BOOK REVIEW: Three Guesses by Chris McClain Johnson

I’m in luck! Here is another epistolary novel. (Actually, this one is a novella.)

Three Guesses by Chris McClain Johnson is a heartwarming story of an unconventional friendship among three grown-up pen pals.

Sam Brooks gets the ball rolling by connecting with Pete Wren (an artist who donated a painting to a charity auction) and Richard Mabry (who bought the painting, perhaps inadvertently.) Sam worked with a temp agency who sent her to the company coordinating the auction, and she wanted to know the story behind the sale.

Richard dives right in. Pete joins in, reluctantly at first, but then becomes as committed a writer as the other two. They live in different parts of the country, have different backgrounds, and have different struggles. Because of the anonymity of the endeavor (they have a pact never to meet in person), they find themselves opening up, becoming intensely honest, and then genuinely caring about one another. Although the letters are not frequent, and one or the other falls away from time to time, the friendship they forge is one of the strongest connections of their lives. 

Beautifully written, the novel explores the importance and joy of enduring friendship. And may make you wish the art of letter writing was better appreciated now.

BOOK REVIEW: The Correspondent by Virginia Evans

I’m always a bit hesitant to read a book with overwhelmingly positive buzz. What if I don’t like it? But when I heard The Correspondent by Virginia Evans was an epistolary novel, I couldn’t resist. I’m a sucker for epistolary novels. And this one certainly lives up to the hype.

Sybil Van Antwerp is a retired lawyer, divorced, living alone, who has spent the greater part of her life writing letters. She writes to friends, family members, authors she admires, her next door neighbor, even the customer service representative at a DNA-testing site reminiscent of 23andMe or Ancestry.com. Now that she is in later life, with little in-person social interaction, maybe lonely though she denies it, she has stepped up her correspondence. Lurking in the background is the fact that she has a rare inherited condition from which she is slowly going blind.

The reader gets to know Sybil through the letters she writes. We can see her contradictions, her prickliness, her pride, and her regrets. We learn that she is still grieving a son who died when he was school-aged, and that her relationships with her surviving (now adult) children are strained. And we watch as she makes the most of her remaining years.

This book is moving, emotionally rewarding, and impossible to put down. I kept thinking, I’ll read just one more letter. Then one more. Read it and you’ll want to go buy some stationery and stamps. Highly recommended.

BOOK REVIEW: Address Unknown by Kathrine Kressmann Taylor

Address Unknown by Kathrine Kressmann Taylor is a brilliant epistolary novella first published in 1938. Essentially contemporary with Hitler’s rise to power, the novel comprises the correspondence between two friends: Max, a gallery owner and art dealer in San Francisco, who is Jewish, and Martin, his one-time business partner, who has returned to Germany with his wife and children after a good deal of financial success as Max’s partner. 

After settling back into German life, Martin abandons his liberal ideas, joins the Nazi party, and hero-worships Hitler. He breaks off the now-inconvenient friendship with Max as all his latent anti-Semitism comes to the fore.

Things progress from there.

Although ~85 years old, this is nevertheless a timely look at how quickly fascism can infect the minds of those willing to scapegoat others to advance their own agendas. It is both a sad look at the past and a warning for the future.

BOOK REVIEW: Confessions of a Curious Bookseller by Elizabeth Green

 I received this book for free from Netgalley. That did not influence this review.

This book was hard-going, but I’m glad I stuck with it to the end. Fortunately, with the epistolary format, it was a pretty quick read because the protagonist, Fawn Birchill, is not someone I’d want to spend a lot of time with.

Fawn is a mid-fifties-aged woman who owns and runs a used book store in Philadelphia. It’s in a rundown old Victorian home and she lives above the store. The building is on its last legs and she doesn’t have the resources to maintain it. Her ongoing struggles with the building mirror her struggles with her falling-apart life.

Fawn had a difficult childhood. Her father was also in retail, running an unsuccessful general store, using his two daughters as his workforce. Fawn’s resentment of her “lost childhood” fuels a lot of her dissatisfaction with life. She refuses to visit her dying father, and avoids her mother and sister. Instead, she makes a family of her three salesclerks (or tries to) and spends time with the lonely, elderly woman who rents an apartment in her home. (The attention she gives to this woman is her most redemptive characteristic, even if she does rob her to pay the bills.) She also lavishes attention on cats.

So far, so good. But Fawn is a terrible businesswoman and her store is just eking by. When a new bookstore opens two blocks away, a modern store with coffee, book signings, and events, Fawn is unable to compete. Or, maybe it isn’t the competition. Fawn’s store was likely to fail all on its own.

The story is told through Fawn’s email correspondence with her staff, her family, and an old friend/penpal that she has never met in person. Through these epistles, we are introduced to a petty, self-aggrandizing, lonely, and essentially pathetic woman who lies, makes pitiful attempts at manipulating others, and whines. Her attempts to extort help from other local businesses are truly cringe-worthy. Her attempts at snark come across as desperate rather than funny. Just based on these bits of public persona, she is horribly unlikeable.

Fortunately, interspersed with these emails, there are journal entries that show a different side to Fawn. She is unhappy, drinks too much, and shows just enough insight and self-reflection to salvage the character. 

There is a character arc with some growth. It takes the death of her father for her to realize how similar she has been to him and how much of her life she has spent trying to spite him with her own success– success that eludes her. Redemption comes late in the book but patience is rewarded. As Fawn rides off into the sunset, I do hope she’s destined for something better.

BOOK REVIEW: Where'd You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple

Where’d You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple is a modern-day epistolary novel, constructed by narrator Bee Branch, a wise, sweet 15-year-old girl, who pieces together the story of her mother’s disappearance using emails, faxes, doctor’s notes, receipts, and even a transcript of a TED talk.

Bee’s mother, Bernadette Fox, is/was a brilliant architect, winner of a MacArthur genius grant, known in architectural circles for two quirky “locally sourced” houses, but best known for disappearing. Following the demolition of her second house, she abandoned her career, escaped to suburban Seattle with her Microsoft-bound husband, and focused on raising her daughter. Averse to people in general and Seattle-ites in particular, she essentially drops out of sight.

Her reclusiveness incites the ire of the other parents at Bee’s exclusive (but second-tier) private school. Bernadette would rather avoid conflict but stirs it up effortlessly–leading to the amusing if farcical train of events that make up the narrative.

The story takes off when Bee earns straight A’s and reminds her parents that her promised reward is a trip to Antarctica. Bernadette hates the thought of traveling, especially by boat, but cannot disappoint Bee. She tries to pull herself together for the trip, relying on an outsourced email personal assistant. Things spiral out of control. Drastically. Then Bernadette disappears again.

Bee is unwilling to accept that her mother would abandon her. And she adamantly refuses to believe her mother is dead. So she reconstructs the last few weeks of her mother’s life, then delves into her mother’s past.

The result is a wacky picture of a creative genius, stifled by circumstance, whose love for her family helps her find a way forward.

The book is fast-paced and entertaining.  It suffers bit by comparison with Daisy Jones and the Six, which I had just finished reading, which also had a pieced together narrative but was more realistic and grittier. Where’d You Go, Bernadette was a fun book and I imagine it makes for a delightful movie, but it isn’t something that will stick with me.

ESCAPE TO THE PAST WITH: Letters from Skye by Jessica Brockmole

I’ve been eager to get my hands on Letters from Skye by Jessica Brockmole. It’s an epistolary novel and I love that format. It’s set in Scotland, in Edinburgh and on the remote Island of Skye, and I guess also in Illinois, although the setting of the male protagonist didn’t make as much of an impression on me. Most of the story takes place during WWI, but it begins during WWII, and then unfolds with flashbacks.

I’m making it sound more confusing than it is.

Elspeth Dunn is a poet in her mid-twenties living on Skye who receives a fan letter from a twenty-one year old college man, David Graham, living in Illinois. They strike up a flirtatious correspondence that results in their falling in love, despite the fact that Elspeth is married. When WWI begins, Elspeth’s husband goes off to join the fighting. Soon after, David volunteers as an ambulance driver. Elspeth and David meet for the first time and consummate their emotional affair. Elspeth now has a husband and a lover to worry about at the front.

In addition to the letters between Elspeth and David, there are also letters set during WWII between Elspeth and her daughter, Margaret, and between Margaret and her beau, Paul. Elspeth is concerned that the relationship between Margaret and Paul is progressing too quickly. Then a bomb drops, rattling Elspeth’s home and exposing Elspeth’s hidden letters. Margaret finds one of them, but before she can get any explanation, her mother disappears. Margaret, who remembers nothing about her father and knows nothing about her mother’s past, recognizes that the letters must hold the key.

The stories unfold simultaneously, with chapters shifting back and forth in time. Both Elspeth and David’s relationship and Margaret’s search for answers about the past are engaging narratives, and I didn’t want to put the book down. It’s nicely descriptive of the tension of wartime romance.

Still, when all was said and done, I felt sorry for Elspeth’s husband. And I couldn’t help but wonder why it was somehow OK for Elspeth to have an emotional affair because she used snail mail. If she and Davey had been interacting through Facebook or gmail, it would seem much more tawdry than their poignant, witty, captivating letters. So, as much as I liked the book, it nagged at me that I was rooting for this relationship. I had a mental image of Ann Landers interjecting a letter at the beginning of Elspeth’s story, suggesting that she cease writing to her American stranger and rather focus on rekindling the romance with her husband. Ann would suggest that they get some counseling. The reaction is anachronistic, of course. But if, by today’s moral standards, one should frown on online cheating on one’s spouse, why is it acceptable to consider snail-mail cheating on one’s spouse in 1912 the start of a beautiful love story? And yet, the love story did tug at the heart strings.

If you enjoy epistolary novels and wartime romances, Letters from Skye fits the bill. There is love, friendship, family drama and moral dilemma enough to keep you turning the pages. And then there are questions to think about after the last page is turned. It might make a good book club book.

I’m just going to keep going with the Historical Fiction Challenge, hosted by Historical Tapestry. And I have now finished the Library Book Challenge, hosted by Gina at Book Dragon’s Lair! This was a great challenge for me. It really helped me to use the resources of my wonderful local library more.

BACK TO THE CLASSICS CHALLENGE - Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Choderlos de Laclos

In one of my college French classes, we were assigned Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Choderlos de Laclos. I don’t remember which class it was, or why we were given the English translation to read (although I’m glad I don’t have the French version or I’d never attempt a re-read now!) But I do remember being floored by the book.

It was first published in Paris in 1782. From the moment of its publication it was enormously popular. But it was also condemned as corrupt and dangerous. An epistolary novel, the book is introduced by a fictional narrator who claims to be presenting letters extracted from a larger collection. Thus, we can be misled to believe that what we are about to read is true. However a publisher’s note hastens to assure us that they don’t believe it. It’s absurd.

Settle in.

The anti-heroes of this tale are the primary letter writers, the Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont. At one time lovers, they are now friends and allies in a contest of sexual intrigue. Who is better at it? Valmont has seduced and ruined more women than can be counted; however, the Marquise de Merteuil has a more difficult task. She has managed to live a libertine’s life, taking a succession of lovers, while maintaining a spotless reputation.

As the story opens, the marquise has asked Valmont to help her with a new and worthwhile project – revenge. She wants him to seduce a young girl named Cecile Volanges, recently removed from the convent to marry the Comte de Gercourt. Gercourt was Madame de Merteuil’s lover but jilted her. She wants to see Gercourt humiliated.

Valmont, although generally willing to jump to his old mistress’s command, refuses this time because he is otherwise occupied. He has become obsessed with a young married woman whose virtue is known to be beyond reproach, Madame de Tourvel. He cannot rest until he can have her. He is determined that she fall in love and yield to him willingly.

Letters fly back and forth between the plotters as well as among their intended unfortunate victims. The innocent Cecile falls for an almost equally innocent young chevalier, Danceny, and Madame de Merteuil decides he will do just as well to ruin the girl.

Mercilessly, Valmont and Madame de Merteuil pursue their goals, ensnaring others along the way, goading each other to additional cruelties.

The letter are extremely well written. Each character has a distinctive voice that brings him alive even though we’re just seeing snippets through the letters. The plot moves quickly along. The story is shocking – not so much because of the subject matter -- we read much more graphic material today, but because of the cold-bloodedness of the protagonists. They delight in their own amorality and cruelty. The letters are witty and interesting to read, and when they tease each other you can almost get caught up in their fondness, except for the uncomfortable undercurrent of this is wrong!

I loved this book in college and I wanted to read it again for the Back to the Classics challenge, (the book to re-read) to see if it would still make such an impression on me. I’m more impressed with the writing this time around than I am swept away by the characters. I think back then I wanted to find some excuse for their behavior, something redeeming about them. Maybe their friendship? This time I just accepted them for what they were. They are horrible people, deserving of their fate. But they can sure write entertaining letters!

ESCAPE TO THE PAST WITH: 84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff

Knowing my love for epistolary novels, a couple of people have suggested 84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff. It’s not a novel, but a collection of letters that tells a story so delightfully it reads like one. Between October 1949 and January 1969, Helene Hanff, a writer in New York carried on a correspondence with the employees at a used book shop in London at 84, Charing Cross. Her primary contact was Frank Doel, but over time her letters inspired responses from other workers in the shop, Frank’s wife, and even a neighbor. Helene and Frank bonded over their appreciation of books, but a shared sense of humor moved the relationship beyond business to personal. The letters are a joy to read. Helene’s are bold. It takes Frank a little longer to come out of his shell. Although they never meet, you can get a sense of how much they value one another.

The book shows Helene’s personality best because she is the most open, sharing little tidbits of her personal and professional life as she requests new books and praises or complains about the ones she has received. But we are also treated to sidelong views of the booksellers, some of whom move away or pass away during the course of twenty years. It’s amazing how well they portray themselves in so few words. Lives are encapsulated in snapshots.

What I like best about the book is how uplifting it is. These are normal people going about their normal lives and they are open-hearted, trusting, generous, compassionate, grateful, kind, and friendly. What starts out as a commercial transaction – a woman writing an open-ended letter to a used bookseller – blossoms into a twenty-year friendship. It’s pleasant to catch a glimpse of a world in which people are inherently good. I need a little of that every once in awhile.

THURSDAY- GOLDEN OLDIES: Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn

Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn is a difficult book to categorize, so I’ll just call it incredibly clever. It’s an epistolary novel, and I have a soft spot for those, but it is also a word game. The plot manages to be both quirky and sweet, and the protagonist is heroic and funny. Here’s the deal...

Ella Minnow Pea is just a small town girl living on the island of Nollop off the coast of South Carolina. (The fictional island is geographically close to the US but is autonomously governed.) She is witness to, chronicler of, and activist in the fight against the bizarre events that unfold.

Her island home revolves around (worships) its most famous deceased resident, Nevin Nollop, the author of the phrase that was once memorized by budding typists everywhere: "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." This famous sentence was purportedly the shortest known sentence to use all the letters of the alphabet. As such, it was immortalized with tile letters atop a statue of Nollop in the town center. One day, the letter "Z" falls from the monument!!!

The town council rejects the possibility of repair, opting instead for the choice that Nollop is obviously commanding from beyond the grave. The letter "Z" must be excised from the alphabet. Henceforth, the inhabitants of the island are forbidden to use it. This option takes some of the islanders by surprise. It seems a bit extreme. But after all, it’s only a "Z."

As time goes by, and more letters fall, the council goes to greater lengths to ensure that letters are obliterated from existence. Neighbors begin to inform on one another. People are exiled from the island. Ella is one of the few brave resistance fighters, seeking sanity in a world gone mad.

Written as a series of epistles, the writers don’t dare use the banned letters or they risk harsh penalties. The contortions they go through to obey the laws are funny and inspiring. The amazing thing about this novel is that Dunn drops letters from the book as they fall from the statue. (And the options left get very limited, but he keeps on–like a verbal limbo– how low can he go?)

It’s a silly book. And yet through this silliness Dunn is showing us things about human nature and human resilience. Ella is a shining example of courage and common sense. And through it all, the love of language shines brightest of all.

THURSDAY- GOLDEN OLDIES: Daddy-Long-Legs by Jean Webster

I love epistolary novels. Letter writing, good letter writing, is a true art, one that I admittedly never mastered. It seems a rather archaic talent at this point, since so few people have the time or inclination to write letters anymore. Maybe the epistolary novel will disappear as people forget what real letters looked like, which would be a shame. (Although new forms are evolving all the time. Tweeted novels, etc.) They do still exist, of course. Historical fiction is the most obvious place to find them. The wonderful The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society is as fine an example as you could hope to find. And, thankfully, if you want to settle back and read someone else’s delightful story in letters, you can always go back to a golden oldie.

One of my favorites, from way back, is Daddy-Long-Legs by Jean Webster. I can’t remember how old I was when I first read this book but I saw it referenced in the Mother Daughter Book Club series by Heather Vogel Frederick and fond memories came flooding back. I wondered if the book was something that would stand the test of time, or if a rereading would disillusion me.

I’m pleased to report, the book (written in 1912!) retains the power to charm.

Jerusha (or sometimes Judy) Abbott is a promising orphan who was given a scholarship to a girls’ college by an anonymous benefactor with the simple requirement that she write him letters to update him on her progress. I should say almost anonymous. Jerusha caught a quick glimpse of the man and knows him to be very tall. Being something of a free-spirit, rather than using a stuffy To- Whom-It-May-Concern, she addresses her letters to Dear Daddy-Long-Legs.

What follows is a delightful coming-of-age tale of a guileless, generous, honest young girl who is intellectually curious, friendly, genuinely grateful for the opportunity she has been given, and utterly determined to be a credit to her benefactor and ultimately repay him. She has a few moments of self-pity but never wallows in it, and it is lovely to see her express her lows with as much whole-heartedness as she does her highs. As we follow her years at school, its impossible not to grow as enchanted with her as her benefactor does.

Can the reader see the twist at the end coming before Judy does? Well, yes. But rather than making her seem dumb, Judy’s naivete is somehow quaint. Isn’t the book a little hokey? Yes, a little. But that’s part of its charm. Aren’t we all pretty sophisticated now? A bit jaded and cynical? Forget all that. Every once in a while, it’s a simple pleasure to read a well-written book that shows a girl facing the world with wide-eyed wonder and ending up joyfully surprised.