Cocoa Beach - Beatriz Williams

Don't be fooled by the pretty colors and frothy cover--Cocoa Beach is not a book about a vacation on a tropical beach.  Rather, it's a historical novel set during World War I and during the interwar years, with a quiet menace lurking in the background and a whole posse of unreliable characters.  This book could have easily been titled Liars and the Lies They Tell but it probably wouldn't have given off the same vibe.

The book is entirely from the perspective of Virginia Fortescue, a young mother whose family has a dark secret that's just come to light and who spent World War I driving ambulances in Europe, where she met her husband, British doctor Simon.  The time period alternates between Virginia's time meeting and falling in love with Simon during the war and several years later, when they've been separated, Simon is dead, and Virginia has gone to Florida with their daughter to handle the estate of the man she hasn't seen in three years.  But Virginia doesn't quite believe that Simon is actually dead, and a whole heap of things suggest she might be right--and even if she's not, there was definitely more going on with his death than just an accidental house fire.

I really enjoyed this book.  Trying to figure out which characters were telling the truth and which ones were lying was an interesting endeavor.  I guessed some of the plot points here ahead of time, but not all of them, and there was one doozy near the end that really came out of nowhere to smack me upside the head--but still made sense in the context of the book.  The writing was very good--not excellent, but very good.  The atmosphere that Williams creates in war-torn France, in dreary Cornwall, and of course in Cocoa Beach is wonderful.  There are even some Gothic tones, particularly in the long segment at Maitland, the citrus plantation that features.  She also does a good job of making you doubt pretty much everyone; in the afterword, she mentioned that for much of the book she herself hadn't been sure of whether Simon was a good guy or a bad guy, and I could really feel that come through in Virginia's search for what happened.  That said, there were a few issues.  The "dark family secret" turns out to be nothing such; that should have been left alone, there was no need for it to be undone like that.  And then there are some weird turns of phrase here and there--the phrase "omnivorous eyes" comes instantly to mind.

Still, I really liked this.  It's a good historical mystery, but one that's not about a detective or officer, just a normal woman trying to find out what has happened to her life.  The settings and atmosphere suited it perfectly, and the juxtaposition between Virginia's near-bliss in war-torn Europe and her misery in the paradise of Cocoa Beach was very well done.  I would definitely recommend it and would even consider reading it again!

4 stars out of 5.

Women of the Silk - Gail Tsukiyama

I remember my stepsister reading Women of the Silk when she was in middle school or early high school and loving it, and while I creeped on her bookshelf many times, this was never a book that I actually picked up.  Having read The Samurai's Garden within the past few years, however, this seemed like a good book to read when I came across it in a used bookstore.

The story follows Pei from her girlhood to young adulthood in rural China, where she first lives with her family on a farm for mulberry leaves and fish ponds, and then--for most of the book--inside a silk factory, where her father takes her when the family encounters financial difficulties.  As Pei grows older, she clings to relationships she's built in the factory and her dormitory-style home outside of it as surrogates for her birth family and comes to terms with an independence that most women in this time period in China were not able to gain for themselves.

The writing in this book is very simplistic, and while sometimes I felt like the style fit the narrative, at other times it felt like Tsukiyama was info-dumping, just pouring out information about side characters because she wanted them to be more important than they ultimately were to Pei's own narrative.  Pei herself was a strong-minded character but one who was still adrift, which worked well for the story.  What I was never entirely sure of was her exact relationship with Lin; sometimes it seemed completely platonic, then Tsukiyama would throw in something about desire, and then it would go back to being platonic, so it was a bit baffling in that way.

The setting was perfect for this place and time period; starting during the Great Depression and going forward into World War II, Pei is relatively sheltered from global events, but we as readers can still see the world's wider influence bearing down upon the silk factory and the girls who work there.  The slow encroachment of the Japanese, the conflicts involving communists, all of it kind of swirls around Pei without touching her, until it finally slams into the silk factory.  It was a good method of setting the story, but there was one problem with it: because none of this ever really touches Pei, I never felt like she actually matured as a character.  At the end of the book, she felt just as young as she did at the beginning of the book, almost two decades before.

Overall, though, this was a lovely book.  It appears there's a sequel, though this hasn't been formally slotted into a series, and I might check that out at some point if I can get it from the library, though it's not something I feel a need to rush out and buy.

3.5 stars out of 5.

Atonement - Ian McEwan

Atonement has been on my to-read list for a while, but I finally got around to it because I fit it into both my normal reading challenge and my romance reading challenge for 2016.  For my regular reading challenge, it fit the category of "A book set during wartime."  For the romance challenge, I slotted it in for "A literary romance."

Atonement is a weird sort of book.  It has a meta storyline, fitting the events of the book into their own book story.  The plot follows two sisters of the wealthy Tallis family, Cecilia and Briony, and the son of the family's charwoman, Robbie.  One day in 1935, there's a house party at the Tallis home for Cecilia and Briony's visiting brother and his friend.  Briony, an aspiring author and possibly playwright, sees a confrontation between Cecilia and Robbie, who both attended the same school and have spent the past few years in a sort of dance around each other, drawn to each other but unable to put a pin in their feelings.  Briony, ten years younger than Cecilia and Robbie and not within hearing distance, thinks Robbie is coercing Cecilia into some perverse act that involves taking her clothes off and getting into a fountain.  Later, when Robbie puts his feelings to paper in an apology to Cecilia, he gives Briony the note to deliver and she reads it--but Robbie has actually given her a draft that includes some passionate but rather vulgar phrasing, and it helps to cement in Briony's mind that Robbie is a dangerous deviant.  All of this sets off a chain of events that ends with Robbie being falsely accused of rape and imprisoned, and then joining the infantry just before the start of World War II to lessen his prison sentence.  All the while, he and Cecilia maintain a relationship via letters, and Cecilia severs her relationship with her family due to how easily they turned on Robbie.

The romance in here is definitely a secondary story, with the main story revolving around the devastation the rape allegations wreak on Robbie's life and, to a lesser degree, Cecilia's, and how Briony comes to the realization that she was wrong as she grows older and tries to atone for her actions, even though there's no way she can completely right the wrong she committed.  This is an interesting concept, and once the book moved into the second and third parts, it moved quickly and was pretty enjoyable.  However, the first part, which takes up the first half of the book, is very slow, and it almost had me quitting reading a couple of times.  The problem is that, despite the part taking place over only a day, it just drags.  Pretty much every scene has to be rehashed from at least two different viewpoints, and while I understand that the perspectives were necessary to introduce both the truth of the events and how Briony interprets them, but I can't help but wonder if there would have been a more streamlined way to do this that wouldn't have resulted in the beginning of the book being so incredibly slow and clunky.

Later in the book, Briony receives a rejection letter from a literary magazine to who she'd submitted a piece of writing based on the pivotal events of the book.  The letter contains a bunch of advice for Briony about the weak points of her work--and I couldn't help but feel like those weak points were still evident in the book itself, which is ultimately supposed to be Briony's final draft of the events, one that she's worked over again and again for decades.  But I found the same weaknesses and tedium in it that were pointed out in this fictional rejection letter, and it just highlighted to me that the beginning of the book was...not that good.

Overall, I can see why people like this--it's very meta, and the later parts of the book are enjoyable.  But the slow beginning and rehashing of any and every event in the first half of the book really impacted my enjoyment of it.

3 stars out of 5.

Enchanted Islands - Allison Amend

Enchanted Islands was my selection for June from Book of the Month, but it took me a while to actually start reading it.  The story follows Frances Frank(owski) from her childhood through her old age, in the form of her writing down a memoir of sorts in order to record the rather extraordinary events of her life.  The book starts with Frances in an old folk' home with her long-time friend Rosalie.  Rosalie is receiving an award from a Jewish society for the work she did during the war, which mostly consisted of fund-raising.  Frances is a bit jealous, because she was doing other work during the war that she can't talk about--which launches her into her recollections.  Frances is from Duluth, Minnesota, and has a plethora of siblings and parents who haven't adjusted well to life as immigrants from Poland.  While at the library one day, she meets Rosalie, and the two become fast friends.  Following the revelation of some rather horrid things that happened to Rosalie, the two run away to Chicago, and after some time there and Rosalie being a really crappy friend, Frances runs away again, and eventually ends up in California.  The real part of the story that Frances wants to talk about doesn't start until she's in her fifties, when she's working as a secretary for the intelligence portion of the navy and agrees to marry a man, Ainslie, who is eleven years her junior, so that they can go be spies in the Galapagos Islands.

Frances and Ainslie's relationship is off from the very beginning, and while I think most readers can easily determine why, it takes Frances quite a while to pin it down--understandably, given her background and knowledge.  But it's sad to watch Frances pine for Ainslie's love when it's apparent that it's not really ever going to go anywhere, at least not in the way that she wants.  The Galapagos Islands themselves are a beautiful backdrop to this drama as it plays out, though this isn't really a "spy story," as I thought it would be, except for one or two chapters.  Beyond that, Frances is just a cover, and doesn't have much to do with the work that Ainslie is presumably off doing.  Becuase this is a first-person story, it means it's mostly about her just living in the islands.  But she loves them, loves how living there means that everything is focused on survival and has a visible impact, and also finds comfort in knowing that nothing they do will ultimately affect the state of the universe--though it might, just might, impact the world.

One thing I didn't like was Rosalie, and how Frances kept going back to her.  I really hated Rosalie.  I didn't mind her at the beginning--and she had some really terrible things happen to her when she was young.  You could make the argument, and it would be a good one, that these events are what shaped Rosalie and her actions for the rest of her life.  I even believe that.  But Rosalie was still a really shitty friend at multiple points, and was an extremely selfish person, and I hated how Frances just let Rosalie walk all over her and forgave her for everything she did.  You can have terrible things happen to you and not be a selfish, terrible person; Rosalie chose to take that path anyway, and then she had the audacity to try to tear down Frances at multiple points.  I couldn't bring myself to like her, not even a little bit, and I think that tainted the book as a whole for me because I knew Rosalie was there and never really got what I consider her "just deserts."  Sure, that doesn't always happen in real life, but I still wanted it to.

Overall, the part of this book that actually took place on the islands was the best.  There were some beautiful descriptions and I think Frances really came into her own there--something she herself acknowledged at multiple points.  But this is only a portion of the book, and the rest of it didn't have a ton of appeal to me.  I wish there were more books with settings like this; it did make me want to read some things like Swiss Family Robinson, which I've never read before.  But I don't think this is something I'll return to again and again.

3 stars out of 5.

Seabiscuit - Laura Hillenbrand

Seabiscuit had been on my to-read list for a while, and relatively toward the top of it because my university's library system had a copy.  I requested it, along with a bunch of other books, and took it home.  Where it sat.  And sat.  And sat.  At one point, it even ended up in the laundry basket, because I had to move it and that's just where it ended up.  And then, of course, it got buried by clothes.  It came overdue; I renewed it, but still didn't touch the book to actually read it.  And then I came to a realization: I didn't really want to read it at all.  This meant, of course, that even though it was numerically high on my to-read list (the books the library has are always numerically high; I sort through them pretty often) it was actually very low on the want-to-read list.  Hm.  A book at the bottom of your to-read list... Popsugar, is that you?  Why yes, it is!  When I realized this, I immediately fished the book out and began to read it.

Most of the delay is my own fault.  After checking Seabiscuit out, I realized I'd been mixing up horse movies the entire time.  See, I have a few movie weaknesses: sport movies (Friday Night Lights, Miracle) figure skating movies (Ice Castles, The Cutting Edge, Ice Princess) and horse movies.  And I'd been mixing two up!  In my head, Seabiscuit had gotten all muddled up with Hidalgo, and after checking the book out I realized that Hidalgo was the movie I'd actually wanted to read.  However, Hidalgo isn't a book, and so I was left with Seabiscuit.  I started it anyway, because now the book would count for a category of the Popsugar challenge that I hadn't locked down yet.  And... I was pleasantly surprised!

Laura Hillenbrand is an excellent writer.  That's probably why her two books, Seabiscuit and Unbroken, were both made into movies.  She has a way of writing that really makes historical scenes come alive.  In Seabiscuit, she follows the horse himself, as well as owner Charles Howard, jockeys Red Pollard and George Woolf, trainer Tom Smith, and some of Seabiscuit's rivals.  She follows the threads through all their lives as they come together and move apart, building up the tension of Seabiscuit's wins, losses, injuries, and comebacks.  I like horse movies, but I don't actually care one whit about horse racing, and Hillenbrand still managed to keep me riveted even though I knew how the story ended.  It's a really good author who can do that, and Hillenbrand definitely managed it.  The edition I read was even illustrated, which Hillenbrand apparently really pushed for, so that you could follow the whole saga in pictures.  While this made it a rather unwieldy book, one that was definitely suited for the coffee table rather than the bus, I think it was a nice touch overall.

Was this one of my favorite books of nonfiction?  No.  It wasn't.  Nonfiction books that fall onto my favorites list make me think, give me revelations, or bring out something that I never knew before.  This didn't do any of those, but that's just the nature of this book.  It's not really Hillenbrand's fault, and I think that, if I were really into horse racing or had known even less about the sport, it would have resonated much more with me.  I just happened to fall into the part of the spectrum where it didn't have that sort of impact.  Still, a very enjoyable book, and I read it over the course of a few lazy evenings.  I'd recommend it to someone who's interested in what's probably one of the greatest stories of horse racing, but doesn't feel like slogging through pages and pages of backstory and information in order to do it.

3.5 stars out of 5.