Books Set in North America; Manhattan, New York

The Real Mrs. Tobias, by Sally Koslow (2022)

 

Meet Veronika Tobias, the matriarch.  She is a psychologist.  Meet Mel, her daughter-in-law, a psychotherapist.  Meet Birdie, Mel’s daughter-in-law.  Birdie is a mid-westerner and an aspiring writer who gave up her dreams to follow her husband to live in New York City.  Three women, all known as Mrs. Tobias.

 

Birdie and Micah married young and now have a young daughter, Alice.  Micah has yet to grow up and become a responsible adult.  Instead of joining his grandfather’s and father’s thriving clothing store, he operates a operates a food truck that sells, of all things, mashed potatoes.  Driving home after an evening of drinking, Mel accidently hit something, but didn’t know whether it was a person, animal, or object.  He didn’t see anyone, so continued home and never reported the incident to the police.  At the family’s weekly Shabbat dinner, he reports the incident, who urge him to own up to his actions.  

 

This sets up the scene for exploring family relationships.  Veronika and Mel can assist other people with their problems in their professional life, but struggle with their own family problems.  As the meddling mothers-in-law try to help Micah and Birdie, the younger Tobias’ must come to their own solution to their troubles.

 

This was a delightful novel, told through the eyes of each of the three women.  I would have rated this book a 5, but for Alice.  I found the dialogue with the three-year-old Alice to be totally unbelievable in an otherwise lovely book about family and love.

 

Read: January 8, 2024

4 Stars

Books Set in North America, United States, Seattle, Washington

Firefly Lane, by Kristen Hannah (2008)

 

This is a novel about a life-long friendship between two women who couldn’t be more different.  They became friends as young teens, when Tully Hart and her hippy mother, Cloud, moves into the house across the street from Kate Mularkey.  Although Kate and her mother have the normal teen mother-daughter struggles, she comes from a stable middle-class family.  Tully, on the other hand, lives mostly with her grandmother unless her mother floats into her life for brief periods.

 

Tully is a risk taker.  She decided early on that she was going to become a star reporter.  Nothing will stop in her way.  As teens, both girls were going to pursue that path, but that wasn’t the route that Kate wanted.  Kate knows that Tully always gets what she wants.  When both young women intern at the local television station, both are smitten by Johnny.

 

Sadly, this book is filled with cliches.  I quickly tired of the constant pop culture references beginning in the 1970s and continued throughout the length of the book, which ended around 2008.  The author constantly teases the reader into thinking that a rift will divide the friendship, and hints that the rift will be over Johnny.  The rift, which the reader knows is coming, is actually over another matter.

 

As Kate and Johnny’s daughter, Marah, becomes a teenager, she and Kate enter into their own teen-age mother/daughter struggle.  Marah turns to her “Aunt Tully”, who typically takes Marah’s side.  Hence the rift, which actually came about when Tully basically accused Kate of being an overprotective mother on live television.  After this event, the two women didn’t speak to each other for some unspecified years.

 

The point the author is trying to make is that in life, family is what matters most.  This comes only in the last 30 or so pages (and this is quite a long book).  As the book nears the end, we learn that Kate, who married Johnny after she became pregnant, has inflammatory breast cancer (IBC) and is dying.  She thinks that Tully is after Johnny but has reconciled with that thought.  Although Johnny had a one-night stand with Tully before he and Kate married, he was truly in love with Kate.

 

I read the book in its entirety.  If this had been the first book I read by Kristen Hannah, it would not have been inclined to read her other books.

 

Read:  October 10, 2021

 

3 Stars

Books Set in Africa; Nigeria

Stay with Me, by Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀ (2017)

 

This novel takes place in Nigeria, mostly in the 1980s, against the political upheaval in the country.  Yejide and Akin were university students when they met and fell in love.  In a country where it was not uncommon for men to have multiple marriages, Yejide agreed to marry Akin only if he would not take other wives.  Yejide’ mother had died when she was born and was raised by her father’s several other wives, none of whom were especially kind to her.  In her marriage to Akin, she initially bonds with her mother-in-law.

 

After four years of marriage, the couple have not been able to have a baby.  They seek out fertility doctors and healers, all to no avail.  Akin’s family pressures him into taking another wife.  Finally, Akin is forced to give into family demands. Yejide was furious when she learned after the fact that her beloved husband took another wife.  Under mutual agreement, the new wife has an apartment on the other side of town and Akin only spends weekends with her.

 

Yejide believes that the only way to save her marriage and have life return to the early days of their marriage is to become pregnant.  She will do whatever it takes to become a mother, despite the cost.

 

After Akin’s younger no-good brother, Dotun, lost his job, he briefly moved in with Akin and Yejide.  He seduces her and soon Yejide gives birth to a beautiful little daughter.  Five months after the birth of her daughter, the child died suddenly.  Dotum again seduces Yejide a second time and this time she gives birth to a son.  When he is about 5 years old, he is diagnosed with Sickle Cell Disease.  Dotum was a carrier of the disease, but not Akin.  Akin rages when the doctor tells him that he could not have been the father.

 

Later we learn that Akin knew all along that he was impotent and talked his brother into seducing his wife so that they could have children.  Akin, however, couldn’t even admit to himself, that he could not father children.  Finally, Yejide learned the truth about her husband, and leaves him, only to see him years later at his father’s funeral.

 

I loved this book.

 

Read:  December 6, 2020

 

5 Stars

 

Books Set in North America: United States: New York

The Grammarians, by Cathleen Schine (2019)

The Grammarians is a novel about a set of identical twins, Laurel and Daphne Wolfe, who were obsessed with words and the English language.  Their favorite book as a child is an old dictionary, which they pore over intently.

As children, they are inseparable, but as they grow up, the language that was the glue that kept them together, becomes the cause of their separation.

I didn’t care for the characters and their mundane lives.

This book was recommended by one of my book groups that focuses on Jewish-themed books.  This was billed as describing growing up in a middle-class Jewish family from the 1950s to present.  There was virtually no Jewish content to this novel.

Read:  November 8, 2019

2 Stars

Books Set in North America: United States

The Abstinence Teacher, by Tom Perrotta (2007)

Ruth Ramsey is the sex education teacher in a small town somewhere in the northeast. She believes in teaching the high school students the truth about sex.  All was going well until the growing and ultra-fundamentalist church in the community objected.  Suddenly, the lines between church and state became blurred.  The Tabernacle of the Gospel Truth convinced the school board to institute an abstinence curriculum.

Ruth is sent to re-training seminars to learn this new focus on sex-ed.  Although she tries to teach the new course, she makes known to the students that her heart isn’t into the new curriculum.

Ruth is divorced with two young daughters.  One of her daughters, Maggie, is on the soccer team, which is coached by Tim Mason.

Tim is a former rock musician, alcoholic and had serious drug problems.  He, too, is divorced, with a daughter, who lives with her mother and wealthy step-father.  Tim joined the Tabernacle and believes that it turned his life around. At the behest of Pastor Dennis, Tim married Carrie, a fellow church member, who is much younger.  Thus, Tim entered into a “good Christian marriage”, albeit one with an unsatisfactory sex life.

All seems to be going well with Tim until after a big soccer game, he leads all the girls on the team into a Tabernacle prayer.  This was the last straw for Ruth, who was dealing with the Tabernacle’s interference in her sex-ed class.  Ruth is also struggling with young teen daughters, who are ready to rebel against their mother.  When Maggie begins to show an interest in joining the Tabernacle Church, Ruth really becomes concerned.

Ruth confronts Tim with the issue of his proselytizing.  Although they have an initial mistrust, they have an unmistakable attraction.  Tim begins to re-evaluate his life and question the structure of his life within the Tabernacle.

In one scene, Ruth’s daughter was required to write an essay on the woman and man who made an impression on her.  When Ruth asked her daughter who the man she wrote about, the daughter answered “Donald Trump.”  Remember this book was written in 2007!

I’m not sure what to make of this novel.  His description of JoAnn Marlow, the “virginity consultant”, seemed like a caricature.  The descriptions of the pastor at the Tabernacle Church was always reminding Tim not to slip back into sin, thus Tim was constantly worrying about whether or not he was a good Christian.

It was a quick read, but will not be added to my top favorites.

Read: September 25, 2018

3 Stars

Books Set in the United States

The Immortalists, by Chloe Benjamin (2018)

Would you want to know the date of your death, and if you did know when you would die, would that impact your life?  That’s the premise of The Immortalists.

In 1969, the four Gold children, Simon, Klara, Daniel and Varya, aged 7, 9, 11, and 13, respectively, visit a mysterious woman said to tell fortunes.  As the children individually enter the woman’s apartment, she tells them the exact date of their death.  Some of the children share that date, the others keep it a secret.  But the children are just that ~ should they take the woman seriously?

The novel follows each of the four children.  Simon, the youngest, leaves home at age 16 to seek a new start in San Francisco.  Klara focuses on magic and perfects a death-defying trick of hanging by her teeth from a rope.  Daniel becomes a military doctor, and Varya becomes a researcher in aging.  Each child remains haunted by their early prophesy into their death.  This supposed knowledge also affects their relationships with family members and others they encounter.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book.  The author really made the character’s come alive.

Read:  May 14, 2018

4 Stars

Books Set in Europe and the United States: Williamsburg

I am Forbidden, by Anouk Markovits (2012)

I am Forbidden is a look into the life of the ultra-orthodox Satmar community. The novel begins in 1939 in Transylvania and follows the family of Zalman Stern, and his extended family.

Five-year old Josef Lichentenstein sees his family murdered and is raised by the family’s gentile maid, Florina.  When he is 10, he rescues Mila Heller after her family was killed running for the Kasztner train, an historical event, that transported approximately 1,600 Jews from Hungary to safety in Switzerland.  Her parents were running to meet the Rebbe who was to have saved them.

Josef sends Mila to Zalman Stern’s family who adopt her.  Zalman has several children, including Atara, who is about the same age as Mila and the two become very close.

Zalman is a leader in the Satmar community and his family must live by the very strict and rigid rules of that community. Following World War II, the family moved to Paris to escape the communist regime.  They live isolated from the secular aspects of Paris.  The girls attend a religious school where they learn how to observe the tight rules.

Atria is curious about the secular world.  She questions the fundamentalist doctrine and leaves the community to avoid an early arranged marriage.  From then on, she is totally cut off from her family.

Mila, however, remains religious.  She is sent to Williamsburg to marry Josef, the boy who saved her years earlier.  Their marriage is challenged with their struggle with childlessness.  There are strict rules within their community regarding their inability to produce children, which is a constant pain for the couple.  The novel explores a resolution that test the bonds of the couple.

I found this book a bit difficult to get into, but once I did, I found it difficult to put down.

4 Stars

Read:  May 11, 2018