Readers & Writers!Β  Β 

I’m always on a reading spree, but today I pause to share some of my best finds with YOU!

 

Novelist Alice Hoffman

Reading Alice Hoffman’s historical fiction is always a treat for me. Her prose glows as she probes the magic and mystery of both the ordinary and extraordinary in any age. Recently, I read A Marriage of Opposites.

Here is my review on Goodreads:

Alice Hoffman’s A Marriage of Opposites (2015) is certainly a romance, but more than that it is a tale of forbidden love between Rachel PomiΓ© Petit and FrΓ©dΓ©ric Pissarro, a union that begets Camille Pissarro, the impressionistic painter of outdoor rural activity and still life scenes.

As the story progresses, Pissarro, the painter, unites with housemaid Julie, thus perpetuating the family saga of forbidden marriage into the next generation. The threads of the story seem to be historically accurate but wound around a fictional narrative. In essence, the story recounts the migration of Jewish Danes from Paris and thence to the Virgin Islands, documenting their struggle to survive and maintain their identity as Jews.

Nature in the Island of St. Thomas can be seen as one of the characters. I admired the author’s description of luscious apples, dark soil, luminous leaves blowing variously green, gray, and silver under a β€œhaint” blue sky, a setting where the reader may imagine ghosts lingering in the atmosphere. If family feuds and opposing dispositions, imprinted with the stamp of history, sound tempting, A Marriage of Opposites may be your next engrossing read.Β  Link: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6817107316

Dreamstime image of Jewish Synagogue on the Island of St. Thomas

 

Novelist Tracy Chevalier

 

I’ve fallen in love with Tracy Chevalier’s fiction ever since I read The Girl with the Pearl Earring (2001). My paperback copy survived our move eight years ago. Now I’ve finished reading and reviewing The Glassmaker, which portrays three-dimensional glass makers, who make Venetian glass glitter.

Here is my Goodreads’ review:

β€œIf you skim a flat stone skillfully across water, it will touch down many times, in long or short intervals as it lands.” So begins Tracy Chevalier’s novel entitled The Glassmaker of Murano, Italy. The novelist plays with time as she narrates the story of many generations of the Rosso family who endured the plague of 1691 and the pandemic of 2019 along with historic floods in Venice, a City of Water built on wooden pilings over a lagoon. Male members of the Rosso family fashion Muranese glass from a peculiar sand which can magically turn translucent or even transparent when melted. Chevalier’s fictional glassmaker is a woman, Orsolo Rosso. β€œAs a woman, she is not meant to work with glassβ€”but she has the hands for it, the heart, and a vision. When her father dies, she teaches herself to make glass beads in secret, and her work supports the Rosso family fortunes” as the Amazon blurb declares. Chevalier orchestrates the fates of a full gallery of colorful characters, including the flamboyant Marchesa Luisa Casati and her stable of live cheetahs and male lovers.

Readers can feel the heat and tedium of the glass-making process, observe the fierce rivalries of the glass-making dynasties, and admire the glittering beauty of Venetian glass. Once again, Chevalier is a master of her own craft, inventing a riveting story of a woman, a family, and a city of everlasting beauty. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6849056165

***

I’ve never met Alice Hoffman or Tracy Chevalier, but I have “met” Pamela Wight, novelist, poet, and children’s author. We have read and reviewed one another’s books and visit regularly on our blogs. You can read more about Pam’s writing life here: https://roughwighting.net/about/

Recently, Pam and her grandson Neville have teamed up to write her third children’s book, Petey Wants Wings.

 

 

The beautifully illustrated hardbound book tells a fable of contentment, a lesson appropriate for any age.Β 

Petey the squirrel wants wings. Despite his great life as a squirrel with many friends, Petey is unhappy. He knows that if he could fly like his bird friend Bessie, then his life would be complete.Β  A magical dragonfly grants Petey his wish, but only if he gives up something important. Through misadventures and surprises, Petey discovers that changing himself to be like someone else won’t bring him joy. In fact, taking away his own unique skills could be his downfall. By the end of the tale, Petey discovers how special it is …. to be himself.

You can find the book here:Β  Amazon,Β Borgo Publishing

 

This picture book is gratifying to read, especially with someone of a different generation. However, the tale of how the book came to be is equally fascinating. Here’s the condensed version: After writer Pam and grandson Neville indulged in playing several games of Monopoly and munched on “stickeydoodles,” Neville’s nickname for Snickerdoodles, grandson queried his “Madre” — “Why haven’t you written another children’s book? And thus began a magical collaboration. You can read the complete story here: https://roughwighting.net/2024/08/30/fantastical-but-true/

 

Neville and His Madre Pam

 

You can find Petey Wants Wings HERE!

 

 

As Sir Francis Bacon has wisely said in his essay “Of Studies”

β€œSome books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.”