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.  

The Windsor Knot by S.J. Bennett

 

Meet the new sleuth in town--or in the castle--Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth.  From this most unlikely premise comes a new mystery series that is well written and highly entertaining.  

On the eve of the Queen's 90th birthday, a special "dine and sleep" is held in Windsor Castle for members of the royal family and their select guests--and yes, this is really a thing.  In this particular event (completely fictional), a young Russian pianist is discovered dead in his room under compromising circumstances. His death involves a badly tied knot following an evening of glittering performance, exquisite dancing, and seduction.  

The Queen listens to the reports from her own staff, given with embarrassment at particular points, as well as from MI5, but she conducts her own investigation using her personal secretary, Rozie Oshodi, for some behind-the-scenes legwork.  Rozie is a Briton of Nigerian descent, and her background in the Royal Horse Artillery (a military unit) along with her high heels and pencil skirts give her singular skills and camouflage in her investigations.  

This is a highly entertaining mystery, because of some hilarious conversations involving the Queen and Prince Philip, a view into life at Windsor, commentary on world leaders and their relationships to dogs (a brutal assessment of Putin here), and special appearances by several well-known people including the Obamas.  There are also some really touching scenes that bring humanity to the Queen.  

The audio version is narrated beautifully by Jane Copland and will be available from Libro.fm Audiobooks (https://libro.fm/), when the book is published on March 9.

This is a gem--don't miss it!

Thanks to Libro.fm and HarperCollins for an advance copy.

The Survivors by Jane Harper

Jane Harper has a gift for developing intense, small town mysteries set in Australia, where the setting becomes an integral and often hostile part of the story.  In The Survivors (Feb. 2021), set in a beach town in the state of Tasmania, Kieran Elliott returns home to Evelyn Bay to help his mother pack up the family home in anticipation of a move to the mainland for assistance with Kieran's father who is suffering from dementia.  Being home is loaded with bad memories surrounding the death of Kieran's older brother Finn and Kieran's part in that accident, but it is tempered by his loving--and fairly new--relationship with Mia, also from Evelyn Bay, and their baby daughter Audrey.

The visit takes a sudden turn for the worse when the body of a young woman is found on the beach, and the death dredges up mysteries and ill feelings from the past.  When the death is deemed suspicious, a whole host of characters with questionable motives makes the reader wonder who is involved.  Stephen Shanahan's narration brings an emotional depth to the story in his wonderful Aussie accent.  

If you haven't discovered the mysteries by this Australian author, you are in for a treat.  The Dry, The Lost Man, and Force of Nature are excellent crime novels, and The Dry is being released as a movie starring Eric Bana in Australia and New Zealand on New Year's Day; hopefully, it will make its way here soon.  These are all stand-alone novels, although federal police officer Aaron Falk appears in two of the books (The Dry and Force of Nature).  The Survivors, which provides a terrific mystery, also introduces readers to life in a small vacation town on the other side of the world.  It is highly recommended.  

The book and audiobook will be released on February 2.  Thanks to NetGalley and Macmillan Audio for an advance copy.

The Kitchen Front by Jennifer Ryan

This past spring when the shortage of toilet paper and cleaning supplies had everyone in a mad dash to locate them and stock up, people had one very tiny look into what the British faced during the war and several years beyond with food scarcity and rationing.  This is the central theme of Jennifer Ryan’s (The Chilbury Ladies’ Choir and The Spies of Shilling Lane) new book The Kitchen Front, which is coming out from Ballantine in February 2021.

“The Kitchen Front” was an actual BBC radio show during the war, which helped housewives and cooks manage their food supplies and cook interesting and nutritious meals with what little they had.  In the novel, author Ryan imagines what would happen if the radio show looked for a woman who would join male broadcaster Ambrose Hart on air.  To select that person, there would be a cooking contest with three rounds featuring a starter, a main course, and a dessert, open to cooks with some professional cooking experience in Ambrose’s small village of Fenley.  

The four entrants are fierce competitors and all for varying reasons.  Baker Audrey Landon is a war widow who is just barely keeping ahead of loan payments for the house where she is raising her three sons; her estranged sister Lady Gwendoline Strickland, who is serving as a demonstrator for the Ministry of Food, is attempting to appease her demanding husband; kitchen maid Nell Brown is encouraged by her mentor Mrs. Quince, a revered but elderly country house cook whose health is failing; and Zelda Dupont, a displaced London chef who is trying to work her way back to the city and to a position as a head chef.

As each woman plans and prepares the three courses, readers are introduced to the immense challenges facing them with finding food, using substitutions, putting seasonal products and local harvests to use, and not exceeding the weekly rations.  Some of the recipes, included at the end of each cooking chapter, are mouth-watering, and Ryan describes the tastes, textures, and smells in loving detail.  Audrey’s Mushroom Soup and Fruit Scones are a couple I would want to try, but I would give a hard pass to Chef James’ Whale Meat and Mushroom Pie, and I almost gag even thinking about The Ministry of Food’s Sheep’s Head Roll.

One of the best things about the book is how the women choose their recipes, which come from a wide-ranging set of sources—like an ancient country house cookbook, a young Italian POW, or secretly enlisting a well-known London chef—and then how they go about finding their ingredients, which opens up a wonderful look at foraging for mushrooms, raising bees, buying from local vendors, and even making use of the black market.

The four women in this small village showcase varying degrees of status and experience of wartime Britain, and their personal lives bring challenges and strong rivalries.  How these are all worked out falls into the best traditions of homefront stories with small acts of courage and budding friendships.  

Jennifer Ryan is an impeccable researcher and works her wide range of WWII knowledge smoothly into the novel.  Inspired by many of her grandmother’s stories, she also has collected information from BBC archives, published histories, Ministry of Food pamphlets, cookbooks, recorded interviews, and diaries of daily lives in the Mass Observation project.  In addition, she consulted with home economists and cooks for testing the recipes and sharing details.  

This is a heartwarming story of female friendship, the strength of community, creativity driven by necessity, and overcoming odds during the worst of times.  

Thanks to the publisher and to NetGalley for an advance copy.

Snowy Christmas Fiction - New in 2020

 If you are dreaming of a white Christmas, these three novels of 2020 will provide you one.  Each is set in a northern climate that has its fair share of snow, a little bit of humor, a lot of romance and some interesting and extra-special seasonal decorations. (All published in October.)

Author Jenny Colgan can be counted on to provide a really solid story, and the holiday-themed Christmas at the Island Hotel (Mure #4; William Morrow, Oct. 20) is no exception.  You don’t need to read the previous books in the series to enjoy this one, set on the remote Scottish island of Mure, where Flora MacKenzie and her brother Fintan are almost set to open a new hotel in time for Christmas guests.  The people who help them bring this about include several islanders, a tattooed and contemptuous French chef, and one young man from Norway, exiled for his bad behavior and the need to grow up.  Each character faces personal challenges, and all are stressed by the Christmas preparations.  There are some tender moments, some soul-searching, some creativity involving a very special Christmas tradition, and some hilarious episodes including one featuring a kitchen, diners in the new hotel, and Bjark, an oversize and out-of-control dog.  This is a heart-warming but unsentimental Christmas story.

 

New fallen snow, soft homemade sweaters, mince pies, tartan blankets, fairy lights, baubles—these are the elements of a small village English Christmas.  While it would be enticing to step into this lovely scene, there are also slippery roads, some slipperier relationships and a few questionable partners in Kate’s The Twelve Dates of Christmas by Jenny Bayliss (G.P. Putnam, Oct 13).  Kate joins the exclusive holiday dating event which introduces her to men in a cocktail party, an escape room challenge, a gingerbread house contest and nine other Christmas-themed activities, but will any of these men she meets be the one that she can settle down with?  The problem is that Kate’s childhood friend, Matt, is dating another woman but keeps cropping up in her life and in her mind.  The book’s snowy setting is beautifully described, but for all its loveliness, the author keeps it real with some pretty ticklish situations.


 

There’s nothing like putting it all out there, and that’s what the residents of Moose Springs, Alaska do in the opening line of Sarah Morgenthaler’s second book in the series, Mistletoe and Mr. Right (Sourcebooks, Oct. 6).  The townies do NOT like Lana Montgomery’s plans for condos near the mountain resort overlooking their town, and they aren’t afraid to say so, but she is prepared to step up and show them how much the little Alaskan community means to her.  She and best friend Zoey are prepared to brave northern cold to track down the “Santa Moose” that is destroying the locals’ Christmas decorations.  She is also prepared to lend a hand to Rick Harding, a struggling business owner who is the exact opposite to her own confident, savvy and wealthy self.  More “rom” than “com,” this does have a couple funny scenes where the attire of the local animals gets out of hand.

 

 

These three books will provide an entertaining respite from holiday stresses.  Do you look for new holiday books to read each year or do you like to return to old favorites?

Many thanks to the publishers and Edelweiss for advance copies.