A Funeral, Covid, and New Books

It has been one eventful week.

A cousin’s battle with health issues came to an end. My brother and I decided to drive to Buffalo, NY for the funeral.

A facebook friend gave me suggestions for hotels. I was intrigued by a new hotel in a historic building in downtown Buffalo. The Richardson Hotel, whose building was designed by Henry Hobson Richardson, is situated on a grounds designed by Frederick Law Olmstead. It is located near legendary Forest Lawn Cemetery, the art museum, the university, and other attractions. It was once an asylum. The red sandstone building is Romanesque Revival in style, and consists of long wings on either side of the towers.

We set off at 1 pm for a five hour drive. We were a few miles down the road when the low tire pressure warning light came on. We were literally driving past a tire store, and drove in. They warned of a 2 1/2 hour wait. Across the street was another tire store, so we made our way there. Same wait time. We searched maps and found a third store near by. They took us right away. At 2:45, we were on our way again.

A lane closure has us at a crawl for 2 miles. We finally reached the Port Huron bridge to Ontario four hours after we left!

We reached the hotel at 8:45 at night, exhausted and weary. And promptly went to the wrong wing and couldn’t find our rooms! We found out way back to the desk after walking 3/4 of a mile through the long halls. After learning our way around, we had a comfortable stay.

We had a little free time to visit our parents at the Elmlawn Cemetery in Tonawanda, NY, and to drive along the Niagara River. We accidently found an amazing restaurant for seafood, visited a book store in the Elmwood neighborhood, and lunched at an upscale taco place.

On Saturday morning, my brother went to see a Frank Llyod Wright house and even where our grandfather worked during WWII. I was tired and stayed at the hotel that morning.

We drove along the Niagara River and by the Grand Island Bridge, places I know so well. We had lunch at a restaurant on the Erie Canal in downtown Tonawanda, dining on local Buffalo cuisine–beef on weck. The ‘weck’ is kummelweck rolls, topped with caraway and salt. I couldn’t eat it all!

I have masked in public and avoided eating out for three years. But I didn’t mask at the visitation, funeral, funeral luncheon, or family gathering. We had to eat all our meals out. So, perhaps it was no surprise that by the time we drove back home, I was feeling poorly. The next day I was tested for flu, strep, and covid–and came out with Paxlovid. The day after that, my brother and my husband tested positive for covid.

Paxlovid has been a miracle for me, and after three doses I felt nearly ‘normal.’

Waiting for me at home was book mail!

From A. A. Knopf came Tomorrow Perhaps the Future: Writers, Outsiders, and the Spanish Civil War by Sarah Watling and The Lost Wife by Susanna Moore.

And I received Mending What is Broken by Robert McKean from Caitlin Hamilton Marketing.

New galleys on the shelf include

• White House Wild Child: How Alice Roosevelt Broke All the Rules and Won the Heart of America by Shelley Fraser Mickle
• Class by Stephanie Land, author of the hit Maid
• You Have to Be Prepared to Die Before You Can Begin to Live: Ten Weeks in Birmingham that Changed America by Paul Kix
• The Nightingale Affair by Tim Mason

I also received a surprise package from Simon & Schuster Book Club Favorites: a set of illustrations for the imaginary world in the novel The Secret Book of Flora Lea by Patti Callahan Henry! I had just started reading the novel and love it. The photo of the book cover doesn’t do it justice. It is beautifully designed.

Exciting news for the library book club! I have been hoping to schedule more author Zoom meetings and was given permission for 3 to 4 a year, as the readers love them but also want to meet in person. I was lucky that Anthony Marra graciously agreed to join us next month! We read his novel A Constellation of Vital Phenomena a few months ago, and are next reading Mercury Pictures Presents.

You bet I will be masking again in public. The minute clinic nurse said she hadn’t seen covid for a few weeks, but funerals were notorious speaders.

Stay safe.

Find your bliss.

Juno Loves Legs by Karl Geary

They were beautiful, beautiful children and I thought, surely we were beautiful children too–why didn’t anyone say? We should have been told of it, our beauty.

from Juno Loves Legs by Karl Geary

Two Dublin teens act out against their peers and the priest who runs their Catholic school. Juno is fierce, brash, her mother struggling to keep the family afloat, her father distant and drunk; “They were two mouths and I was their ear,” she tells us. Her only friend and ally is ‘Legs,’ a loner ostracized by the Sister for his beauty and verbally abused by the Father for his sexual orientation. The pair form an allegiance and take care of each other, and love each other.

The Catholic church rules their world, constantly reminding the children of their sinfulness and the church’s authority given by God. Juno and Leg have no haven in their homes. The world is seemingly against them. All they have is each other.

Legs is a talented artist. Juno loves to watch her mother sew and repair garments, longing to be allowed to use the Singer sewing machine. She spends hours at the local library, the librarian suggesting books to read. There is another world that Juno can’t even imagine. Where young women go to college and find careers.

Tragic events separate the pair, but when they reunite, Legs protects and cares for the only person who ever loved him, even while Juno must learn the limits of their relationship and how to let go.

“He was never really my fella, he was something else, something more,” Juno thinks. Their love is more beautiful than any romance.

A poignant portrait of two people caught in poverty and an intolerant society, this one will break your heart.

I received a free egalley from the publisher through Edelweiss. My review is fair and unbiased.

Juno Loves Legs
by Karl Geary
Catapult
Pub Date April 18, 2023
ISBN: 9781646221134

from the publisher

Juno Loves Legs is the story of two teens labeled as delinquents. Juno and “Legs” grow up on the same housing estate in Dublin, where spirited, intelligent Juno is ostracized for her poverty and Legs is persecuted for his sexuality; they find safety only in each other.

Set against the backdrop of Dublin in the 1980s, a place of political, social and religious change, the friends yearn for an unbound life and together they begin to fight to take up the space of who they truly are. As their defiance reverberates through their lives, the children are further alienated from their surrounding society through acts of bravery and cowardice, both their own and others’. Finding themselves as outsiders, they are feared, coveted and watched, but rarely truly seen.

Told through the eyes of Juno, we see the pair begin to navigate the political and oftentimes confusing adult world with honesty and intuition. A country emerging from a dark Catholicism into the wider world of possibilities. Who is invited into modernity and gentrification and who is left behind?

Caught between the rich depth of her intellect and the harsh reality of her life, we follow Juno as she begins to understand how divergent a life lived and a life thought can be.

Juno Loves Legs shows the frustration of feeling trapped in a life that is not yours and the ability of friendship to lift us out of our experiences and into a truer version of ourselves. It is a novel that reminds us that kindness, bravery, and love appear in places where they are not always expected and in forms not usually recognised, but with a potency that cannot be ignored.

Out of Ireland by Marian O’Shea Wernicke

My interest was caught by Out of Ireland when I saw it was about the Irish Republican Brotherhood which arose to fight for Irish independence from Britain.

The novel tells the story of an Irish family struggling to survive after the death of their patriarch. The eldest son will inherit the farm, along with the requirement to hand over a percentage of the crop to the English landowner. The daughter, Eileen, is an intelligent sixteen-year-old with a love of books, who is forced into an arranged marriage with a man who has lost his beloved wife and son. She does not love her withdrawn husband, but takes on her yoke dutifully. When she births a son, he becomes the shared love of the family.

The younger son is involved with the Irish Republican Army, fighting for Irish independence from Britain. He is also hopelessly in love with the landowner’s daughter. When she finds a gun he has hidden in the stall of her horse, marking him a rebel, he flees Ireland, first for London, then to New York City. In America, he seeks to join the Clan na Gael, ex-pat Irish who send money and arms back home to support the cause. Seeking advancement, he moves to St. Louis, MO, where he becomes embroiled in a crime syndicate claiming to support the Irish cause.

Crop failures impel Eileen and her family to follow her brother to America. The depredations and unsanitary conditions of steerage, chillingly rendered, culminates in tragedy for Eileen. Life in America has additional challenges for the family, and more sorrow comes their way. Eileen joins her brother in St. Louis to start anew.

I was impressed by the descriptions of daily life in Ireland, well weaving in the complicated political situation. The personal story was engaging and poignant. The ending was perhaps a little too sweetly wrapped up for me, but will satisfy romantics. It was an enjoyable read.

I received a free egalley through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Out of Ireland
by Marian O’Shea Wernicke
Pub Date April 25, 2023
She Writes Press
ISBN: 9781647423995

from the publisher

In the late 1860s in Bantry, Ireland, sixteen-year-old Eileen O’Donovan is forced by her family to marry an older widower whom she barely knows and does not love. Her brother Michael, at age nineteen, becomes involved with the outlawed Irish Republican Brotherhood, a secret organization dedicated to the violent overthrow of British rule in Ireland. Their fates intertwine when they each decide to emigrate to America, where both tragedy and happiness await them.

An exciting coming-of-age story of a brother and sister in an Ireland still under the harsh rule of the British, Out of Ireland brings alive the story of our ancestors who braved the dangers of immigration in order to find a better life for themselves and their families.

about the author

MARIAN O’SHEA WERNICKE is the author of the debut novel Toward That Which is Beautiful (She Writes Press, 2020). She has also published a memoir about her father called Tom O’Shea: A Twentieth Century Man.

Born in St. Louis, Missouri, to an Irish Catholic family, she entered the convent of the Sisters of the Most Precious Blood at age sixteen and spent eleven years as a nun before leaving the convent. Later, she met and married Michael Wernicke, an electrical engineer from Pensacola, Florida. Wernicke earned a master’s degree in English from the University of West Florida and went on to become a professor of English at Pensacola State College for twenty-five years. Upon her retirement from college teaching, Wernicke began her new life as full-time writer in 2010. She and her husband now live in Austin, Texas

The Skin and Its Girl by Sarah Cypher

Long ago, all stories told only the truth, in a literal way, with no need to jump around and gather meanings piece by piece.

from The Skin and Its Girl by Sarah Cypher

If you are looking for a plot-driven novel that is an easy read, you can just pass this book by. If you love lush language, deep psychological exploration, a circuitous and slow reveal, and haunting characters, then, yes, this is your book. Employing folk tales and metaphor, and rich with history, this is a remarkable debut novel addressing questions of identity, heritage, love, and loyalty.

The Rummani family’s stories were kept by Auntie Nuha. She rescues a newborn from being given up for adoption. The infant’s mother was depressive and separated from a husband who had betrayed her. While the child was being born, the family’s abandoned soap factory oversea in Palestine was being destroyed. The legendary soap had made the family fortune. Auntie told of a blue soap that turned girls blue, giving a heritage to the new baby whose skin was indigo.

Now grown, the girl has come to her aunt’s graveside. Both women were constrained by their skin; Auntie taking on another’s identity, and the girl by the blue that set her apart. She is struggling to decide between staying with her mother or leaving with her lover. A decision that Auntie had made upon her birth, when she had planned to leave with her lover but stayed behind to care for her.

I’m at your graveside on your actual birthday desiring help, perspective, a story to follow through a patch of unspeakable confusion.

from The Skin and Its Girl by Sarah Cypher

“There is no truth but in old women’s tales,” the girl is told. Auntie was full of stories. Her stories interpret life and the world: the Tower of Babel, the pursuit of an elusive silver gazelle, a boy on fire saved by a girl’s rope of long hair.

An admirable debut novel.

I received a free egalley from the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.

The Skin and Its Girl
by Sarah Cypher
Pub Date April 25, 2023
Ballantine Books
ISBN: 9780593499535

from the publisher

A young, queer Palestinian American woman pieces together her great-aunt’s secrets in this sweeping debut, confronting questions of sexual identity, exile, and lineage.

In a Pacific Northwest hospital far from the Rummani family’s ancestral home in Palestine, the heart of a stillborn baby begins to beat and her skin turns vibrantly, permanently cobalt blue. On the same day, the Rummanis’ centuries-old soap factory in Nablus is destroyed in an air strike. The family matriarch and keeper of their lore, Aunt Nuha, believes that the blue girl embodies their sacred history, harkening back to a time when the Rummanis were among the wealthiest soap-makers and their blue soap was a symbol of a legendary love.

Decades later, Betty returns to Aunt Nuha’s gravestone, faced with a difficult decision: Should she stay in the only country she’s ever known, or should she follow her heart and the woman she loves, perpetuating her family’s cycle of exile? Betty finds her answer in partially translated notebooks that reveal her aunt’s complex life and struggle with her own sexuality, which Nuha hid to help the family immigrate to the United States. But, as Betty soon discovers, her aunt hid much more than that.

The Skin and Its Girl is a searing, poetic tale about desire and identity, and a provocative exploration of how we let stories divide, unite, and define us—and wield even the power to restore a broken family. Sarah Cypher is that rare debut novelist who writes with the mastery and flair of a seasoned storyteller.