The Club

 By Ellery Lloyd

Harper     2022

320 pages     Thriller

When the world seems to be getting the best of me, I often turn to mysteries or thrillers, because they are engrossing, and because my cares seem insignificant in comparison to what is happening in the mystery.

Such is the case with The Club, written by a London-based husband and wife team, who write under the pseudonym, Ellery Lloyd. “The Club” is really more than just a club, it is a series of resorts owned and operated by Ned Groom with the assistance of his brother Adam. The clubs all have the name “Home” in their titles, and their newest club, Island Home, is opening this weekend. The rich and famous belong to the Home Club, so that wherever they are, they have a luxurious place to stay. Island Home is a spectacular place, off the coast of England, and its three-day launch party is going to be spectacular as far as the owners and the guests are concerned. 

But as we find out, The Club is not filled with nice people. The plot emerges through the point of view of several employees—Adam, Annie, Jess, and Nikki. Several of the guests are profiled as well, although as their names piled up, it was somewhat difficult to tell them all apart. I had to stop and think: Oh yeah, he’s the TV host, or she’s the actress with the little girl, etc. The point, however, is that everyone has something to hide, and a lot of people are going to die.

The structure of The Club is novel in itself, wavering as it does between what is actually going on and the POV of each of the main actors. The setting is exceptional, the characters are interesting, and the plot twists are breathtaking. It was exactly what I needed to take me away from my own particular setting and cast of characters.

The Bookreporter review says that The Club is: “Perfect for readers of twisty novels and star-studded casts, THE CLUB is a glitzy, glamorous thriller with a dark and deadly mystery at its heart. If you’re ready for an escape from domestic suspense, plan your next trip to Island Home.”

I was reminded of another mystery I read that was set on an island in the British Isles, The Guest List by Lucy Foley. And then, last night, I watched a couple episodes of Inventing Anna on Netflix, which is the story of a real-life scammer, Anna Sorokin, who posed as a rich German heiress and conned many of New York’s rich and famous. She would definitely have been a guest at one of the Home Clubs, or have been working in cahoots with Ned Groom.   

I am always curious about people who write books as a team, such as the team that writes as Ellery Lloyd. Ellery Lloyd is the pseudonym for the London-based husband-and-wife writing team of Collette Lyons and Paul Vlitos. Collette is a journalist and editor, the former content director of Elle (UK), and editorial director at Soho House. She has written for The Guardian, The Telegraph, and the Sunday Times. Paul is the author of two previous novels, Welcome to the Working Week and Every Day Is Like Sunday. He is the subject leader for English literature, film, and creative writing at the University of Surrey. They have one other novel written together, People Like Her. 

I also have to mention that The Club is Reese Witherspoon’s book club pick for March, 2022.

 

In the Margins: on the Pleasures of Reading and Writing

 By Elena Ferrante

Translated by Ann Goldstein

Europa Editions 2022

111 pages     Essays

We do not know exactly who Elena Ferrante is, except that she is a gifted writer. In 2020, she wrote some lectures that were intended to be read by actors, not the author herself. She remains anonymous, but we learn a little more about her writing style in these four essays, aptly named In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing. 

She discusses the difficulties of growing up female and trying to compete in the male-dominated literary scene. She says, “I had to write like a man, staying strictly within the male tradition: although a woman, I couldn’t write like a woman except by violating what I was diligently trying to learn from the male tradition.” It wasn’t until she read Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas that she affirmed her voice as a female writer.

This very much reminded me of a paper I wrote for a philosophy class my senior year of university, probably 1965. The professor gave me an A+ on the paper and wrote, “Now you are starting to think like a man” on the paper’s margins. While I appreciated the A+, I was deeply offended by the comment. Because Ferrante must be about my age, I was able to understand her perturbation about trying to find her own voice as a writer.

The essays are a bit meandering. However, I really appreciated the essay that she calls, Histories I. This is where the reader comes to understand Ferrante’s skill as a writer telling the story of women’s lives and the challenges female authors face. She closes this essay by saying, “ I believe that the pure and simple joining of the female ‘I’ to History changes history.” She is proud that no one can now say of her writing that finally she is thinking like a man.

The reviewer in The Guardian writes, “The book feels uneven, tantalising in places, opaque in others. Her ideas can be distilled down into: powerful prose emerges from dutiful prose; all writing is built on the shoulders of great literature; the paradox of realism is it requires truthful lies; and it’s a real bitch to get what’s in your head on to the page.” 

Although I read My Brilliant Friend and watched the first season on HBO, that is the only Ferrante that I have read or watched. I may go back now and read her latest novel, The Lying Life of Adults, which has lingered on my Kindle for a couple of years.

In the Margins is an excellent footnote on the art of writing, and the skill that a woman writer must develop. Besides that, focus on the incredible book cover. The cover highlights and explains the book's contents explicitly. 

All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake

 By Tiya Miles

Random House     2021

385 pages     History

A very quick summary: A renowned historian traces the life of a single object handed down through three generations of Black women to craft an extraordinary testament to people who are left out of the archives.

Dr. Tiya Miles is a Harvard historian. All That She Carried won the 2021 National Award for nonfiction. It is a meticulously-researched look at an embroidered feed sack that was found among a lot of fabric at a Nashville flea market in 2007. The purchaser realized that this was more than very old fabric, and donated it to the Middleton Place museum. The book’s author saw the sack while it was on loan to the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington DC. She was immediately attracted to the sack and sought to learn and reconstruct what turned out to be an amazing story. Her research showed that Rose, a slave,  filled the sack with three items when her daughter Ashley was sold as a little girl. The sack contained a lock of Rose’s hair, a tattered dress, and three handfuls of pecans. When the sack came to the great-granddaughter Ruth, she embroidered the story of the sack on the front of the bag.

More than telling the story of the sack, Miles relates those three items to historical evidence of their importance. For example, the lock of hair examines the importance of African American women’s hair, up to the present. The tattered dress leads to a discussion of the importance and skill of dressmaking, embroidery, and quilt making in defining a woman’s role—in the Black community—and in women’s roles across the ages. The pecans could either have been eaten or planted, and Miles discusses slave labor and what Rose and Ashley’s role might have been during their life and times. She says, “Out of the shadows Rose would emerge, bearing the sack as a lifeline and staking a claim on her family’s continuance amid and despite unrelenting change.”

My sister has been creating a history of our families, and she has traced our people to some of the first settlers in what would become the United States. While Miles was attempting to trace the family that included Rose, Ashley, and Ruth, she ran into many dead ends, and was only able to find the possibility of who the family members were, not who they actually were. I was so struck by the differences. One of her discoveries was a record that turned up both names in an estate inventory shortly after the slave owner, Robert Martin, died in 1852. Because there were very few women named Ashley, Miles is quite sure that she had the correct family, and Ashley had a value price, just like the cattle.

The trauma of separation is a major theme of the book, and we must assume that there were thousands of stories similar to the story of Rose, Ashley, and Ruth.  What Miles shows is that the sack marks “ a spot in our national story where great wrongs were committed, deep sufferings were felt, love was sustained against all odds and a vision of survival for future generations persisted.”

 I believe that All That She Carried is one of the most significant books of our generation, not only because of the research that went into creating it, but because of its relationship to our current world situation. I watched the Supreme Court confirmation hearing with Judge Jackson yesterday, and I realized that fragile sack is still being filled.

All That She Carried will continue to haunt me in the weeks and months ahead. At my church book group, where we read and discussed the book, everyone brought something that they would take with them if they had to leave home quickly. What would you carry?

Here is a book talk with Dr. Miles at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute. The New York Times carried a remarkable review.

Girl in Ice

 By Erica Ferencik

Gallery     2022

304 pages     Thriller

It is 2023, just a year from the present, but climate change has increased its activity. One of the strange happenings is what the scientists are calling "ice wind," a strong freezing, sudden wind that immediately freezes any animal or human that is caught in the blast. On a small island off the coast of Greenland within the Artic Circle, a group of scientists led by Wyatt Speeks are trying to understand this climate phenomenon. They discover a young girl in the ice on the island, bring her back to the station, and thaw her out to try to learn whatever they can about her and the ice wind. Unbelievably, the girl thaws out alive. She is trying to talk to the scientists, but they can’t understand her language, nor can any of the indigenous people who bring supplies to the station.

Val Chesterfield is a brilliant linguist specializing in extinct Nordic languages. Wyatt sends for her, thinking that she might be able to decode what the girl is saying. Val has another connection to the science station: her brother Andy, also a climate scientist, committed suicide at the station. Val accepts Wyatt’s offer because she is tremendously curious about the little girl, but also because she hopes to solve what she believes is not a suicide by her brother, but more than likely a murder.

There are a tremendous number of details to unravel, and Ferencik has an amazing grasp of the setting, of the science involved, as well as the language difficulties being explored. I spent the first half of the book in awe of her expertise in all things Greenland as well as the Nordic languages she explores. I was so intrigued by how she wove all these details into an almost believable plot. Because of all the climate-driven science explored and explained by Ferencik, I read slowly through the book’s first half. However, when the action ramped up, and Val starts to understand what little Sigrid is trying to tell her, and Wyatt gets crazier, I really tuned in and hurriedly read to finish the novel. Unfortunately, the conclusion, itself, was a bit off, rushed, and inconclusive. One reviewer said that it appeared that Ferencik drafted a few options and “randomly decided to go with this version of the choose-your-own-adventure.” I felt let down after I had spent most of the novel being in awe of the subject and the plot.

Girl in Ice was at its best when Ferencik was developing the relationship between Val and little Sigrid. Sigrid, of course, is suffering greatly from PTSD, and no one understands what she is trying to say or explain. Val bonds greatly with her, because she herself is suffering from tremendous anxiety, and because she identifies so completely with Sigrid and her needs. The relationship felt very real as Sigrid tries to explain herself to Val, and Val is struggling to understand what her random words mean and what her enigmatic drawings are illustrating.

The NY Times reviewer calls it “hauntingly beautiful,” and Publisher’s Weekly gave it a starred review. Their reviewer says, “Trenchant details about catastrophic climate change bolster a creative plot featuring authentic characters, particularly the anxious, flawed Val. Ferencik outdoes Michael Crichton in the convincing way she mixes emotion and science.”

Here is Ferencik’s website

The Lincoln Highway

 By Amor Towles

Viking 2021

575 pages     Literary

Four boys. One huge adventure. Lots of life lessons learned.

It is 1954. Emmett has been released from a juvenile detention center in Kansas because his little brother, Billy age 8, was left alone following the death of their father. The new warden drives him home to Emmett’s Nebraska farmstead to take responsibility for his brother. Once the warden has gone, Emmett discovers that Woolly and Duchess, two fellow detention-mates, have hidden in the trunk of the warden’s car and are ready for an adventure.

Billy, an extraordinary young child, has two things going for him—he is obsessed with a book of heroes and adventurers, and he has also learned about the Lincoln Highway, which is the first East to West highway in the United States. He wants Emmett to drive West on the highway to San Francisco, where Billy is sure his mother is waiting for them. Their mother left them when Billy was a baby.

Woolly and Duchess have other ideas. They steel Emmett’s Studebaker and travel East to New York, where they are going to find Woolly’s inheritance and Duchess’ erstwhile father, a Shakespearian actor. Thus the adventure begins; Woolly and Duchess by car and Emmett and Billy by boxcar. The reader can’t help to be amazed at how independent and mature these young men are. Emmett is the steady character, while Duchess is the boldest. Billy the intellectual, and Woolly the dreamer.  

The structure of the book, itself, is innovative. It is written in ten sections, with the climax building from section ten to section one, and while section one doesn’t bring about the answers the reader is seeking, it certainly is a dramatic ending.

Every character is marvelously created. I expected that would be the case after having read A Gentleman in Moscow a few years ago. Towles has the ability to see inside the minds of his characters. I especially enjoyed the chapters about Sally, who is a young woman who took care of Billy before Emmett got home. She is a farm girl and a very efficient homemaker, but she is searching for some adventure in her life. She has served others all her teen years, but as she joins the boys on their adventure, she muses: “I thought to myself that there are surely a lot of big things in America. The Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty are big. But there is nothing bigger than a man’s opinion of himself.” Made me laugh.

There are several other great characters that I could write about including the author of Billy’s book and a traveling man named Ulysses, who bonds with Billy as well as the author of Billy’s book. But primarily, the book is about the adventure. The NPR reviewer closes by saying: “There’s so much to enjoy in this generous novel packed with fantastic characters—male and female, black and white, rich and poor—and filled with digressions, magic tricks, sorry sagas, retributions, and the messy business of balancing accounts. ‘How easily we forget—we in the business of storytelling—that life was the point all along,’ Towles oldest character comments as he heads off on an unexpected adventure. It’s something Towles never forgets.”

When I first began to read The Lincoln Highway for my book club, I was enthusiastic but a bit intimidated by the size of the book. But I reasoned that it had won many awards for a reason, including the fact that it has remained on the bestseller list for weeks and weeks. I soon became completely enthralled with the characters, the settings, the plot, and the humor. It was when I read a question and answer session that appeared on Towles’ website that the book began to make complete sense to me, including its innovative structure.

I was also struck by the title and it’s origin. I didn’t know that there was such a thing as the Lincoln Highway, but when Towles discovered the existence of the Lincoln Highway, I realized that I was not alone, and when I looked at the map, I realized that the Lincoln Highway runs just south of us through the northern part of Indiana. I want a summer adventure to take us from South Bend to Pittsburgh on the highway.

Don’t be intimidated by the size of The Lincoln Highway. You will be so caught up in the adventure and the characters that the pages, like miles, will fly by.