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 Weekly Words about Books
August 17, 2014
Two Novels Worth Noting

Small Blessings by Martha Woodroof. This is a debut novel, but NPR veteran writer/producer Woodroof is no novice writer, having worked as a journalist at Virginia NPR station WMRA for many years. In Small Blessings, an entertaining comedy of manners, her protagonist is an affable English professor at a Virginia women's college who has resigned himself to a quiet and half-fulfilled life - until life intrudes and throws him three unexpected curves that signal change is on the way.

Here's what one bookseller, recommending the book for the August Indie Next list, had to say about it:

"A cast of quirky characters - a well-meaning but bumbling college professor, his agoraphobic wife, his sitcom-worthy mother-in-law, and a charming itinerant bookseller - is thrown into a whirl when a small 'orphan' boy appears in their midst. The power of love and caring lifts everyone above their flaws in a heartwarming story about finding love and family in unconventional ways."  
- Jenny Stroyeck, The Homer Bookstore, Homer, AK   


Lisette's List by Susan Vreeland. Some of you may know Vreeland from her book, Girl in Hyacinth Blue, a bestseller back in 2000. Since then, she has made a career out of writing novels combining art and history, and Lisette's List is a worthy addition to her body of work.

 Vreeland introduces readers to a young Parisian woman, Lisette Roux, who is exiled to Provence in 1937 to take care of her husband's ailing grandfather Pascal during the Vichy regime. Despite the the horrors of war, and her husband joining the war, she learns from Pascal - a former pigment salesman and frame maker who befriended the likes of Cezanne and Pissaro - about the power of art. As the war spreads, she sets out on a search for lost paintings, meets Marc and Bella Chagall, and eventually learns to forgive the past and to love again.  
Imminent Movie Release Is Good Reason To Read This Book - and Laugh a Lot
My wife hated This Is Where I Leave You when I first started reading it a couple of years ago. Actually, what she hated was me reading the book in bed while she was reading her own book next to me. We'd be lying companionably, books in hand, when I'd suddenly burst out laughing uncontrollably and say, "Stop reading - you gotta hear this!"

As you can imagine, that got old for her pretty quickly, but I couldn't help myself. Jonathan's Tropper novel about a dysfunctional Jewish family drawn back together by the death of the family patriarch is flat-out funny. It's also heartbreaking and moving at times, but it keeps going back to funny.

I mention the book now because the film version, starring Jason Bateman, Tina Fey, and Jane Fonda, opens in theaters in September; that has prompted the reissue of the paperback with a new "Movie Tie-In cover. Having seen the movie trailer, I am cautiously optimistic that it has captured much of Tropper's humor and sensibilities, but I would urge reading the book first in case the old adage "You can't judge a book by it's movie" is right.

I will also note that, although the family is Jewish and I'm not, it didn't matter. Here's the basic set-up - when their father passes away, four grown siblings are forced to return to their childhood home and sit shiva for a week, along with their over-sharing mother and an assortment of spouses, exes, and might-have-beens. Under Tropper's adept hand,  the Hebrew tradition of a seven-day mourning period is a perfect device for bringing this quartet of screwed up and estranged siblings together to interact and act badly. Yes shiva is a Jewish tradition and yes, there is plenty of guilt to go around, but the family interactions and sibling rivalries are universal and identifiable to all.

I won't presume that my sense of humor matches yours, and this may not be a book for everyone. But I found the characters to be pretty realistic and their struggles believable, and I laughed a lot.

WHERE TO FIND 
AN INDEPENDENT BOOKSTORE
Many of you already have a favorite local bookstore, but for those of you without such a relationship, this link will take you to a list of Northern California indie bookstores by region.
 
If you live or work elsewhere, you can click here to find the nearest indie bookstore by simply entering your postal code. 

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A LITTLE BIT ABOUT ME
My name is Hut Landon. I'm a former bookstore owner who now runs the Northern California Independent Booksellers Association (NCIBA) in San Francisco.

My goal with this newsletter is to keep readers up to date about new books hitting the shelves, share what booksellers are recommending in their stores, and pass on occasional news about the book world.

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