Nevermore: Birds of America, Murmur of Bees, An Only Child and Her Sister, Circe

 

Reported by Garry

 

Birds of America by Mary McCarthy is the coming-of-age story of Peter Levi, a sheltered and shy young man who has come to Paris in 1964 to study at the Sorbonne. Determined to live a life free of stress and unnecessary complications, Peter soon learns that adulthood will replace his childhood whether he is ready for it or not. Paralleling Peter’s chaotic emergence into adulthood are the stirrings of war in Southeast Asia and the growing social unrest in the West. Our reader said that McCarthy does an excellent job evoking the overall feelings of the turbulent 1960s in this historical fiction novel, and recommends it highly.  DC

 

The Murmur of Bees is the best-selling magical realism novel by Sophia Segovia. This is the first of Segovia’s novels to be translated into English, and if the reaction of our reader is anything to judge by, this will definitely not be the last. Simonopio is an abandoned child with amazing powers – he is protected by a swarm of bees, and when he closes his eyes he can see the future. The book follows the lives of Simonopio, his adoptive family and the fates and fortunes of those in the small, Northern Mexican town where they live. Set against the backdrop of both the Mexican revolution and the Spanish Flu of 1916, this historical novel is “absolutely beautiful” as our reader exclaimed.  AH

 

An Only Child and Her Sister by Casey Maxwell Clair is the harrowing memoir of a Hollywood family that was dysfunctional to the extreme. Casey and her little sister, Christine were born into an affluent, successful Hollywood family: a starlet mother and a successful songwriter father. But looks can be deceiving – their mother didn’t like or want children, and their father had a hidden drug habit that turned the charismatic, charming man into a hair-trigger rage monster. Our reader was aghast at what the two children went through and was frankly amazed that the writer, Casey, survived to be a successful as she is.  CD

 

Circe by Madeline Miller. Daughter of the Helios, God of the Son, and a beautiful human woman, Circe is a conundrum – she does not appear to have inherited any of her father’s powers or her mother’s beauty. But Circe does possess power: witchcraft, with which she can threaten the very gods themselves. Zeus banishes Circe to a deserted island where she hones her craft and powers until she is forced to choose whether she is a god or a mortal. While the names of the Greek gods confused our reader a bit, she said that the storytelling was top-notch and gives voice to a character whose story has until now existed only on the peripheries of others.  MH

 

Also mentioned:

 

Properties of Thirst by Marianne Wiggins

Finding Your Way Without Map or Compass by Harold Gatty

Mountain of the Dead: The Dyatlov Pass Incident by Keith McCloskey

The Sweet Remnants of Summer by Alexander McCall Smith

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes

Switchboard Soldiers by Jennifer Chiaverini

Under the Whispering Door by TJ Klune

Any Other Family by Eleanor Brown

Geiger by Gustaf Skördeman

Fighting Words by Kimberley Brubaker Bradley

Raising Lazarus: Hope, Justice, and the Future of America’s Overdose Crisis by Beth Macy

When The Moon Turns to Blood: Lori Vallow, Chad Daybell, and a Story of Murder, Wild Faith, and End Times by Leah Sottile

Unmask Alice: LSD, Satanic Panic, and the Imposter behind the World’s Most Notorious Diaries by Rick Emerson

A Melungeon Winter by Patrick Bone

The Aliens of Transylvania County by Patrick Bone

The Books of Earthsea:  The Complete Illustrated Edition by Ursula K. Le Guin

Nevermore: Gordon, Segovia, Epstein, Picoult, Getty, Cep, Golding, LeGuin, Cooper, Flagg

This week our readers reviewed some classics, some new books, and we learned a thing or two that we didn’t know (and may not have wanted to know) about vultures.

 

Our first reader reviewed Matters of Choice by Noah Gordon, the third book in the historical fiction Cole Trilogy. This book talks about wanting proper health care and freedom of choice.  The main character, Roberta, comes from a long line of physicians and continues the family tradition.   After a personal crisis, she ends up in a small town in Massachusetts and she takes care of the local people and they take care of her.  Our reader liked this book so much that she will look for the initial books in the series.   The trilogy starts with The Physician and is followed by Shaman.   Many of our other readers who have read the first two thought they were far better than this last book, but highly recommend the entire series. 

 

The next book was The Murmur of Bees by Sofia Segovia, a historical fiction book about a family in Mexico during the flu and also about the revolution and the time that they were banning priests.  At the time of this writing, our reader was about two-thirds of the way through the book and wasn’t yet sure it is headed – it is kind of mysterious yet thoroughly enjoyable. 

 

Next up was a biography of early 20^th century writer Edna St. Vincent Millay who was considered one of the most romantic modern poets. What Lips My Lips Have Kissed by Daniel Mark Epstein details Millay’s life and real romances and explores some of her best-know works.  Our reader felt the book was very well written and thinks that if you like Millay’s works, you will love this book.

 

The next book reviewed was The Book of Two Ways by Jodi Picoult.   This book goes back and forth in time so much that our reader found it confusing to keep the timelines straight and wished the book had been written in a more straightforward fashion.  Overall, she found it to be a very good book due to the writing, but confusing with the jumping timelines.  The main character, Dawn Edelstein is a death doula and the story centers on her relationships in both America where she has a husband and family, and in Egypt with her former lover.  Our reader’s opinion that the book would be easier to read if it were written linearly was echoed by other readers that had also read the book.

 

Our next reader told us a hilarious and revolting story about a time in 1876 when meat rained from the sky over Mrs. Crouch’s farm near Ranking in Kentucky.  This mysterious happening gathered widespread attention, including that of a local chemistry professor Kirk Gohde who had the taste of the meat duplicated by a lab and put into jelly beans for the locals to safely sample at the local yearly festival.  It turns out that the meat was from vultures – a whole flock of vultures who had thrown-up over the Crouch farm!  The story came from the website https://www.atlasobscura.com/ which is a travel site featuring strange stories from around the world.  There is also a book by the same title which collects some of these essays.

 

Next up was another reader of How to They/Them by Stuart Getty.  As with our previous reviewer of this book, it opened our reader’s mind to things that she had not taken into account before.  She thoroughly enjoyed it and learned a phenomenal amount from How to They/Them.  This book makes you very aware of how gender terms are used today.

 

Furious Hours by Casey Cep is a true-crime book about the intersection of one of America’s most honored authors, Harper Lee, and a possible real-life serial killer, Reverend Willie Maxwell.  Maxwell was an African-American preacher and voodoo practitioner whose relatives seemed to have a habit of dying violently, but not until after Maxwell took out insurance policies on them. Lee covered his trial with the idea of writing a true-crime book (she had helped research the groundbreaking In Cold Blood for her childhood friend Truman Capote) but that book never came into being and instead Lee became famous for her novel To Kill a Mockingbird. Furious Hours paints an unflattering portrayal of Lee.  Some feel that To Kill a Mockingbird would never have been published if Lee had not had such a good editor who did a lot of editing and rewriting for her. 

 

Speaking of classics, the same reader re-read Lord of the Flies by William Golding, and she could keep thinking about was how prescient the book was - we have two sets of people now, and so many of us are shocked to find out who our friends are; they are not who we thought they were.  It is sort of like the two groups in the book.  While our reader liked the suspense and writing in the book, she just kept thinking about it mirrors today’s society – and not in a good way.

 

Another of our readers highly recommended two young adult series that are touchstones for him:  The Earthsea Cycle and The Dark Is Rising series.  The Earthsea Cycle, written by Ursula LeGuin has become a classic in young adult literature – it follows the life of Ged, a young wizard, through his life and trials, and finishes with the story of Tehanu a mysterious young woman who does not know her past. The first book in the series is A Wizard of Earthsea.  The Dark Is Rising Series by Susan Cooper is a five book series based in England and is steeped in Aurthurian and pre-Christian British Isles mythology.  The series focuses on Will Stanton, the last of the Old Ones, born into this world to do battle with The Dark for the future of humanity.  While technically the first book is Over Sea, Under Stone, some readers prefer to start with The Dark Is Rising.

 

The Wonder Boy of Whistle Stop by Fanny Flagg won effusive praise from our next reviewer.  This long awaited sequel to the beloved Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café was deemed a fitting sequel.  She loved the book and now wants to go back and read the first book again – it is like visiting with family you haven’t seen in a long while.  Definitely recommend. 

 

Nevermore: Murmur of Bees, Bitter and Sweet, Alexander Hamilton, The Historian, Man on a Raft, Elderly Lady Is Up to No Good

 

Reported by Kristin

Nevermore began our latest Zoom book club discussing Alexander Hamilton: The Formative Years by Michael E. Newton. Our reader is a huge Hamilton fan and has read many books about him over the years, but was highly impressed with Newton’s research. She said that she thought she knew everything about Hamilton, but learned so much more with this reading. Hamilton’s heroic exploits of the Revolutionary War were emphasized, even praising his compassion at the Battle of Yorktown as he quickly outmaneuvered the British troops, but let the defeated soldiers go rather than dispatching them with bayonets.

Our next reader picked up a recommended book from six decades ago, (1960!) Man on a Raft by Kenneth Cooke. Although faded and worn, this little paperback was proclaimed to be wonderful, even though the main character endured so much misery. Our reader said that it was truly about courage, and that she was inspired by others’ perseverance.

 

On another serious note, the same reader highly recommended the Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford. Set in Seattle and moving between the 1940s and the 1980s, this debut novel tells the story of Asian families removed to internment camps. The Panama Hotel once served as an intersectional place for the Japanese and Chinese communities, and indeed, Henry Lee met his first love, Keiko Okabe, there during the war years. Our reader said that one of the best parts of the book was how Henry and his father came to understand each other as they each tried to define their cultural identity.

 

Moving further back in historical fiction, another book club member read The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova, a venture back to the fifteenth century in another retelling of the Dracula tale. The novel uses three different narrators: an unnamed young woman in the 1970s, her father Paul in the 1950s, and Paul’s mentor a generation earlier in the 1930s. The story weaves much travel through Eastern Europe through the pages, visiting monasteries and villages while looking for the origin of Dracula.

 

Back on this side of the Atlantic, our next reader read another novel that sounds all too familiar these days because it involved an influenza pandemic, The Murmur of Bees by Sofia Segovia. The first of this Mexican author’s books translated into English, this is the tale of Simonopio, a baby found under a bridge and covered in bees. As he grows, he has visions, causing some villagers to view him with superstition. With the 1918 pandemic and the Mexican Revolution intertwined, Segovia’s beautiful voice tells of turbulent times of change.

 

Finally, another reader enjoyed a book that has been making the rounds of Nevermore for months: An Elderly Lady is Up to No Good by Helene Tursten. This small book of stories was translated from the original Swedish, and has been well enjoyed by most readers. Maud is 88 years old and has been living in her inherited apartment for decades, (rent-free, mind you) and has no plan to give it up anytime soon. She is clever, possibly criminal, and an absolute joy to know—as long as you don’t cross her.