Posts Tagged Porter Square Books
book review: On Turpentine Lane
Posted by Amy Steele in Books on February 28, 2017
On Turpentine Lane by Elinor Lipman. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt| February 2017| 305 pages | $24.00| ISBN: 978-0-544-80824-9
RATING: ****/5*
Faith Frankel, a thirty-two-year-old single woman, moved back to her hometown and works in stewardship at her alma mater, a private school. She recently purchased a house with a questionable history. Faith’s fiancé quit his job to trek across the country living off of Faith’s credit cards. He’s not walking for a cause but to find himself and Faith’s rather bothered by the photos with various women he keeps posting to social media. Faith’s father has become a painter, specifically making Chagall knock-offs and personalizing them. He becomes involved with a younger woman setting off some issues with her parents and the rest of the family (mainly Faith and her brother). While juggling her fiancés antics with her father’s new career and her mom’s meddling, her brother hustles with his snowplow business in the small western Massachusetts town.
Why someone so smart and independent would remain engaged to this unaware guy? What’s appealing about Faith is that she’s not obsessed with getting married even though she did get engaged to her boyfriend before he embarked on his cross-country walk. She enjoys her work but isn’t obsessed with it. While her friends can’t understand why Faith moved back home from Manhattan, she’s thrilled to make a cozy home on Turpentine Lane. She’s content with her straightforward comfortable career and her new house.
Author Elinor Lipman describes Faith’s position as writing thank-you notes (by hand!) to donors. I have worked in stewardship and never wrote notes by hand. But I let it go as it’s a small town and a private school and a novel. In the Q & A that arrived with the press materials for the novel there’s this question: “Faith works at a private school as Director of Stewardship. Is that a real job?” Do people, particularly in publishing and writing, not know about it? At another point in the novel there’s mention of a landline. I don’t know anyone under 50 who still uses a landline.
The local police keep searching Faith’s basement for murder evidence based on an anonymous tip. After finding a creepy photo album in her attic, Faith invites her handsome coworker, who recently split with his live-in girlfriend, to become her housemate. It’s not long before the longtime friends become romantically involved. Her brother and her mother end up helping Faith investigate the strange photo album and its connection to the past owner. This all sounds rather madcap and it could go terribly awry. In Lipman’s hands it’s a clever and delightful read.
A native of Massachusetts, Lipman graduated from Simmons College. I am also an alumna. I’ve read every one of Lipman’s novels. My favorite is The Inn at Lake Devine. I also really like Isabel’s Bed and Then She Found Me (which was adapted into a film starring Helen Hunt). Her novels tend to be witty, engaging and feature multifaceted, appealing and flawed female characters. Is there any more intriguing kind of woman? If you’re looking for a sharp and entertaining read, On Turpentine Lane will definitely satisfy.
–review by Amy Steele
FTC Disclosure: I received this book for review from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Elinor Lipman will read at Porter Square Books, Cambridge, Mass. on Thursday, March 2, 2017.
book review: We Love You, Charlie Freeman
Posted by Amy Steele in Books on March 9, 2016
We Love You, Charlie Freeman by Kaitlyn Greenidge. Algonquin| March 8, 2016| 326 pages | $25.95| ISBN: 978-1-61620-467-9
RATING: *****/5*
We Love You, Charlie Freeman stands out as a thoughtful and provocative novel which effectively and creatively winds together numerous subjects from coming-of-age, first love, adolescence, sisterhood, race, anthropology, history and family dynamics. In 1990, a family relocates from Dorchester, Massachusetts to the Berkshires to teach sign language to a chimpanzee at the Toneybee Institute for Great Ape Research.
Mainly Laurel, the mother, will work with Charlie, the chimpanzee. Both daughters– teenager Charlotte and 11-year-old Callie– know sign language and the entire family with live with Charlie as if he’s another member of the family, sort of a brother. That’s the intent. Charlotte and Callie went to a “black, deaf overnight camp in the backwoods of Maryland.” Charlotte surmises it was for the two to make friends. She notes: “In Dorchester, our constant signing, our bookish ways and bans from fast-food restaurants and booty music, assured that me and Callie were unpopular on the block.” Debut novelist Kaitlyn Greenidge grew up in Boston and accurately describes Dorchester, the Berkshires and race in Massachusetts. The family soon learns about the institute’s notorious reputation, insidious rumors and unusual history.
Greenidge rotates points-of-view between the family members as well as a black woman name Nymphadora with an unusual association with the institution in 1929. Nymphadora describes herself: “I am a thirty-six-year-old unmarried, orphaned Negro schoolteacher, in charge of a room full of impressionable young colored minds and every night, I sing a dirty nursery rhyme to help me go to sleep. It is enough to laugh, if I did not always feel like weeping.”
Nymphadora lives in the mostly black Spring City. Back then researcher Dr. Gardner hires Nymphadora as a model to sketch. He sketches her nude and asks her to pose in unusual style. One day Nymphadora comes across the sketches Dr. Gardner made but instead of her face they contain the face of one of the chimpanzees. Appalled and upset, Nymphadora takes one of the sketches with her and writes to Dr. Gardner. Attempts and fails to collect an explanation or apology. The layers to Dr. Gardner’s shocking studies highlight misconceptions and stereotypes about race. Greenridge writes beautifully about the relationship that develops between Nympahdora and Dr. Gardner. She’s naïve. She trusts him enough to expose herself fully to him. He takes advantage and embarrasses her as well as many others.
In her new high school, although she’s one of few black students, Charlotte enjoys being rather anonymous. She notes: “Here, in Courtland County, I had the benefit of being unknown. Back home in Dorchester, I had been with the same kids since kindergarten and they all remembered me as the know-it-all who got uppity and insulted everyone in a secret language she spoke with her hands.” Charlotte’s dealing with a crush at school on another black student named Adia Breitling who teaches her many things about black culture, its history, the music and provides her information about what’s rumored about the institute. Charlotte notes that according to the Breitlings: “Black people could love Joni Mitchell but still claim to hate white singers. According to them, these were the things black people did not do: eat mayonnaise; drink milk; listen to Elvis Presley; watch Westerns or Dynasty; read Time magazine; appreciate Jack London; know the lyrics to Kenny Rogers’s songs; suffer fools; enjoy the cold or any kind of winter.”
One day Charlotte even finds her mom breastfeeding Charlie which leads her to question the entire situation. It’s clearly upsetting and weird for her. She also comes across information about the experiments conducted on black people by the institute in the 1930s. She speaks out at a dinner with Ms. Julia Toneybee-Leroy one evening and throws everyone into a frenzy. I preferred and appreciated Charlotte’s point-of-view most of all and it might have been as effective if she told the Freeman’s story.
Immediately bonding with Charlie, Laurel carries him around like a baby. He’s instantly attached and rather protective of their relationship. He wants no one to come between him and Laurel. This position at the institute training Charlie could change everything for Laurel. She’s always insisted on using black sign language versus white. “She should have started signing white again, at least get a shot at the better jobs, but Laurel was stubborn. She truly believed that she could win people over to her side of things. They only had to see black sign language, she was certain, to understand that is was special.” And Laurel does in the end choose Charlie over everything and everyone.
Callie grows jealous that her sister has a new friend and that her mom spends most of her time with Charlie. She starts over-eating and gains lots of weight. Charles, the father—who teaches at the school Charlotte attends–begins to grow apart from Laurel, abhors the entire experiment and decides to move out. This once close-knit family feels increasingly strained and pushed by Charlie the chimpanzee and Laurel’s fervent devotion to him. Eventually everything implodes.
–review by Amy Steele
Kaitlyn Greenidge will be reading at Porter Square Books on Thursday, March 17, 2016.
FTC Disclosure: I received this book for review from Algonquin Books.
purchase at Amazon: We Love You, Charlie Freeman: A Novel
September Boston-area Book Readings of Note
Posted by Amy Steele in Books on September 2, 2015
Christopher Moore
Secondhand Souls
Brookline Booksmith
At Coolidge Corner Theatre
Wednesday, September 2 at 6pm
read my interview with Christopher Moore
Jill Bialosky
The Prize
Harvard Book Store
Thursday, September 10 at 7pm
Amy Stewart
Girl Waits with Gun
Harvard Book Store
Friday, September 11 at 7pm
Mary Karr
The Art of Memoir
Monday, September 14 at 6pm
Harvard Book Store at Brattle Theatre
Ann Beattie
The State We’re In: Maine Stories
Harvard Book Store
Tuesday, September 15 at 7pm
Alice Hoffman
The Marriage of Opposites
Newtonville Books
Thursday, September 17 at 7pm
Salman Rushdie
Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights
Harvard Book Store at First Parish Church
Monday, September 21 at 7pm
Nina de Gramont
The Last September
Porter Square Books
Monday, September 21 at 7pm
Lauren Groff
Fates and Furies
Harvard Book Store
Tuesday, September 22 at 7pm
J. Shoshanna Ehrlich
Regulating Desire
Harvard Book Store
Friday, September 25 at 3pm
Elizabeth Gilbert
Big Magic
Harvard Book Store
Friday, September 25 at 7pm
Michael I. Bennett, MD and Sarah Bennett
F*ck Feelings: One Shrink’s Practical Advice for Manageing All Life’s Impossible Challenges
Brookline Booksmith
Tuesday, September 29 at 7pm
Jojo Moyes
After You
Brookline Booksmith
Wednesday, September 30 at 7pm
Summer Boston-area Book Readings of Note
Posted by Amy Steele in Books on July 15, 2015
JULY
Mia Alvar
In the Country: stories
Harvard Book Store
Wednesday, July 22 at 7pm
Elizabeth Little
Dear Daughter
Harvard Book Store
Tuesday, July 28 at 7pm
Anthony Amore
The Art of the Con: The Most Notorious Fakes, Frauds, and Forgeries in the Art World
Brookline Booksmith
Thursday, July 30 at 7pm
Jennifer Steil
The Ambassador’s Wife
Porter Square Books
Thursday, July 30 at 7pm
AUGUST
J. Shoshanna Ehrlich
Regulating Desire
Brookline Booksmith
Tuesday, August 4 at 7pm
Alice Hoffman
The Marriage of Opposites
Harvard Book Store
Wednesday, August 5 at 7pm
Felicia Day
You’re Never Weird on the Internet [almost]
Brookline Booksmith
Wednesday, August 12 at 6pm
Alex Dolan
The Euthanist
Harvard Book Store
Thursday, August 13 at 7pm
BOOK TOUR: Anita Diamant
Posted by Amy Steele in Books on December 5, 2014
It’s a great next few days for Anita Diamant. Lifetime will air a miniseries adaptation of her beloved novel and best-selling novel The Red Tent this Sunday, December 7 and Monday, December 8.It’s a very good miniseries with an all-star cast including Minnie Driver [About a Boy, Beyond the Lights, Good Will Hunting], Debra Winger [An Officer and a Gentleman, Terms of Endearment], Iain Glen [Game of Thrones], Monica Baccarin [Gotham, Homeland] and Rebecca Ferguson [The White Queen] as Dinah.
Tuesday December 9 is the release date for Diamant’s lates novel The Boston Girl, a wonderful work of historical fiction that focuses on a savvy, spunky feminist heroine from the early 1900s and beyond. I’m halfway through and will publish a review before the release date. I adore it so far.
BOOK TOUR:
Tuesday, December 9/ 7pm
Brookline Booksmith
Brookline, Mass.
Monday, December 15/ 7pm
Rockport Library
Rockport, Mass.
Tuesday, January 5/ 7pm
Porter Square Books
Cambridge, Mass.
Tuesday, January 13/ 7pm
6th & I Synagogue
Washington, DC
Thursday, January 15/ 7pm
Kepler’s
San Francisco, Calif.
Friday, January 16/ noon
Book Passage
Dallas, Texas
Sunday, January 18/ 7pm
Highland Park United Methodist Church
Dallas, Texas
Thursday, January 29/ 7pm
Newtonville Books
Newton, Mass.
Monday, February 2/ 8pm
Books & Books
Miami, Florida
Tuesday, February 3/ 2:30pm
West Boca Branch Library
Delray Beach, Florida
Wednesday, February 18 7pm
Newton Free Library
Newton, Mass.
Monday, February 23/ 7pm
Marcus JCC
Atlanta, Georgia
Sunday-Monday, March 15-16
Brandeis National Book & Author Event
Phoenix, Arizona
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