Staff Review: Circling the Sun by Paula McLain

Circling the Sun is an exhilarating novel -- author Paula McLain has done it again. Her second book, The Paris Wife, published in 2011, told the novelized story of Ernest Hemingway's ill-fated first marriage, to Hadley Richardson, a story that played out among the brilliant ex-pat community known as the Lost Generation in Paris in the 1920s. The Paris Wife quickly became a bestseller.

This time round, McLain tackles the life of aviator Beryl Markham, who told her story herself in her marvelous memoir West with the Night, a book that Hemingway, incidentally, referred to as "bloody wonderful." 

Beryl Markham was born in England in 1902 and moved to Kenya (then British East Africa) as a tiny girl. Her mother was unable to handle life in Africa and soon fled with Beryl's older brother, leaving Beryl in her father's care for good. This unusual and tragic abandonment had a silver lining: it seems to have liberated Beryl from most of the rigid restrictions and tiresome conventions placed upon girls in affluent British families. Instead Beryl literally ran wild, which makes for one invigorating story.

When small, Beryl played freely in the African wilderness with her close friend Kibii of the Kipsigis tribe and received almost no formal education. She hunted warthogs barefoot with a spear, attended tribal dances, and was mauled by a lion. Her father bred and trained horses at their farm in Kenya, and horses became Beryl's passion too. Before she was 20, she became the first licensed female racehorse trainer in Kenya, and at age 34 she became the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic and the first person to do so nonstop east to west.

Have I mentioned yet that Beryl was also beautiful and loved to party? She hobnobbed with all the British colonials, including the uber-hedonistic Happy Valley set, whose drinking, drug use, and promiscuity have become the stuff of legend. Beryl herself married three times, disastrously, and had countless lovers throughout her life. The love of her life was Denys Finch Hatton, the aristocratic big-game hunter and not-so-secret paramour of the writer Isak Dineson (played by Meryl Streep to Robert Redford's Finch Hatton in the 1985 film Out of Africa).

This review cannot even begin to describe the adventurous, ambitious life of Beryl Markham. My only quibble with the novel is that it airbrushes some of Beryl's less admirable qualities. In real life she suffered for them though: she was often embroiled in scandal, she never received her due acclaim, and her final days saw her living in poverty. My caveat to readers is that references to safaris, lion hunting, ivory expeditions -- indeed to so many things decadent, exploitative, and colonial -- can be hard to take. But this was the (waning) age of imperialism and of the Great White Hunter (in the U.S. Teddy Roosevelt had recently been president) and it must have seemed at the time that Brittania still ruled and that Africa's wildlife was endless.

~Ann, Adult Services

Staff Review: Kitchens of the Great Midwest by J. Ryan Stradal

Many readers are calling J. Ryan Stradal's debut novel Kitchens of the Great Midwest "quirky." The way I'd describe it -- and a reader's possible reaction to it -- is this: it may not be your cup of tea if you love linear plots, character development, and satisfying resolutions. On the other hand, you may love it if you're open to vivid vignettes, you love eating (and reading about) food, and you have a big, broad sense of humor. Living in the northern Midwest (in Dubuque, for instance) will dispose you toward it too.

Although labeled a novel, Kitchens more closely resembles a set of linked stories, in the first half of which Eva Thorvald, the protagonist, is a child. Eva is gifted with an exceptional palate and through the course of the book's twenty years becomes the most celebrated chef in America, one whose exquisite dishes are available only through highly-sought-after, ticketed dinners at venues across the U.S. The second half of the book circles around Eva more distantly, through the exquisitely-portrayed (and sometimes skewered) lives of a large cast of secondary characters. 

Although there were a couple times early on when I considered dropping the book altogether (one chapter in particular just seemed too dark and too mean), I soldiered on and I'm so glad I did. I soon found myself laughing out loud, recognizing fictional characters that matched (to a T) individuals I'd known in Wisconsin, and marveling at the heartfelt poignance of some of the scenes. Originally from Minnesota, Stradal is a confident debut writer, maybe because writing is just one thing he does well (he's also a TV producer who knows a bit about food and a whole lot more about wine -- food and wine pairings feature prominently in the novel).

In the funniest parts, Stradal pokes gentle fun at Midwestern county-fair-bake-sale participants (who apparently haven't changed much since the fifties), but also at those hyper-fastidious eaters within the new food culture who are more obsessed with what they can't or won't eat than with what they can or will. A New York Times reviewer points out in a positive review that describes Kitchens as "a gastronomic portrait of a region," that "Stradal reserves his most gleeful satire for the overwrought foodies who rock back and forth in their chairs, weeping and licking their dishes, in response to a $5,000-a-plate dinner for which they’ve spent four years on the waiting list."

So, set aside any pre-conceived notions of what a novel should be and hop aboard for this fun, fast-moving ride. You may even decide to read the book twice, as the large cast of characters who re-appear only after the passage of many pages and years can be tricky to keep track of first time 'round (the book ought to come with a schematic). I wouldn't want to read book after book structured this way, but like the occasional gooey dessert, this book was pretty delicious.

~Ann, Adult Services

New Item Tuesday

via Instagram http://ift.tt/1Q3PhAg