Recent Reviews

Tara Conklin's The House Girl

Interview with Melanie Benjamin, author of The Aviator's Wife

Karen Russell's The Vampires in the Lemon Grove

Philip Sington's The Valley of Unknowing

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Yes, I'm still alive:)

Thank you to all of you have checked back over the past nine months, hoping, no doubt, that I would surface. Well, here I am. My sweet William was born in April. He's been a delight. (There he is below, dressed as a sheep for Halloween. His sister was Bo Peep. I couldn't resist.)

I'm excited about 2013. I suspect there will be some great reading and posting this year, perhaps an interview or two, and some other exciting things. Stay tuned! Pin It

April Pick: The Tiger's Wife by Tea Obreht

When Natalia discovers that her beloved grandfather is dead, she is pained and mystified. Without a word to his family, her grandfather left home and never returned, dying alone in a remote village the family knew nothing of. Grandfather was a talented physician who should have recognized his physical limitations and perhaps the imminence of his death, so what drew him away from home at such a delicate time? As Natalia ponders the mystery and sets out to uncover where her grandfather went and why, she begins to remember the stories he told her growing up, stories about "the deathless man." Natalia is drawn deeper into her memories of her grandfather's stories, as she learns the history of her grandfather's childhood, a dark past that includes not only deathless men, but a woman married to a tiger and other fantastical characters.

As we follow Natalia on her journey through an unnamed war-ravaged Balkan state on the search for answers, we also delve deeply into the interstices between truth and fiction, sentiment and reason, superstition and fact. Could these stories be true or are they attempts to explain a harsh and brutal world? Obreht artfully draws these ambiguities across her novel, asking us to assess our own opinions of how storytelling impacts (and even shapes) history, and how we can think we understand a person until we realize, too late, that we know very little. This is a masterful achievement, at once a page-turner and a literary puzzler, that will haunt you long after you've turned the final page. The Tiger's Wife won the 2011 Orange Prize and was nominated for the National Book Award.

Purchase from Bound to Be Read: http://www.boundtobereadbooks.com/book/9780385343848 Pin It

The Downton Abbey Reader: Part I

Who isn't obsessed with this enthralling "upstairs-downstairs" series? The only problem is that we now have to wait until season 3, which is why I offer a palliative to all of you who are experiencing intense DTs from Downton Abbey withdrawal, which I definitely am.

Below Stairs by Margaret Powell: Powell's saucy expose on life in service provided inspiration for Julian Fellowes' massively successful series Downton Abbey. Powell worked for a number of families, most of which were exceedingly difficult, and the range of her experiences gives a wonderful overview of the type of life one could expect as a servant in Britain before
World War II.

Rose: My Life in Service to Lady Astor by Rosina Harrison: Those looking for insights into the notorious Lady Astor's character will be disappointed. Rose is close-lipped about the first female MP, who may or may not have been a Nazi sympathizer. Never fear, though: this lively memoir opens the door on life in the ritzy upper-class world of the British Aristocracy, and though it tows the party line to a certain extent, it provides an adequate picture of one lady's maid's dynamic life.

Life in the English Country House by Mark Girouard: This historical survey of the English country house is more architectural in scope than social. Those looking for an abundance of details about daily life in one of these beautiful homes will want to look elsewhere. Still, Girouard describes the rise and fall of this classic feature of the English countryside, providing insight into how and why the country house became the object of romance and interest.

Up and Downstairs: The History of the Country House Servant by Jeremy Musson: Whereas Girouard's work focuses on the physical development of the country house, Musson's book charts the history of the people who served in these elite establishments. Musson's history abounds with wonderful details.

Inheritance: The Story of Knole and the Sackvilles by Robert Sackville-West: Built during Elizabethan times as a Calendar House (a building that boasts 365 rooms, 52 stairwells, and 7 courtyards), Knole is a charming example of the country house. Knole is still occupied by the Sackville family - though the house is run by the National Trust and partially open to the public. Written by the seventh Lord Sackville-West, this history tells the story of the beautiful home (that was also immortalized by Virginia Woolf in her novel Orlando), and the family of characters that lived in it for over 400 years.

Consuelo and Alva Vanderbilt: The story of a Daughter and a Mother in the Gilded Age by Amanda Mackenzie Stuart: Cora Grantham was not the only American heiress to save an British family's ancestral pile. In the late 19th century, Consuelo Vanderbilt, granddaughter to Commodore Vanderbilt, was sent to England to marry the Duke of Marlborough and secure herself a royal title for the benefit of her ambitious mother. The marriage was unsuccessful, and this biography covers much more than Consuelo's few years as the Duchess of Marlborough, but readers interested in Downton Abbey will find the descriptions of her married life and experiences in of England's most charming (and one of the largest) great houses - Blenheim - to be quite interesting.

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Weekly Catch

It doesn't just stop at Guinness: 18 English words that come from Irish.

I don't have an Ipad, but these apps make me want to get one.

Language doesn't just happen on the page.

The business case for readinng novels.

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March Pick: Jesmyn Ward's Salvage the Bones

Jesmyn Ward’s 2011 National Book Award-winning novel Salvage the Bones is a tragic, beautifully executed narrative about a poor African-American family caught in the maelstrom of Hurricane Katrina.

In the distance, a hurricane is building in the Gulf of Mexico, but for Esch and her four brothers, the birth of China’s puppies and the hard-scrabble life they live with their bitter, drunken father in the depth of the Mississippi bayou are more pressing than any storm. As the story builds over twelve days, we watch a family, fragmented and loving, trying desperately to combat a multitude of challenges. As Katrina battles its way along the coast, destroying everything from lives to homes, it becomes clear that perhaps a hurricane is not the biggest fight these four children may have to wage. Without a mother, and virtually without a father, Esch and her brothers are lost children, desperate souls, wanting only to make sense of the disappointment and neglect around them. Esch views the world through her own yearning and pain, smartly drawing associations between her own experience and those of the characters she reads about in beloved books at school. This melding of literature and poverty permeates the entire book, as Ward’s gorgeous prose describes the grit and hopelessness of this destitute community.

Artfully constructed and poignant in its detail of abject poverty, Salvage the Bones is an unlikely novel to love, but that’s exactly what happens over the course of its pages. As Ward folds us into the lives of Esch and her brothers, we want to fight for them, help them, find a way to stop the hurricane. This novel provides insight into a community that many will want to ignore, but Ward illustrates the beauty and humanity that can arise from the swamps – that, we hope, can arise from all of us.

Purchase the novel.

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An Interview with Jonathan Odell

Red Room Library caught up with Jonathan Odell to discuss his stunning second novel The Healing.

Part 1

What is your writing process and how do you create such real characters?

I’ve tried everything that other writers have recommended - getting up in the morning, work till noon – but none of that works for me. My process is to follow the voices. I’m very verbal. I’m not visual. I think most writers are probably visual, but I wait until voices come to me and then I pick up the dialogue. I write what I’m hearing. What helps me, too, is that I read a lot of history. I spend a lot of time in libraries looking at oral histories to find people who talked like the people in my head so that I can get the language right. If I can hear the voice, then I can write the book. It kind of dictates itself that way. I put in the pictures later. In fact, the first draft of the first book that I wrote was all dialogue. I was really disappointed when I found out that the characters were supposed to have bodies, that they were supposed to live in houses. I had to teach myself how to do the description stuff. That does not come second nature to me. To prime the pump, I start with the dialogue. I have people talk to each other, and I write that down and then that leads to a scene.

Whom did you hear first: Polly Shine or Grenada?

Polly’s voice was the first real voice. Granada came years ago, but I could never make her sound real. She felt artificial. I was talking to my partner, and I said: "I need to give Granada a bigger life. She feels so one-dimensional." He asked me to read some of what I’d written. I must have given him about 30 pages or so, and there was one paragraph where Granada was thinking back on an old woman who taught her the trade [midwifery]. And my partner said: “You know, most of that is pretty boring until you talk about that old woman in a memory. Why don’t you make her a character?” And I said, “Well, I’ll try.” And as soon as I wrote the first sentence about her [Polly], the whole book changed. It was like she took over.

Both of your novels investigate the theme of remembering. Why is this important to you?

I used to think that remembering was something that was unchangeable, that you had certain memories and that you carried those memories with you, but through some of the therapy work that I’ve done, I’ve come to believe that how we remember is more important that what we remember. We have choice over how we remember things and most of our lives are dictated by how we see the past. We have a moral responsibility to see the past as truthfully as we can. Sometimes that means changing our minds. Sometimes that means forgiveness. Sometimes that means learning other people’s stories rather than mine, and letting that story contradict my story. So, as a white man when I went back to Mississippi, and I started talking to all these black people who were outside my little white bubble that I lived in as I grew up, and started listening to their stories, I started remembering my own past differently. It was like “Oh, that’s who you were and that’s who I was. I was a little spoiled white supremacist kid and that’s why you reacted the way you did, and that was why you couldn’t stick up for yourselves." Remembering is so powerful. We don’t know who we are, what we’re doing, where we’re going in our lives, until we remember accurately who we were. I think Faulkner said it: “ The past is not dead. It’s not even past” The past isn’t dead, it’s still forming, and we work on it day by day. Memories are very malleable, and we are responsible as adults to take control of our memories, not to just take things down as law from our parents or history books or people we admire. Even though we admire them, they lie to us because they have a different interpretation.

Coming out of the 1960s South, I was raised where Martin Luther King, Jr. was called a communist, where “our black people are happy, it’s the outside ones who are agitators,' where white people were all good-natured, and all those Klan people were just exceptions to the rule. In doing this re-remembering, it’s painful because sometimes you have to go back and emotionally confront the people you love the most because it wasn’t just the evil people telling you this, it was my pastor at church, my parents. The racism that I learned, that was passed to me was toxic, and I had to go back and re-remember these things. And this is the root of Polly’s wisdom: you have to remember who you are. Don’t believe what they tell you about who you are and what your past as been. You have to take hold of your own memory.

Read Part II

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