Back from hiatus with THE LOVE SHACK -- and not a Chrysler or a B-52 in sight

As anyone familiar with this blog knows, I’ve been on hiatus for some time. I didn’t actually mean to go on hiatus – it just happened. We went to Shanghai, my daughter went to college, I went on sabbatical, my mom got sick. I’ve certainly been reading – as always, it’s been a huge comfort. But I just couldn’t find the time and energy to share my thoughts. It became stress, and not fun, and that’s exactly what I didn’t want when I started this blog. So I stepped back – and vegged.

Around January, I realized I was getting antsy, and had some things to share. But I held back from jumping back in to the book blogging world – I felt detached from a community I had been part of, and I didn’t know how to jump back in. So I waffled, which is like vegging, but with the addition of conflicted thought.

But then I got an email about a TLC tour that was way off my normal reading radar – a beach romance, for goodness sake. And I thought to myself, “Maybe that’s just the thing. Read something you haven’t read since you were a teenager, and see if it gives you something new to say.”

Which is the long way round to explaining why my usually lit/fic, historical novel and mystery blog is featuring a romance for my return to blogdom. A romance called, The Love Shack, no less. (Cue  the B-52s, my favorite 80s band).                                                                                                                                                            

All I can say was, it was a reading vacation. It was fun, decadent, and not terribly demanding.

Christie Ridgway gives the reader a story more Georgette Heyer than Nora Roberts. There’s lots of back story, lots of emotion, lots of complications and even a rumored necklace with lots of jewels. Oh, and there’s romance too. But it’s way more cerebral than I thought it would be. Seriously.    

The story is as simple at its heart as you might expect. Gage is a photojournalist who books some downtime in the place he happily vacationed as a child – Beach House No. 9. The owner’s little brat of a daughter, Skye, is now the owner of the place – and predictably gorgeous. He’s been working behind enemy lines in the war on terror. She’s been dealing with her own war on peace at home. Both Gage and Skye have incidents in their past that tend to keep them isolated – but they are also absolutely drawn to each other. You know they belong together from the first chapter – it’s a romance, for goodness sake – but Ridgway keeps you wondering if they’re going to figure it out before calamity strikes.

The Love Shack is a good beach book: comfortable and escapist, but just a little unexpected. Ridgway definitely channeled the Regency Romance aesthetic in a contemporary setting. The book was honestly far more restrained than I had expected. If you are looking for a fun, contemporary romance with an interesting set of supporting characters, consider putting The Love Shack in your beach bag this summer. No one is going to confuse it with Anna Karenina -- or The Gulag Archipelago for that matter* – but it’s good, reasonably clean fun.

I was supposed to receive a copy of this book in return for my honest opinion, but had so much trouble with NetGalley that I bought the book myself. Still, many thanks, as always, to Lisa at TLC for including me on this tour.  For other opinions about this title, follow this link.

*Deperado Penguin knows this to be true!

Book Review: Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand

I was really happy to be asked to join a book club. And even better, I was thrilled to see the list of books the club had already decided on. Some were totally new to me, but many were already on my TBR. One of those was Helen Simonson’s Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand, which wound up being the next book on the list. I have to admit, I thought it started slow – but in the end I found myself completely captivated by it.

We meet the widowed Major Pettigrew at a horrible moment: he has just learned that his younger brother has died unexpectedly. Mrs. Ali, owner of the local store, happens upon the Major in a horrible state. She comes to his aide, making him tea and giving him someone to talk with. And thus begins a most unlikely friendship: one human’s completely decent response to the distress of another.

As it turns out, the retired Major and Mrs. Ali have a lot in common: both have recently lost dear spouses, both honor their families, both have a sense of history and a love of books. But their friendship appears improbable because to most observers, even their dearest friends, what are most noticeable are their differences: the Major is from an old, aristocratic, English family, while Mrs. Ali is a shop keeping Pakistani Muslim.

With this premise, Helen Simonson could have written a very predictable “East Meets West” kind of story, but for the most part she didn’t. That is perhaps a function of the sensational cast of supporting characters that inhabit Edgecombe St. Mary, the increasingly suburban (and decreasingly idyllic) home to the Major’s small ancestral estate. Abdul Wahid, Mrs. Ali’s nephew, is an angry young man, trying to decide if his love or his faith is more important. Roger Pettigrew, the Major’s son, is a crass, overindulged, self-centered British Millennial who longs for wealth to match his social status. British-born Amina eschews her family’s traditional Pakistani values, but as tough as she is she still struggles as a single parent in a society that will never fully accept her or her illegitimate son, George. The Major and Mrs. Ali are also well drawn, wryly humorous and insightful, but it’s really the overall effect of the personalities converging on Edgecombe St. Mary, from the upper-crusty but highly taxed peers to the eco-terrorists next door, that set this book apart for me.

That said, I’m going to admit that the book was not entirely successful from my point of view. And that is because Simonson, an ex-pat Brit who apparently lives in the New York area, committed one of the current literary offenses that ticks me off most: employing the “stereotypical American” as symbol of all that is wrong with the world. (My little diatribe begins about here, so you can feel free to skip it if you’d like.)

Here’s the thing: Simonson’s own discussion points indicate she wanted to show that all British people are not the same. Fine. So why are all Americans the same in so many recent books that come out of the former British Empire? Note to writers – we are quite a diverse group. We put the “multi” in multicultural. We are not all hegemony-minded business majors with great teeth (okay, our teeth are usually pretty good), too much money and no manners. And we don’t all have a burning desire to buy up your country and titles. That American represents a literary trope at this point. If you can write with understanding about a misguided bunch of codgers who wouldn’t dream of allowing a Pakistani couple join their club (and to your credit, you did), I’d think you could steer your way clear to writing an interesting – and by that I don’t mean perfect, but at least imperfect in an interesting way – American. And while we’re at it, it doesn’t count to have one British person – in this case the Major’s son Roger – be just as awful as an American. I’m talking about relative levels of interest here, and not relative levels of evil. (End of diatribe; it’s now safe to go back to the review.)

For the most part this was a very successful novel. The more I got to know the characters, the more I enjoyed it. The ending is both exciting and unexpected. And it provided a great night of discussion for my book club. There was a great diversity of opinion about what Major Pettigrew’s “last stand” actually was – nearly everyone had a different take. So the book is highly recommended for readers of literary fiction and romance, diatribe notwithstanding.