Songs of Willow Frost by Jamie Ford (audiobook)

Although I loved Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, I only give Jamie Ford's second book a C.  The story is interesting and it's obvious that the author has researched the time and location of the novel (Seattle in the 1920's 1930's).  But it's a book where everything terrible that can happen, happens.  The story is told by William, a young Chinese boy living in an orphanage, and by his mother, Liu Song (aka Willow).  Liu Song's story is made up of one tragedy after another, and while it may be a typical one of that time, it is told in such a melodramatic manner that I found it difficult to read.  The author repeated things as if the reader might not have caught them the first five times they were stated.  Plus the author teased the reader with the idea that Liu Song might eventually reveal her secret as to who is William's father, but no - she would think about telling it but always held back.  I wanted to choke her and say "Tell them!!" but she didn't.  This is not one I'd recommend.  -June

The Woman Upstairs by Claire Messud

I can't wait to talk about this book in my book group.  There are several members who insist that they can't like a book unless they like the main character, and Nora, the main character in The Woman Upstairs, isn't really very likable.  In fact, at times, she's strange, creepy, and sad.  Mostly, reading about her feelings sometimes made me uncomfortable.  I found I didn't want to pick up the book and read it just because it was like spending time with an acquaintance I'm not that fond of.  And for those people who who like a plot-driven book, they won't like this book either.  There isn't much plot, and the ending, while it has a surprise or two, isn't really very satisfying. 

Nora is a almost-forty schoolteacher in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  She's never been married and has no children.  She's been a dutiful daughter and taken care of her dying mother and elderly father.  But she's one hell of an angry woman.  The book is her story and the one year she spent meeting and loving a family who moves to her town.  Yes, she was in love with the whole family.

And yet the book is beautifully written.  This is one of the few books where I found myself using the "bookmark" and "notes" feature on my Kindle.  Here are a few examples.

As she laments her life she says, "I was suddenly aware, almost in a panic - a joyful panic - of the wealth of possibility of in the world, and also within myself.  My everyday Appleton life, my phone calls to my father, my occasional beers with friends, my Saturday-morning jobs around the reservoir - what was all that but the opiated husk of a life, the treadmill of the ordinary, a cage built of convention and consumerism and obligation and fear, in which I'll lolled for decades, oblivious, like a lotus eater, as my body aged and time advanced?"

Did I mention that there are lots of long, run-on sentences in this book?  Here's another example:

"All the cliches of a city are new to any individual visitor and hence not cliches; just as love, in spite of the paltry means we have to express it, is, each time experienced, completely new: it can be pyrotechnic in its intensity or slow and tender but overwhelming, like a glacier passing over a landscape; or evanescent but glorious like the field of fireflies on Martha's Vineyard in my youth - whatever it is, each time is familiar and new at once, an overturning."

One more thing.... Nora is only in her late 30's.  Yet she describes her life as a spinster - as if her time for love and possibly a family is over.  She talked and acted like someone twice her age, and I'm sure every 30-year-old who read the book will agree. 

So, would I recommend it?  Yes, I would.  Will my book club like it?  Maybe a few will, but I have a feeling the majority will be negative.  -June