JESS JUST READS

A BOOK REVIEW BLOG

A Reunion of Ghosts by Judith Claire Mitchell

How do three sisters write a single suicide note?

In the waning days of 1999, the Alter sisters—Lady, Vee, and Delph—finalize their plans to end their lives. Their reasons are not theirs alone; they are the last in a long line of Alters who have killed themselves, beginning with their great-grandmother, the wife of a Jewish Nobel Prize-winning chemist who developed the first poison gas used in World War I and the lethal agent used in Third Reich gas chambers. The chemist himself, their son Richard, and Richard’s children all followed suit.

A Reunion of Ghosts is a magnificent tale of fate and blood, sin and absolution; partly a memoir of sisters unified by a singular burden, partly an unflinching eulogy of those who have gone before, and above all a profound commentary on the events of the 20th century.

Title: A Reunion of Ghosts
Author: Judith Claire Mitchell
Publish Date: April 1st, 2015

This novel was promoted/described as being ‘like the Virgin Suicides’, and, as a huge Eugenides fan, that’s why I picked up this book. But I’ll be blunt: this is nothing like The Virgin Suicides. It’s not even close to being like it. There’s no mystery to these main characters. Everything about them is said (mostly by themselves), in a way where nothing is left to the imagination and the reader feels like they’re being talked at for 400 pages.

The ancestors’ history was somewhat interesting, but they seemed bland and lacking dimension. Their actions seemed unmotivated – they dragged along in their respective chapters. Also, there didn’t seem to be enough of an emotional connection between the three main characters and their ancestors. They seemed too separate.

The three main characters – Lady, Vee, and Delph – seemed like cardboard cut outs. They’re interesting at first and their lives seem to be a comedy of errors. But then they bored me so much that finishing this book was a real struggle. There didn’t seem to be anything about these women that I could relate to – they seemed sad and desperate, but with no redeeming qualities. At times they were funny, but that was it.

The setting in this novel was Manhattan, but it lost (or perhaps never really had) any real vibrancy. The author did nothing to use setting to the character’s advantage. In some ways, the setting was just as depressing as the three main characters.

My Score: 4/10
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The Book of Lost and Found by Lucy Foley

HERTFORDSHIRE, 1928
The paths of Tom and Alice collide against a haze of youthful, carefree exuberance. There’s champagne and excitement, but above all there’s the beginning of a love story that finds its feet by a lake one silvery moonlit evening.

PARIS, 1939
Alice is living in the city of light, but the pain of the last decade has already left its mark. Against the shadow that sweeps across Europe, she and Thomas Stafford – now a world famous artist – meet once more…

LONDON, 1986
Bestowed with an old charcoal portrait from her grandmother, Kate Darling can’t possibly imagine the secrets that have been lost to time. Kate’s journey takes her to Corsica, Paris and beyond, and as time melts away she is catapulted into the heart of a love story as epic as it is life changing…

I was reluctant to start this book because I really dislike the cover – it doesn’t scream LITERARY FICTION to me. But everyone else seemed to like the cover, so I’ll just move right along.

The first 100 pages are slow and hard to understand. There’s two different time periods, but for the same characters. And then there’s another time period more in the future, featuring completely different characters. It’s not until you get one third of the way through the story before you realise how the storylines connect. But, it’s worth it.

Lucy Foley captures Kate’s curiosity well. She wants to find out what happened to her maternal grandmother, but isn’t unrealistically too eager about it. And in this circumstance, her behaviour is believable. Her relationship with Thomas Stafford and his son is fleeting and polite, and her brief fling with his son is unresolved. I liked that. It makes the reader fill in the gaps left deliberately by Lucy Foley, and the reader knows that relationship never would’ve lasted anyway. It gives the relationship immortality and youth, and it gives the reader room for reverence.

I recommend this book to literary lovers – the writing is poignant, flowing, and descriptively imaginative.

My Score: 8/10
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Single, Carefree, Mellow by Katherine Heiny

Maya is in love with both her boyfriend and her boss. Sadie’s lover calls her as he drives to meet his wife at marriage counseling. Gwen pines for her roommate, a man who will hold her hand but then tells her that her palm is sweaty. And Sasha agrees to have a drink with her married lover’s wife and then immediately regrets it. These are the women of Single, Carefree, Mellow, and in these eleven sublime stories they are grappling with unwelcome houseguests, disastrous birthday parties, needy but loyal friends, and all manner of love, secrets, and betrayal.

In “Cranberry Relish” Josie’s ex—a man she met on Facebook—has a new girlfriend he found on Twitter. In “Blue Heron Bridge” Nina is more worried that the Presbyterian minister living in her garage will hear her kids swearing than about his finding out that she’s sleeping with her running partner. And in “The Rhett Butlers” a teenager loses her virginity to her history teacher and then outgrows him.

Single, Carefree, Mellow is a collection of short stories about love, deceit, and betrayal. In fact, every short story (except for one) involves a couple where the female in the relationship is having an affair. And it’s usually introduced in the opening sentence. One particular cheater is the main character in three of the short stories. That’s a lot of betrayal for one book. I didn’t actually realise this before reading it, but then got to about the third or fourth short story and started to notice a trend.

And coincidentally, the one short story I didn’t like was the one where there was no affair. I’m going to assume it’s because without the cheating and scheming that I had grown accustomed to reading from the other stories, I found this particular short story a little boring. Even though it was about this mother’s struggling need to make her son’s birthday party a success, despite the trivial scenario, it dragged on and was quite unnecessarily detailed and started to bore me.

Katherine Heiny is a skilled short story writer – she opens her stories with a reflective, but morally-challenging paragraph that draws the reader in. And then she finishes her story with enough of a conclusion that the reader is satisfied, but they’re still hoping that character turns up in a later story. It was lovely that Maya’s story returned in two other stories – it helped me follow her story through.

Katherine Heiny’s writing style is quite reflective and the characters are unapologetically flawed. I enjoyed reading them and recommend this to fiction and romance readers, even you don’t normally read short stories.

My Score: 8/10
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Still Alice by Lisa Genova

In Lisa Genova’s extraordinary New York Times bestselling novel, an accomplished professor diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease learns that her worth is comprised of more than her ability to remember.

Alice Howland is proud of the life she worked so hard to build. At fifty years old she’s a cognitive psychology professor at Harvard and a world-renowned expert in linguistics with a successful husband and three grown children. When she becomes increasingly disoriented and forgetful, a tragic diagnosis changes her lifeand her relationship with her family and the world forever.

And yet another book comes along that I noticed because of a film adaptation. The cover (film tie in edition) is intriguing, and says enough about the nature and storyline of the book. The main character, Alice, develops early onset Alzheimer’s. The book is in third person, although it’s really told from Alice’s perspective. She realises there’s something wrong quite early on in the story – she forgets certain words in a lecture and forgets to meet people or attend a dinner. It’d be easy for her to brush this off as ‘getting older’ or ‘going through menopause’, but she pushes to find the answer to what’s happening to her, even though her husband refuses to believe it.

I have mixed opinions of her husband. You can tell he’s just as heartbroken with her diagnosis as she is, but he deals with it in what I’d say is the wrong way. He ignores it, and he pretends it’s not happening. He tries to move Alice to NY, even though that would be terrible for her Alzheimer’s. She’d be alone, and she’d be terrified and away from her children and future grandchildren. Throughout the book, the reader doubts his commitment to her – he comes across as selfish and conceited. But he does love her; he’s simply struggling to come to terms with her disease and how it’s affecting their family.

This book changes how you see Alzheimer’s. It can affect people as young as 40, and Alice is a 50 year old Harvard professor. She’s extremely intelligent, but her mind deteriorates. She can’t remember where she put her copy of Moby Dick, and then she finds it in the microwave. She keeps hearing the ‘beep beep’ of the telephone, only to realise it’s actually the microwave.

Her disease is horrible for her to come to terms with because she can’t do her job anymore, and then, as the disease gets worse, she sleeps all day and she can’t remember why she’s in the bathroom. She can’t remember where she is when she goes running, and she can’t even remember that she has children.
The ending to the novel is open-ended, but that’s what this disease is. It doesn’t end, and at the moment there’s no cure. This book highlights the tragic nature of Alzheimer’s, and how difficult it is not only for the person suffering from it but for their family as well.

Lisa Genova has done such a marvellous job at being subtle. You realise Alice’s pain without Alice telling you, or without her even realising it herself. She forgets things and she misses her lectures, and she never really realises, but you – as the reader – realise. And you feel for her. Warning: this novel might come with tears. Have tissues handy.

My Score: 10/10
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The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides

First published in 1993, The Virgin Suicides announced the arrival of a major new American novelist. In a quiet suburb of Detroit, the five Lisbon sisters — beautiful, eccentric, and obsessively watched by the neighborhood boys–commit suicide one by one over the course of a single year. As the boys observe them from afar, transfixed, they piece together the mystery of the family’s fatal melancholy, in this hypnotic and unforgettable novel of adolescent love, disquiet, and death. Jeffrey Eugenides evokes the emotions of youth with haunting sensitivity and dark humor and creates a coming-of-age story unlike any of our time. Adapted into a critically acclaimed film by Sofia Coppola, The Virgin Suicides is a modern classic, a lyrical and timeless tale of sex and suicide that transforms and mythologizes suburban middle-American life.

I finally found the time to reread this amazing book! And if you’re reading this review but haven’t read the book, hurry up and buy it. It’s beautifully written and incredibly insightful. I still can’t believe it’s been almost 25 years since it was first published. Jeffrey Eugenides understood school-aged children even back then.

This book doesn’t say more than it does say. You really have to read between the lines to understand the meaning of this story. It emphasises to the reader that suicide – and more specifically suicide pacts – don’t make sense. They affect many people, not just those involved, and the mental spiral into depression can be clear from the outside, if you’re close enough to see it. The boys in the story watched the girls very closely, and they note the restricted nature of the Lisbon mother. And the deterioration of the Lisbon house highlights how the Lisbon girls are mentally deteriorating themselves.

This book is told from the POV of a group of boys who live across the street from the Lisbon girls. All the girls kill themselves within the same year, and these boys are transfixed by the girls. The greatest stylistic element to this story is that you never fully understand the girls. You never know what they’re thinking or feeling – you only get glimpses of their world from notes or messages that they leave for other people.

The boys ask other people about their experiences with the girls, so everything feels very distanced. And because of that, you still don’t understand why the girls killed themselves. You can sit there and reread the book, but Eugenides has left out so much about the girls that they remain mysterious. And their youth transcends time until the boys are all much older and they’re still obsessing about the girls. They’re still trying to understand why the girls reached out to the boys and what they thought, and yet the reader knows that those boys will never find that out.

This book is brilliant. I recommend it to everyone.

My Score: 10/10
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