Better Luck Next Time by Julia Claiborne Johnson

Ward Bennett, young, good looking, and quick witted, works as a cowboy on dude ranch catering to divorcing women.  The year is 1938, the place is Reno, Nevada, and the wealthy women who visit the ranch must stay for six weeks to establish residency in order to divorce at the end of that time.  Ward, and Sam, the other cowboy, chauffeur the ladies around on shopping trips and to and from the airport as well as to lawyer’s appointments.  They provide trail rides and fishing expeditions and generally cater to the ladies’ needs—but with the utmost propriety as overseen by ranch owners Margaret and Max.

Some of the visitors at the Flying Leap are repeat customers; others are there for the first time; all are trying to work out the mysteries of marriage and seem determined to keep on trying until they have it right.  Ward, from a stable and loving family, has spent a year in college and a couple years in other jobs and thinks that his understanding of the world is pretty much under control.  When an aviatrix from St. Louis and an heiress from San Francisco come to the ranch that idea is upended as they unintentionally they wreak havoc in his life.  

The story is told in first person by Ward as he reminisces many years later about his time at the ranch, and although it’s almost completely focused on a particular time at the Flying Leap, it gradually reveals his life in later years.  The story is hilarious in many spots, touching in others, and it’s punctuated with cowboy philosophy,  malapropisms and asides that are a hoot.  

The audiobook is narrated by David Aaron Baker and perfectly captures the elderly retiree and the young cowboy he once was.  (Available from your local independent book store through Libro.fm.)

Julia Claiborne Johnson’s first novel, Be Frank with Me, is one of the most engaging books I’ve ever read, so it isn’t surprising that her second one would be as well.  And even though both are so humorous and have such perceptive observations on the human condition, they are very different stories.  I highly recommend them both.  

(Wm. Morrow, 2021; audio by Harper Audio)

Favorite quotes:

Ward on Jell-O:    Would you like some of this Jell-O? No? I don’t blame you .  They keep trying to pass this stuff off as dessert, but it just isn’t. Jell-O always makes me think of death.  Every time I attend a funeral for a patient, I look over at the widowed partner or bereft children and think, “Hoo boy, I hope you like a Jell-O salad, because several dozen will be wiggling your way in the next week or two.” How congealed salads jazzed up with marshmallows and pineapple tidbits got to be the go-to dish for the bereaved I’ll never know.  Of course, it’s not the gift that matters.  What matters is the impulse to give.  

Conversation at the ranch:    “Gambling is throwing money away,” Emily said.  “Spending hundreds of dollars on cloths you’ll never wear is throwing money away.  Buying books is an investment in the future.”
    “Emily’s right,” Nina said.  “Where there are books, there’s hope.  I have stacks of novels I haven’t gotten to yet.  It’s the best reason to go on living I can think of.”

Our Darkest Night by Jennifer Robson

In a literary field filled with fiction on World War II, is there room for one more book?  If it’s Jennifer Robson’s new novel, the answer is a resounding yes.

By mid-war in Italy, the Jewish residents of Venice were still fairly insulated from the brutalities faced by other Jews in Europe, but Dr. Gabriele Mazin was keenly aware that his family’s life was in imminent danger.   His wife, who lived in a casa di riposo, a nursing home, was too ill to leave the city, and he would never leave her and his patients, but he was determined that his only child, his daughter Antonina in her early 20s, would go to a safe place to live out the war.  

One of Dr. Mazin’s oldest friends, Father Bernardi from the little town of Mezzo Ciel in northern Italy, suggests that Antonina come with him and live as a farm wife to a young man he knew.  Antonina is heartsick about leaving her beloved parents, sad about leaving behind her medical studies with her father, and terrified to enter a world she knows nothing about.  

From farm chores to attending mass to living in a room with Nico Gerardi, the man she meets the day he takes her away, is a trial to Antonina—now Nina Gerardi.  Work in the house and the fields is long and hard, and Nico’s sister Rosa doesn’t intend to make it any easier for Nina, whose appearance was a total surprise to the family and assured a complete halt to Nico’s interrupted seminary studies to enter the priesthood.  

Although danger lurks in many places, Nina manages to navigate them through her growing friendship with Nico.  When Nico’s former adversary in seminary, now the German officer Obersturmfurhrer Zwerger, arrives in the village to taunt and bully Nico, he is immediately suspicious of his bride and puts Nina to many ongoing tests.

Our Darkest Night is told in third person in Nina’s point of view.  Its chronological telling adds suspense to the story, in part because the reader understands certain things about the war, including the import of being herded onto a train.  

The fact that the author was able to interview people from her husband’s family and village about their war experiences and everyday life adds a deep authenticity to the story.  Never a rote recitation, everyday life is beautifully described, and the hardships are not sugar coated.  The language is often poetic, even in the harshest circumstances.  Descriptions, character development, language, pacing all add up to an engrossing and memorable novel.  

(Wm. Morrow, January 5, 2021)

My advance copy came from a Goodreads giveaway. 

Band of Sisters by Lauren Willig

One little known story from World War I is brought to life in Lauren Willig’s excellent novel about a group of Smith College alumnae who volunteer for the war effort by assisting French villagers in the war zone.  Based on a voluminous collection of letters and diaries housed at Smith, every event in the novel actually took place although the characters are wholly or partially creations of the author.

It is captivating stuff.  This one small group of women pulled together in a few short months to pack their bags and travel to France to give social, educational, medical, and agricultural support to the people left in devastated villages—with little training, a lot of skepticism on the part of the Red Cross and the British army, and certainly without much knowledge of what the war was like and the horrific casualties and injuries it was producing.  

Stationed very near the front lines, they set up a base in one village and traveled out in various conveyances to the surrounding countryside.  Their work proceeded in fits and starts, hampered by personality conflicts, language barriers, lack of supplies, and sometimes, the hilarious consequences of not knowing the difference between roosters and hens.

Much of the interest comes from watching these characters develop a camaraderie based on necessity and on friendship, but for the three main characters, it means overcoming longstanding misunderstandings: Kate Moran for being a scholarship student from a lower social class; Emmy Van Alden for being overshadowed by her activist mother; Julia Prine, for family financial problems and difficulties of being a female medical doctor.  

Letters home frame the action of the story and reveal much about the war, and the author’s description of daily life and the women’s attempts to improve it are an excellent addition to WWI literature.  The growing crescendo of an advancing army is both well-written and plotted to provide a narrative arc that keeps the story moving.  This is a long book but never slow!

The audio version is well worth listening to and narrator Julia Whelan wonderfully portrays the various characters.

Many thanks to the publisher and to Libro.fm for an advance audio copy.  Band of Sisters will be published on March 2.