Tag: literary fiction

Book Review: The Biographies of Ordinary People, Vol. 1 by Nicole Dieker

whatcathyreadnext1 Comment

TheBiographiesofOrdinaryPeopleAbout the Book

The Biographies of Ordinary People is the story of the Gruber family: Rosemary and Jack, and their daughters Meredith, Natalie, and Jackie. The two-volume series begins in July 1989, on Rosemary’s thirty-fifth birthday; it ends in November 2016, on Meredith’s thirty-fifth birthday.

When the Grubers move to a small Midwestern town so Jack can teach music at a local college, each family member has an idea of who they might become. Jack wants to foster intellectual curiosity in his students. Rosemary wants to be “the most important person in her own life for the length of an afternoon.” Meredith wants to model herself after the girls she’s read about in books: Betsy Ray, Pauline Fossil, Jo March. Natalie wants to figure out how she’s different from her sisters – and Jackie, the youngest, wants to sing.

Set against the past thirty years of social and cultural changes, this story of family, friendship, and artistic ambition takes us into intimately familiar experiences: putting on a play, falling out with a best friend, getting dial-up internet for the first time. Drinking sparkling wine out of a paper cup on December 31, 1999 and wondering what will happen next.

Format: eBook, paperback (384 pp.)    Publisher:
Published: 23rd May 2017                       Genre: Literary Fiction

Purchase Links*
Amazon.co.uk ǀ Amazon.com ǀ Kobo
*links provided for convenience, not as part of any affiliate programme

Find The Biographies of Ordinary People, Vol .1 on Goodreads

My Review

In her guest post published on my blog a few months ago, Nicole talked about the  inspiration for her book and her reason for focussing on the lives of just one family. She illustrated this with a quote from volume two in which Meredith asks:

“There are all these biographies of famous people and how they lived their lives, but most of us aren’t going to be famous. It’s like we’ve gotten these models for life that aren’t applicable…We’ve learned about all of these well-known artists and how they did their work, but we don’t ever study how the rest of us do it. Where are the biographies of ordinary people?”

The Biographies of Ordinary People has been described as, ‘a millennial-era Little Women’ but don’t think that this means it’s at all sentimental, preachy or twee (not that I’m suggesting Little Women deserves those descriptions either). I saw a one-star review that said (summarising) “not much happens” and feel that the reviewer missed the point of this book really. Sure, there are no dramatic events like murders or violent deaths but then those things are not a feature of normal family life for most of us, unless you’re really unfortunate.

Things do happen in The Biographies of Ordinary People but they’re the things that make up everyday domestic life and reflect the experience of most of us growing up: making up games for entertainment on car journeys, starting school, making new friends, moving to a new town, going to the swimming pool, visiting the video store, attending your first prom. In the case of the Gruber girls, their experiences also reflect the period covered by the book so it’s videos not DVDs or streaming, video games not apps on your phone and the first glimpses of something called the Internet. There are also the sad events that unfortunately occur in any family over time.

Meredith is the character that resonated most strongly with me. She’s clever, thoughtful, bookish, protective towards her younger sisters, competitive but perhaps over-absorbed by the desire to get things right and, in this respect, can come across as mature beyond her years. At one point she muses, “I wonder if I am good at anything that I haven’t practiced”. Meredith seems absolutely real as a character with the good points and flaws that make up all humans and I think this is the author’s chief accomplishment that, in this book, she has created truly realistic characters that you feel you could meet in the street or the local shop.

I found the Gruber parents – Rosemary and Jack – really interesting although not altogether likeable. They seem so careful and controlled in their parenting and in bringing up their girls so that this carefulness becomes ingrained in Meredith, in particular. In fact, at the town’s annual Easter Egg Hunt, Rosemary does seem to recognise this: ‘Rosemary often didn’t know how to feel about her daughter; certainly there was a sense of pride and love and accomplishment in the idea that she had raised a child who would hold back, whose sharp, smart eyes would case the room for eggs and then help her younger sisters find them. But she also felt a little sad, watching this, because she saw her daughter growing up and doing exactly what she and Jack had taught her, think before you speak and before you act – and she worried that Meredith thought too much.’

I really liked the contrast made with the arrangements in the household of Meredith’s best friend, Alex.  ‘[Meredith] had never known anyone like Alex, who walked down the sidewalks saying hello to everyone, who climbed up on a library stepstool without asking, who ran towards her father every evening shouting “Daddy, daddy, daddy!” Mike MacAllister was big and red-headed and he would lift Alex off the ground or tousle her tangled hair. When Meredith went back to her own home she said “Hello” and whichever parent was in the living room said “Hello” and asked how her visit had been…’

‘That was one of the reasons Meredith and Alex were best friends. They talked, in Alex’s bedroom, about the Gruber way and the MacAllister way.’

I received a review copy courtesy of the author in return for an honest and unbiased review.  I really enjoyed the first volume of The Biographies of Ordinary People and I’m looking forward to reading the second volume covering the years 2004 to 2016 and seeing what life has in store for Meredith, her siblings and friends. It’s due for publication some time in 2018.

Follow my blog with Bloglovin

In three words: Intimate, realistic, engaging

NicoleDiekerAbout the Author

Nicole Dieker is a freelance writer, a senior editor at The Billfold, and a columnist at The Write Life. Her work has appeared in Boing Boing, Popular Science, Scratch, SparkLife, The Freelancer, The Toast, and numerous other publications. The Biographies of Ordinary People is her debut novel, if you don’t count the speculative fiction epic she wrote when she was in high school.

Connect with Nicole

Website ǀ Twitter ǀ Goodreads

 

Throwback Thursday: Letting Go by Maria Thompson Corley

whatcathyreadnext

ThrowbackThursday

Throwback Thursday is a weekly meme hosted by Renee at It’s Book Talk. It’s designed as an opportunity to share old favourites as well as books that we’ve finally got around to reading that were published over a year ago. If you decide to take part, please link back to It’s Book Talk.

This week is a book I’ve had on my review stack for a while: Letting Go by Maria Thompson Corley.

LettingGoAbout the Book

Even though she lives hundreds of miles away, when Langston, who dreams of being a chef, meets Cecile, a Juilliard-trained pianist, he is sure that his history of being a sidekick, instead of a love interest, is finally over. Their connection is real and full of potential for a deeper bond but the obstacles between them turn out to be greater than distance. Can these busy, complicated people be ready for each other at the same time? Does it even matter? Before they can answer these questions, each must do battle with the ultimate demon – fear.

Told in a witty combination of standard prose, letters, emails and diary entries, Letting Go, in the tradition of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah, is a long-distance love story that also examines race, religion and the difficult choices we make following our passions. From the Great White North to the streets of New York City, to the beaches of Bermuda, Letting Go is a journey of longing, betrayal, self-discovery and hope you will never forget.

Format: eBook (560 pp.)      Publisher:
Published: 5th July 2016       Genre: Fiction

Purchase Links*
Amazon.co.uk ǀ Amazon.com
*links provided for convenience, not as part of any affiliate programme

Find Letting Go on Goodreads

My Review

In Letting Go, the reader follows the lives of two young people, Cecile and Langston. In separate story lines that converge at points, we see them navigate life, love and career over a period of more than twenty years.   The author’s supreme achievement is to make Cecile and Langston seem so real that the reader cannot help feeling completely invested in their respective life journeys. In their different ways, both Cecile and Langston are searching for fulfilment. And, as so often in life, their stories are filled with missed opportunities, misunderstandings and things left unsaid.

Langston is trying to find love that goes beyond just a physical relationship. He doesn’t want a casual relationship or a series of one night stands. He’s a handsome guy; he could have plenty of those if he wanted. But Langston wants someone he can truly commit to and build a life with, someone who will share his love of food, films and books. Someone like Cecile, in fact. But life events seem destined to get in the way of that happening. Langston is someone who thinks very deeply (too deeply?) about things. He wrestles with his conscience, trying to balance his desire for freedom and independence with his feeling of responsibility for his beloved grandmother who brought him up. And underneath everything is the trauma of his parents’ drug addiction and their rejection of him and his siblings.

Cecile has her own family trauma to overcome. Furthermore, admitted to the prestigious Juilliard School, and alone in a strange city, Cecile initially struggles to overcome her shyness and form friendships with other students. Eventually she finds herself part of a group of fellow black students who can identify with her situation of being a black face in a predominantly white institution. As her life unfolds, Cecile too has inner demons to battle, struggling to balance her religious beliefs and the commitments she has made with her own happiness and fulfilment. Sometimes, it seems she is her own worst enemy:  ‘Her brain had always been both a friend and an enemy, making her academic career easy and everything else difficult. Thinking, overthinking, trying not to think…’

The author’s own passion for music (and religious belief) shines through in Cecile.  ‘She was amazed at the beauty of a phrase, the joy of flying through a technically difficult passage, the power of being able to create a deafening fortissimo, the delicacy of triple piano. She felt blessed beyond compare to be allowed the gift of music, so she wouldn’t give up on her talent. It would be an insult to the Giver of the gift, a surgical removal of a vital organ.’

And in a clever nod to those with musical knowledge, the book is structured to mirror the elements of a sonata: Introduction, Exposition, Codetta, Development, Recapitulation and Coda. I also liked the author’s use of letters to illustrate the development of the relationship between Cecile and Langston. I always think a shared sense of humour is a great indicator of the strength of, and likely future success of, a relationship.

The book explores a number of other themes, including racial discrimination and the idea that black people have to try harder and be better to be successful than their white counterparts.

I really enjoyed Letting Go and I’ll admit to shedding a little tear at the end and whispering ‘Thank you’ to the author for the book’s conclusion which treads that fine line between telling you too much and leaving you out on a limb.  I heartily recommend Letting Go for readers who appreciate a character-driven, authentic story that really immerses you in the lives of its characters.

I received a review copy courtesy of the author in return for an honest and unbiased review. I’d like to thank Maria for her patience in waiting much longer than originally envisaged for me to read and review her book.  For me, it was well worth the wait.

As well as being an author, Maria is a gifted pianist. Listen to Maria performing some of the beautiful music she has chosen to accompany Letting Go:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7X42fibmEQ

To purchase the CD, which also includes Maria reading passages from the book, click here

Follow my blog with Bloglovin

In three words: Emotional, intimate, character-driven

MariaCorleyAbout the Author

Award-winning ​​​Jamaican-born Canadian pianist, Maria Thompson Corley, gave her first public performance at the age of eight. Since then, she has appeared on radio, television, and concert stages in Canada, the United States, Central America, the Caribbean, Bermuda and Europe, both as a solo and collaborative artist.

Maria received both Master’s and Doctorate degrees in piano performance from the Juilliard School, where she was a student of renowned Hungarian pianist Gyorgy Sandor. Dr. Corley was the only pianist admitted into Juilliard’s doctoral program for the period of two years. She was also chosen to represent her alma mater in a tour of Central America, where she gave performances and master classes. Aside from being an accomplished pianist, Maria Corley is an author. She contributes regularly to Broad Street Review, an online arts magazine, and her first novel, Choices, was published by Kensington.  Letting Go is her second novel.

Connect with Maria

Website ǀ Facebook ǀ Twitter ǀ Goodreads