Deborah Feldman-Unorthodox

I know the sign of a good story when I don't want the book to end.  This is how I felt with Feldman's story, Unorthodox.  I originally read this story on xojane.com, in their blog series, It Happened to Me.  I immediately put the book on my to-read list (which is quite long!) and a few months later, I downloaded it onto my Nook.

Feldman was born to an Orthodox family in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.  Her father was from a local family and her mother was from England.  Her mother deserted the Orthodox community when Feldman was very young, for many reasons but also including the fact that Feldman's father was not a stable person.  It is unclear what exactly but he had some mental deficiencies and most likely some mental health issues as well.  Feldman was then raised by her grandparents and various aunts and uncles who did a lot of butting in.  It was fascinating to hear some of the inner-workings of the community, such as Satmar actually comes from the town Santa Maria, where the founding rabbi originated from.  Feldman is only a few years younger than me so to reflect that these were the experiences she was going through while I was living a very different American/Jewish lifestyle took me back a bit.

As tends to be the case in the Orthodox community, Feldman married quite young.  She was very open about her thoughts and feelings about the wedding and initially was very excited.  It might have been that she was very excited about the wedding and just really hadn't thought about the marriage piece of things.  The marriage piece did not get off to a great start, there was some sexual problems that they had to seek help for.  

The marriage also did not last long.   Feldman, very slowly, started tasting more and more non-Orthodox life.  I can only imagine that it was much more painful than was conveyed in the book to completely isolate herself from the family that she had been raised with as well as the father of her child, even if she wasn't herself particularly connected to him.

While I really enjoyed the story, as I said in the beginning, I wish that there was a bit of an epilogue to say where she now and what she's doing.

R.A. Dickey-Wherever I Wind Up

I've always been a peripheral baseball fan.  I grew up in Portland, Oregon where the only professional sports team was basketball.  On the other hand, family lore is that my dad's parents, huge Brooklyn Dodger fans, lasted one season after the Dodgers moved to California before packing up my dad and uncle and heading west.  Whether this is true or not, doesn't matter as it's become such a part of the family legend.

So if I have to say a favorite team, I'm going to have to say the Dodgers.  But since moving to New York, I've developed an appreciation for the Mets and the fact that my uncle is a huge Mets fan, it's rubbed off on me.


About a year ago, I was listening to Fresh Air on NPR and there was an interview with R.A. Dickey.  Being that I am living in New York, I had heard about him but really didn't know much about him.  Well the interview was out because he was in the process of writing a book.  During the summer I started going to some Mets games with my roommate and became hooked.  So, for my birthday, my roommate bought the the Dickey biography.

R.A. Dickey has a fascinating life.  He was raised in a divorced family in Tennessee and was sexually abused twice as a child-once by a man and once by a teenage female babysitter of his.  Although he's had some horrible life experiences, he has also overcome these experiences, whether through his faith or through his passion for baseball.  He actually met his wife as a kid, when he became friends with her brother.  They were a very well off family in the private school that he was lucky enough to attend and it was pretty clear to him that they were meant to be.

His career into baseball was by no means an easy one.  He had been drafted straight from college to play for the Texas Rangers but when he had a physical for them, it became apparent that he was missing a muscle in his wrist (ironically, earlier this year I had wrist surgery and they found an extra muscle so a friend of mine teased that it was R.A. Dickey's missing muscle).  As a result of that, the offer was rescinded.  He ended up playing AAA ball for a long time and even spent time playing in South America.  He was not successful and kept volleying between teams and was not happy nor was his marriage good.  He ended up having a near death experience of his own making and started turning his life around.

It was around this time that he also began learning how to be a knuckleballer.  Prior to this, he had been a traditional pitcher but when it came down to either he was going to need to leave baseball or learn something new to keep him in the game, he started learning.  He currently is the only knuckleballer in the major leagues and hopes to stay there until someone replaces him.

He has also become an advocate for children who have been sexually abused and actually climbed Mount Everest, against the wishes of the Mets in order to raise awareness.  This book was an amazing read and the entire story is an unbelievable story.  R.A. Dickey is a true hero in my mind.

Probably my biggest disappointment now is that I never got to see R.A. Dickey pitch.  Every time I went he had just pitched the night before.  Now he's being traded to the Toronto Blue Jays so unless I see him against a team I'm watching, I won't get the chance.

Kristin Hannah-Winter Garden

Family dynamics plays a huge part in so many books, I think because we all have families that we have to deal with and even if the particular situations differ from family to family, the overwhelming feeling remains the same.  As I've blogged before, Hannah writes about family situations and family situations that are struggling.

This novel also takes place in Washington, as do the majority of her books that I've read.  There is also a cruise to Alaska that takes central stage and being that I just returned from an Alaskan cruise, that was exciting to read about.

The novel jumps from the past to the present and is told in three voices, the two grown daughters, Meredith and Nina, and their mother.  Their father has just passed away and the younger daughter, Nina returns from Africa, where she is a photojournalist.  The older daughter, Meredith has inherited her father's winery and the care of their mother.  Their mother is a strong, cantankerous woman.  We can see that there is a story that we don't understand from her past.  She is Russian and married to an American.

The daughters have never really felt that their mother loved them and always felt that they were playing second fiddle to the past.  The only time they felt that they were truly loved by their mother was when they were being told a fairy tale as children.  As their father is dying, he tells Nina that she needs to get their mother to share the story with them.

This is an incredibly difficult task as Meredith doesn't believe that Nina is actually going to stay and sees that her mother is having some memory issues.  Nina is convinced that she needs to hear the story to truly understand what has kept their mother from loving them completely and freely.

The alternating chapters is the story of what happened to their mother who was living in Russia during World War II and what that meant for herself and her family.  It turns out that Alaska plays a part in the mystery of what happens.

This is a beautifully written novel and, as always, I enjoyed reading Hannah's novels.  In fact I just downloaded three more on my Nook so there will be more reviews to come!

Marcus Samuelsson-Yes, Chef

For those that know me I love cooking and over the last couple of years I have become more and more enamored with the Food Network.  More specifically, I have a few shows that I really enjoy: Chopped, The Next Iron Chef, and The Next Food Network Star.  There are a few other ones that I'll watch if I'm just looking for something on television.

Because Marcus Samuelsson was most recently on the The Next Iron Chef and because he is a frequent judge on Chopped, I was very excited to read his memoir.  I knew that he had an interesting upbringing but I didn't know much about it.


Well I definitely learned A LOT about him and his life and while I still think he's a brilliant chef-in fact I'm going to his restaurant, Red Rooster, in Harlem with some friends next week, I don't necessarily think he's the nicest guy in the world.  Samuelsson was born in Ethiopia and was adopted as a very young child to Sweden.  His birth mother, quite a heroic lady, walked him and his sister miles upon miles to a hospital nowhere near their small village in Ethiopia.  She passed away at the hospital and there wasn't a lot of information about his family so they were adopted by a Swedish family.

Samuelsson definitely speaks very highly of his family in Sweden and clearly views them as his family.  Initially as a child he wanted to be a soccer player and played throughout high school but ultimately was deemed too small and short to be an effective player.  He was extremely disappointed but ended up turning this passion and drive into cooking.

The book chronicles his growth as a chef as well as his personal life.  There were definitely some decisions in his personal life that he made that I really disagreed with but he thought that he was doing the right thing in pursuing his passion.

He's definitely become a success here in New York and at this point, internationally.  I do thing that he's advanced the profession of chefs that are not the norm.  He's written a cookbook specializing in Ethiopian food and I am really looking forward to trying his restaurant out.

Jodi Picoult-Lone Wolf

Jodi Picoult is another one of my go to authors.  She consistently writes good, long books.  Long books are important for me because I get through them so stinking fast!  I don't think I've met a Picoult book I didn't like.  She also writes about timely issues, such as school shootings, teen pregnancy and family lawsuits.

Lone Wolf is about a divorced family.  It's told in four different voices, which is another literary technique that Picoult uses in nearly all, if not all of her novels.  The four main characters are Luke and Georgie, divorced parents and their children, Edward and Cara.  Luke is a caretaker for wolves.  Georgie left for a variety of reasons, one being that she knew Luke would never love her as much or as fiercely as he loved his wolves.

The story starts with a car accident.  Luke and Cara, who is living with him and a teenager, are in a crash and Luke suffers from severe brain trauma and is in a coma.  Cara comes out relatively unscathed physically, except for a broken arm.  Georgie is called to the hospital and makes the decision to call Edward, her eldest son who ran away years before and has been living in Thailand.  We get the sense that something happened, primarily between Edward and Luke but it's unclear what exactly.

Edward comes home, for the first time in five or so years and he and Cara are faced with the decision, as the only living relatives of Luke over whether to take Luke off life support.  They are deeply divided on this issue.  Edward would like to take Luke off as he can't stand the suffering and Cara wants to do anything she can to keep her father alive.  Each claim that they know best.

The book waffles between the points of view of all the characters.  In the scenes narrated by Luke, we learn about his fascination with wolves and how he has put his life and the lives of his family aside in order to learn more about them.  He spent a year living in the Canadian wilderness right before the time that he and Edward had the fight that would separate their family.  When he made the decision to go into the wilderness and try to become part of a wolf pack, he did not think he would make it out of there alive.

The other three perspectives are from Georgie, Edward and Cara and the present time.  Additionally, Georgie's new husband, a lawyer, plays a role in the narrative as well as he represents Edward against Cara. I would imagine that this kind of family struggle is very personal and would be very different for each family and for each individual within a family.  Could I make the decision to take another person off life support?  I honestly don't know.  I know that I can make that choice for myself and that if there were truly no way for me to make a meaningful recovery then I would want to be taken off life support so that my family and loved ones can work through the grief without constantly being reminded of my inabilities.

On the same token, I hope that everyone has the conversation with their loved ones prior to anything drastic happening, as we can see in numerous cases around the country that this is an issue that really does divide families and create greater pain and torment.

Jamie Ford-Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet

This was a phenomenal story about a topic that we don't hear very often.  I often get into a mode where I can't read anymore WWII novels because it's often a similar tale with a different plot line.  It's not because I'm not interested in the topic or that I don't find the novels engrossing, I am interested in the topic and each novel is, for the most part, very engrossing.  I have Holocaust fatigue.  I've been raised learning about WWII and the Holocaust since as long as I could remember because Hebrew Schools and other Jewish programs have decided that this is the narrative that guides our Jewish story.  This is frustrating to me because this is not what defines us as a people nor should it.  The Holocaust is definitely something that happened and affected the entire world and especially affected the Jewish people but we've had 2,000 years of history prior to that, with other horrific events and we've had nearly seventy years of history occur after that with notable events.

So I was interested to read a WWII novel from another perspective.  Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet is written through the eyes of a Chinese man, he was raised in Seattle to immigrant parents.  His father especially suffered in China and very much wanted to classify himself and his son as Americans.  In the early 1940's this became increasingly difficult to do because of the war going on and when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941, this was near impossible.  Many people didn't take the time to necessarily differentiate between Chinese Americans or Japanese Americans and just saw someone with Asiatic features.

Henry, the Chinese man, as a young boy is sent to a private school in Seattle where he is the only Asian kid. As part of the financial arrangement, he works in the kitchen during lunch.  Relatively soon after he starts, he is joined by another Asian girl, a Japanese girl named Keiko.  Henry and Keiko strike up a friendship and they become very very close.  This is a friendship that Henry doesn't bring home.  His father very much wants Henry to be an American and makes Henry wear an American flag patch so that people know that he truly is an American.

The novel follows the story of the Japanese in Seattle at the time and at a certain point, Keiko and her family are moved to an internment camp in eastern Washington.  Henry doesn't understand this when it seems that Keiko's family is more American than even his own family.  He writes letters constantly to Keiko and they have a correspondence.

The book is told through flashbacks.  At the beginning of the novel we learn that Henry's wife has just died and he has a somewhat difficult relationship with his son.  He learns that they are going to knock down a hotel in what had been the Japanese section of Seattle prior to the war.  In the basement of this hotel, that has been boarded up for decades, the owner finds trunks of belongings from those that were interned.  Henry gains access and seems to be looking for one certain thing.

The story is a beautiful story and one that I would absolutely recommend.  It is a tale of enduring friendship and true love set against an America that most of us wouldn't recognize today.  Nor, really, would we want to.

Yona Zeldin McDonough-A Wedding in Great Neck

This was overall a good read.  It was the story of a family getting together to celebrate the youngest child's wedding.  My initial interest in the book was that it was set in Great Neck, on Long Island.  I teach in the next town over and thought it would be fun to read a book set in a town I'd spent time in.

The book centers around the bride's family and the drama that ensues.  The entire family gathers at the home of the mother of the bride and her very rich second husband who is paying for the entire wedding and in fact pays for many things in these children's lives.  The mother is a woman who went from being married to an alcoholic no-gooder (the father of her four children) to marrying the man of her dreams who is rich beyond belief and treats her like a king.  Her life often centers around her very nervous tiny dog that to some extent causes grief to all the children.  Her ex husband, father of all the children, has moved to Calif

  The oldest daughter is separated with twin pre-teen daughters.  She is in the midst of marital angst because her husband cheated on her with a student (university level) and the drama that comes around that.  Her daughters are very much dealing with both the issue of being a pre-teen in general and the fact that their father is no longer living with them.  They are being shielded from the worst as they don't know that their father has cheated and will be potentially starting a new family with his girlfriend.  He's a fun character with an Irish accent.  The eldest daughter is definitely a character with a lot of flaws, some real and some perceived but is an interesting character.  Their two daughters are also interesting characters.  One is especially going through a hard time, both with her parent's separation and general teen girl drama.  She is also somewhat in love and somewhat in hate with her aunt's fiance, soon to be husband, an Israeli who served in the military.  On the one hand, she thinks he's super nice and sweet but on the other hand, she's learned about the conflict in Israel and is afraid that he's killed innocent Palestinian children.  She also has some sort of issues with her aunt.

The next eldest, a son, is there with his girlfriend and honestly is a somewhat blah character.  He and his girlfriend had some drama but really not enough to merit much in the book.

The third child, another son, is there with his newish boyfriend.  This is the first time that his family is meeting his boyfriend but there is no conflict between the family and the fact that he's gay.  There is however conflict between him and his boyfriend.

The bride herself is a bit of a pain in the butt.  She's seems very entitled but also very talented.  She's the baby and especially to her father, that is a big deal.

Overall, this was a good novel but not one that I would rave about.  Definitely an entertaining read worth a look if you don't have other amazing books on your list.