Book Club Mom’s Author Update: News from C. Faherty Brown

Hi Everyone, Happy Friday! I recently caught up with author C. Faherty Brown to learn about her TWO NEW BOOKS. Read more about them here:

I learned years ago that brevity is my friend, so my news is short. I just published SNOW NIGHT, a fictional story inspired by a story my grandmother told me many years ago. It has sadness within, but it is full of love and how we move forward. Earlier this year, I published ANOTHER YELLOW DOOR, a follow-up to my favorite piece of work, YELLOW DOOR, (though SNOW NIGHT runs a close second.)

Website/blog link: https://bikecolleenbrown.wordpress.com/

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Are you working on a new book? Have you won an award or a writing contest? Did you just update your website? Maybe you just want to tell readers about an experience you’ve had. Book Club Mom’s Author Update is a great way to share news and information about you and your books.

Email Book Club Mom at bvitelli2009@gmail.com for more information.

Open to all authors – self-published, indie, big-time and anything in between

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Educated – A Memoir by Tara Westover

Educated – A Memoir
by
Tara Westover

Rating:

Imagine growing up in isolation, with a father who regarded the government with paranoid distrust, who prepared the family for an impending apocalypse by stockpiling food, fuel and ammunition and “head for the hills” bags. Who made his children work with him in a dangerous scrap yard, where they were often severely injured.  And who manipulated them with his skewed interpretation of the Mormon faith. With a mother who only occasionally homeschooled her seven children and deferred to her husband, despite being the primary breadwinner as a midwife and natural healer. With a violent and abusive brother. Could you get out?

Tara Westover did, but at a cost. She taught herself enough math and grammar to be accepted at Brigham Young University, stumbled on her ignorance, but eventually gained her footing and began reading and learning. Her pursuits took her to Cambridge and then to Harvard, where she earned a PhD. The cost was estrangement from half her family. The half that denied there was anything wrong.

Education is Westover’s memoir, an account of these years in which she left her home in the mountains of Idaho. She tells her story of universities and degrees, but more importantly, she describes her education about family, mental illness and abuse. And then she explains what she did about it, how, inch by inch, she moved away from both her father’s and her brother’s strongholds.

Educated is a fascinating description of a life that is nearly impossible to envision. As a reader, you can’t imagine how to get into college with no schooling. Westover may not have understood the abuse and dysfunction at age sixteen, but she knew enough that she had to get out. The most absorbing part of her memoir, however, is how she began to recognize her father’s behavior as mental illness. But suspecting this didn’t change the danger of her brother’s abuse, which was both mental and physical. Most disturbing was how she reached out to her mother and sister and how they didn’t back her up.

I enjoyed reading Westover’s story, however, I would have been interested in knowing more about her college and later years, including her relationships with other students and new friends. I finished the book wondering what she’s doing right now. I think these details would give the reader a better understanding of who Tara Westover has become. It’s interesting to watch her book tour interviews and you can check out this Christiane Amanpour interview on CNN here. Westover also has a beautiful signing voice. You can listen to Tara Westover sing a Mormon hymn on PBS NewsHour here.

I recommend Educated to readers to enjoy memoirs and autobiographies and also those who like reading about overcoming adversity.

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Audiobook: Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng, narrated by Cassandra Campbell

Audiobook

Everything I Never Told You
by
Celeste Ng

Narrated by Cassandra Campbell

Rating:

On a spring morning in 1977, James and Marilyn Lee’s family changes in the worst way when their daughter, Lydia, goes missing. When police find her body at the bottom of the lake in their Ohio town, the agonizing questions begin. What happened? Was it murder or suicide? Lydia’s high school classmates can offer nothing, but her brother, Nath, has an idea who might know: their neighbor and classmate, Jack.

What follows is a painful look at a Chinese-American family and their struggle to understand how a girl who was seemingly happy, was not. Lydia’s story is paralleled by her mother’s abandoned dream to become a doctor. And while Marilyn wants Lydia to pick up the dream, James, who was lonely as the only Chinese boy in school, wants only for his children to fit in as Americans. Now without Lydia, her parents’ dreams are forever lost.

Everything I Never Told You is a story about regrets, unfulfilled dreams, unspoken feelings and the inevitable conflicts and misunderstandings that result. James wants his children to be popular because he was not. Marilyn wants to be nothing like her mother, but when she finds herself married and shackled by children, she puts her dream on Lydia. Lydia wants only to please her mother. Nath dreams of escape and Hannah, their younger sister, just wants someone to notice her. Instead of showing how they feel, they pretend. And when Lydia dies, they can’t reach each other for comfort.

It’s only after Lydia dies that her parents get to know her, but it is too late to understand or change the events. Ng helps the reader understand by going back in time to tell each family member’s story, including Lydia’s friendship with Jack and her final night. A tentative connection suggests healing and hope, based on better communication. But they must all move forward without a full knowledge of what happened.

I enjoyed listening to this story, but I found it depressing, if both words can be in the same sentence. It was more of a compulsive listen because of Ng’s excellent writing and her ability to make the reader/listener feel, which was greatly enhanced by the narrator. I was very moved by her character’s emotions. And while there is hope at the finish, I wanted to rewind and tell the Lee children to act out rather than retreat. The need to please parents is always strong, however, and perhaps their feelings of isolation made them focus only on this.

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Book Review: A Spool of Blue Thread by Anne Tyler

A Spool of Blue Thread
by
Anne Tyler

Can a house be a character in a book? I’ve been thinking about this ever since I finished Anne Tyler’s twentieth novel, A Spool of Blue Thread. Tyler incorporates her favorite themes of family and relationships into the story and her characters are tightly connected to the Baltimore family’s house on Bouton Road, where three generations have lived. And in that house the big question remains. If the anchor is pulled, where will they go?

This is only one of the themes in the book, the question of what ties a family together and how this changes as its members move on, grow older or die. The Whitshank family is both typical and unique in this regard, with its own set of problems and complex dynamics. When Abby Whitshank becomes forgetful and Red’s hearing worsens, their adult children come together, messily, to help them. Contributing to this drama is Denny Whitshank, the third child, and the family’s rebel. He’s perpetually misunderstood, causing all the problems that come with being a wayward son. But his siblings privately wonder, has he been their mother’s favorite all this time?

Class distinction and getting ahead drove the family’s patriarch, Junior Whitshank, who came from nothing and built a construction business, including the house on Bouton. That drive only carries to some of the family and is often in conflict with his wife’s down-home ways and his daughter-in-law, Abby’s social consciousness. Here’s a good example of a common difference in thinking which can pit family members against each other.

The plot jumps back and forth between the lives of Red, Abby and their children and Junior and Linnie Mae’s marriage a generation before. Learning the backstory after knowing the characters is one of my favorite story structures because I think it resembles the way we get to know people and understand their actions.

I enjoyed this story very much, in which Tyler creates a complicated family, full of undercurrent secrets and an unacknowledged division between its members. And despite this division and simmering aggression, they manage to maintain their dedication to each other when they pull together, without question, for emergencies, holidays and group vacations. I felt invested in these characters, developed my own favorites and hoped for the best when relationships took their hits.

I read this book greedily, thinking I knew how it would end, but I was a little disappointed with its uneventful finish, which will no doubt lead to a lot of book club discussion. Perhaps such an ending is Tyler’s point, that sometimes the buildup to a big decision makes the day it happens kind of ordinary.

I recommend A Spool of Blue Thread to readers who like stories about families. If you’re an Anne Tyler fan, you will enjoy this one as much as the others and look forward to the next one!

Check out The Beginner’s Goodbye by Anne Tyler here.

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