Book Review: Vigil Harbor

 

The acknowledgement at the end of this book makes a reference to how difficult it was to write, that it took years and many different versions. It sort of confirmed my experience reading the book. The climax seemed to come too early and the last half of the book was the multiple narrators rehashing their perspective of the ending when there were no longer any stakes.

That said, Julia Glass could not write a bad book if she fell asleep on her keyboard. Vigil Harbor was not my favorite thing she's written,  (for that, check out The Whole World Over) but I still enjoyed it. For character driven stories about people who feel real, there's nobody who does it better.

I was hesitant to pick this up because the description mentions a supernatural element I wasn't sure I could get on board for. Thankfully the author never takes a hard line on this and you're free to dismiss it as a crazy fantasy, as I did.

The not-so-distant future world where this story is set is on the edge of climate apocalypse and, unfortunately, comes  across as thoroughly believable.    

Tucson Festival of Books: Julia Glass

So, I'm pushing forty and this is the first time I've gotten someone's autograph. Julia Glass is in my top five all-time favorite authors. I've read all her books once, The Whole World Over three times.

In each of my own novels, I make reference to one of the writers I most admire. In Finding Charlie, it's this scene of Olivia reading in her back yard:

"I was reading the latest novel by Julia Glass. She was delving deeper into the lives of characters who had been on the edges of her earlier work. I liked this idea: we are all peripheral characters in someone else’s story and every peripheral character is the lead in their own."

This is the way I write too - standalone stories with overlapping characters. No one does it better than Julia Glass, who was one of several inspiring authors at this year's Festival of Books. (But again, the only one whose autograph I just had to have!)

Book Review: And the Dark Sacred Night

I am a big Julia Glass fan. I even reread her first novel before starting this one because I knew she'd be revisiting some old characters. Glass is a phenomenal writer and I have read all of her books. So I was expecting to fall in love with And the Dark Sacred Night and I'm disappointed to say I did not.

Don't get me wrong: this book is well written. The dialogue is pitch perfect, the characters feel like real people, the premise is juicy. Readers of Three Junes get to find out what happened to the son Malachy abandoned. But, somewhere along the way, Glass took a weird turn in the story telling. She started jumping months and years ahead, skipping over the complicated emotional (interesting) parts of the story and describing the mundane moments that led up to them: the board games played and meals prepared during a rainy weekend, the excruciating details of an archival job involving Inuit art.

For the life of me, I can not imagine why Fenno was in this book. I liked seeing him again, but his short friendship with Kit's long dead father did not make him relevant to this family reunion. That he might have been secretly in love with Mal doesn't give him any meaningful information to bestow on Kit. And he doesn't. While I could understand Kit's desire to connect with his biological father's family, I could not understand why he wanted his mother to spend a weekend doing the same. Or why he withholds from his children how they're related to these people they're spending time with.

The story gets back on track for the last three pages and manages a satisfying conclusion. I just wish she'd go back and rewrite the last third of the book.

Book Review - Three Junes

My boyfriend gifted me with the newest Julia Glass novel, And the Dark Sacred Night. Glass is one of my favorite authors, and when I read the synopsis, I realized this book would have some familiar characters. So I went back and reread Three Junes, the novel that first made me fall in love with this writer.

There are three separate stories here, the "three Junes" the title alludes to, and the main character in each story is connected to the others, sometimes in ways only the reader will ever know. The first June tells the story of Paul McLeod, newly widowed and finding himself in the anonymity of a group tour of Greece. The second June follows his son, Fenno, years later. Fenno is the only character to appear in all three Junes, and he narrates in first person while the other stories are told in limited third. Fenno's June is years after the first and finds him preparing for his father's funeral while reminiscing on the death of a friend from AIDS and the tense atmosphere surrounding the disease in New York City in the 80's. The last June, more years into the future, has Fenno crossing paths with someone his father met in the first June. The fact that neither of them recognize this connection is a bittersweet prize that belong to the reader alone.

This is character driven literary fiction about how we're all connected in ways we may never fully comprehend. For writers in this genre, there is no better "How To."

Book Review: The Widower's Tale

Julia Glass is one of my favorite authors. It's always with a bit of trepidation that I read new books from old favorites. The mysterious combination of my too-high hopes and the lower standard known authors must meet to be published often ends with disappointment.

But not this time. I wouldn't say The Widower's Tale was Glass' best novel - she'll be hard pressed to outdo The Whole World Over, in my eyes - but I enjoyed every minute of this read.

The plot is not something that I would have thought would appeal to me and I was surprised to find myself so interested when the four POV characters were all men, none of whom I have much in common with (the old widower, the Harvard boy, the gay teacher, the undocumented day laborer). But Glass' strength is in creating characters that are so three-dimensional with complicated, unique histories that make them come alive and make you root for them.

The plot doesn't matter. This is character-driven fiction about family dynamics and community inter-connection. If, like me, you like being lost in the believable lives of imaginary people, you'll enjoy this book.