The Photographer

The Photographer by Mary Dixie Carter 304 pages

For fans of Tarryn Fisher’s ‘The Wrong Family.”

Delta Dawn is the children’s photographer to New York City’s elite. She specializes in children’s birthday parties. She is magic behind the camera, thanks in part to a boatload of editing software. She can make the most disastrous party look like fun was had by all. For the most part, she is just a fly on the wall, unseen and unnoticed.

Then Delta is hired by Amelia and Fritz Straub to shoot eleven-year-old Natalie’s party. It’s there that she realizes this is the perfect family and longs to be noticed, to play an important role in their lives.

She develops a plan that will integrate her into their lives and becomes indispensable to the Straub’s. The plan begins with Delta taking an interest in the neglected little girl. She begins babysitting on Friday nights when Amelia and Fritz have to go out. The Straub’s are famous architects who have clients around the world. Delta tries to seem like a friend who can help. She runs errands for Amelia; talks with Fritz about a myriad of subjects.

When Delta isn’t at the Straub family home, she is in her apartment, manipulating photos to include herself. The pictures are of her and Fritz…in bed and naked; of her and Amelia…laughing and drinking wine, standing extremely close together…photos of her and Natalie having fun.

Delta learns Amelia deepest desire, and how that desire has been thwarted over the years. But Delta knows how to help make her dream come true.

Carter, a first-time novelist, has created a super-duper creepy thriller that will have readers looking twice at anyone who comes into their homes. I read it in one day! There was only one problem in this pageturner. There is no explanation as to why Delta needs this family so much. What triggered this obsessive need to fit in with the Straub’s. Not that it impedes the creep factor, but as I read the last page, I wondered what was Delta’s motive?

I was going to give “The Photographer” 6 out of 5 stars in Julie’s world. However, due to the lack of motive, “The Photographer” received 5 out of 5 stars in Julie’s world.

 

We Hope for Better Things

We Hope for Better Things by Erin Bartels    400 pages

As a reader and a writer, I’m always looking for compelling reads that linger long after I’ve turned the last page. Erin Bartels’s debut novel, “We Hope for Better Things,” is such a novel. Bartels startles with her ability to take three separate timelines and weave them into one excellent story.

The story lines cover contemporary times, 1960s Detroit and Civil War-era Detroit outskirts. At the heart of each plot is forbidden love, one of the most that forbidden loves of all times, between whites and blacks. There are also the stories of race relations of each time period that could easily overpower the story, but Bartels uses her skill to not let that happen.

The main protagonist is journalist Elizabeth Balsam, who works for the scandalous rag, the “Free Press.” She is about to break a story that will have major repercussions in Detroit’s political powerhouse. Before that happens, Elizabeth has been contacted by a man who claims to have a box of photos and a camera that belongs to her family. Someone she has never heard of.

Elizabeth, who loves a good story, rather reluctantly agrees to take the camera, and if she can contact the woman named Nora, and if she wants the, she’ll arrange to have the photos returned.

Nora is Elizabeth’s great-aunt on her father’s side. Her sister knows of her as does a cousin, Barb, that is also a stranger. In contacting Barb, now unemployed, Elizabeth has somehow managed to agree to see if old Aunt Nora is still fit to live alone. Elizabeth goes to visit Nora, and there she begins to learn her family history, a history that is foreign to her, and one that she participates in.

Sometimes the timelines between the contemporary story and the 1960s story was a little confusing. Nora is such a major character in those periods that it threw me off a tad when the story switched, although Bartels clearly delineates each section.

 “We Hope for Better Things” is a wonderful read, and it receives 6 out of 5 stars in Julie’s world.