One for the Books: Great stories, memorable characters
- Mary Louise Ruehr
I love a good story. Add a memorable character, and I’m hooked. Here are a few to try.
“Frankie” is the latest novel from Graham Norton. Damian works as a caregiver for the elderly. His new client is an 84-year-old woman named Frances who has broken her ankle. In her bedroom, he finds “what should have been the window was completely blocked up with precarious towers of books.” Of course, I adored her immediately.
As they’re both Irish, they hit it off right away, and she tells him her life story. Whoosh! We’re back in Ireland in the 1950s. Just before her 11th birthday, Frances is orphaned, and her aunt and uncle take her in. They aren’t the warmest of human beings, and soon after she turns 18, they marry her off to an older man. The marriage is not a success.
She goes off to London to find refuge with her best friend, Norah, who christens her with the nickname “Frankie.” It’s the swinging ’60s, and Frankie finds the “swinging” part a bit awkward. But it gives her a chance to go to America, where she finds work at a restaurant and falls in love with an unconventional artist who has painted the walls, doors, and ceilings in his apartment: “The whole thing was like an enormous child’s drawing, only so much more than that. Fantastical plants chased each other around the light fixture, the leaves and stalks coming to life like twisted green creatures. The blossoms burst open into glittering mosaics made up of pottery fragments and glass.” With him her life takes an incredible turn in the 1980s. “They seemed like one of those couples who had it all, and they were, until they didn’t.”
This is one of those books I got lost in and forgot I was reading. Frankie is a complete character, one you’ll feel you’ve met. I highly recommend this one.
Adult situations.
“The Briar Club” by Kate Quinn is another book you can get lost in, with a bunch of intertwining stories, great characters, and an ongoing mystery. And there are recipes!
It’s 1950 in Washington, D.C., where Briarwood House is a boarding house “for ladies” with about eight residents who come and go, along with the landlady and her children.
One tenant’s husband is an army doctor still serving in San Diego. One is a secretary for a controversial senator. One works for the National Archives. The residents hardly speak to each other until a new tenant moves in. It’s Grace, who starts shaking things up by painting on the dull walls, creating a lengthy vine and colorful flowers “blooming” everywhere. Others join in and add their own flowers to it. Then she brings the boarders together for a shared meal once a week. “You couldn’t find a more different batch of women than the Briar Club, … but after so many suppers together they had somehow acquired a shared funny bone, a way of setting each other off that made the laughter contagious.”
She seems to make everybody’s life better. Grace can be funny, as when she tells another resident, “A successful dinner party needs just one person all the others loathe. … It gives everyone something to unite against.” Several tenants become their own heroes, and I was rooting for them.
Amid postwar paranoia and the Red Scare, we meet musicians, gangsters, a thieving brother, a bunch of people to love and hate, and we watch the ins and outs, secrets and surprises of all the tenants and their occasional back stories. Fun!
This book is simply wonderful! Highly recommended. I thank my niece, Katy Epling, for suggesting it.
Adult language and situations.
“Shelterwood” by Lisa Wingate, with dual timelines, is set in the Winding Stair Mountains of southeastern Oklahoma. In 1990, Valerie has just arrived at the national park, where she’s the new law enforcement officer. Someone has found the bones of three long-dead children in a nearby cave, and Valerie is investigating this as well as looking for a couple of recently missing persons.
In 1909, 11-year-old Olive has run away from her abusive stepfather, Tesco Peele, taking along her 6-year-old adopted Choctaw sister, Nessa. The girls and their pony have to survive many tribulations to get to a safe place. If they’re caught, they’ll be sent right back to the horrible man. Olive is intrepid. Whatever happens, Olive tells Nessa, “You don’t let anybody take you back to Tesco Peele. He is a bad, bad man.” It’s a terrifying journey for children, facing starvation and avoiding mountain lions, bears, coyotes, and worst of all, greedy humans.
Greed is the major theme of the book. Criminals are blatantly stealing land and money from indigenous people — even from children. Here’s an example: Amos, age 14, is Choctaw and is awarded a patch of land and a cabin. “Then one day comes a man who says, ‘I’m your ma’s half brother. I am to take care of you. … For you to keep this land, you need to marry up with a woman. I found you a woman, and we’ll go to the justice of the peace to marry. Once the knot is tied, we’ll all have ice cream and get you a fine horse and saddle and a new rifle.’ … [So] they see the justice, say some words, mark some papers. … Next thing Amos knows, he’s all alone there on the boardwalk, waitin’ on a horse, saddle, and gun that ain’t comin’. He don’t have to worry about that land or cabin, either, because by the time he finally finds his way back there, the wife and half uncle have moved in, and she’s getting a divorce from Amos and taking the land as her part.” And he’s warned that “if he goes tellin’ his tale, he’ll wind up dead or in jail.”
It’s great for history lovers and anyone who enjoyed “Killers of the Flower Moon,” as it’s a similar theme.
This is OK for young adults to read.
Happy reading!
Mary Louise Ruehr
Mary Louise Ruehr is a books columnist for The Portager. Her One for the Books column previously appeared in the <em>Record-Courier</em>, where she was an editor.