Enchanted Prose

Unreliable Narrator? (British village; July – September, present-day): It’s awfully tempting to compare The Breakdown with B. A. Paris’ knock-out debut Behind Closed Doors, reviewed here a year ago. If you’re wondering if her second novel disappoints because her first was too good an act to follow, the answer is unequivocally no. Both are non-stop, suspenseful novels that get-inside-your-head. Both excel at keeping the tension going and going and going.

How does the author achieve a relentless, psychological pace? Writing is such an elusive, subjective art. Wish there was a definitive blueprint. At best, suppositions.

Paris has an impressive knack for creating unreliable characters. In Behind Closed Doors, the narrator’s perpetrator, her husband, was pathologically unreliable, a psychopath who fooled everyone. This time it’s the narrator herself – thirty-three year-old high school teacher Cass – who is unreliable. We suspect her reliability more than you would otherwise by establishing that her mother had early-onset dementia by forty-four. (Before marrying Matthew a year ago, Cass spent three stressful years caring for her Mom, now deceased.) The author takes this fact further by making sure her protagonist tells us at every twist and turn that she doubts her trustworthiness, fears she may have inherited the disease as she’s been forgetful lately, worried she’s losing her memory, an early symptom. A perfect set-up for us to question who and what to believe is going on.

The second set-up is mirrored in Paris’ first novel. The author orchestrates an opening scene in which the reader senses something ominous is at play. In Behind Closed Doors this happened at a dinner party. In The Breakdown, a thunderstorm is brewing as Cass bids goodbye to colleagues as their summer break kicks-off. The weather worsens. By page three, its palpable her Mini car is no match for the conditions. Matthew called to warn her to stay clear of the short-cut home. Cass intended to heed her husband’s advice, but in the blink of an eye made the kind of decision any driver might have given heavy traffic and no let-up in the wicked downpour. A decision that changes her life.

“Although this road is beautiful by day – it cuts through bluebell woods – its hidden dips and bends will make it treacherous on a night like this. A knot of anxiety balls in my stomach at the thought of the journey ahead. But the house is only fifteen minutes away. If I keep my nerve, and not do anything rash, I’ll soon be home. Still, I put my foot down a little.”

Language is a third element in the author’s highly-effective style. Prose that, like the merciless weather, doesn’t let up. It flows on and on conversationally, naturally, realistically, so Cass feels very familiar to us. She could easily be a friend, a sister, a neighbor, and we’d be someone she’s very comfortable confiding her innermost guilt, worries, and fears, which intensify at a quick pace. Increasingly, Cass finds herself telling little white lies to Matthew and others, worried they’ll also think she’s confused, exhibiting more and more symptoms of dementia. This leads her to isolate herself more and more, dig herself deeper into this mental abyss. In a matter of weeks, she’s spiraled rapidly downhill, terrified of the terror she’s experiencing. At every step of the way, she’s not sure if it’s internal or external, imaginary or real. That’s because Paris has laid the groundwork, by page four, with an incident that ignites her duress.

Let’s turn back onto that haunting road. If it weren’t for the inside jacket cover, you’d be pretty sure Cass’ vehicle was headed for disaster. You wouldn’t be totally off-base as there is a problem with a car – someone else’s. Broken down, pulled over to the side of the road. Cass thinks instinctively, as we might. Should she slow down, see if she can help, or drive by not to risk her own safety?

We like Cass from the beginning for she tries to be a Samaritan, stops beside the car to see if there’s something she can do. What she sees is a woman gazing at her through the dark, wet window, so she can’t make out her face. Since the motorist shows no sign of needing assistance, Cass assumes, as we would, she’s waiting for road assistance to arrive and thus drives home. The next day, Cass learns the woman in the car was found murdered. Who wouldn’t feel guilty? Think we might have saved a life.

On second thought, Cass realizes she too could have been killed. A killer is on the loose. Since she lives not far from the wooded murder site in a charming cottage that’s also isolated, her mind starts working overtime, which ours might do too. But the truth is we’re not like Cass. We wouldn’t let our wariness completely overcome us, paralyze us, because we’re not petrified we’re deteriorating mentally.

What’s the chance that Cass actually knows the murdered woman, named Jane? The two recently met at her best-friend-like-a-sister, Rachel’s workplace. Jane and Cass clicked, even made a plan to get together soon. Of course, the guilt magnifies.

There are indications something is terribly amiss. A series of things – forgetting appointments, promises, conversations, her pocketbook, where her car is parked. Paris ups the ante as these little things get bigger, more alarming, like seeing a knife laying out in her kitchen that could be the one the killer used, returning to it once the police arrive and its gone. Is it hers? Did she forget to put it away? Hallucinate it? Added to all that turmoil is the constant barrage of silent calls she’s now receiving, a “chilling silence.” Matthew tries to calm her down, says the calls are merely solicitors. But Cass senses breathlessness at the other end. Could it be the killer, who saw her car at the scene of the crime?  Is someone stalking her? Or, is her mental state doing the tormenting?

We’re riveted to the pages, on the lookout for clues, aware how the author so cleverly planted a web of seeds in Behind Closed Doors.  Is someone watching her? Or, does poor Cass need some watching? A toxic, brilliant stew.

The title tantalizes too. Does it refer to Jane’s tragic breakdown? Our narrator’s nervous breakdown? Exacerbated by lots of coincidences and having too much idle time alone over a summer break?

You may think you’ve figured this thriller out around page 200. But Paris is smarter than us.

Lorraine

Life-Affirming (Manhattan/Brooklyn, Northern CA, Durham NC; 2001 to present): If the punch power of a vivid, heart-to-heart memoir doesn’t take your breath away, Heather Harpham’s journey parenting a “human cupcake of a girl” born with a rare, unidentified red blood cell disease should change that.

Oozing with love for Amelia-Grace, there’s so much to say about Harpham’s incredible story, which makes the point is not entirely hers. But a lot has been left out here, so you can read it raw, feel the full brunt force of it. The treatments, decisions, sadness, loneliness, unfairness, relocations, commutes, anger, unfairness, ups and downs. And still the title is Happiness, with slight billing to the frightening road ahead, the crooked little road.

The heartfelt prose stuns and grips, as it brings to life people who’ll touch you. You’ll fall in love with Gracie, care what happens to her. A “little football of a person” who “smelled like sliced apple and salted pretzels” when she entered the world, only to be whisked away moments later from her adoring mother for the first of countless blood transfusions – once every three or four weeks – to survive. Then, when too much iron built up in her system, she had to be hooked up to a cleansing machine for twelve hours every night, forecast for the rest of her life. Harpham didn’t even broach asking about Gracie’s life-expectancy until she was 1½ years old. A 50-50 chance of living beyond twenty-nine are odds no parent should have to hear and bear, which again makes the Happiness title striking.

I once took a class in which the entire semester was focused on the topic of Resilience. Why some people possess it and others are unable to cope. It’s a question you’ll be asking throughout as this story overflows with this almost indescribable quality. Ironic the author believed she was “poorly equipped for hardship.” Wow, nothing could be further from the truth.

The declaration does give you a glimpse into Heather Harpham’s happiness perspective. How she was someone who “captures the shiny, pretty, easy things, and lets the rest drop away.” A cup-runneth-over person. A California spirit who spent the first twenty-three years of her life appreciating the beauty of the Marin County highlands, outside of San Francisco. For ten years, she trained in and performed improvisational theatre. Today, the visiting artist teaches performance drama at Sarah Lawrence College. (Amelia-Grace’s father teaches there too.) So we assume Harpham was endowed with much creativity and spontaneity when she “stepped off the edge of the world” at thirty-two, better prepared than she gave/gives herself credit for.

The author is very close with her fun-loving, bohemian mother, who clearly instilled a joyful soul in her daughter despite the “serial chaos” of divorce, remarriage, stepsiblings. A therapist who “had a way of looking at the world that moved me; she saw the light, no matter what.” The two were “expert at laughing through the worst.” So we shouldn’t be spellbound the author nurtured a little girl with an awesome “life force” of her own (“what she did have, more every day, almost every hour, was personality”), but we are. Happiness is a manifesto to saying “YES to life” in spite of everything.

Geography organizes the chapters since Gracie’s needs dictated geography. When the first chapter opens on Two Coasts – with the baby’s five-month pregnant mother having returned home to California and the father, Brian, a high-disciplined, prize-winning novelist living and teaching in New York – we immediately grasp that as heartbreaking as Gracie’s life-and-death medical issues were going to be this story was even more complicated than that. How is that possible? Do you believe people are only given what they can handle?

Happiness digs deeper than a “mom-and-girl versus world story.” For its Brian’s story too, told sensitively and candidly, with what the author calls a “seesaw quality” – “I love you, you infuriate me.” The two eventually married, but it didn’t happen overnight. That their relationship not only survived but thrived is a testament to their love. Even the best of marriages would have been sorely tested, for Gracie’s care demanded superhuman strengths. I counted at least a dozen medical centers Gracie was treated at or consulted about by the time she was four.

Caregiving is beyond exhausting, physically and emotionally, particularly when it’s your child (and other children you meet along the way) enduring the “suffering of innocents.” Yet Amelia-Grace seems to have inherited her mother’s inner core. Her “refusal to see herself sick … dazzling and a little scary.”

We read so much these days about deadbeat dads but that’s not Brian. Ten years older than Harpham, he was terribly honest early on: “If I wanted to have children with anyone, it would be with you.” Yet he didn’t run away, though he only saw Gracie twice in the first six months of her life. Forgiveness is hard, but once he enters the picture, he does so in a big, devoted, loving way. Passionately committed to his writing, when he was in he was all in.

We admire many people in this story, starting off, of course, with mother and daughter. “We’re not hospital people, we’re home people” Amelia-Grace preciously, poignantly says. “Mommie, its love from me to you.” If we feel our heartstrings pulled, imagine how the author felt? We can. For her heart is big enough to let us in.

Someone you’d want in your corner. So we read about friends, terrific friends, because Harpham cherishes friendships and they surely cherish her too. Three are prominent and significant: Cassie from childhood, Suzi from college, and Kathy, newly found.

“If you’re lucky, you meet four or five people in your lifetime you are totally comfortable with. Comfortable in a way that causes your best self to surge forward.”

Not a shred of doubt this memoir is about being your best self ever.

Three surprises to note. First is Brian’s identity. As if to protect him, we don’t find out who the acclaimed writer is until page 95. Such a pleasant surprise having read (and loved) one of Brian Morton’s novels, Starting Out in the Evening. Lots to catch up on (Florence Gordon, his most recent).

The second surprise hit me personally 100 pages later when the name of a world-renowned Duke University medical pioneer is introduced. Without giving anything away, let me just say: What is the chance I went to junior high school with Dr. Joanne Kurtzberg? A good reason to save old yearbooks! There she was, her long hair now cropped but she looks remarkably the same. Googling I confirmed the famous hematologist came from my hometown, Bayside, NY and it was her father who owned the stationary store my CPA dad and I visited often.

The biggest surprise, though, is the one I’ve intentionally not mentioned. You must discover Amelia-Grace’s little brother, Gabriel, all by yourself. A lifeline.

“It was astonishing how little time there was to make sense of the world.” What’s more astonishing is how much Happiness shows us what really matters in this “anything, everything is up for grabs” world.

Lorraine

Saying goodbye to the greatest of memories at Tisbury Great Pond (West Tisbury, Martha’s Vineyard, 1970s to 2014): Whatever you think of today’s “summering” Martha’s Vineyard – when the population on the island swells from 16,000 to over 100,000 – whether you’ve been one of those visitors or aware of luminaries who are – you’ll find the old Vineyard nostalgically, lovingly memorialized here.

To the New Owners is a love letter to the “kind of childhood people used to have before they were born,” reflects non-fiction author Madeleine Blais, a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalism professor. No surprise then that she writes with a reporter’s eye for details and the lyricism and pathos of a novelist.

Paying “tribute to what is best about summer, its power to lull, its essential sleepiness,” full of gratitude for thirty-some years of incomparable summertime memories, Blais’ memoir is also a eulogy mourning the “end of an era.”

“How can you pack a view?” the wistful memoirist asks. How can you whittle down a lifetime’s worth of memories? So many interesting, heartwarming, campy anecdotes about so many people, family and friends, in under 300 pages. Yet she does, and the result is a reader’s delight.

That’s not to say everything was rosy, as Blais points out: the island’s social problems, unpredictable New England weather and other nature foes, lack of creature comforts. First and foremost though is being a “trooper” not a “princess” to abide by the mantra of Blais’ summertime “shack” – not hers but owned by her illustrious in-laws – that “everyone’s job was to have a good time.” To “err on the side of having fun” is something this large, good-natured, appreciative bunch knows how to do quite well. Infectious, if only we were one of the fortunate invited for a stay by the benevolent owners, Nicholas and Lydia Katzenbach.

If you’re of the baby boomer age, the Katzenbach name will at the very least ring a bell. As it should. Nick Katzenbach, one of David Halberstam’s “best and the brightest,” is etched in the legacy of the civil rights movement. As Deputy Attorney General under the Kennedy administration, he was the government’s face in the segregation standoffs at the Universities of Alabama and Mississippi.

Vivian Malone registering at the University of Alabama, with Katzenbach in the crowd, 1963
By Warren K. Leffler, U.S. News & World Report Magazine
Restored by Adam Cuerden, via Wikimedia Commons

Under the Johnson administration, Nicholas Katzenbach essentially wrote the Voting Rights Act. He also defended the legality of the Vietnam War, which led to a public rebuke in the Vineyard Gazette, from which the author often quotes, a stark contrast to the island’s “respect for privacy.” The beautiful island is a beautiful hideaway for that very reason.

Of all the famous people on the island, this humble man who had the “means to create this haven,” and “the heart to share it,” is a favorite. So, while one of the ways the author characterizes perceptions of the Vineyard culture is “stuck up” – it would be impossible to write an authentic narrative about all the comings-and-goings at this cherished summer retreat and on the island without mentioning some of the notables, which the author does – please don’t form the wrong impression about these spirited souls whose spirit is charmingly laid down here. For all their celebrity, actually because of it, they seem like some of the most down-to-earth people you’ll ever meet. Who doesn’t admire a couple who found doing the dishes together “romantic”?

Equally smitten with her mother-in-law and her “bohemian outrageousness, the author admits Lydia was a “formidable” force who “intimidated” her. Everything from “regal to renegade,” she was independent-minded, not a trophy political wife. She became a psychoanalyst after the couple left Washington; former patients stayed in touch. Although the author and her mother-in-law came from entirely different backgrounds, they shared a desire for a “large, less claustrophobic, less rule-ridden world.” Precisely what you’ll find at Thumb Point.

Depicted as the “slow rhythm of a place that lives off the land and sea,” this summer “house loved with an extravagant love” sits like a big thumb on 5.5 secluded acres overlooking a sublime tidal pond barely separated from the Atlantic Ocean. In fact, several times a year the thin strip of beach and barrier is “cut,” flooding a Great Pond with saline ocean waters ecologically favorable to shellfish. A stunning vista:

“The world was in layers – the blue gray of the pond, the beige lip of sand in the distance, the different blue of the ocean, and yet another blue for the sky – an orgy of horizons, interrupted now and then by white birds, white foam, and white clouds.”

Who wouldn’t be forlorn when Lydia decided to sell the property due to her declining health, two years after the death of her husband? With grace and enormous gratitude, Blais thanks her father-in-law for having the vision to purchase the property in the ‘70s for $80,000, sold in 2014 for $3 million, yet priceless to those who became “lighter” there, “less burdened.” She muses on how the new owners could possibly understand what the sale meant to them? The letting go, physically and emotionally. Gone was the spontaneous, timeworn, and beloved. Grazed down to make room for a conspicuous glass behemoth with a planned-for lap pool and faux meaning. Mourning not just “for selfish reasons but for the passing of time.” Which makes the memoir an ode to all of us who miss “simpler, younger times, and moments of great kid enthusiasm.”

Blais attributes her detailed recollections over decades to eight nautical logbooks published by A.G.A. Correa & Son of Maine. Initially, these were intended to be guest journals, but “thanks to the logs the muddle of time was less muddled.” Many vacationers were writerly types, so many entries are witty and poignant. A sampling will give you a sense of that, and how blessed everyone felt after sojourning by Tisbury Great Pond:

“There may be other places in the world that are as beautiful, but I doubt there are any that are more beautiful.”

“If this is a dream I hope to never wake up.”

“I can think of no other place I’d rather go out and not catch fish.”

“There’s no such thing as too much of a good thing.”

No doubt the logs refreshed and enriched the author’s remembrances, but it seems doubtful she forgot socializing with Katherine Graham, also legendary for her dinner parties, or the warmth of friendship with frequent guests, Philip Caputo, also a Pulitzer-Prize winner, and his wife Leslie Ware, Consumer Reports editor who gave top-rated annual assessments like her final one: “best beach house ever, RIP, Thumb Point.”

Sure sounds like it was! A place with “beauty and quiet and melody” marvelously in tune with this fun-loving, zany crew with a zest for life. They love children, dogs, fishing, crabbing, clambakes, storytelling, board games, trivia contests, Humphrey’s pies, Mad Martha’s ice cream, Black Dog Bakery’s treats, seafood markets, dream auctions, dreams …

If you’ve visited the island, you can attest to its memorability. The author evokes the island’s six towns, each with unique character, as fresh and flavorful as if your visit was yesterday.

Map created by NormanEinstein, July 18, 2005, via Wikimedia Commons

Similarly, the beach house is also a unique character. Complete with a range of emotions humans experience: joie de vivre, love, playfulness, wishful thinking, devotion, attachment, heartache.

Now it’s our turn to say thanks to Madeleine Blais for allowing us to bear “witness to all the beauty mingled with goodwill and hope.” A treat as tasty as the island’s fabled sweet treats.

Lorraine

Southern storytelling with superpowers (Alabama, present-day): What I love most about The Almost Sisters (and there’s plenty to love) is how powerfully it shows the power of words. Prose that sweeps you along, makes you laugh a little, cry a little and touches you deeply. Feels like Joshilyn Jackson is skip, skip, skipping along confiding a tall Southern tale about characters with superpowers. Part poignant, part comical, part far-fetched, part wrongful, part downright intolerable. “Beauty and the beast all in one package.”

Don’t take my word about the author’s flowing, eclectic, colorful writing style. Take hers:

“Weirdo Fiction with a Shot of Southern Gothic Influence for Smart People Who Can Catch the Nuances but Who Like Narrative Drive, and Who Have a Sense of Humor but Who Are Willing to Go Down to Dark Places.”

Colorful is one way to think about the novel. Violet is one of the colors our narrator sees in her fantastical world of vivid colors and images. Leia Birch Briggs (38, unmarried) is a comic book artist, creator of the hugely popular Violence in Violet graphic novel. Though “nerdfame wasn’t like real famous,” she says, a nod to elevating respect for this art form.

While we might not be familiar with Leia’s pop culture lingo and urban slang straight out of the Comic Con universe, it permeates Jackson’s lyrical prose, brilliantly symbolizing our need for people with magical powers to protect the rest of us.

Leia’s Violet character was inspired by a long ago event that had the “power to crush” (she’s still coping with it), so she invented a super-girl (Violence) with superhuman powers to protect a “sweet girl” (Violet). Now she’s being asked to be super-strong to protect others, to draw upon her own super-strengths of compassion, righteousness, and a capacity to love equal to a “dozen heartbeats.”

Three intermingled family plots are tumbling at the same time, collapsing like when “you pull out the wrong piece of keepsake Jenga and topple everything down.” One is a problem of Leia’s making, one involves her super-perfect stepsister Rachel, and the other dramatically affects her beloved, “Southern Lady Genteel” yet feisty ninety-year-old grandmother, Emily Birch Briggs – Birchie.

Leia’s comic world is “chock-full of monsters and lost children, race wars, and superbeings.” As is the novel’s. Perhaps not as barefaced, but lurking. Jackson writes of the South, new and old. Birchville is a fictitious town in Alabama, but “ugly-donkey braying” voices harken painfully true. So while Leia’s memories of this rural place are “all sweet tea and decency and Jesus,” there’s also a “Second South” — “a thin, green cover over the rancid soil in our dark history.” The old Birchie brings forth idyllic times, but this new, unrecognizable one shocks history alive. Yes, racism is an all-powerful theme. In more ways than one.

The novel opens with Leia’s words: “My son, Digby.” She goes on to inform us she’s pregnant with a biracial son from a one-night stand when she was dressed as Wonder Woman (we assume, her favorite) and the father as Batman. In comic con jargon, the two were on “nerdcations,” cosplaying.

Like many references in the novel, Digby’s name is a play on words as it’s also the name of a comic book company and comic character. Leia plans to raise Digby by herself. Single motherhood, absentee fathers, another potent theme.

There’s plenty to like about Leia. Starting with her candidness, questioning her own racial attitudes, wondering if she threw away Batman’s contact info because someplace in the back of her mind she was succumbing to negative stereotypes that black men make lousy fathers. You’ll see what she’s really running away from is that “the Birch line had bad luck with fathers.”

We cheer Leia’s unorthodoxy unlike her Mom and stepdad, Keith, and “cool blonde dignity” of a stepsister Rachel. All live in Norfolk, Virginia, a place Leia suspects their neighbors might be racist – the “world was full of them” – so she better hide her surprise news from them, until she can’t. Not the only thing hidden in the novel.

The identity of Batman, even his given name, is unknown to Leia. Clever, as “origin story” is also a comic book term. “Every superbeing has one.” Seems that happens when something almighty transforms ordinary souls into superheroes (or supervillains.) The phrase has a third connotation here as another stressor plaguing Leia is she’s signed a contract with Dark Horse Comics to produce a prequel to Violence in Violet, but all she has are blank panels as to the origin of Violence’s powers. This pressure runs throughout while Leia is figuring out what, if anything, to do about Digby’s dad and the two other family plots playing out.

The one person Leia wants to open up to about Digby is Birchie, who’d unconditionally love him too. For her dearest, fiercely devoted friend is Wattie, who is black. They live together in Birchie’s legendary, homey, white Victorian. “Birchie and Wattie were a living hinge. They were the place where the South met itself.” They are so close they take turns going to each other’s church on Sundays. Church communities are a microcosm of Southern manners, customs (the annual Fish Fry!), gossip, grudges, prejudices.

Sadly, Leia can’t. In the same opening chapter we learn of Leia’s complicated pregnancy, she learns Birchie is losing her mind. Dropping everything, she races seven hundred miles to Birchville to find Birchie and Wattie have hidden her dementia – the Lewy body type. Birchie hallucinates, shouts out-of-character profanities, and reveals scandalous secrets that get her and others into big trouble. Since everyone knows everyone’s business in small towns, forbidden and dark news spread like wildfire. The literary trick is somehow the disturbing and outlandish come off a bit playfully.

As if these catastrophes aren’t enough for pregnant Leia to grapple with, before she sets out for Birchville she visits Rachel, normally oozing with “self-assured rightness,” but on this day Rachel is in the midst of a major marital meltdown. Rachel begs Leia to take her thirteen-year-old daughter Lavender (another sweet color) along to shield her from the emotional upheaval. All Leia’s life Rachel had been the savior, Leia the “underdog.” (Underdog is also the name of a comic strip). So she can’t refuse. Besides, she and her niece are fond of each other. Lav is depicted authentically in dialogue and coming-of-age behaviors, including Leia’s worries about two neighbor boys she’s befriended. All decent, well-meaning adolescents but they too reap trouble!

Nowhere on the order of a cringing scene with long-timer Martina Mack, a “vicious crone” who utters a racial slur. One vulgar word that packs so much power.

Thanks to the comic book characters, Southern folksy expressions, regional foods that are “the very taste of freedom,” and Leia’s “ballooning love,” the racial messaging is coated, making it easier to swallow.

Actually, The Almost Sisters is a joy to read. Right down to the very last sentence. The author concludes her warmhearted acknowledgements (which begin with “Dear Person-Holding-This-Book”) by thanking the First Baptist Church of Decatur (Georgia, where she lives) for:

“Trying to be a place where we broken humans of all flavors can be welcome and beloved. It’s an uphill walk, isn’t it? But damn, I love the view. Shalom, y’all.”

A super-message that colors our day brightly.

Lorraine

A profile in dishonesty, a character we still like (Manhattan and Montauk, Long Island; June-August present-day): Laura Dave knows something about dream jobs. Three of her five bestsellers have been optioned for movies, including her newest charmer Hello, Sunshine. So in Sunshine Mackenzie, she’s cooked up a cooking star with a dream job, dreamy husband, and daydream Tribeca loft overlooking the Hudson River. Except sometimes dreams can be too good to be true. As Sunny – and her 2.7 million Twitter followers and 1.5 million so-called “friends” on Facebook and all Dave’s fans – are about to find out when someone tweets out of her account: “I’m a fraud. #aintnosunshine.” 

People in Sunshine’s universe wanted to believe she was the real deal: a YouTube cooking sensation (#1 in the hot competition for that lucrative spot) whose “farm-to-table recipes” straight from her Georgia farm upbringing evoked a simpler, more wholesome time. Except Sunny cannot cook, and those easy, mouthwatering recipes she’s touted as her very own originated from someone else.

Got to hand it to the novel’s sunny title and bright design for demonstrating how easy it is to fool us, somewhat. While it is true it’s a breezy read, it’s also a serious statement about honesty and fairness in the digital age.

Truthfulness is a timeless, old-fashioned virtue. Dave drives home a cautionary contemporary tale. “It’s amazing, after all, what you ignore when you want something to be right, isn’t it? Like in this case the truth,” Sunny airs, now that she’s been unmasked as other than the innocent she purports to be. Maybe she didn’t intend to put out falsehoods and the downhome cooking concept wasn’t even hers at first, but one fabrication led to another until little white lies became big ones. At what point should she have said enough is enough? The game’s not cute anymore; we’ve gone too far. Makes you wonder if the inventors of the Internet, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram etc. considered the extent to which unintended consequences – ethical, moral, societal, psychological – could overshadow intended benefits? How can we fix that now?

Hello, Sunshine, like our protagonist, is disguised. On the surface, it’s a smart, fun read packed with laser-sharp one-liners – zingers that flash cynicism, anger, and resentment at betrayals and guile with standout, realistic (not all enchanted!) dialogue already scripted for the big screen. Yet underneath, it’s a condemnation of a society that’s gotten too cozy with people who have a “loose hold on the truth.”

Sunshine’s scandal kicks-off as summertime kicks in (the June Part) with this punchy, opening paragraph:

You should probably know two things up front. And the first is this: On my thirty-fifth birthday, the day I lost my career and my husband and my home in one uncompromising swoop – I woke up to one of my favorite songs playing on the radio-alarm clock. I woke up to “Moonlight Mile” …

Sunshine then proceeds to tell us about Moonlight Mile, that it’s “the most honest rock song ever recorded.” The Rolling Stones songwriter, guitarist Mick Taylor, never got the credit for it. There’s our theme: honesty or the lack thereof. Someone taking credit for something he or she didn’t earn.

Such an engaging opener you forget there’s something else Sunny wanted us to know. Which she tells us a few pages in, admitting she was not “a good person. Some would even say I was a bad person.” She can bear herself brutally because once upon a time she “used to be a very honest person.” But she’s mastered – from her producer pro, forty-year-old Ryan Landy – how-to be “charming, deceitful.” So when she unveils that second thing, she confesses to gaming us too by letting us wait a bit, a strategy for “garnering sympathy.”

How did she become, as she also admits, a “seasoned liar”? Terrific adjective since her deceptions blended in with the seasonings. Truth is when you lie about one thing and get rather good at it (she can’t get over the “ease and strength in which people lied”), turns out you lie about other things. So when you’re ruthlessly exposed, your whole world collapses like a house of cards. Not exactly a sunny June, a sunny birthday celebration!

June is also when we meet other characters who figure in Sunshine’s shattered world. One is her dreamy husband, Danny, with “stunning green eyes” and a “killer smile.” They’ve been married fourteen years, college sweethearts. He’s an architect working on a coveted project, a 5,000 square foot residence with views of Central Park. The truth about Danny is he truly loves Sunny, though you may feel otherwise as their lives fall apart.

Some around Sunshine knew truths about her, but “people only spoke up about something if it benefited them,” Sunny perceptively says. That line really hit me having just watched The Zookeeper’s Wife based on real events about a Polish couple risking their lives to rescue 300 Jews during WWII because it was morally just. A stark contrast between their profiles in courage versus Sunshine’s “faux-sympathy” orbit and today’s political climate.

July is when Sunshine faces a friendless world despite all those million “friends.” Having no place to go, she returns to Montauk, where she’s really from. Though the truth of her former life along the tip of the Hamptons is “not as showy,” it’s a long way from the farm girl image she impersonated.

Among the “dunes, beach, charm” of Montauk the real Sunshine Stephens shows up. As do a number of colorful characters from her past and beaten-down present. Here is where we learn what drove her away, and why pretending to be someone other than who she was took such hold.

Montauk, NY Lighthouse
Photo by chartersny on Flickr

These are sad times, but not everything is bad. The imagery of Montauk – Atlantic Ocean, sustainable fishing, old working lighthouse, for starters. There’s also some good people. They and this special place seem to hold the answers to the peace and healing Sunshine desperately needs.

Not so fast! Sunshine has a lot on her plate and recovery does not come overnight. August is when she works at reclaiming her former self, or perhaps a truer self. As Sunny seeks to become a good person again, we wonder if you have to lose it all to truly find yourself?

So grab this entertaining, perfectly-sized vacation read (256 pages, short-chapters), and play around with who you’d cast in the starring role of Sunshine. More food for thought.

Lorraine