Proud to be at Hindman Settlement School this week. I’m teaching a short story workshop full of amazing writers. Feeling lucky today!
Appalachian Writers’ Workshop ❤️
My Interview at Shelf Unbound
Big thanks to Christina Consolino at Shelf Unbound for this wonderful interview and for helping me promote Daughters of Muscadine. Here’s the link:
What I’m Reading Now: Long Island by Colm Toibin
I read Colm Toibin’s Brooklyn several years ago, and I also enjoyed that movie adaptation. Right now, I’m listening to the sequel, Long Island. This book follows Eilish and the events that occur after she and Tony have been married for twenty years. They are living in New York with their two children, and they live near Tony’s brothers and mother. The opening of the book really hooked me. A complete stranger with an aggressive posture shows up at Eilish’s door. The stranger sounds like an Irishman, and he says that Eilish’s husband has impregnated the Irishman’s wife. He goes on to say he refuses to raise the bastard and that he will deliver the baby to Eilish’s door once it is born. Eilish is shocked and hurt. She doesn’t want the baby, and she’s surprised and mortified to learn that her mother-in-law is considering adopting the baby.
This book reminds us that Eilish also had an affair in the previous book. We catch up to Eilish’s previous lover in here, and I like that I don’t know where exactly the author is going with these two storylines.
I’m only about six chapters along so far, but I’m really enjoying it. It’s a good premise for a book. I like the family dynamics in the story, and I have always loved domestic novels! I look forward to finishing this one.
What I’m Reading Now: Memphis by Tara Stringfellow
I just started this one today. I’m about three hours into it, and I like it so far. It’s about a Black southern family, and it focuses on the females living in Memphis. They endure spousal abuse, sexual violence, and single motherhood. I’ve always been a sucker for a generational novel, and I love reading about women’s lives.
The thing I like most about this one is the love and appreciation for Black beauty. Most novels I’ve read are by white authors who wax poetic about blue eyes and/or pale skin. This one doesn’t do that so far. There’s a paragraph in chapter one where the character admires a tall, dark-skinned woman. 🤗
The book skips around in time. The earliest events take place in the 1930s and the more recent events take place in the early 2000s. There’s a family tree at the beginning of the story to help you keep track of who is who since there are so many principal characters.
If you like women’s fiction and family sagas, give this one a try.
What I’m Reading Now: The Tobacco Wives
Adele Myers’ historical novel is set in 1946 North Carolina where 15–year-old Maddie has been dropped off to stay with her aunt Etta for the summer in Bright Leaf, a town known for growing tobacco and manufacturing cigarettes. Maddie’s aunt makes gowns and dresses for all the local “tobacco wives,” the upper class women married to the big bosses in the tobacco industry.
When her aunt becomes sick soon after Maddie arrives in town, it’s up to Maddie and her assistant, Anthony, to make the season’s dresses. It’s a lot of pressure on the shoulders of the 15-year-old, but she’s been sewing for years and it looks like she’s capable of pulling it off. One thing I like about Maddie is that she’s so independent. She knows she doesn’t want to end up depending on a man the way that her mother depended on her father. The backstory is that Maddie’s father passed away in WWII right before the novel opens. So our heroine is not only missing her absent mother that summer, but she’s also still mourning her father.
When people around Maddie start to become sick, Maddie struggles with exposing the truth about the toxicity of tobacco, especially in an environment where nearly everyone around her depends on the plant to survive.
The prose style is simple and easy to follow. Myers sprinkles in a few old-fashioned expressions and details about the culture of the time. I listened to the audiobook, and the narrator did a good job of varying her voice to match the various characters. The story is in first-person in Maddie’s voice. The narrator is expressive enough to keep my attention, and the southern accent is subtle.
All We Ever Wanted by Emily Giffin
This was my introduction to Ms. Griffin’s work, and I am pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed most of this one. Usually I think books with trite titles will be predictable and/or saccharine sweet, but this one has well-developed characters and a believable twist near the end (though what happens at the very end is maddening, but feels true).
The author has also written some chick lit/love stories, though I think this book leans toward the shelves in the bookstore that just say, “fiction.” In a nutshell, the story focuses on two families—one lower middle-class and the other upper class. The wealthy son of one family attends private school with the middle-class daughter of the other family. At a party one night, the middle-class daughter, Lila, gets drunk and wakes the next day to learn that Finch, the rich kid, has a photo of her on his phone. The photo has been circulated around to nearly everyone at their prep school, and it shows her lying around semi-conscious with her boob out. There’s a racist caption attached to the pic that says something about her getting her green card (She’s part Brazilian).
The son tries to downplay the incident, and his father does the same. The mother, Nina, is the only one of the three of them who is appropriately appalled. The dad even goes so far as to attempt to pay the girl’s father off with $15,000 because he’s afraid his son will be kicked out of school and lose his place in the Ivy League.
One thing I enjoyed about the book was the subject matter. It feels all too familiar and real. I don’t like where the story took Finch, but I won’t spoil that for you here. I do like that the story is told in first person from three different narrators: Nina, Lila, and Tom (Lila’s dad). The voices are pretty distinct, and I enjoyed putting myself in each of the character’s shoes. For instance, what would I do if Lila were my daughter? How would I react at the end if Finch were my son?
I will look for more of Emily Giffin’s books.
Monic Ductan 