One-Lane Bridge

One-Lane Bridge by Dan Krzyzkowski 436 pages

What a great way to start 2023 with an exceptional novel by an unknown writer and a six-star read! I won the book in a giveaway contest on Shelf Awareness. It sounded interesting, and I like to get free books.  I must admit that heart sank when it arrived in the mail. 

Self-published! YIKES! That usually means a talented writer, but the manuscript isn’t polished. I can say though that this one couldn’t be more polished! I also must admit that I perused the reviews on Amazon before reading to see how bad it is. I mean, 436 pages is a lot to read of a less-than-perfect manuscript. 

I wish I had written the reviewer’s name down, but once I read this sentence, “I traveled to so many places both inside and outside of the human heart through the pages of One-Lane Bridge.”, I knew I was in for a treat!

Thanks to encouragement from his dad on the day he died, the now twenty-three-year old Simon Kozlowski is taking a gap year between college and law school. His dad wanted him to work for a year with his hands in order that he may truly understand potential clients. He wanted Simon to do hard work, like the majority of Americans. Simon secured a job doing road construction in New Hampshire.

He has to take several transportation modes to get to the job site from his home in New Jersey. That part of the book was a tad slow, but don’t give up. If you, like me, find it tedious, keep reading, it will be worth your time!

Unfortunately, when Simon arrived, the job had been eliminated. The project he was supposed to work on was not going to happen.

Simon had to figure out what he was going to do. He was stuck in Swan Like, an up-scale, Hallmark-esque small town. He wanders into a diner for a piece of pie. As he tells the diner’s owner, Molly, his woes, one of the area’s residents, Alisha Caldwell, overhears him and offers him a job as a “companion” for her five-year-old son, Corey. Companion is another word for nanny or manny.

Since he is out of options, Simon agrees. It’s a nanny job, but soon, Simon finds himself becoming attached to Corey… and to his mother…and to the town.

Secrets of the town, of the Caldwell’s, and even Simon’s own family back in New Jersey begin to unravel.

This novel is character-drive, and soon I was enchanted with these characters. To me it was reminiscent of Robert James Waller's novel, "The Bridges of Madison County. Therefore  “One-Lane Bridge” received 6 out of 5 stars in Julie’s world.

The Kingdoms of Savannah

The Kingdoms of Savanah by George Dawes Green 304 pages

This Southern Gothic Noir novel has been compared to one of my favorite books, John Berendt’s “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.”  However, I didn’t find anything about this novel anywhere close to MGGE.

I must be on some kind of weird streak because this is the third book in a row that has thoroughly disappointed me. I should have known when the readers are told that two of the catalyst characters are murdered and disappears, respectively, in the second sentence.

Most of Savannah knows what happened and who is responsible, but the police, once again, look the other way. But society maven Morgana Musgrove has decided that the case needs more than the police are willing to do. She owns a small private investigation firm and puts it to work. Over the course, all four of her adult children are involved, but it’s nothing to write home about; It’s not even a page turner.

The “Kingdoms” that is referred to in the title are homeless encampment that ring the city. And the dark secrets the Savannah is trying to hide are hidden beneath its tourist spots. Savannah, Georgia, has secrets? How shocking! But the book is supposed to reveal those secrets that were neither shocking nor surprises. It never, truly, did.

Author Dawes Green goes against conventional things like punctuation, grammar, paragraph break, accents, character descriptions---which I’m not against---but they have to work, and you guessed it! For me they didn’t. Therefore, “The Kingdoms of Savannah” receives 1 out of 5 stars in Julie’s world. 

 

Carolina Moonset

Carolina Moonset by Matt Goldman 272 pages 

Divorced dad, Joey Green, returns home to the small town of Beaufort, South Carolina, to help his mother look after his father for a while. Marshall Green is suffering from Lewy Body dementia*. His short-term memory has almost disappeared, but his long-term memory is strong. 

Marshall is not violent, except when it comes to the Hammond family. He has unexpected outbursts when the name is mentioned. Marshall has some old unresolved issues that come out when he talks with his old friend, Trip Patterson, who died decades ago, who appears in a hallucination. 

As Marshall’s long-term memories rise, so does the memory of his first love, Delphi, who was murdered because back then, in South Carolina, mixed-race couples were not tolerated. But even those memories are not exactly correct as readers discover. There is another murder and a probable murder after Delphi’s that sets the town on edge. 

In current time, Roy’s brother is murdered, down the street from the Green home. At first, the police are interested in Marshall as he cannot account for his whereabouts that evening.  

Joey, interested in clearing his father, wants to learn what happened to Trip, Delphi and Roy. At the same time, Joey’s mother, Carol, and the next-door neighbors are trying to set Joey up with their also-divorced daughter, Leela. Sparks flair, Joey and Leela turn investigators together. 

This book got off to a slow start for me, but I am glad I hung in there. It turned out to be a true page-turner. Once the new murder happens, the plotline sets off on a can't-put-down thrill ride full of secrets, scandals, lies, memories, romance and racism. “Carolina Moonset” received 4 stars in Julie’s world. 

 

*Lewy Body Dementia is “a progressive dementia that results from protein deposits in nerve cells of brain. It affects movement, thinking skills, mood, memory, and behavior” with frequent bouts of hallucinations. 

 

Meeting in Positano

Meeting in Positano (translated from the Italian by Brian Robert Moore) by Goliarda Sapienza 256 pages

What attracted me to this novel was that it was set in Positano, a town south of Naples on the Amalfi coast. I love Italian settings. Picking up the book paid off because Positano is more than a setting; it’s a character in the book.  Author Sapienza does a wonderful job describing its beauty.

Sapienza worked as an actress from the late 1940s to the early ‘50s.  She made six films and after worked dried up, she worked in other areas of the movie industry. However, after her death in 1996, her husband found several novels that she had written and began publishing them.

In this novel, she is scouting locations and meets Erica Beneventano, a lovely widow. The two women become very intimate friends, not lovers but almost. This story is a bit confusing. First, I was never completely sure who the narrator was. It’s supposed to Goliarda, but at times I felt as if the words were coming from Erica. And at other times, the plot seemed more like a memoir than a fictional piece, especially since author Goliarda uses her own name as her character’s name (that was really off-putting).

Basically this is Erica’s life story. The book could also be labeled as “based on a true story,” with Erica taking the lead as most of the story was hers. As Goliarda goes about her movie business, the two women become very close, not lover-close, by closer than sisters.

Life was not easy for Erica. She was a middle sister, forced to go to work at an early age, married to one of her father’s ex-business associates and forced to have an abortion that results in her inability to conceive more children Sometimes I couldn’t follow the plot, which I found quite frustrating. But the beauty of the writing and the descriptions kept me reading. 

I was dismayed at the end when I found an Afterword by Goliarda’s husband, Angelo Pellegrino. The back of the book also contained a timeline of Goliarda’s life and pictures of Positano. I wish I had read them first. I believe if I had, I wouldn’t have had such a hard time following the book’s action.  Therefore, “Meeting in Positano” receives 3 out of 5 stars in Julie’s world.