Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name by Vendela Vida

This was a quick read, and an enjoyable one. Clarissa, the heroine, is in search of her roots. At her father's death, she finds out that he was not really her father after all, and her mother left the family when Clarissa was just a teen. She just disappeared one day when she and Clarissa were doing their Christmas shopping at the Poughkeepsie Mall. Her mom arranged to meet her at a given place at a given time, and never came back. And her father never shared this secret with her. Neither did her fiance, who has known for 15 years that it was not her father, either.
Clarissa finds her birth certificate in her father's papers after he dies and finds another man's name as her father. He is a Sami priest and lives in Lapland. (The Sami are the indigenous population in Lapland, resembling our Native Americans.) Clarissa leaves her fiance to find out the truth about her past.
When she finds him in Lapland, she finds out other interesting information as well, and her journey takes her eventually to the truth about her past.
I heard of this author because she has a new book out that is on my Want to Read list but since I could not get it, I took this one out instead. She is a good writer and I am inclined now to find her other books.

The Three Weissmans of Westport by Cathleen Schine

After reading other reviews of this novel,  I guess I need to read Sense and Sensibility again in order to appreciate this one.  But I DID appreciate it, even without a reminder of the close correlation between the Jane Austen book and this one.
The characters Betty, Miranda and Annie are interesting and human. Betty, the mother, has just been left by her husband of 40 plus years. She moves from NYC to Westport, CT into a cottage owned by her Uncle Lou and is joined by her two daughters.  Their "adventures" are described in detail in this entertaining novel that is full of humor, satire and pathos.

Julia's Chocolates by Cathy Lamb

I can't say that I did not enjoy reading this book, but I was a bit disappointed since it came highly recommended.  The story follows a young woman, Julia Bennett, as she escapes the torture and abuse of an abusive mother and blue blood fiance. The story is told in a humorous way, but personally, I find it hard to be glib about subjects as serious as these are.
The novel becomes a kind of "male bashing" vehicle, but there are sympathetic male characters in the book as well, which makes it a bit more palatable in the end.
Julie leaves her wedding gown draped over a tree in North Dakota as she escapes from her horrendous fiance, Robert. This was probably the best part of the book.  I really loved the description of Julia trying to drape that gown over the tree and have it stay there. So initially, I was "hooked," the talent of this young writer was powerful to start.
But I found as I continued reading that the characters were typical and predictable and reminiscent of other such novels, such as the Ya Ya Sisterhood.
I wanted more. The ending was not surprising. I was hoping for more.
Is Cathy Lamb related to Wally?

The Irresistable Henry House by Lisa Gruenwald

I was totally unaware of the fact that in the late 40's & early 50's and up to the late 60's, colleges and universities had home economics classes in childcare that had young women "practicing" mothering skills on orphans who were supplied by local orphanages. Quite strange!
This book deals with just such a baby - Henry House - who was reared by multiple moms for a short time in his infancy and who is then adopted by Martha, the head of the program at the school. She is so dedicated to Henry but he does not feel the same toward her. She lied to him early in his life, hiding the truth of his parentage and suffocating him with her love.
Henry has relationship and committment issues, given his unusual rearing and the book follows his life through his early years and into his adulthood. He has numerous relationships, but none can really last until Henry deals with his own insecurities and feelings about his past.
I recommend this book!

Private Life by Jane Smiley

I looked forward to reading this book and had it reserved for me at the Library, but I must say, I was a bit disappointed, especially since one of Smiley's early books, A Thousand Acres, has always been a favorite of mine. It is a slow moving story, but in the end, I realized that it was probably Smiley's intention to tell the story that way to convey the slowness of Margaret's life and how she must have felt during her long marriage to a delusional and eccentric man.

This book tells the story of Margaret Mayfield and it begins in the late 1880's when she is just five years old. The story ends during WWII in 1942, so you experience Margaret's life over a long span. In essence, the story is of her marriage to Captain Andrew Early, a "brilliant" scientist in a fairly well-to-do family in St. Louis where the story begins. She marries late (for the times) at age 28.  Never is there a shred of evidence that there was any romance in her marriage at all.  And her childhood was spotted with tragedies - the death of two brothers and the suicide of her father. You realize early on that the title of the book has relevance; Margaret lives a very quiet and introspective life and takes what life has been dealt to her with acceptance, sacrificing her own urges and interests to her husband. She rarely stands up to him but just accepts his dictates and fanciful ideas without question.

After Margaret and the Captain marry, they move to the west coast, outside of San Francisco in Vallejo. I must say, I enjoyed the fact that most of the book takes place in an area that I love and am so familiar with. The novelist brings current events of the time  into the story - the Civil War, the 1905 earthquake in San Francisco, the first world war and then the second world war.

Out west, Margaret meets some interesting people who help to spice up her life a bit and she becomes close to a Japanese family and an odd Ukrainian man named Pete. Perhaps one of the most interesting characters in the book is Dora, from her home town, who stays single her whole life and travels all over the world as a news correspondent. Certainly, daring for a woman during that era.

A public hanging witnessed by Margaret when she was five years old is an event that is mentioned over and over again throughout the book and in the memory of it serves as a way to bring Margaret's life to closure.

It is written well, and has some passages that did captivate me, but overall, I was anxious to finish the book and move on to the next.

So Much for That by Lionel Schriver

This is a very powerful and disturbing book but in the end, uplifting. It deals with a family's confrontation with a serious form of cancer and the accompanying issues at hand when facing such a tragedy: the illness itself, facing death, chemotherapy, changes in your life and then - the health care issues. At the start of the novel, the husband, Shep, is preparing to tell his wife of many years that he is ready for "the Afterlife." For him, the afterlife does not mean death, but instead means that he plans to pick up and leave the United States, his job and his family (if they won't accompany him) and move to Pemba in Africa. It's been his dream for many years to leave the rat race that is life in America and live a simple, self sustaining life in a third world country where the cost of living is very low. Before he can tell Glynnis, she tells him her news: she is sick and has been for a while and has been diagnosed with mesothelioma. She is an artist who works with metal and over the years has had much exposure to asbestos. And the bottom line is - he can't go to Pemba because she needs his health insurance.
There are other interesting characters in the book, mainly his best friend Jackson and Jackson's family. The daughter has a rare congenital disease, familial dysautonomia (FD), which requires frequent and unpleasant medical interventions, and of course, vast amounts of money to contain and control. So the theme of health care, its costs, its inequities are all a very large part of this interesting novel.
One theme that was particularly difficult for me to deal with was the cancer victim's relationship with her family and "friends."  The book hit very close to home for me in this regard, as I have lost several friends to various forms of cancer and grappled all the time with my inability to deal with people who are sick and provide the "right" kind of support. I was always beating myself up for not doing enough. Glynnis expresses her feelings quite frankly about the friends who don't know what to say or how to act and it was difficult for me to read these passages, as they strengthened my feeling of inadequacy in this regard. Glynnis' end was painful to read as well, as I was reminded of being with my mom when she took her last breath.
I don't want to sound as if this book is a terrible downer, because it is not. I really liked the ending, but won't give it away. The book had humor and pathos and I did enjoy reading it.

The Monsters of Templeton by Lauren Groff

Quite a different book! Templeton is really Cooperstown and Marmaduke Templeton is the father of a character who is James Fennimore Cooper,  author of Last of the Mohicans. References are made to the book and to the Baseball Hall of Fame, so fact and fiction intertwine in interesting ways.
It's the tale of a young woman, Willie, who returns home to Templeton from Stanford, after falling from grace in her doctoral program. She slept with her professor, who is married and threatens his wife. She returns home, the prodigal daughter, to her single mother, Vi, who has had a similar life experience herself.
Vi has changed, however, from the hippie chick she was when she returned home to Templeton from San Francisco when both of her parents died tragically in a car accident. Vi is no longer the hippie, but instead a nurse and "born again" Christian who is dating the local reverend.
Willie finds out from her mom that her father is someone from town. Previously she had been told that her mom did not know who father was - it could have been one of three men, she claimed.
Willie spends time researching all of her ancestors, beginning with Marmaduke, meeting old friends and classmates in her home town, and getting to know her mom. She is desparate to find out who her father is. And she does find that out in the end.
It's a really fun read and very unique, too. I have not mentioned the "monsters" in this blog post, but you will have to read the book to meet them.