27. We Hope for Better Things by Erin Bartels

listened to eAudio - RBDigital/TPPL
narrated by Stina Nielsen
Unabridged audio (12:03)
2019, Fleming H. Revell Co.
393 pgs.
Adult Hidtorical Fiction told in 3 time periods
Finished 2/10/2020
Goodreads rating:  4.22 - 2440 ratings
My rating:  5
Setting:Detroit and rural Michigan:  1861-1871, 1963-1967, and present time

First line/s:  Detroit: July  "The Lafayette Coney Island was not a comfortable place to be early."

My comments:  This was one of those books I didn't want to put don't and I couldn't wait to get back to.  I love historical fiction that goes back and forth between points-of-view, and this one didn't disappoint. Told from the viewpoints of three strong women, all related, and dealing with the racism of the Civil War, 1960's Detroit, and present day, and how history can follow a family - and just how important a family's history can be.  Beautifully read, great characters, and a setting that is a hugely strong part of the story, a great story.

Goodreads synopsis:  When Detroit Free Press reporter Elizabeth Balsam meets James Rich, his strange request--that she look up a relative she didn't know she had in order to deliver an old camera and a box of photos--seems like it isn't worth her time. But when she loses her job after a botched investigation, she suddenly finds herself with nothing but time.
          At her great-aunt's 150-year-old farmhouse, Elizabeth uncovers a series of mysterious items, locked doors, and hidden graves. As she searches for answers to the riddles around her, the remarkable stories of two women who lived in this very house emerge as testaments to love, resilience, and courage in the face of war, racism, and misunderstanding. And as Elizabeth soon discovers, the past is never as past as we might like to think.
          Debut novelist Erin Bartels takes readers on an emotional journey through time--from the volatile streets of 1960s Detroit to the Underground Railroad during the Civil War--to uncover the past, confront the seeds of hatred, and discover where love goes to hide.

PICTURE BOOK - Dorothea's Eyes by Barb Rosenstock

Illustrated by Gerard DuBois

2016 Calkins Creed, Honesdale, PA (an Imprint of Highlights)

HC $16.99

32 pgs.

Goodreads rating:  4.11 - 167 ratings

My rating:  4

Endpapers:  large dotted background with the same camera-on-legs repeated over and over

Dedications:  "For my grandfather - BR"
     "For my sister, with love - GD"

1^st line/s:  "Dorothea opens her grey-green eyes.  They are special eyes.  They see what others miss."

My comments:  Nice introduction for kids of the life of Dorothea Lange - what drove her and the type of photos she took.  It touches upon the developing of them, but I wish this had been mentioned, and explained, a bit more to help inform our kids in this digital age.  Although prone to sickness and always dealing with the polio she endured as a child, she is an active photographer in the streets and fields of the Depression.  At the end of the book there is a sampling of six of her photos - including "Migrant Mother."  An afterword, selected bibliography and two-page timeline are added touches at the end of the book.  A great model for researching and teaching.

Goodreads:  After a childhood bout of polio left her with a limp, all Dorothea Lange wanted to do was disappear. But this desire not to be seen helped her learn how to blend into the background and observe others acutely. With a passion for the artistic life, and in spite of her family’s disapproval, Dorothea pursued her dream to become a photographer and focused her lens on the previously unseen victims of the Great Depression. This poetic biography tells the emotional story of Lange’s evolution as one of the founders of documentary photography. It includes a gallery of Lange’s photographs, and an author’s note, timeline, and bibliography.

28. Hard Light - Elizabeth Hand

#3 Cass Neary, Photographer
read the actual book
2016, Minotaur Books
355 pgs.
Adult mystery
Finished 5/16/16
Goodreads rating: 4.17
My rating: 5
Setting: Contemporary England - half London, half the moors

First line/s:  "A stolen passport will only get you so far.  In my case, that was through Customs and Immigration at Heathrow, where I stood in the line for EU travelers, praying I wouldn't have to fake a Swedish accent as an impassive official ran a check on my documentation."

My comments:  I read the second book in this series because Ms. Hand is a Maine author, one of my go-to choices.  Then I read the first, which is set in Maine (yay!).  When I saw this , the third in the series, on the shelf at the library, I couldn't wait to get my hands on it.
          I really enjoyed this book.  A lot.  Couldn't wait to finish it.  Maybe I'm not quite as shocked about Cass Neary's failings and downfalls (klepto, druggie, alkie), a bit enamored with her deep-down humanity and amount of knowledge of the world and its history, and in agreement with some of her "who cares" attitude about people and situations.
     This was a great story - half taking place in a cold, wintery contemporary London and the other half taking place out on the stormy English moors.  Good mystery, great characterization, a really interesting delve into the underground music and film-making life of the 60s and how poorly it's all aged.   More Cass Neary will be appreciated.  She's really grown on me.

Goodreads synopsis:

71. Generation Loss - Elizabeth Hand

#1 Cassandra Neary series

Read on my iPhone through Kindle

2007 Small Beer Press

265 pgs.

Adult .... Mystery/CRF

Finished Thanksgiving, 2014

Goodreads rating: 3.79

My rating:    3 (Liked It)

Setting:  Fictional Burnt Harbor, Maine (Downeast) and its outer islands

1st sentence/s:  "There's always a moment where everything changes.  A great photographer -- someone like Diane Arbus, or me during that fraction of a second when I was great -- she sees that moment coming, and presses the shutter release an instant before the change hits. If you don't see it coming, if you blink or you're drunk or just looking the other way -- well, everything changes anyway, it's not like things would have been different."

My comments:  There were parts of this book that were hard from me to imagine....because there are a lot of references to photography and processing film, that sort of thing. The setting, in downeast Maine in winter, I can imagine.  It's dreary, poor, bleak.  The protagonist, Cassandra Neary, is one of the most unlikable characters I've come across.  But that makes her incredibly interesting, actually.  I'm guessing she's around 40, friendless, a kleptomaniac, hardly eats, survives on Jim Beam and speed. A real downer.  This was quite a story, somewhat of a mystery, but more of a contemporary realistic fiction that skirts the edge of a really dark, somewhat bizarre (though real, unfortunately) world. (And I will go on to read another, because I liked it more than I didn't....)

Goodreads book summary:  Cass Neary made her name in the 1970s as a photographer embedded in the burgeoning punk movement in New York City. Her pictures of the musicians and hangers on, the infamous, the damned, and the dead, got her into art galleries and a book deal. But thirty years later she is adrift, on her way down, and almost out. Then an old acquaintance sends her on a mercy gig to interview a famously reclusive photographer who lives on an island in Maine. When she arrives Downeast, Cass stumbles across a decades-old mystery that is still claiming victims, and into one final shot at redemption.

41. In the Kingdom of Men - Kim Barnes

2012, Alfred A. Knopf

324 pgs.

Written for adults

Finished 9/16/2013

Genre: Historical Fiction/1967

Goodreads Rating: 3.44

My Rating:  Liked it (3.5)

TPPL

Setting: rural Oklahoma but mainly the American Aramco company housing and desert surrounding it in Saudi Arabia (simply called "Arabia" in the book) in 1967

1^st sentence from the prologue: "Here is the first thing you need to know about me: I'm a barefoot girl from red-dirt Oklahoma, and all the marble floors in the world will never change that."

1st sentence from Chapter 1:  "In the beginning  --- these three words my daily bread, recited at the kitchen table in our shack in Shawnee, the bible open in front of me.":

My comments:  I have ups and downs with my reactions to this book. I loved the setting - a mysterious one, for me. Arabia in the 1960's, in the American-based housing commune - certainly nothing I had any prior knowledge about.  The Bedouin.  The animosity.  The "kingdom of men"......  And I was unprepared for the ending, a feeling that left me pleasantly surprised, because it was unexpected and perfect for the story.

Goodreads Review:   1967. Gin Mitchell knows a better life awaits her when she marries hometown hero Mason McPhee. Raised in a two-room shack by her Oklahoma grandfather, a strict Methodist minister, Gin never believed that someone like Mason, a handsome college boy, the pride of Shawnee, would look her way. And nothing can prepare her for the world she and Mason step into when he takes a job with the Arabian American Oil company in Saudi Arabia. In the gated compound of Abqaiq, Gin and Mason are given a home with marble floors, a houseboy to cook their meals, and a gardener to tend the sandy patch out back. Even among the veiled women and strict laws of shariah, Gin’s life has become the stuff of fairy tales. She buys her first swimsuit, she pierces her ears, and Mason gives her a glittering diamond ring. But when a young Bedouin woman is found dead, washed up on the shores of the Persian Gulf, Gin’s world closes in around her, and the one person she trusts is nowhere to be found. 

   Set against the gorgeously etched landscape of a country on the cusp of enormous change, In the Kingdom of Men abounds with sandstorms and locust swarms, shrimp peddlers, pearl divers, and Bedouin caravans—a luminous portrait of life in the desert. 

31. Available Dark – Elizabeth Hand

Thomas Dunne/ Minotaur Books, 2012

246 pgs.

for: adults

Rating:  Mixed feelings, but I liked it….quite a bit, after much thought

Setting:  NYC for a short time, then Finland for a bit, the rest in Iceland in winter…probably December, when there’s almost no daylight, just gray light for a few hours or total darkness.

First line/s:  There had been more trouble, as usual.  In November I’d headed north to an island off the coast of Maine, hoping to score an interview that might jump-start the cold wreckage of my career as a photographer, dead for more than thirty years.  Instead, I got sucked into some seriously bad shit.  The upshot was that I was now back in the city, almost dead broke, with winter coming down and even fewer prospects than when I’d left weeks earlier.  I dealt with this the way I usually did:  I bought a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, cranked my stereo, and got hammered.”

OSS:  Photographer Cass Neary, user of Jack Daniels and meth and uppers and downers and anything she can get her hands on, goes to Finland to authenticate a series of unbelievable photos; then gets pulled into a series of murders all revolving around Viking mythology and Black Metal music

I figured out that the references to Maine, her bad experiences there, and some other references that she had to stay low, were references to the first book about Cass/Cassandra Neary called Generation Loss.  Because of the island off the coast of Maine setting (! ! !) I do plan to find it and read it this summer.

This was really quite fascinating, incredibly dark, and thought-provoking.  Because I spent 24 hours in Iceland (in August, when the sun hardly went down), I’ve always wondered about winter there. Cheap flights in winter, horribly expensive ones in summer. Well, this is a view that I would never, ever see or think about as an average tourist.  The current punk scene, I guess you’d call it.  But Cass – and all her acquaintance’s fascination with death and its mythologies, is a pretty dark trip for someone who thrives on sunshine…..(me)……  This is one of those books that teach you, make you think outside the box, helps you make connections you might never have made, ever.  And, ultimately, I liked it.

76. Solomon's Oak - Jo-Ann Mapson

2010, Bloomsbury
TPPL
371 pgs.
For: adults
Rating: 4

I remember my friend, Carol, talking about Jo-Ann Mapson, so when I was this sitting on the "New Books" shelf at the library, I decided to try it. Thanks, Carol!

I enjoyed it. I enjoyed the setting, which is in the farmlands east of Monterey, California. I enjoyed the characters, although I couldn't quite get into the protagonists head, although Mapson tried really hard. I am not an animal lover and this is a book about animal lovers....horses, goats, and dogs, particularly. However, I didn't mind it at all, and enjoyed learning bout the different personalities of each.

Three people with emotional wounds are brought together. The protagonist, a farm woman who lost her dearly beloved husband of 20-or-so years unexpectedly the previous year, a New Mexican crime lab photographer that has been injured in a shootout and must learn to live with intense pain - physically and emotionally - for the rest of his life, and a teenage girl with a huge chip on her shoulder and even more loss. Her sister disappeared four years before, and that led to her mother's death and her father's abandonment. Whoa!

The story is well told, though almost repetitious in places. However, it went fast and was entertaining and made me think....deeply. The widow, Glory Solomon, is coping with money problems and begins a small business holding weddings and the reception at the chapel her husband had built, and in their barn. The cop, Joseph Vigil, is making a photographic studies of trees, and the teenager, Juniper McGuire, complete with multiple piercings and even a tattoo, is quickly put to work helping with catering the weddings and lots of farm chores.

These people, and people like them, are everywhere. Out there. In our world. Trying to live with the heartbreak and anxiety and unfairness of life. Parts of each of them are in many of us. It doesn't hurt to be reminded of this once in awhile.