#62: Sisterhood Everlasting

Sisterhood Everlasting, by Ann Brashares (New York: Random House, 2011)

Summary:
"Return to The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants ... ten years later.

"From #1 New York Times bestselling author Ann Brashares comes the welcome return of the characters whose friendship became a touchstone for a generation. Now Tibby, Lena, Carmen, and Bridget have grown up, starting their lives on their own. And though the jeans they shared are long gone, the sisterhood is everlasting.

"Despite having jobs and men that they love, each knows that something is missing: the closeness that once sustained them. Carmen is a successful actress in New York, engaged to be married, but misses her friends. Lena finds solace in her art, teaching in Rhode Island, but still thinks of Kostos and the road she didn't take. Bridget lives with her longtime boyfriend, Eric, in San Francisco, and though a part of her wants to settle down, a bigger part can't seem to shed her old restlessness.

"Then Tibby reaches out to bridge the distance, sending the others plane tickets for a reunion that they all breathlessly await. And indeed, it will change their lives forever -- but in ways that none of them could ever have expected.

"As moving and live-changing as an encounter with long-lost best friends, Sisterhood Everlasting is a powerful story about growing up, losing your way, and finding the courage to create a new one."

Opening Line:
"Once upon a time, there were four pregnant women who met in an aerobics gym."

My Take:
Again, hope to write a bit more later -- it is what it is, with apologies to those of you who hate that phrase. Entertaining, better than I'd expected/ feared -- but great literature it's not. I do give the author bonus points, though, for letting her characters change in less-than-perfect or -predictable ways in a series that spans many years.

The novel opens with the four principals almost-but-not-quite having gone their separate ways. They're all still committed to the idea of the sisterhood, of course, but in terms of actually feeling the same close connection to their three besties, even though they've now headed down different paths in different places? Not so much. Carmen, as the jacket blurb indicates, has become a successful actress, a regular minor character on a Law and Order-style crime drama, with a loft apartment to die for, engaged to the somewhat-insufferable Jones, more than 10 years her senior and a (pretentious, controlling) VIP in the TV biz. Lena's barely squeaking by as an adjunct/ private art instructor, maintaining a tepid relationship with some dude who works at a sandwich shop nearby and with a social/ emotional life just this side of hermetic/ agoraphobic. Bridget's a latter-day hippie whose SF neighbors know her as That Girl Who Rides Her Bike Everywhere, who seems to have a different job every few weeks, and randomly gives this or the other of her few possessions away to a familiar homeless person in a nearby park. (It's never explicitly specified, but we presume she's being kept afloat financially by Eric, her soccer-playing almost-boyfriend from the original Sisterhood, who's now dropped the almost- and grown up to be a successful lawyer and all-around mensch.) And Tibby? Well, Tibby up and moved to Australia with her boyfriend some time ago, and the gals have heard precious little from her since.

That is, until the story's beginning, where each of the other 3 mysteriously gets a letter and plane ticket from Tibby, inviting/ summoning them to meet for a reunion at Lena's grandparents' place in Santorini. (Lena's grandparents have since passed away, although her parents haven't yet sold the house, and it's never quite clear how Tibby manages to gain access to a house in Greece when she's Down Under and the home's current owner is somewhere in the States.) Everyone accepts, or at least plans to go, each thinking maybe this is the answer to her current restlessness and loneliness. They arrive at the airport, eager as can be for Tibby to meet them ... but wait and wait as they may, she doesn't.

To tell you much more of the story beyond this point would spoil it, which I try not to do ... but I will say that for the rest of the book, each character grapples with her own, newly-launched adult dilemma and the question of how to stay connected with her old friends as their lives diverge. Is that elusive sense of purpose Bridget seeks Somewhere Out There, or is she looking in all the wrong places? Is Lena really as down with the quiet, making-do, good-enough life she's cobbed together in Rhode Island, or should she maybe go back and find that road not taken after all? Carmen's star is rising, but is it really shining where and how she wants it to? And what unimagined chain of events made Tibby up and disappear on them?

Of these four questions, only the last answer was at all surprising -- at least to me. I did, however, appreciate the book's acknowledgement that at some point, any "lifelong" friendships you've made up till, say, your early 20s will be tested by physical and experiential distance ... and while they may or may not last, it's highly unlikely they'll end with all your BFFs living next door/ across the street from you on Wisteria Lane.

#64: The Pile of Stuff at the Bottom of the Stairs

The Pile of Stuff at the Bottom of the Stairs, by Christina Hopkinson (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2011).

Summary:
"What do you hate most about the one you love? Mary Gilmour doesn't know whether it's his not quite reaching the laundry basket when he throws his dirty clothes at it (but doesn't ever walk over to finish the job) or the balled-up tissues he puts on the bedside table when he has a cold. Is it the way he never completely empties the dishwasher, leaving the 'difficult' items for her to put away, or the fact that she is responsible for all of the domestic tasks in the house just because she's only working part-time?

"Mother to two young boys, Mary knows how to get them to behave the way she wants. Now she's designing the spousal equivalent of a star chart, and every little thing her husband does wrong will go on it. Though Mary knows you're supposed to reward the good behavior rather than punish the bad, the rules for those in middle age are different than the rules for those not even in middle school . . .

"This is the novel for every woman who finds herself frustrated with something (or perhaps everything) her husband does. Harried and hilarious, Mary's trip beyond the breaking point will carry any reader through this wry, astute novel about marriage, motherhood, children, work, and above all, that ever-growing pile of clutter."

Opening Line:
"The solitary jigsaw piece sits in the corner of the living room, daring me to ignore it."

My Take:
I was about to say "add this one right under Sisterhood Everlasting on the list of 'books that turned out way better than they should have,'" but realized that wasn't quite accurate. Sisterhood was OK, even entertaining ... but this is basically just giving it the benefit of my rather low expectations. (The only prior non-young-adult novel of Brashares's I'd read was pretty darned boring, if I remember correctly, and the Sisterhood series up till now is an entertaining beach read or 2 with way too many sequels.)

Pile of Stuff ..., on the other hand, was a few cuts above your basic chick lit, mom flavor, story. This is due in large part to Hopkinson's well-honed gift for satire. When a friend-of-a-friend drops by unannounced and finds Mary's home not quite passing the white glove test, she offers to let her in on the secret, and presses a Post-It with a URL scribbled on it into Mary's palm as if it's a map to Ponce de Leon's elusive fountain. When Mary logs on, she finds a parody of the FlyLady web site that had me in stitches:

"Instead of the virtual magic I've been hoping for, I'm faced with one of the messiest looking web pages I've ever seen, with the exhortations, 'Declutter!,' 'A new program for home executives!' and 'Shiny happy sinks!' I am very confused. Is this really the life-saving secret that Alison has bestowed on me?

"I read on ... I force myself through the myriad exclamation marks to try to make sense of it all. The website tells, I finally discover, of a system by which your house will be spotless and permanently guest-ready, without you having to spend more than fifteen minutes a day on it. Florid testimonials tell of lives and homes transformed by the mere application of the 'dance of disposal,' where the home executive will put on a three-minute song and throw away as many things as she can in its duration. Others speak of the elimination of their 'toxic spot,' which sounds like something I haven't done since I had adolescent acne. All write eulogies as to the transformative powers of the creation of a 'Golden Notebook,' a ring-binder of to-do lists, menu plans and household zones. Doris Lessing, I think, must be so proud.

"I read on, hoping to discover the secret of how you can inspire those that you share your house with to take as much interest in purging household junk as you do, while at the same time wondering why the women behind this site didn't think to perhaps try to declutter some of the excessive exclamation marks littering the prose. My eyes are glazing over just thinking about these commands to enjoy the daily cleaning of my toilet bowl and to have fun while throwing out junk. ...

"But still, I concede, can all these women (and they are all women) be so wrong? ... Before I can change my mind, I sign up for email reminders of how to 'Work the System!' and resolve to give the 'Clutter NoNo!' system of home-executive efficiency a week's trial.

"Day 1. By the time I check my messages at work on Monday morning I have 39 emails from my new friends at ClutterNoNo. I'm confused before I've even read them. How am I supposed to find time to wade through the household detritus if I have to spend all my time wading through my inbox?

"I soon discover that I'm falling woefully behind. I should have set my alarm to get up half an hour before the rest of my family in order to get that toilet bowl really sparkly, as well as making sure that I have put on a 'face' -- by which I think they mean makeup, rather than just pulling one. ...

"Day 2. The house doesn't look much better than it did before. I find I am spending so much time trying to create a nice-looking Golden Notebook that I don't have time to get myself looking 'nice 'n' pretty' for the day. ...

"Day 3. What I am asked to do: fertilize the plants, write outstanding thank-you notes, buy the groceries, balance my checkbook and change dead lightbulbs in the cooker hood. I must tell each member of my family that I love them, and one thing that I think is awesome about their personalities. I must tell myself that I love me, and find five things that I think are awesome about my personality.

"What I actually do: scream.

"Stop it, stop it, stop! You stupid idiotic women! Leave me alone, stop hassling me, why are you on at me all day long? For Christ's sake, stop nagging. Does it really matter if I haven't shampooed the carpet on a Thursday? You're all flaming crazy. ...

"I find the unsubscribe button and then declutter my email inbox of every single last reminder, all 103 of them, from that source of 1950s pinny-wearing nonsense. I breathe out. They're right about one thing, those Clutter NoNo ladies, it does feel wonderful to expunge unwanted crap."

(OK, clearly someone needs to explain digest format to our heroine, but still.)

Then there's Mitzi, Mary's old college friend, now frenemy, who's probably the funniest and most over-the-top character in the book. She's the type who's married a man rich and successful enough that they have not one but two showplace homes, each furnished in oh-so-original, environmentally friendly, perfect taste. She takes great pride in being an at-home mom to four perfectly-coiffed, private-schooled children -- Molyneux, Mahalia, Merle, and Milburn -- despite having a staff of nannies et al. to swoop in whenever anything messy or unfun needs doing. Complains Mary's husband, Joel, at the prospect of a weekend at Mitzi and Michael's country home, "'[W]e'll be expected to way lyrical about ... the wonderful original features and aren't you clever to have found flagstones made from the bones of real organic orphans, and a bath hand-knitted by a thousand Hindu priests and filled with holy water from the river Ganges.'" Yes, said country home visit does finally happen, and proves to be a turning point in the book, in a manner both hilarious and sweet.

Overall, a pleasant surprise to have what initially seemed like someone's admittedly funny blog have so much insight and heart to it.

#35: My Name Is Memory

My Name Is Memory, by Ann Brashares (New York: Riverhead Books, 2010)


Summary:
"Lucy Broward is an ordinary girl growing up in the Virginia suburbs, soon to head off to college. As she prepares for her last high school dance, she allows herself to hope that this might be the night her elusive crush, Daniel Grey, finally notices her. As the events of the night unfold, though, Lucy discovers that Daniel is much more complicated than she imagined, and perceives that there's something going on here that she really doesn't understand. Why does he call her Sophia? And why does it make her feel so strange?


"Daniel Grey is no ordinary young man. Daniel has 'the memory,' the ability to recall past lives and recognize the souls of those he's previously known. And he has spent centuries falling in love with the same girl. Life after life, crossing continents and dynasties, he and Lucy (despite her changing name and form) have been drawn together -- and he remembers it all. It is both a gift and a curse. For all the many times they have come together throughout history, they have also been torn painfully, fatally, apart. A love always too short.


"As we watch Daniel and Lucy's relationship unfold during the present day, interwoven are glimpses of their history together. From 552 Asia Minor to 1918 England and 1972 Virginia, the two souls share a long and sometimes torturous path of seeking each other time and again. But just when Lucy begins to awaken to the secret of her past, to understand her relationship to Sophia, and to understand the true reason for the strength of her attraction to Daniel, the mysterious force that has torn them apart in the past reappears. Ultimately, they must confront not just their complicated history, but a persistent adversary as well, if they are ever to spend a lifetime together."

Opening Lines:
"I have lived more than a thousand years. I have died countless times."

My Take:
Brashares is still a writer of young adult novels at heart, but this one was stronger and more grown-up than, say, Sisterhood Everlasting, or than The Last Summer (of You & Me), which I remember reading and being disappointed by, though it must have been before I started the book blog.

Here, as the jacket suggests, Daniel is an old soul -- he's been around since at least the 6th century, in a sequence of different bodies and locations. What's uncommon about this is the fact that he remembers many of his past lives; most people, we're given to understand, have been around a few times before but are blissfully unaware of the fact. Daniel, on the other hand, has spent more than a millenium finding, falling in love with, and ultimately losing the same woman, always trying to make up for burning her house and village in a misdirected military raid in Asia Minor some time around 550 A.D. As you might guess, that girl/ woman is living in 21st-century Virginia as Lucy, a college-bound high school graduate who's had a crush on this mysterious Daniel guy all through senior year, and whose own sense of loss and isolation seems at first to stem (understandably) from the death of her older sister Dana from a drug overdose some years before the novel begins.

The novel's central questions are pretty much what you'd expect: Will Lucy ever remember knowing and loving Daniel in a past life? Will the two of them finally get it together on this go-round? And will Daniel's one-time older brother, Joaquin, a sinister dude who's been looking for revenge on Daniel and Sophia/ Lucy ever since Daniel stole his wife (guess who?) a couple of lifetimes ago, track them down and spoil everything?

Where the book falls short is in making the past-life romance between Sophia and Daniel seem believable. We're convinced by Daniel's recollections of the past that the two knew each other, and it's not too much of a stretch to imagine that a basically decent guy could still be carrying around guilt over having massacred the young Sophia's entire family ... but other than that, we don't really see anything in their past that helps us understand how or why they fell in love. I'm not convinced that proximity itself is enough; if it were, those folks I seem to see in the grocery store or library every week might just as well be my own soul mates. However, for someone who likes a little other-worldly mystery with their romance, and even a few interesting observations on life and death and love, you could do worse.