The Matchmaker ( 2014) by Elin Hilderbrand

At first glance I thought that this book would be fluff, but it was not.  I could hardly read for my tears as the novel concluded.  Last year my younger sister died from cancer and I know what it is like to watch someone you love painfully wither away.

Thanks to the author for the following:

The True Story This Fiction Writer Has To Tell Today

Posted: 06/12/2014 8:31 am EDT Updated: 08/12/2014 5:59 am EDT

Without fail, the first question I am asked at any author event is: Are your books based on your real life? Over the years I have come to realize that no matter how satisfying fiction is, it becomes that much better when it actually happened. My answer, no doubt, disappoints: No, I do not use people or events from my real life. The occasional detail, yes: how could I not? But all of my novels are crafted by my imagination.

This year, however: a plot twist.

On June 10, my novel The Matchmaker came out. In this novel (SPOILER ALERT), one of my main characters battles cancer. It was Oscar Wilde who said, "Life imitates art much more often than art imitates life." A month before the publication date ofThe Matchmaker , I discovered that I am also entering this battle. I have been diagnosed with breast cancer.

I found the lump myself, while on my annual writing retreat to St. John. The lump was small and very hard, like a pebble embedded just under my skin. St. John doesn't have a hospital, and text consultation with a dear friend who is a nurse practitioner led me to believe it was probably a calcified milk duct or a cyst. I would wait and get it checked out when I got home.

A few weeks later found me at my PCP's office at Nantucket Cottage Hospital, where the physician's assistant felt the lump and agreed I should see the breast specialist. But it was Nantucket, and the breast specialist only came on Tuesdays, and she was booked for weeks. Then it was Easter break and I was taking my three children to San Diego. Then I was going home to see my family in Philadelphia for a week. My appointment to see the breast specialist was pushed back to early May.

Although the nurses could feel the lump, it did not show up on the mammogram. An ultrasound was performed, where the doctor said, "Well, it's not a cyst," meaning it was not filled with water. It would have to be biopsied.

I cried.

The biopsy took place the following Tuesday and was performed by a doctor who had read all of my books, which I believed was a good omen. She assured me that 80 percent of all biopsies turned up benign. I was certain this would be the case with me. I had no family history, I had breastfed my three children for a year apiece without incident, I was healthy and ran 7-8 miles a day, I ate a lot of blueberries. During the biopsy, a "marker" was set into my breast, which was described to me as looking like the tip of a pen. I thought that was perfect: I was a writer with a pen tip embedded in my breast. I had a second mammogram following the biopsy, but even with the marker in place, the lump didn't show up on the film.

I waited eight days for the results. When the phone call came, I was running. The doctor asked if it was a good time to talk.

I said, Sure.

She said, Cancer.

I cried.

Two days later, I was at Mass General, meeting my surgeon, whom I immediately thought of as Elin Hilderbrand in a White Coat. She was my age, blond, the mother of four, and she wore Manolos. She described the lumpectomy she would perform: outpatient surgery, followed by 4-6 weeks of radiation. It was Userfriendly cancer. It was so easily dealt with I almost felt embarrassed.

But before I left the hospital, I had to have an MRI to make sure there was nothing else hiding. I was stoic in the loud, claustrophobic hour in the tube. I thought, Of course there's nothing else... I've already had two mammograms!

The Elin Hilderbrand-as-Surgeon called me the next day. The MRI had turned up three additional tumors in the right breast and one in the left.

I cried.

Tomorrow, three days after the publication of my book, I will undergo a double mastectomy.

I have never been a particularly private person, probably because I live on an island that is 4 miles by 13, and my house has large windows that are three feet off the street, and everyone on Nantucket has always known my business, sometimes even before I have. I allow, indeed encourage, photos at my events. I tell people the designers of my clothes and of my shoes (duh, Manolo.) But it was a delicate and much-deliberated decision to disclose that I am sick. I have, after all, been dubbed "the Queen of the Summer Novel." Nobody wants to hear that the Queen has cancer. Readers want the Queen where she belongs -- in her beach chair scribbling away her next best seller as the gentle ocean waves lap at her feet.

I make a living telling stories, and yet my desire to tell the truth here is so overwhelming that it cannot be denied. Just like so many of my beautiful readers, I am facing a serious health crisis. I am anxious, I am scared, I have started crying every time my eldest son throws a strike from the pitcher's mound because life has changed in an instant and I fear, oh how I fear, I won't be around to see him pitch next year. My friends say, You will fight, we are here, you will beat this. And yet as anyone who has been diagnosed with cancer knows, we are all alone when it comes to our bodies. No one can alleviate the burden. It is solitary confinement.

I cannot help but draw parallels with the protagonist of The Matchmaker, Dabney Kimball Beech. I spent many months trying to put myself in Dabney's penny loafers, asking myself: What would it feel like to find out you had cancer? How would you react? Would you do things differently? Would you do things the same? I tell my audiences that I don't write from real life, and yet I had Dabney handle her situation the way I thought I would have. She is brave, she prays, she sets her affairs in order, she smiles, she cherishes the days she has left, and she is most worried for the people she is leaving behind.

I told myself that if I could write a character like Dabney, then I could be like Dabney. I would accept the fact that my body and its current failings were my own, and I would fight and I would smile and I would do everything in my power to live to write thirteen more novels and sit on my throne and let the ocean lap at my feet. I would see more strikes thrown.

My children, raised in the age of Twitter and Instagram, have created the hashtag #mamastrong when talking to their friends about my condition -- so at least I have managed to fool them. But having cancer has left me stranded in a landscape of confusing emotion. My mind goes everywhere, despite my best efforts to keep it positive. My reactions to my diagnosis have not been charming or admirable. I love my life; I don't want to die. I want to wake up and hear the birds and get my coffee. I want to drive my children to the bus stop. When I'm done enumerating the million reasons I want to live, I want to know why I got cancer. I lie awake in the middle of the night and think: What caused it? Chapstick? Advil? Veuve Clicquot? Airport security? The extra sides of mayonnaise?

I have come to grips, but only very recently, with the fact that I am not a fictional character whose emotions I can control. My story will have an ending, but it will not be me who writes it. I pray for the ending where I walk out of the hospital cancer-free, wearing a t-shirt over my new, surgically perfect breasts that reads #mamastrong. And it's the truth.

Sycamore Row (2013) by John Grisham

Thank you New York Times for this review

By Janet Maslin

Published: October 30, 2013

John Grisham’s “Sycamore Row” revisits Clanton, Miss., the site of his first and still most famous book, “A Time to Kill.” Just three years have passed since young Jake Brigance crusaded his way through Clanton’s most racially inflammatory murder trial. It is 1988, and Jake now has a small practice, a big reputation and a housing problem created when Ku Klux Klan members torched his lovingly restored Victorian home.

Alessandra Montalto/The New York Times

John Grisham

Bob Krasner

John Grisham

Mr. Grisham does not seem to have revisited his most popular character for the usual writerly reason: desperation. The unstoppable Energizer Bunny of legal fiction, Mr. Grisham does not need to cannibalize old hits to create new ones. Instead, “Sycamore Row” sets Jake in the midst of what is now a historical novel, resurrecting the Clanton of 25 years ago. That gives the author a new perspective on the town’s racial tensions and a chance to resurrect Jake, who by now feels like an old friend. All it takes is one big twist of fate, and Jake is back on center stage.

The twist is the suicide of a wealthy white man named Henry Seth Hubbard. He had a will that made beneficiaries of his two grown children, Ramona and Herschel. But on the last day of his life, Hubbard supposedly changed his mind. An envelope is delivered to Jake’s office containing a final, handwritten will that reverses the first one. Hubbard’s primary beneficiary is now Lettie Lang, his housekeeper, who is black and spent a lot of time alone with him. And Hubbard anticipates his family’s outrage at this move. “These are not nice people and they will fight, so get ready,” he warns. “Fight them, Mr. Brigance, to the bitter end.”

The legal issues raised by two differing wills, and the smell of money, invite a large crew of eager lawyers into the fight. Mr. Grisham’s gift for manipulating and explicating legal battles makes this multifaceted one satisfyingly cagey. But a curious phenomenon makes it too easy to be distracted from a Grisham novel in its early stages, before the fight really gets rolling. It’s not the fault of Mr. Grisham’s clean and clear prose. It’s because he is accurately capturing all the tedium, repetition, red tape and soporific rhetoric with which lawyers contend. If they must plod through discovery and suffer death by deposition, readers do too.

Mr. Grisham knows what lawyers have been taught to do. More important, he also knows how they actually behave. Although “Sycamore Row” is a bit crude at first, treating Lettie as a long-suffering saint and the Hubbards as racists who neither know or care when they insult her, it snaps into shape as soon as Clantonites realize how high the stakes are in this fight. Lettie’s potential inheritance would make a black maid the richest woman in Mr. Grisham’s Ford County. And the Ford County of 1988 is not about to let that happen.

Mr. Grisham lets the Hubbards stay happily oblivious for a while, as Jake, chosen by Hubbard as his executor, quietly tracks down the dead man’s assets. Yes, this is a book about probate and appraisals and other nonscintillating processes that a will sets in motion. But it is also about the feeding frenzy that initially surrounds the Hubbards, who have no idea a second will exists. The jolt of that potentially more valid will sends shysters heading for Lettie, who is almost too shocked to understand her situation. Mr. Grisham cleverly positions Jake in the middle, as a lawyer well liked by the judge in the case, Reuben Attlee. Judge Attlee and other holdovers from “A Time to Kill” become strong, calculating characters in this book, too.

“Everything is about race in Mississippi,” Jake is told by Lucien Wilbanks, a disbarred lawyer and drunk who won’t stay out of the case — or out of Jake’s office, since Lucien is the landlord. Regardless of whether Lucien has that right, everything in “Sycamore Row” is about racial nuances and how they play. Lettie becomes shark bait for the high-profile black lawyer Booker Sistrunk, “an infamous bomb thrower” with an imposingly flashy style. He drives a Rolls-Royce, grandstands in the courtroom and seems guaranteed to alienate any white jurors, in the case where the jury will be mostly white. Jury selection is one more legal process that is described here in all of its authentically monotonous yet, from the lawyers’ standpoints, make-or-break detail. Mr. Grisham prefers grinding reality to a hyped-up sense of excitement.

Jake is blindsided with realizations that his actions can cause trouble, too. Jake makes one well-intentioned but bad mistake by helping Lettie’s husband, who proves so disreputable and dangerous that Jake can be tainted by even a distant connection. He is warned not to find too nice a place for his family to live; any suggestion that Jake is being well paid for his efforts could also taint him. And he fails to match the opposing lawyers’ research capabilities — which means he can be gobsmacked in the courtroom by a witness who was unknown to him beforehand. Mr. Grisham details the dirty tricks, data dumping and witness dumping, routinely used by a large legal team to flummox the other side.

As “Sycamore Row” finally reaches its trial phase, the author hits his full stride. He knows the courtroom inside out, and he helpfully describes each little step of these proceedings. Even if sharp-eyed readers already know how the book’s surprises may arise — has there ever been a long-lost relative who did not show up in a work of legal fiction? — they will still miss the final whammy that Mr. Grisham has in store. Hubbard hanged himself from a Sycamore tree, but that is not why this book is called “Sycamore Row.”

“We haven’t had this much excitement since the Hailey trial,” says Dell, the local waitress, speaking of the sparks that flew in Mr. Grisham’s 1989 debut. She’s right. And this may not be the end of it. Mr. Grisham leaves Jake ready and waiting to be seen again.

A version of this review appears in print on October 31, 2013, on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: More Vexing Challenges For That Mississippi Lawyer.

Just one evil act: A Lynley Novel (2014) by Elizabeth George

Originally published Friday, October 11, 2013 at 5:09 AM with thanks to Moira MacDonald of The Seattle Times

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We get hooked on a mystery series for the comfort of the familiar, for time spent with characters we’ve come to know and love, for the reassuring feeling that our detective-hero will somehow make things turn out right. And we want the characters to grow and change, but not too much. (For those who, like me, are eagerly following Sue Grafton’s journey through the alphabet: nobody out there is hoping Kinsey moves out of Henry’s rental apartment and buys her own place, right?)

So fans should be reassured to hear that Elizabeth George’s “Just One Evil Act,” (Dutton, 723 pp., $29.95) the 18th novel in the Whidbey Island author’s excellent Inspector Lynley series, keeps things mostly to the status quo. After dramatically killing off a main character in “With No One as Witness,” George has perhaps rightly guessed that readers can only handle so much change, and so “Just One Evil Act” unfolds along familiar lines.

Little Hadiyyah Upman, daughter of Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers’ neighbor and friend Taymullah Azhar, has been kidnapped (for the second time in her eventful life, poor kid; she was previously snatched in “Deception on His Mind”). Detective Inspector Lynley counsels prudence; Havers, in her usual fashion, plunges headlong into the case with little regard for rules and protocol; and a complex tale spins out, rushing us from London to Italy and back again.

George, an American who lives in the Pacific Northwest, has an uncanny ear for dialogue (and Britishisms); you hear the characters in your head long after putting the book down. And the voice you hear most strongly here is one of her most beloved characters: Havers, the disheveled, lonely sergeant whose inclination to let her heart rule her head takes her to dangerous places. Those of us who’ve devoured the Lynley mysteries know that she’s long been in love with Azhar (without the books ever really having to say it) and adores Hadiyyah — so this case is just the right one for her to run off the rails.

And she does, gloriously, in her collection of high-top trainers and ratty T-shirts (my favorite slogan “No Toads Need to Pucker Up”), trademark smart-ass repartee, habitual nutritional chaos, and utterly endearing loyalty. Might she cross paths again some day with the charming Italian Chief Inspector Salvatore Lo Bianco, who thinks she has an “extraordinarily lovely smile?” Let’s hope. Longtime readers may wonder if Havers will ever be allowed to learn from her mistakes (really, does she think a game of tit-for-tat with a sleazy tabloid reporter could possibly turn out well?), but she’s, as always, a delight to spend time with.

Meanwhile, the noble Lynley (we’re reminded that he dresses “in an elegantly rumpled and casual manner that suggested mounds of money and self-confidence”) continues to slowly heal from his wife’s death; Acting Detective Superintendent Isabelle Ardery remains prickly and yet intriguing; Detective Sergeant Winston Nkata makes a tantalizingly brief appearance, as if just waving hello to readers; a host of other characters in London and Italy join the narrative; and mysterious British foods, such as a “bacon butty” (guess who eats it?), are consumed. It’s a pleasure no less enjoyable for being familiar; you finish the book longing for the next installment to arrive swiftly, so as to hear Lynley and Havers’ voices again.

Daddy's gone a hunting (2013) by Mary Higgins Clark

In her latest novel Mary Higgins Clark, the beloved, bestselling "Queen of Suspense," exposes a dark secret from a family's past that threatens the lives of two sisters, Kate and Hannah Connelly, when the family-owned furniture firm in Long Island City, founded by their grandfather and famous for its fine reproductions of antiques, explodes into flames in the middle of the night, leveling the buildings to the ground, including the museum where priceless antiques have been on permanent display for years.

The ashes reveal a startling and grisly discovery, and provoke a host of suspicions and questions. Was the explosion deliberately set? What was Kate—tall, gorgeous, blond, a CPA for one of the biggest accounting firms in the country, and sister of a rising fashion designer—doing in the museum when it burst into flames? Why was Gus, a retired and disgruntled craftsman, with her at that time of night? What if someone isn't who he claims to be?

Now Gus is dead, and Kate lies in the hospital badly injured and in a coma, so neither can tell what drew them there, or what the tragedy may have to do with the hunt for a young woman missing for many years, nor can they warn that somebody may be covering his tracks, willing to kill to save himself . . .

Step by step, in a novel of dazzling suspense and excitement, Mary Higgins Clark once again demonstrates the mastery of her craft that has made her books international bestsellers for years. She presents the reader with a perplexing mystery, a puzzling question of identity, and a fascinating cast of characters—one of whom may just be a ruthless killer . . .

Minister without portfolio (20 ) by Michael Winter

Nothing makes me swoon like a good title, so let it be said right off the top: Michael Winter’s fifth novel has a very, very good title. Recognizable but intriguing, it can rattle around the reader’s mind for a long time without giving away all of its secrets. In this case, however, the title quickly becomes too much of a good thing. As an abstract concept, “minister without portfolio” is an apt description of Henry Hayward, an aimless Newfoundlander who wanders off to the war in Afghanistan to get over a bad breakup, witnesses a friend get killed, and then spends the rest of the book trying to make sense of life back home.

Instead, Winter awkwardly puts the phrase in the mouth of more than one character, none of whom pull it off. “Let’s be outlaws,” says Tender, Henry’s soon-to-be deceased childhood friend, early on. “Except for Henry – he’s our minister without portfolio.” Henry asks what that means. Tender’s reply: “You’re not committed to anything but you got a hand in everywhere.” Nobody would say such a thing. It has simply been parachuted in to make a thematic point.

As it happens, the two engines that fuel Henry’s restlessness – his relationship falling apart, and his traumatic stint in Afghanistan – make up only a brief opening segment of the novel. The vast majority of our time is spent back in Newfoundland, where Henry begins a new romance with Tender’s former spouse Martha, which is triply complicated by the fact that Henry may be responsible for his friend getting killed in the first place. The pair also embark on a mission (really, more of a fool’s errand) of figuring out who is the rightful owner of an abandoned house that Henry wants to restore and move into.

There are some vivid scenes. The rigmarole of running a business in small-town Newfoundland is captured with wit and love, as is the patchwork bureaucracy. When Henry asks a bank teller where he might find a justice of the peace, the woman yells over to her coworker, “Is Linda still doing that?” And just as Winter has made use of his real life in past books – the protagonist of his first novel, This All Happened, struggled to piece together notes for a book that would, four years later, become Winter’s own The Big Why – the new novel also pulls from life: in this case, the author’s accidental fall into an industrial garbage incinerator in 2006. Genuine horror overtakes him as the reality of his situation becomes clear. “His lungs felt warm,” Winter writes. “A new shock. He wasn’t going to burn to death: he was cooking.” (He is later rescued, as was Winter himself, by two men who just so happened to be standing nearby.)

But the novel as a whole is unfocused and opaque, in large part due to what seems like an error in perspective. Winter creates a sizeable cast of characters, only to then stick us with by far the least interesting one among them. Henry rarely displays any outward signs of heartache or mourning, and Winter’s staccato prose doesn’t let us get very far inside his head. So if his supposedly traumatic experience overseas doesn’t inform the rest of the book, why couldn’t he instead be given the far more compelling personality of, say, the neighbour who’s lost both of his hands in a pipe-fitting accident – and who is so stubborn and/or stoic that, after spilling a bag of nails in a hardware store, he spends the next half an hour using his hooks to pick them up, one at a time?

A more obvious contender for protagonist is Martha, Tender’s former spouse, who soon reveals herself to be pregnant with Tender’s child. There are so many opportunities to plumb around at this all-too-real intersection of grief and new life. Instead, Winter keeps us on the outside, in the process missing his chance to justify some pretty hard-to-read behaviour. At one point Henry recoils while they’re having sex, saying he felt as though Tender were nearby. “But Tender is in the bed with us,” Martha replies. “We’ve said that. He will always be there. Is that something we can live with?”

If that’s meant to be a demonstration of her inner strength of character, we need to see more. Ditto if it’s meant to show her self-delusion. The more likely scenario, unfortunately, is neither: Winter has Martha say this not to illustrate anything at all about her, but to have something about Henry’s own guilt parroted back at him. The real victim ends up having to comfort the sad-sack male hero. It’s a depressing image, but not in the way Winter intends.

In The Big Why, Winter gave us a similar story about building a home in a place where you may not be wanted – and in the painter Rockwell Kent, he gave us a more dynamic and sympathetic protagonist, to boot. Minister Without Portfolio covers much of the same territory, but much less convincingly.

Michael Hingston is the books columnist for the Edmonton Journal. His first novel, The Dilettantes, will be released by Freehand in September. Thanks for his review.
Special to The Globe and Mail
Published Friday, Aug. 30 2013,

At risk (1988) by Alice Hoffman

With this moving novel, Hoffman has written a story about a family attacked by tragedy, and has given it a larger relevance by confronting one of the most frightening issues of our times. The Farrells are a middle-class family living in a small New England town. Ivan Farrell is an astronomer, wife Polly a photographer, eight-year-old Charlie a budding biologist and 11-year-old Amanda a talented gymnast. Hoffman has few rivals in depicting domestic scenes: the bickering between siblings, the tension between spouses, and withal, the humor and love that holds families together. Suddenly the Farrells are singled out for grief. Amanda, who has been winning gymnastic meets despite a summer-long malaise, tests positive for AIDS, contracted some five years before when she was transfused with contaminated blood after an appendectomy. In unsensationalized detail, Hoffman depicts the effects of her illness. Too stunned, angry and anguished even to turn to each other, Polly and Ivan retreat into separate worlds. Charlie is abandoned by his best friend and shunned by his schoolmates. Amanda, an average adolescent who loves Madonna records, must come to grips with the process of dying. The hysterical reaction of some members of the community is a further blow. Hoffman's sensitive handling of this material is both matter of fact and heartbreaking. Ivan's friendship with a man he meets through the AIDS hotline, Polly's search for comfort with Amanda's pediatrician, Charlie's stoic bewilderment, Amanda's bond with a young woman who is a medium (the only evidence in this novel of Hoffman's characteristic feeling for the supernatural) are all beautifully portrayed.

Thanks to Goodreads

The diaries of Jane Somers (1984) by Doris Lessing

The Diaries of Jane Somers, first published pseudonymously and separately as The Diary of a Good Neighbour and If The Old Could, appear here in one volume for the first time under Doris Lessing's name, together with a new preface by the author. While marking a return to the most realistic subject matter of Doris Lessing's early fiction, they are also a provocative new departure.At the centre of both novels is attractive, intelligent magazine editor Jane Somers, whose wry perception informs and animates every page. Jane was an ambitious journalist concerned with success, clothes and comfort when her life changed. Her husband died, then her mother. Suddenly understanding her real inadequacy, Jane becomes deeply committed to the very old and deprived, making particular friends with one old woman, Maudie, whose life has been all struggle and poverty.
The contrast between these two lives produces the framework for a difficult growth towards self-knowledge. At the end of The Diary of a Good Neighbour the future is hinted at when Jill, a clever hard girl, as Jane once was, moves into her flat and takes over her life, Jane understands young people as little as she did so recently the old.
If the Old Could, Jane falls seriously in love for the first time in her life. By now, she is in her fifties. So is Richard Curtis, who loves her. Both are weighed down with responsibilities which are always preventing them from enjoying each other. But with whom is Jane really in love? Who really is she longing for if not her dead husband, whom she did not value at all when he was alive? This new lover is the old one in disguise, just as bright ambitious Jill is Jane when young. Jane seems surrounded - like the very old - by mirrors, by echoes.Who, then, in this gallery of mirrors is niece Kate, with whom Jane is landed by a process of emotional logic which she understands very well? This all-competent woman cannot begin to cope with the poor helpless Kate: they are opposites, extremes - or so it seems.

Thanks to www.dorislessing.org