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Girls in White Dresses by Jennifer Close
Published by Knopf, an imprint of Random House
The post-college years can be a relationship minefield. You begin to drift away from the friends who marry and have children significantly before - or after - you do; finding new friends and lovers becomes more difficult as you are no longer routinely thrown together in school with people in a similar age bracket and with similar interests. It is this limbo in which Isabella, Mary, and Lauren are firmly stuck. They are out of college and on their own: in nice apartments in Chicago and crummy shoebox ‘apartments’ in New York; in good relationships and dating idiots who cannot spell their names correctly; in nice, stable jobs and the worst of the worst waitressing jobs. In the middle of all this, they are scraping up cash for bridesmaids dresses, wedding shower presents, wedding presents, and baby shower presents, as it seems that everyone they know seems to be moving into that settled state of coupledom and familydom.
Girls in White Dresses is less a cohesive narrative than a collection of anecdotes about Isabella, Mary, Lauren, and their friends as they attempt to navigate young adulthoood. Rather than causing the readers to feel disconnected from her characters, though, Close’s structure lent her story a sense of universality. No matter what your post-college path or choices, it is likely that you will identify with one or more of the girls’ stories. Many of the vignettes in Girls in White Dresses are laugh out loud funny, as is this scene at a bridal shower when the bride’s mother’s friends all begin singing My Favorite Things:
They kept singing and started swaying back and forth. Abby was standing unfortunately close to the woman who’d started the singing, and the woman wrapped her arm around Abby’s shoulders, forced her to move in time with the music, and looked at her with an encouraging smile until Abby started to sing along with her. A few of the women were snapping their fingers. Lauren looked at Isabella and Mary and said, “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me, right?” -p. 171
Others, however, are poignant and thoughtful, as when Lauren and Isabella discuss a recently-divorced friend who has elected to keep her married name:
“Why wouldn’t she go back to Beth Bauer?” she asked Lauren. “She doesn’t have any kids. It’s so weird.”
“I don’t know,” Lauren said. “Maybe she’s afraid no one will remember who she is.”
“Maybe,” Isabella said. The thought left her uneasy. -p. 249
Close’s humor and grace is intensified by her lovely and engaging prose, creating in Girls in White Dresses a book that readers will be hard-pressed to put down.
Highly recommended.
Buy this book from:
Powells | Indiebound*
Source: Publisher.
* These links are all affiliate links. If you buy your book here I’ll make a very small amount of money that goes towards hosting, giveaways, etc.
 Copyright protected by Digiprove © 2011
Welcome to Saturday Story Spotlight, my feature where I discuss books my husband and I are reading with our son, Daniel. These are books that he, we, or all of us particularly enjoy.
The Lost and Found Pony by Tracy Dockray
Published by Feiwel & Friends, an imprint of Macmillan
The eponymous and unnamed pony is small, but she (or possibly he, along with being unnamed she is never explicitly given a gender, but let’s just make her a she for the sake of argument) is perfectly happy with herself. That happiness is even more pronounced when she is given to a young girl as a birthday present. She and the girl are a perfect match, until one day it becomes apparent that the girl has outgrown her, and the girl’s parents replace our dear pony with a larger horse.
The pony is sold off to the circus, which is not a bad life, but she misses the girl each and every day. Still, life goes on - until the circus begins to lose money and the animals are sold off. This is perhaps the scariest time in our pony’s life, but it results in a reunion with her girl, now all grown up.
This is just a lovely book. Dockray’s illustrations are absolutely gorgeous. I wanted to reach into the book and stroke the pony’s muzzle in the early pages. The circus illustrations are particularly vibrant, the ones of the circus’s dissolution still beautiful but tinged with despair. The story is incredibly sweet as well. The pony knows love and won’t give up on it, but also makes the best of the situation at hand. Her reunion with her long-lost girl makes me go “awww.”
My only real problem with The Lost and Found Pony - which is not a fault of the book itself, but evidence of a slight mismatch between the book and my family - is the fact that it is far too long for even my book-obsessed two year old’s attention span. Although I assumed she would be reunited with the girl, I never actually made it all the way through until I reread it prior to writing this review. Still, he enjoys the half or so of the book he’ll sit through, and absolutely adores the pictures (horsey! elephant!).
The Lost and Found Pony will definitely be keeping a place in our permanent collection, so we can continue to revisit it as Daniel grows older and can perhaps even sit through to the ending.
 Buy this book from:
Powells | Indiebound*
Source: Review copy
* These links are all affiliate links. If you buy your book here I’ll make a very small amount of money that goes towards hosting, giveaways, etc.
Copyright protected by Digiprove © 2011
Joy for Beginners by Erica Bauermeister
Published by Putnam Adult, an imprint of Penguin
Kate is officially clear of cancer, but is now facing something potentially even more terrifying: whitewater rafting through the Grand Canyon with her daughter. When her friends gather to celebrate her recovery, though, they convince her that she should take advantage of the years returned to her and go for it. If Kate is going to face her fears, though, she is determined that the rest of her friends - a very heterogeneous group of women, who originally befriended one another during a baby holding circle for Sara and her twins.
Bauermeister is a master of connected stories that read more like a single, complete unit than disparate pieces. Her debut novel, The School of Essential Ingredients, followed a group of people taking cooking lessons with a very special woman. Joy for Beginners is even more wonderfully cohesive; all of the women are friends, so their lives intersect and intertwine in lovely, natural ways.
Part of what worked so well about Joy for Beginners is the fact that each of these women were at different stages of life, and in different places in their life. There is something for nearly every woman to identify with. Even better, however, is the fact that all of the women are real and genuine enough that the reader can empathize even with the ones whose lives least closely resemble her own.
An absolutely lovely book. Highly recommended.
Buy this book from:
Powells | Indiebound*
Source: Publisher, at request of the author.
* These links are all affiliate links. If you buy your book here I’ll make a very small amount of money that goes towards hosting, giveaways, etc.
Copyright protected by Digiprove © 2011
The Art of Forgetting by Camille Noe Pagan
Published by Dutton, an imprint of Penguin
For years, Marissa has been trailing her best friend Julia around. When she was new to school, it was Julia who befriended her, who rescued her from the realm of friendless new girl. Julia may have been bossy, at best, but she was Marissa’s friend. Until one day, when Julia is running late to meet Marissa for dinner and she is hit by a car. Julia’s physical injuries are relatively minor, but her brain injuries are not. She hasn’t forgotten entirely who she is, but her behavior is somewhat erratic and she does not always recognize her friends and family.
“Oh, I know who you are,” she says haughtily, instantly reminding me of my grandfather after he developed Alzheimer’s. The comparison sends a chill straight down spine. -p. 19*
Throwing the reader immediately into the drama can be a risky proposition for a novel; there is always the possibility that even the most heart-wrenching event will leave the reader feeling cold, wondering why she should care about anything that happens to these characters. Debut novelist Camile Noe Pagan made it work, though. The Art of Forgetting opens in the first few pages with Julia’s tragic accident and it packs all the emotional impact one could hope for.
I very much enjoyed The Art of Forgetting, although I did have a couple of minor issues. First and foremost, I hated Marissa and Julia’s friendship. I was hoping all along that Julia’s accident would bring Marissa to the realization that they had never really been friends. Julia was very much a mean girl, at times bordering on abusive. Marissa’s personal growth arc throughout the novel is fantastic, but at times I wished it went just little further so that she could disassociate herself more completely with her friend. In addition, some of the dialogue was every so slightly stilted. Still, most of the writing and characterization was so good that even with the minor complaints I very much enjoyed The Art of Forgetting.
Recommended.
*Page numbers based on the egalley
Buy this book from:
Powells | Indiebound*
Source: The Art of Forgetting.
* These links are all affiliate links. If you buy your book here I’ll make a very small amount of money that goes towards hosting, giveaways, etc.
Copyright protected by Digiprove © 2011
Friendship Bread by Darien Gee
Published by Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House
Julia Evarts’s life is basically falling apart. She has her husband Mark and her daughter Gracie, but she can’t enjoy them, not since her son died, just months before her daughter’s birth. Since that time her grief has crippled her, she can’t work, she can barely care for her daughter, and her husband is like a stranger to her. And then, one day, someone leaves a bag of friendship bread starter on her doorstep. With every ounce of insistence a five-year old can muster, Gracie cajoles Julia into making the bread and, to everyone’s surprise, Julia has fun with it. Before too long she is venturing to the new tea shop in town, and befriending Madeline and Hannah, both new transplants to Avalon.
As the friendship bread begins to make its way around the town of Avalon, it brings people together as well as pulling people apart. Women are coming together all over town in order to find new ways to use their starter. Of course, there are also people running away from their friends and neighbors because they can’t handle even one more bag of starter.
Early on in Friendship Bread I wasn’t really sure about it. For one thing, there are a great many characters. In addition to Julia, Mark, Madeline, and Hannah, Julia’s sister Livvie and her friend, a reporter named Edie are also main characters. Besides all of these people who have significant story, there are alternating chapters with other members of the community once the bread begins to circulate. In addition, it is a little more uplifting than I typically like. I know that sounds ridiculous, but it was obviously uplifting from the beginning, more so than I typically read.
Except then, Friendship Bread completely sucked me in. 100%. The past tragedies of the citizens of Avalon tugged at my heart-strings, and then when things got really uplifting, it was enough to bring tears to my eyes. Darien Gee created something pretty fantastic here to move me so much with something that initially seemed somewhat lighter than I typically prefer.
Recommended
Buy this book from:
Powells | Indiebound*
Source: Publisher.
* These links are all affiliate links. If you buy your book here I’ll make a very small amount of money that goes towards hosting, giveaways, etc.
Copyright protected by Digiprove © 2011
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