally, I could not tell which section of the novel each writer championed, but the two together created a deep, lush narrative that I found irresistible.

 “The Personal Librarian” receives 4 out of 5 stars in Julie’s world. 

 

Mazes and Monsters

Mazes and Monsters by Rona Jaffe, 329 pages

They are four very different people.  Jay Jay is an eccentric child prodigy with wealthy parents who dreams of becoming an actor.  Daniel is a computer genius who is, contrary to stereotype, exceedingly handsome and successful with women.  Kate is an aspiring writer whose father traded in her mother for a younger model.  Robbie should be so lucky - his parents never stop fighting, and the older brother he idolized ran away from home years ago and hasn't been heard from since.  They all have a couple of things in common - they are all undergraduates at Grant University, and they all share a passion for the role-playing game Mazes and Monsters.  In the game, they can be whatever they want to be: popular, a hero, a fighter, a savior.  For one of them, however, the game will slowly take over his life, and what he thought was an innocent escape will turn into a nightmare he cannot escape.

When it is remembered at all, Mazes and Monsters is remembered today as part of the '80s Satanic panic and for its TV movie adaptation starring a young Tom Hanks (as well as Wendy Crewson, who went straight from it to Skullduggery), making it the equivalent of Reefer Madness for gamers.  Not that there's any Satanism in Mazes and Monsters - Jaffe is far too sophisticated to worry about such things.  Her focus is on the psychodramatic dimension, connecting the players' invention of their characters to their self-invention in college, their confrontations with fictional monsters to their struggles with the burdens of social and parental expectations.  

The book would be more interesting if it was a lurid tale about a diabolical game that seduces players and drives them mad - as it is, Jaffe ultimately blames no one and nothing for what happens.  The kind of irony and insight Judith Rossner used to examine the New York singles scene and connect it to larger social trends in Looking for Mr Goodbar is entirely absent here - not that Jaffe falls short, but that she doesn't even try.  Young people will go to college, it seems, and some will be exceptional but most of them will be ordinary, there they will study, party, and fall in and out of love, most of them will move on to dull futures, others will have bright futures, and some will simply fall apart entirely, more frequently into drugs and sex than into fantasy role-playing games, but that's just the way it is.  Not only does the book avoid both social commentary and exploitative chills and thrills, it also avoids any kind of subtlety.  Jaffe continually drops large paragraphs of exposition detailing personal histories and explaining precisely how a character feels, the dialogue often serving merely to link one expository paragraph to another.  Mazes and Monsters may be "a far-out game," as one character famously puts it, but Mazes and Monsters is a bland, pointless waste of time.

We are the Brennans

 

We are the Brennans by Tracey Lange 288 pages

Tracey Lange’s debut novel centers on an Irish Catholic family in New York with lots of secrets to hide, and that makes for a perfect afternoon of reading!

Sunday Brennan, the only girl in a family of sons, left home five years ago for Los Angeles on the pretext of a job offer to write web content. Leaving involved more than her family. It meant that she walked away without a word to her fiancé. In reality, she was hiding from her deepest secret and trying to overcome it.

Life hasn’t quite worked out for her. She’s basically estranged from her family and drinks too much. After a serious car accident that left her with a broken bone and bumps and really awful bruising, her older brother, Denny, talks her into coming back home to heal. Sunday feels she has no choice and flies back to New York with Denny.

Denny has his own set of problems. He and his best friend, Kale (who is also Sunday’s ex-fiancé) own a pub. They are trying to expand, but things at the new location are not going smoothly. Denny has taken out a mortgage on his family home, unbeknownst to his father, and borrowed money from a very shady character from their past. Denny’s separated from his wife and child, while Kale is also facing difficulties at home.

Navigating the past, each other and the present are at the heart of this family drama, along with the secrets they share.

Told in multiple points of view (there are at least six) I felt this gave the story a completeness that could not have come from a single narrator---readers get multiple sides of the story. Author Lange does a wonderful job in keeping the voices varied and it’s easy to know who is narrating each section.

“We are the Brennans,” receives 5 out of 5 stars in Julie’s world.

Rhapsody

Rhapsody by Mitchell James Kaplan   352 pages

I was so excited to get my hands to read this novel. Set during the Jazz Age in New York, the story centred around George Gershwin and Kay Swift.  I admit that I had no idea who Kay Swift was in the annals of music history. But I am familiar with George, and especially his brother, Ira. The story, I thought, was supposed to be about George and Kay’s 10-year love affair. To me, that story seemed to live in the background most of the time.

Here’s a summery from Goodreads.com that made me want to read this novel:

“One evening in 1924, Katharine “Kay” Swift—the restless but loyal society wife of wealthy banker James Warburg and a serious pianist who longs for recognition—attends a concert. The piece: Rhapsody in Blue. The composer: a brilliant, elusive young musical genius named George Gershwin.

Kay is transfixed, helpless to resist the magnetic pull of George’s talent, charm, and swagger. Their ten-year love affair, complicated by her conflicted loyalty to her husband and the twists and turns of her own musical career, ends only with George’s death from a brain tumor at the age of thirty-eight.

Set in Jazz Age New York City, this stunning work of fiction, for fans of The Paris Wife and Loving Frank, explores the timeless bond between two brilliant, strong-willed artists. George Gershwin left behind not just a body of work unmatched in popular musical history, but a woman who loved him with all her heart, knowing all the while that he belonged not to her, but to the world.”

The novels opens with the focus on Kay. I admit that I had no idea who the author was talking about most of the time when “Jimmy” kept cropping up. Turns out, Jimmy is James Warburg, a wealthy banker and Kay’s husband.

I hate to feel lost and that is what I felt most of the time I was reading. I felt this way the same way I felt about “Loving Frank.”  I just couldn’t care about these people.  In my opinion, Rhapsody is a big ol’ flop and receives 1 out of 5 stars in Julie’s world. 

 

In Our Time

In Our Time by Tom Wolfe, 119 pages

In Our Time collects a number of sketches written or drawn by Tom Wolfe in the years leading up to 1980, with most of the drawings having appeared in the "In Our Time" feature in Harper's magazine.  Together, they present a portrait of America, and especially New York, that is as amusing as it is incisive.

For Wolfe, the hidden significance of the '70s was that it was the decade when the counterculture of the '60s became the culture.  If the '60s witnessed the rise of the young barbarians, the '70s saw their triumph.  Just as importantly, it was when they began, despite their own best efforts, to grow old.

Saving Washington

Saving Washington: The Forgotten Story of the Maryland 400 and The Battle of Brooklyn  by Chris Formant  320 pages

I was attracted to this fragment of forgotten history because of the first line on the dust jacket: “Somewhere deep beneath the bustling streets of Brooklyn, New York, lie the remains of perhaps the most important citizen soldiers in American history; the heroic men from Baltimore, Maryland, who held back superior British forces long enough to preserve the Continental Army and save the life of General George Washington.” After reading it, I expected a story about finding the graves, how they were exhumed and relocated to a place of honor. This is not that story.

The time is 1776. Baltimore teenager Joshua Bolton and his BFF, Ben Wright, watch as the British Army does its best to make the American Colonists’ lives so hard that they would give up that idiotic notion of independence and return to a civilized way of life. As the boys watched the tyranny, they knew that they had to do something. When the call went out for new recruits for the 1^st Maryland Regiment, they boys enlisted.

I know this is historical/biographical fiction, but I was surprised that a black man, even a freed man, was allowed to join the fight.  I need to brush up on this aspect of American history, obviously.

The story illustrates the hardships of the citizen-soldiers, and what they were up against. At first I was surprised that Josh and Ben were teenagers, but then again, I’m not sure we really know how many young adults fought alongside their adult counterparts. A lot I imagine.

The language of the book makes it obvious early on that it is written for young adults. On the downside, I didn’t feel the tension of the situations that the boys got themselves into until the Battle of Brooklyn was underway. I never felt that they were in any real danger.  But that’s the point of view of a middle-age female.

I think young adult readers will enjoy this book. I like that it tells a tale of forgotten heroes, that we all need to know more about.

“Saving Washington: The Forgotten Story of the Maryland 400 and The Battle of Brooklyn” receives 4 out of 5 stars in Julie’s world.

Bonfire of the Vanities

The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe, 659 pages

Sherman McCoy imagines himself a Master of the Universe, spending his days making multi-million-dollar bond trades, or, as his wife puts it, collecting golden crumbs.  Larry Kramer is an Assistant District Attorney in the Bronx, Jewish by birth but Irish by vocation, his heavy caseload and meager pay compensated for by fantasies of power and virility.  Peter Fallow is a reporter for the City Light tabloid, struggling to stay sober long enough to write a story that will justify his continued employment.  All of them are desperately trying to find, keep, and increase their place somewhere in the heap of humanity that is 1980s New York, the capital of the world.  In their persons, the worlds of finance, politics, and the press collide, though in the end their defeats seem to possess more dignity than their victories.

In 2007, The New York Times published a retrospective on Wolfe's debut novel in which it crowed that "the New York of 'Bonfire,' to a degree that might well have shocked people in 1987, no longer exists."  It is true, of course, that street crime in New York is far below the flood crest of the '70s and '80s, but street crime - as opposed to the fear of street crime - plays only an incidental part in The Bonfire of the Vanities, and the last decade has certainly witnessed a resurgence of social unrest and tribalism, complemented by an outrage culture endemic to social media and epidemic in the press, so that we seem more than ever to be living in Bonfire's jungle.  For proof, one need only compare the treatment of Sherman McCoy by a fictional tabloid with the treatment of the Duke Lacrosse players by the actual New York Times.  The same Qoheleth who informs us that "all is vanity" also reminds us that "there is nothing new under the sun."

Lost Roses

Lost Roses by Martha Hall Kelly    448 pages

 

Have you read “Lilac Girls” by the same author who wrote this book?  If you haven’t, I highly recommend it!

 

Martha Hall Kelly’s second novel, “Lost Roses,” is not quite as good as Lilac, but it’s a great read. I had trouble getting into it, but once I got to about page 50, it took off like a rocket.

 

The story begins in 1914 and ends in 1921. It’s less about World War I and more about  the Russian Revolution.  The story focuses on three women. First there is Eliza Ferriday. A real-life heroine, Eliza, spent many years doing her best to help the “White Russians,” immigrants from Russia who had been aristocrats, but who lost everything when the Bolshevicks came into power. Eliza organized the American Central Committee for Russian Relief by finding them homes, including her own New York City apartment and Southhampton cottage.

 

Eliza’s BFF is Sofya Streshayva. While not a real-life person, she is a combination of many of the former aristocrats Hall Kelly researched in writing this novel. Her part of the story is the most compelling. Her distant relation to the Romanov family isn’t helpful during this time period. The scenes were she and her family are captured by the Bolshevicks are intense and some rather disturbing.

 

The third woman, and my least favorite, was Varinka, a Russian peasant with ties to the Red Army. At first she is a sympathetic character, but when she takes the one thing Sofya loves the most, she becomes the novel’s antagonist, along with the Russian Revolution. Varinka is completely fictional.

 

Ultimately this story is about friendship, love, and loss during one of the most turbulent times of the 20^th Century. I enjoyed the different voices of the three women. I found them easily distinguishable. This, to me, is another one of the forgotten stories of human beings and the bonds they forge during difficult times. “Lost Roses” receives 5 out of 5 stars in Julie’s world.

Louisiana Catch

Louisiana Catch by Sweta Srivastava Vikram    261 pages

When I was offered a chance to review this book by the author, I jumped at it. I like the to-the-point summary she gave: “The book is about a grieving daughter and abuse survivor who must summon the courage to run a feminist conference, trust a man she meets over the internet, and escape a catfishing stalker to find her power.” What I wasn’t prepared for was how terrifying it would be.

Thanks to her mumma, Ahanna has recently filed from divorce from her abusive husband. Her life with sex-addict Dev has been a living hell. Terrified that people, especially her family would harshly judge her, she does everything she can to hide what her life is really like. Living in New Delhi with her parents, readers get to see what life there is like for an average woman. The scary part was how unsafe it is for a woman to venture outside her alone. But Ahanna receives courage and support from her Mumma and the rest of her family. 

Tragedy strikes while Ahanna is the in process of organizing a world-wide, feminist conference called “No Excuse.” The conference will be held in New Orleans in one year. She works long days, trying to digest what has happened in her life. Two men come into her life.

First is Rohan Brady, who lives in New Orleans. His PR firm is helping with the conference and Rohan becomes her right-hand person. He likes to tease her, is smart, funny and caring, something that Ahanna is not used to from a man.

Then there is Jay Dubois. She meets him in her online therapy group. As the pages unfold, readers get to watch Jay slowly turn from a seemingly-also depressed individual to a terrifying manipulator.  Jay represents Ahanna’s love life over the years. Jay gave me the creeps from the minute he is introduced, and it turns out, rightly so.

Viram does an excellent job in the slow build-up of the plot. It’s so subtle in the first two-thirds of the novel, that I thought there really wasn’t a plot. That slowly rising tension is enhanced by the voice. It sounds more like a memoir than a novel, which only adds to Vikran’s creditability. The last third of the book read more like a novel with high suspense

I enjoyed reading “Louisiana Catch” and give 4 out of 5 stars in Julie’s world. I wish there had been an appendix that would define all the Indian words that Vikran uses. She defines the majority of them without getting in the way of the story, but I hated not being exactly sure that I understood correctly.

Poppa John

Poppa John by Larry Woiwode, 204 pages

Among the few people left who still call him Ned are his psychiatrist, whom he hasn't seen recently, since money became tight, and his agent, whom he hasn't heard from recently, resulting in money becoming tight.  Virtually everyone else, from the man on the street to his wife, knows him as Poppa John, the character he played for years on one of America's most popular soaps.  "Played" being the operative word - Poppa John, the character, grandfatherly dispenser of spiritual wisdom instantly recognizable to millions by his trademark wave, was killed off.  While the death of Poppa John was a ratings bonanza, it has proved to be a professional and personal disaster for the man who played him for so long and now must, somehow, remember how not to.  Most of the novel takes place over the course of a single day, a few days before Christmas, as the main character attempts to find a gift for his wife but spends most of his time stumbling between bars, tormented by ghosts of the past, present, and future.

Poppa John is a novel of internal struggle.  As such, it is not a very exciting book.  It is, however, very interesting.

Sons of St Patrick

Sons of St Patrick: A History of the Archbishops of New York from Dagger John to Timmytown by George J Marlin and Brad Miner, 421 pages

Sons of St Patrick chronicles the lives and careers of the ten archbishops of New York (Irishmen all), from the combative John Hughes, whose pugnacity earned him the nickname "Dagger John", through his alternately outspoken and reserved, engaged and aloof, feared and beloved successors, down to the legendarily gregarious current occupant of the chair inside New York's St Patrick's Cathedral, Timothy Cardinal Dolan.  In the process, it also provides a kind of core sample of American Catholic history, from the humble beginnings of the Church in the US, through the immigration boom of the 19th century, the rapid establishment of Catholic educational and charitable institutions, the emergence of Catholics into the mainstream of American life and culture, and the resurgence of anti-Catholic prejudice in the late 20th century, while also covering the internal struggles over trusteeism, Americanism, modernism, and human sexuality.

Marlin and Miner approach their subjects charitably but not uncritically.  Their initial brisk pace becomes increasingly slow as their story moves through the decades, mirroring the shift - however much some of their subjects resisted it - from the bishop as spiritual leader to bureaucratic manager.  Thankfully, the authors' wit and care sustain the reader through even the dullest subjects.

We Are Okay

We Are Okay by Nina LaCour     234 pages

Over the winter holidays, college freshman Marin opts to remain in an empty dorm in New York rather than go home to California. The reasons she decides to stay gently unfold one layer at a time, in an introspective novel that powerfully explores her solitude and conflicted emotions against the backdrop of a stormy, icy winter.

This book is very much an homage to a grandfather. It's about loss, and love (many different kinds), and patchwork families. Though it's a YA book, I read it as an adult and still felt a kinship with it. I think I would only recommend this book to teens that enjoy more literary type reads - it's not a plot-driven piece, it's much more a study of grief. 

Under the Egg

Under the Egg by Laura Marx Fitzgerald     247 pages

When Theodora Tenpenny spills a bottle of rubbing alcohol on her late grandfather’s painting, she discovers what seems to be an old Renaissance masterpiece underneath. That’s great news for Theo, who’s struggling to hang onto her family’s two-hundred-year-old townhouse and support her unstable mother on her grandfather’s legacy of $463. There’s just one problem: Theo’s grandfather was a security guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and she worries the painting may be stolen.

With the help of some unusual new friends, Theo’s search for answers takes her all around Manhattan, and introduces her to a side of the city—and her grandfather—that she never knew. To solve the mystery, she’ll have to abandon her hard-won self-reliance and build a community, one serendipitous friendship at a time.

This book was a very good blend of From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler and Chasing Vermeer, just as advertised. I really loved the combination of art history and sleuthing and that the two main characters were girls. It's a solid middle-grade mystery story that has many elements that I love - art, libraries, history, and detecting. I'd highly recommend this to anyone who is into one or all of those things. There's a little bit for everybody.

Humans of New York: Stories

Humans of New York: Stories by Brandon Stanton 428 pages

This is a combination of several photographs and interviews done by Stanton on the streets of New York. It is mixed with happy and sad stories, funny quotes and strange ramblings. There's love, hate, grief, excitement, something for everyone.

This was an enjoyable and easy read. (1 day!) There were compelling stories combined with equally compelling photographs. Anyone who reads this book will find someone they identify with and/or someone they think is way off base and I think that is the beauty of it. It's just humans in New York. They come from all backgrounds and geographical locations. I'm glad the author chose all different kinds of people with all different kinds of views or else this would have been a one-dimensional book. It lets you know he probably encountered people with which he himself did not agree, however he put them in anyway (example atheist and Christian views). The adorable smiles of the children, the love in the eyes of the couples, the loneliness of the grieving, and the sadness of the lonely (to name a few) make for a pictorial I definitely recommend.

The Bronx Is Burning

Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning: 1977, Baseball, Politics, and the Battle for the Soul of a City by Jonathan Mahler, 339 pages

In 1975, New York City, in many ways the capital of the modern world, teetered on the brink of collapse.  The bankrupt city government was refused a federal government bailout, sanitation workers held a ten day strike during which garbage piled up on the sidewalks, and laid off policemen rioted, shutting down the Brooklyn Bridge during rush hour.  The city bounced back in '76, serving as the focal point for the nation's bicentennial celebrations, hosting a successful Democratic National Convention, and cheering the Yankees into the World Series.  The subsequent sweep of the Yankees by the unstoppable Big Red Machine might have served as an omen for '77.  

As author Mahler chronicles, the momentous events of 1977 represented the convergence of a series of trends.  Rupert Murdoch's New York Post continued to change New York's media landscape.  Disco broke big, while punk grew in the East Village and hip hop conquered the Bronx.  Pudgy postman David Berkowitz terrorized the city as the ".44 Caliber Killer" and then as the "Son of Sam", killing 6 and wounding 7 in a series of random shootings that lasted twelve months.  A cascading series of failures in the city's power grid led to a blackout in mid-July that plunged the entire city into darkness, triggering widespread looting and arson.  Most obviously, the future of the city was weighed in the Democratic primary for mayor, which pitted incumbent technocrat Abe Beame against irrepressible radical Bella Abzug, opinionated loudmouth Ed Koch, and political Hamlet Mario Cuomo.  Yet for Mahler, the great story of '77 is the Yankees' championship season, throughout which manager Billy Martin fought his own personal demons as well as team owner George Steinbrenner and brash slugger Reggie Jackson. 

Mahler's account is written in a readable, straightforward documentary style, but the material is loaded with a symbolic importance far greater than the bare facts.  It is to the author's credit that he does not force interpretations onto these facts.  The Martin-Jackson feud can be seen as representative of an insecure, unhinged white establishment trying desperately to deny the legitimate achievements of rising blacks, or as locally-rooted working class ballplayers being eclipsed by mercenary free agent superstars, or neither, or both.  The Son of Sam murders certainly evoked the horror of urban anonymity (even as the discotheques promised the pleasures of that same anonymity), but also involved the hype of sensationalistic journalism.  The result is genuinely poetic, both a revelatory history and a love song to the city and its legendarily outsized personalities.