Lighten up with Sarah Addison Allen

I've had a marathon reading weekend, taking three hours of R and R yesterday to sit by Don's pool and continue humping through the jungle of Vietnam with Karl Marlantes. I'm almost finished with this outstanding book and it just gets better and better. I just listened to a C-Span interview with the author in which he commented on how it felt to be screamed at by protesters upon his own return from Nam, how he wanted to say to them, "you don't know me, you don't know anything about me."
http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/293989-1

I felt compelled to apologize for them - kind of saying "forgive them, they know not what they do." This novel opens one's eyes to the agonizing dichotomy of a war, any war, where it's kill or be killed on the one hand yet, on the other hand, the internal recognition that so many had no clue what they were really killing for - as the author says through Lt. Mellas - just a filthy piece of ground. They also recognized that they were fighting an enemy they respected for their resilience yet hated for the same reason. It's amazing to me that ANYone can come home from war without PTSD, which is likely why it's often diagnosed years later as was the case for Mr. Marlantes.

In the meantime, I'm still walking and painting and for that I decided that I needed to lighten up a bit, choosing Sarah Addison Allen's latest novel The Girl Who Chased the Moon. My friend Andrea and I had found Ms. Allen's first novel, Garden Spells, to be an absolute delight - a frothy, sweet but not saccharine novel with  a little taste of Alice Hoffman's unexplained "practical magic" thrown in.

Somehow I missed her second novel but listened to this new one in record time. There usually seems to be a character in Allen's novels who has to return "home," wherever that is, through no desire of his/her own. Generally you'll find a family secret, long buried or unacknowledged, and unlikely friendships that lead to discoveries that allow the protagonists to better understand themselves and others.

In this case we have a lovely young woman, Emily Benedict, now an orphan, moving to her mother's small southern hometown to live with a grandfather she never knew she had. As Emily tries to break through grandpa Vance's reserve, she meets a bevy of townspeople who know more about her mom than she ever did and discovers that some had reason to dislike the woman Emily thought walked on water.

A parallel story line involves former town bad girl, Julia, who has returned temporarily upon her dad's death to get his barbecue restaurant back in the black. In a case of the lady doth protest too much, Julia persues her dream of opening a bakery in any other city far away by creating one of a kind desserts that unwittingly entice a former lover to rekindle a high school affair.

Sarah A. Allen's books constitute just the right respite from the plethora of dark novels I have stacked on counters everywhere, not to mention the constantly depressing news from the papers and this morning's talking heads on NBC and ABC. Meanwhile, I just received ANOTHER book from Library Journal - I'd be a millionairess if I was being paid for these reviews!

The new one is by Myla Goldberg whose debut novel Bee Season was a fascinating, complicated read that was made into a less than stellar movie with Richard Gere in a role that just didn't suit. The minute I get out of the jungle I'll jump into Goldberg's The False Friend on which I have a ten day turnaround.