What We’re Reading

The seduction of water | Carol Goodman

Carol Goodman definitely has a thing for water. She has written several mysteries set in the Hudson Valley in which water is a key element. (The Lake of Dead Languages and The Drowning Tree are two others). I heard her speak about the importance of place at a library conference, which led me back to her books.

Here she tells the story of an adjunct English professor who shuttles beteen classes in a prison and community college in Manhattan. She is in an uncommitted state her relationship with her artist lover has no future, and she is unable to commit to completing her dissertation. After selling a short story to an avant garde magazine, she is persuaded to write a book about her mother - a famous author who died under mysterious circumstances when she was a child.

Her research takes her back to the Catskill resort her parents had managed, and which her aunt is still managing.As she delves into the fanatasy world her mother had created, and seeks the lost third volume of her famous series, she uncovers a reality that someone close to her will kill to keep hidden.

Goodman stated in her talk that her locales are all composites of places. The resort has elements of Mohonk, or perhaps Miniwaska House.

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Shrimp | Rachel Cohn

Rating:

After her summer in NYC, Cyd Charisse has a slightly different outlook on life arriving back in California. Happy to have her freedom, she’s lookingg forward to the year, which she plans to make the year of Shrimp.

Much to her dismay, Shrimp is MIA, and rumors abound about his whereabouts and whether he’ll be back or not. After running into his brother’s girlfriend, Cyd finds out that he will indeed be back, but with a slight change: his parents.

As it turns out, that will be only the first of many surprises, and it won’t be the year Cyd, now CC, expected. The uneasy peace with Nancy, the making of actual girl friends, who turn out to be not so bad, the roller coaster of CC and Shrimp. But through it all, CC learns a lot–about herself, people in general, and life.

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Eating the Cheshire Cat | Helen Ellis

Rating:

If you appreciate a darker sense of humor, this is a book for you. If not, you might only end up wanting to throttle the cast.

Sarina Summers is perfect in every way. Except for her pinky fingers. Their slight crookedness mars her style, and so when she is 16, she gets drunk and has her mother break them.

Nicole Hicks lives across the street, and has idolized Sarina her whole life. Her mother is nicer, her life is better. As long as you keep her happy, she’ll return the favor. And all Nicole wants is to keep this balance. So much so that she intentionally fails 10th grade, thinking it will better her chances for a friendship, when in fact it proves to be her undoing.

Bitty Jack Carlson grew up in a small town, on a Summer Camp. Summers, she attends. The rest of the year, she’s home-schooled. The year Sarina attends, life changes forever.

Caught using a hairdryer in an unusual fashion by Bitty Jack’s father while he’s changing a light bulb, Sarina cries abuse. Camp maintenance workers are no longer allowed into cabins without staff invitation, and her father is not allowed to work in them at all during summer, but otherwise, things mostly blow over. Until years down the line when Bitty Jack is dating Sarina’s first boyfriend, and Sarina’s life is coming apart at the seems.

Sarina hatches a plan to get Stewart back. The plan? Out herself as an abuse survivor at a Take Back the Night rally, where both Stewart and Bitty Jack will be there to hear. The back-lash causes the Camp to come under siege by the Press and thus ends the Carlson’s have always known. So when Nicole Hicks climbs through Bitty Jack’s window late one night with her own plan, rather than being afraid, Bitty Jack is mesmerized.

She has few details. They need to hijack the mascot uniform from Stewart. That’s all she knows. From the President’s Box she looks on, and as we wait for Nicole’s plan to hash out, we come to find Bitty Jack had one of her own.

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