BOOK REVIEW: Never Change

Once in awhile a book comes along that turns out to be very personal. A book that makes you want to sit down with a good friend and a good glass of Pinot Grigio to talk about the book and life in general. NEVER CHANGE by Elizabeth Berg was one of those books for me.

Fifty-one years old Myra has never married. She explains herself as the girl in high school who sat on the folding chair selling tickets to the prom, but never having a chance to attend it. Her only relationship seems to be with her dog Frank.

Myra works as a home nurse, visiting patients who need help with changing dressings, giving insulin shots, and similar medical situations. Her new assignment is a former classmate who has been her secret love since their high school days. Chip was the perfect young man, handsome, popular with the girls as well as the boys, a star athlete; the boy who would do well all of his life.

Chip has been diagnosed with brain cancer and has come home to die. Myra and Chip are now in a situation where their roles have done a reversal.Now they share old memories and new discoveries, sometimes from very different points of view.

Elizabeth Berg takes what could have been a very trite plot and weaves a beautiful story. The book's strength is mainly in her cast of characters. Myra should be a pathetic, lonely, middle-aged woman. Instead she shows that she is a hero, a quiet hero full of warmth, wisdom and capabilities. Her attitude keeps us from seeing her as a pitiful creature, instead, we find ourselves admiring her.

We also see the depth of the golden boy Chip. Their memories of high school remind us how we neglect to look beyond the surfaces of our classmates.The perfect person in our English class may have things going on that would surprise us.

I loved how well Berg created Myra's patients. There was a feeling of honesty in their depiction. We met Grace, a fourteen-year-old new mother, DeWitt, a bitter, middle-aged black man who does some dealing in drugs, Rose, a victim of dementia who lives in poverty, blind Fitz who likes to go to the strip clubs. Each of Myra's patients become very real to the reader and as important to us as they are to Myra.There is a mini story in each person.

Author Elizabeth Berg has taken a simple story and fleshed it out with a sharply drawn wry observant eye. Her use of language, her pull on the readers' emotions, her character sketches are all done beautifully without  being over sentimental. NEVER CHANGE is a book that you will want to share.

BOOK REVIEW: The Weight of Water

Author Anita Shreve's THE WEIGHT OF WATER captures the reader's attention in much the same way that watching a train accident does. It is hypnotizing and you know from the start that all is not going to end well.

Jean is a photographer who has become obsessed with the 1873 murder of two women on Smuttynose Island, a small, barren island off the coast of New Hampshire. Jean has been given the assignment to take the photographs that will illustrate a magazine article on the horrific murders.

Jean, her husband Thomas, their five-year-old daughter Billie, and Rich, Thomas's brother, with his new girlfriend, Adaline set out in Rich's boat to help with the photographic assignment planning on a leisurely vacation. The tension on the boat becomes evident very early. Jean and Thomas are having marital problems and Jean believes that Adaline may be involved with Thomas. The best thing on the boat is Billie.

While searching for documents on the murder trial during one of their land excursions, Jean finds an old letter written by Maren Hontvedt. Maren had been on the island the night of the murders and, as an old woman, near the end of her life, she feels obligated to tell the whole story.

This is a novel written as a story within a story. Jean has become so immersed by Maren's letter that it colors everything that is happening in her own life. At one point she asks, "I wonder this: If you take a woman and push her to the edge, how will she behave?" This question may overlap the centuries and apply to Jean as well as Maren.

Each woman's story is told in the first person, giving the book a very intimate feel. The author is excellent at capturing the moods of the people as well as the locations. We feel the cramped quarters of the boat that holds four adults and one little girl as well as the isolation of Smuttynose Island and the small house that at times held too many people.

Author Anita Shreve dovetailed the two stories together perfectly. At times we could see similarities between Jean and Maren and it was easy to see why Jean became so fascinated by Maren's life and the murders. This is more than a murder mystery, but more a study of people, people of 1873 as well as today.

This was my first Anita Shreve book. She really does pull you in until you can not look away. Her characters are complex, her moods compelling, her plots complicated.  THE WEIGHT OF WATER was an excellent choice as a title. The water plays many parts in each of the character's lives.

I have heard so many mixed comments on Shreve as an author that I will have to try another book by her. I would be interested in hearing which book you think it should be. Let me know. Good or bad.

BOOK REVIEW: Black and Blue

BLACK AND BLUE is not my normal type of reading. Domestic violence is rarely the subject for light, romantic novels, but author Anna Quindlen is such a skilled writer that I picked it up. The main character, Fran/Beth so captured me that I read straight through the night.

Fran Benedetto is married to a local policeman. When the beatings started she felt that things would change, besides, she loved him. Then she told herself that having a baby would change things; then she felt that their son deserved a family, a father. The police were no help. He was one of their men. Plus, she loved him.

One day, after a particularly bad beating, she saw the look in ten-year-old Robert's eyes and knew that she had to get the two of them away. At the hospital where she worked, she had listened to a woman who worked with an organization that helped women find a new identity in a new place.
Now, know as Beth, she and her son have started a new life, always aware that one slip up and her husband has the resources to find them.

Anna Quindlen does an excellent job of getting us into Beth's head. Her son does not understand why his father is no longer part of his life. It is difficult for Beth, let alone Robert, to keep her new story straight and the difference in their new lifestyle is difficult. On top of the new hardships, there is always the fear that they will be found and the death threats will become real.

This is not a happy book. Domestic violence is not a happy subject. It takes an author of Quindlen's skill to keep it human and suspenseful. This is not a story that the more lurid talk shows would appreciate. It is a study of a woman with a terrible secret. It is a book to be shared with girlfriends with the prayer that none of them need it.

BOOK REVIEW: Go Set a Watchmanl

It is impossible to talk about Harper Lee's GO SET A WATCHMAN without referring to To Kill a Mockingbird. In fact,if it has been awhile since reading Mockingbird, it might be a good idea to watch the movie at least. The background is important.

GO SET A WATCHMAN finds a twenty-six- year-old Scout returning to Maycomb, Alabama to visit her aging father Atticus. She has been living in New York City and now prefers to be called by her real  name, Jean Louise. Again we meet most of the well known characters from Maycomb, with some sad and surprising changes.

The almost twenty years have brought political tensions to Maycomb. Especially the race situation has become ugly and  Jean Louise is not prepared to find people that she thought she knew filled with bigotry and hatred. When she learns that her father is a member of an organization that is associated with the Klan, she is sick. She feels that this makes everything that she believed that he had taught her to be a lie. The man who stood for fairness and honor has betrayed her.

I do not agree with the many reviews that vilify Atticus. He was and is a man who lives for the fairness of the law. Again, he is willing to defend a black man who is accused of murdering a white man. Although it was an accident that was more the white man's fault, Atticus knows that it will bring the NAACP and national attention to the trial.

Considering that GO SET A WATCHMAN was supposedly written in the mid-1950's, Harper Lee had a very good understanding of the time and place of her characters. The ladies at Aunt Alexandra's Coffee Social and their cliche statements on the blacks were so well drawn that the scene gives us a glimpse of how far Jean Louise has grown from her home town. Henry, Jean Louise's old boyfriend, knows that he has to go along with the current feelings of white superiority in order to fit in. Even Calpurnia is now a stranger and not willing to cross black/white lines.

But it is Atticus and his feelings on the racial situation that make Jean Louise feel that she has been lied to and betrayed, that all that she believed Atticus had stood for has been a lie.

GO SET A WATCHMAN is not a particularly good book. Lee's style of writing is more appropriate for Scout than for Jean Louise. The flashbacks to Scout, Jem and Dill in their Mockingbird days are the only spots of charm in the novel. I can not picture it becoming required reading or of being made into a classic movie.

The publisher that had originally turned the manuscript of GO SET A WATCHMAN down and told Harper Lee to write  about Scout as a young girl was right. Because of his insight we have To Kill a Mockingbird, a book that stays on top of my list of all time best books written. I have always felt that if an author has decided that one of his works is not good enough to be published, we should listen to him. GO SET A WATCHMAN will never get the acclaim that To Kill a Mockingbird so richly deserved, but it still makes for an interesting quick read if only to see how life changes in a small Southern town from the 1940's to the 1950's and what happens to some of Scout's old friends.