The Way Life Should Be

The Way Life Should Be  by Christina Baker Kline    320 pages

Three things drew me to this novel. First, it takes place in Maine. I’ve always wanted to live on the coast of Maine; it’s just so darn beautiful. Second, sometimes when I reflect upon my life, I think, “This isn’t what I signed up for; this isn’t the way life was supposed to be.” The third reason is the author, Christina Baker Kline. After reading, and loving, Orphan Train and A Piece of the World, Kline is one of my favorite authors and I want to read all the books she has published. And just icing on the cake, the front cover blurb is from Caroline Leavitt, an author I’m just discovering. So I ask you, “How could I resist this novel?”

Angela Russo lives in New York City and is thirty-three years old. She is an event planner for one of the lesser-known museums. On her office bulletin board is a cutout magazine photo showing a cottage on the coast of Maine. It portrays such a simple life; the life Angela has always wanted.

With her love life is nonexistent, she decides to look into some internet dating sites. A profile name MaineCatch. He’s thirty-five, has ice-blue eyes and lives in Cushing, Maine. Angela spends more time mooning over MaineCatch than she does thinking about the big fundraising event she is planning for the museum. She has to go to Boston on business, and luckily, MaineCatch sails down to meet her. The sparks fly.

When the event goes horribly, horribly, horribly wrong, Angela is fired from her job. She decided to move north to be with her catch. Things go horribly, horribly wrong; seems she has misunderstood MaineCatch’s intentions.

Without a job to return to, Angela decides to stay in Cushing. She finds a little shack to rent that she can renovate, gets a job in a local coffee house, and begins to rebuild her life. The knack for the Italian cooking she learned from her grandmother rises to the surface.

The novel is written in first person, which I think helps add immediacy to the story while Kline’s scenic description have me longing to pack me bags and head Northeast. I was able to live vicariously through Angela. I could barely put this story down and I didn’t want it to end. I hope in the future Kline writes a follow-up novel. The Way Life Should Be 6 out of 5 stars in Julie’s world.

The Clancys of Queens

The Clancys of Queens  by Tara Clancy 256 pages

When I chose this book, I understood I was picking up nonfiction. I like nonfiction when it’s told as a narrative. Maybe that’s one of the reasons why I love historical fiction so much. Based on the dust jacket cover, even though “A Memoir” is printed right below the title, I thought I was picking up a biography of the Clancy family from maybe the 1930s through the 1950s. I was surprised to learn the timeframe is late 20^th-century into early 21^st century. I will admit that I didn’t’ read much past the first sentence of the book’s description. “Fifth-generation New Yorker, third-generation bartender, and first generation author…” sealed the deal for me. What I thought I was getting and what I got was a pleasant surprise, and an excellent read.

We first meet Tara Clancy when she is seven years old. She divides her time between four homes: Her father’s converted boat shed (talk about open-layout), her mother’s dingy apartment and her mother’s boyfriend’s Hampton estate, and that special place in Queens: her grandparents’ home in a geriatric area filled with Brooklyn-born Italians.

Clancy does an excellent job is depicting her family, the area, her friends, and her lifestyle. I won’t say it was addictive reading, but each evening I looked forward to seeing what Clancy was up to next. I was surprised to learn that all of character’s names had not been changed to protect the innocent, but there is nothing horrible about each one. They are who they are, and I found this refreshing.

The person who most rubbed me the wrong way was Clancy’s grandmother. She was rough. A no-nonsense, foul-mouth Italian immigrant, she was a force to be dealt with. That’s one of the things that make The Clancy’s of Queens such a fascinating read. It’s the real story of real people, not some sugar-coated adaptation of the mild mannered immigrant grateful for the opportunities American provided.

Readers get to experience life in a real way, in Clancy’s way, and those real-life stories are often hard to come by. I have several favorite episodes, but the ones that stand out are:

·        Making her rounds through the neighborhood after being dropped off at her grandmother’s. This sounded like fun and reminded me of my dad making his rounds after he retired.

·        Her mother taking her to Los Angeles to introduce her to her sexuality

·        Weekends spent on Mark’s (her mother boyfriend) Hampton estate, where there was croquette, no television, and hours and hours of philosophical discussion between Clancy and Mark.

The Clancys of Queens gets 5 out of 5 stars in Julie’s world.

I received this book from Blogging for Books in exchange for this review.

How Civility Works

How Civility Works by Keith J Bybee, 69 pages

The past few decades have seen recurrent, and entirely ineffective, calls for a restored sense of civility, but few have thought to ask what civility really is.  Keith Bybee attempts to briefly sketch an answer to that question, charting the changes from chivalry to gentility to courtesy and, finally, to civility, this last codifying the bourgeois separation of public and private.  He then addresses some of the major challenges civility faces in the modern era, concentrating less on the difficulties directly created by cultural diversity than on the objection that civility must inevitably mean insincere hypocrisy, as well as concerns over the role that any accepted standard of manners can play in enforcing social stratification.

Bybee's argument for civility is entirely utilitarian.  On the one hand, civility generally provides for the greatest rhetorical effectiveness.  On the other, civility allows for peaceable interaction between people with differing, or even conflicting, beliefs.  Overall, Bybee seems to view civility as a form of virtue signalling, which lends itself to a great deal of hand-wringing over whether the virtue is real or feigned.  This same possibility of hypocrisy leads him to a certain ambivalence towards the claim that the practice of civility teaches the virtue of civility - an odd problem, as there is no virtue, not even sincerity, which cannot be simulated.

What he omits - and the omission is glaring - is a view of civility that considers the human person as possessed of a certain irreducible value entirely independent of the quality of their virtue or beliefs, and as such entitled to a basic level of respect.  This results in his argument for civility failing even on the practical level on which it is founded - if the only purpose of civility is that it works to my advantage, I am free to abandon it as soon as it is ceases to do so.  Far from recognizing this as a problem, Bybee embraces it, reducing the realm of manners to another ideological battlefield, entirely depriving civility of its power and purpose.

The Truth According to Us

The Truth According to Us by Annie Barrows   512 pages

From the co-author of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Pie Society comes a novel rich in secrets, eccentric characters,, charm, and an un-put-downable story.

It’s autumn 1938. Hotter ‘n a coon dog. In Washington, D.C., socialite Layla Beck has decided that she doesn’t want to marry Nelson, the man her father cherry-picked for her. Senator Beck is outraged and cuts off the young woman, going to far as to have her put on relief and gets he a job with the WPA.

The WPA sends Layla to Macedonia, West Virginia, to write the small-town’s history. This seems odd as the reader is not given any indication that Layla can write a book however brief. Layla settles in at the Romeyns home.

There she encounters the household: 12-year-old Willa (who reminded me of Scout from To Kill a Mockingbird); Willa’s younger sister, Bird; Aunt Jottie, Aunts Mae and Minereva: and Willa and Bird’s father, Felix. Nearby lives another uncle, Emmett.

Willa has reached an age where her perceptions are starting to heighten. She decides that she wants to attain the virtues of the town’s founder, General Magnus Hamilton: ferocity and devotion. In her new found qualities, she is keenly aware of the sparks, or something, flying through the air between Aunt Jottie and Mr. McKubin.  

Layla, a beautiful young woman, attracts the attention of most of the men in town, but especially that of Willa’s father, Felix. He comes and goes in their lives like a ghost. Felix begins to show her around, while she is conducting her research. Layla is determined to do a good job.

As Layla digs into the town’s history, Willa practices ferocity and devotion and begins to uncover some interesting things about her family

.

The story is told in alternate chapters between Willa and a third-person omniscient narrator. I was quickly pulled into the story. Even at 512 pages, the story flew by and I had trouble putting it down. It’s the perfect read for a lazy, hot summer weekend.

I give The Truth According to Us 6 out of 5 stars.