Posted on by Kirsten T. Saxton

Emily, Alone

Stuart Nan (2011)

For two weeks, I have tried to describe the character Emily of our most recently read book Emily Alone. Our discussion began with speculation about how a male author of fifty could so convincingly create a dull and conservative elderly woman character, but soon we all began to admit we found Emily boring.

 Set seven years after O’Nan’s introduction of his eponymous protagonist,   the novel finds Emily rattling around her Pittsburgh house, “her life no longer an urgent or necessary business,” redistributing Kleenex boxes, cleaning her stove in preparation for the cleaning lady’s arrival, noting birds in her journal, scanning the obituaries for familiar names and planning for the annual visits of her children, Margaret and Kenneth, and their children.

I can’t recall another book in which we described the protagonist as boring. It is not that other protagonists were having adventure-filled lives, it was that in most of the books we read, even the least active life is rendered interesting. Noticing birds or preparing or tending to a house can be richly evocative material.

Perhaps it was because Emily is so unlike all of us, except for the fact that she is in our age cohort.

She does not deal with physical or mental illness or disability; she has no financial worries; she has not identified with some external or interior passion; she does not volunteer or have meaningful connections with her present or past communities; she has no internal conversation. 

So while we applauded her for resuming driving and purchasing a bright blue Subaru against the wishes of her overly protective children,  that was about it. 

Her life feels rather small. However as many of the novels we have read over the years make clear, even small things can feel larger or more impactful or create empathy depending on how they are presented.

Emily seems to be primarily concerned about appearances, about doing the proper thing, about showing up because one should show up.

These concerns actually can be made interesting, or revealing; characters can struggle against them, or can reveal the powerful outcomes even superficial showing up can offer. 

We are accustomed to stories about older women who feel disconnected from their adult children, but Emily seems actually more concerned with propriety than with any genuine relationship with her daughter or her son. It is as if she is walking on eggshells all the time in her attempt to avoid conflict, but she does not seem to get much pleasure from her family. Emily avoids any genuine conversations, instead silently critiquing her sister in law Eileen and so forth. 

She seems to be continuing life just as it was before her husband Henry died, as a matter of course. She picks up a familiar novel, even some that are favorites of some of us, like Jane Eyre, but what she reads does not merit attention or thought. Similarly,   music in the novel seems to be background rather than arousing any feeling in her or in the reader.  Perhaps, if we listened to each piece of music mentioned, we would find some subtle meaning, but neither the books nor the music seem to be other than habit.

Many of us have developed habits and rituals that help us cope with aging and failing memories but we get the sense that Emily has always relied on habit, and we missed any spontaneity or genuine delight or despair.

She remains a character on the surface. I wondered how Emily feels in her aging body. What does she remember or miss when she catches a glimpse of herself in the mirror? Has she always held herself at a distance from others? Her children and now grandchildren, so that she is more concerned about the promptness of a thank you note then about any genuine conversation?

I realize my comments sound harsh, and they do not reflect the novel’s rave reviews. There are plenty of unlikeable elderly women characters that generate interest for us. Perhaps this novel is supposed to be read as the story of an older woman without a viable interior or exterior life who cannot handle change? Her rare internal thoughts are about her sad but also frustrating inability to be in the present: she felt “helpless and dissatisfied, as if her life and the lives of all those she’d loved had come to nothing… to be replaced by this diminished present.”

I am not sorry I read it, but I will not be giving it as a gift.

Posted on by Kirsten T. Saxton

The Cemetery of Untold Stories  

by Julia Alvarez (2024)

“Everybody is a walking library” Julia Alvarez

In Julia Alvarez’s most recent novel, The Cemetery of Untold Stories, her narrator, Alma Cruz, laments the many stories she has not been able to finish. Her mentor, a close friend and famous novelist, begs her to finish the incomplete story that has for years driven her to a form of madness; in attempts to better know her unwritten characters, she has traveled internationally, behaved erratically, and still been unable to move forward.

Over the course of the novel, Alma eventually comes to terms with her unfinished manuscripts, facing her mortality navigating the changes and losses of aging, and the shifts in the acts of imagination and ambition that have propelled her for over thirty years of publication, fame, and university teaching.

She decides simply to stop the arc of her present trajectory, not her life, but the life she has been leading and in which she has been struggling. She retires from her teaching position, rents out her home in Vermont, hires a former student to help box up all her manuscripts, and moves to the island she has always considered home: the Dominican Republic, the home from which her family moved when she and her three sisters were children.

Alma and her sister have inherited a dozen small parcels on the island which need to be divided amongst the four sisters. Alma, confusingly to all–readers and characters alike–chooses the parcel in what is considered the most unsavory neighborhood, adjacent to the city dump. 

Once Alma relocates to the island, the narrative, like the character herself, becomes clearer. We agreed the story becomes increasingly compelling when she has relocated and, in a fantastical turn, decides to create a cemetery on her land, a cemetery for her many boxes of untold stories. 

Like her readers, Alma’s neighbors in the barrio are bewildered by the concept of a cemetery for untold stories, rather than people or animals.

Eventually, Alma decides to move from her family’s vacation home and to have a small casita constructed in the cemetery. 

We enjoyed reading about Alma’s friendship with the artist Brava, who eventually creates a fitting marker and sculpture for each unwritten character, each burial plot, each plotted tale untold.

Once the stories are buried, the novel shifts into glowing magical realism. The buried manuscripts  transmit their stories, converse with each other and can be 

heard by local woman Filomena who lives just outside the cemetery and is eventually hired by Alma to help keep an eye on the place, clean the bird shit off the sculptures and communicate with the curious neighbors. She is able to overhear the conversations between the unwritten characters, and we eavesdrop with her.

I had to listen to the audible version a second time before I could separate the multiple stories, begin to figure out the web of characters, and their many secrets and subtle connections. Central to the novel is its parallel sets of sisters: the four sisters of Alma’s lived experience, Filomena and her estranged sister, and sisters in the untold stories.Alma’s family’s lineage, and that of the “real” characters in the novel as well as the fictional characters, some of which are historically based, include details of patriarchal violence, sexism, crimes of passion, murder, repressed sexuality, adultery, and so forth.

When I asked our group to sum up the novel’s topic in a few words and offered “storytelling” as  my  own word, the responses included:   “unfinished business; immigrant experience in New York; who owns a story?” 

We welcomed the many phrases in Spanish and the sense of an expanded reading audience beyond a monolingual audience. We wondered aloud if Alvarez, like Alma had fictionalized her family members, told their secrets and angered them in the telling.Several group members intend to read her earlier fiction or to do a bit of research on her life. 

We agreed we are glad we chose to read this novel, and we then segued to conversations about our own collections–things kept or unfinished: things, our books, the downsizing of our parents’ belongings as well as our own.  

Perhaps because we have chosen to focus on stories of older women for over more than five years now, we are noticing patterns that reappear among stories we initially considered had nothing in common. Across a variety of tones, and formal styles, so many of our books navigate how we, as we age, navigate losses, in the present and in the recent and long past, grief, friendship, family relationships, secrets, and how we stay connected to the power of the imagination, redemption, and connection. Reading these books together connects not only the books, and their characters, but like Alma’s stories, our own. 

Posted on by Kirsten T. Saxton

The Correspondent

Virginia Evans (2025)

This debut epistolary novel reminds us how important letters are. 

Sybil Stone Van Antwerp lives alone in retirement from an impressive career in law. Kind and reserved, she misses the clarity and order of the law.

Her life is not empty, and yet she is alone, tending to her garden, and involved with a variety of family members, local organizations, and old friends through her meticulous letter writing practice.

 We learn that she fell apart after the death of her son Gilbert, age 8, in a diving accident while in her care. She was focused on a legal document from work and not paying attention when he dived into the river and broke his neck on its rocky bottom. Her marriage to Dan could not survive; both grieve, and he returned to his homeland, Brussels, taking their two younger children, 4 year old Fiona and 1 year old Bruce with him.

The novel gradually reveals the long term effects of Gilbert’s death.

She buried herself in her work while still reeling with grief and made a fatal judgement in her legal role, one driven by her rage and sorrow which causes great harm. 

We all agreed that we are glad we read this novel. We had not known when we chose the novels or their order that, as in our previous book Hamnet, this novel dives deep into the narration of a grief stricken mother after the death of her son. 

We talked about the competing pull of profession and family life, and how carefully and subtly the novel captures Sybil’s sense, as an adoptee, of being on the outside, even as her adoptive family is wonderful. In one plot strand, she navigates the gift of a DNA test, and we talked about modern ways of tracing one’s identity by sending off a saliva sample. 

We enjoyed Sybil’s eventual discovery of a sister and extended family in Scotland, her tender friendship with widowed neighbor Theordore, and the realism of the break with Rosalie and then the renewal of their friendship. 

We really appreciated the ways in which Sybill’s letters were so different in tone, tailored toward each of the recipients with precision and care. She can be formal and curt in one letter and delightful and encouraging in another. Her warm connection with her fellow adoptee, her brother, her careful intelligent writing to Joan Didion, her insistent refusals of garden club and university decisions she deems unwise or unfair, and her humane interactions with corporate workers, all build a real sense of a fully developed complex character.

We did wonder why the author included the loud flirtatious retired lawyer from Houston, speculated that he made her laugh and perhaps helped to open her up to friendship with Theodore, as well as showing us that she is of romantic interest not just to Theodore, and we appreciated this vision of possibility and flirtation in later life. 

Her relationship with a colleague’s young son Harry is a particularly compelling epistolary connection, as we see her deep care, her mothering of this young troubled boy with respect and real interest in his individuality, and so glimpse a version of her that her adult children do not see.

Her impending blindness is what initially drew me into the book, and then I was so caught up in her web of characters and the other plot points that I lost track of that until near the end. Her vision seemed to deteriorate much more rapidly than my own, but her loss of independence and need to rely on others for driving and for companionship in travel rang true.

We appreciated the ways in which the novel is redemptive without veering into fairytale happily ever after. I appreciated the novel’s quick, silent death, alone at her writing desk, and the ways in which her unsent letters are discovered and help her family and close friends to understand why she did not attend Dan’s funeral and to grasp the extent of the devastation and intensity of her loss of Gilbert.

Posted on by Kirsten T. Saxton

An Unnecessary Woman by Rabih Alameddine (2014)

This 2014 novel was nominated for the National Book Award for Fiction. 

I am grateful for the members’ insights which I share below, as I was navigating family health crises for this discussion.

From Patricia:

In An Unnecessary Woman, Rabih Alameddine weaves an engaging tale about an unlikely survivor. Despite a dismal childhood, a dreadful arranged marriage, and the misfortune of living in war torn Beirut, Aaliya survives by immersing herself in a world of books – first by reading constantly in the small bookstore she managed and later by translating into Arabic many long and difficult works. Although this elderly Beiruti woman observes: “Most of the books published these days consist of a series of whines followed by an epiphany,” the tale of her life ends with an epiphany of sorts. When a flood threatens to destroy a mountain of boxes containing her many translations, she discovers that she can survive this catastrophe only with the help of several elderly women in her apartment building. Because of the unlikely and untested bond between these women and Aaliya, some of her translations may survive, and she begins to believe she is not an unseen or unnecessary woman.

From Liz:

I enjoyed the story and the characters. I also liked learning about the Lebanese civil war. I found the book sad but hopeful at the end. I disliked the massive number of literary quotes in the book – they became overwhelming for me and took away from the enjoyment of the story.

From Diane:

I recommended this book and really enjoyed it. The author is Lebanese and I learned about the Civil War which deeply affected the protagonist, Aaliya’s life. I found the writing full of wit and also sadness. Many of the references to books and music were not that interesting to me however and I found myself skipping lots of pages. Aaliya is an introvert who isolates herself and prefers the company of books and music, instead of people in her life. 

We appreciated Diane’s suggestion of this nuanced, complex novel.

Posted on by Kirsten T. Saxton

2025 Challenges/Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood

It has been a very plot-driven end to the year 2025 at every level, local, national, international. Like the protagonist of Charlotte Wood’s 2023 novel, we have all been buffeted by the cruelty of what Wood calls, “the broken world,” even as we have cheered on individuals and communities who insist on resistance and hope.

In the midst of the chaos, my husband and I both had medical emergencies (we are mending and home now), and I was grateful for our group, both because the picked up the pieces and kept things going (including taking the leads for two books in discussions and the blogs I am finally posting, and for the continuity and community of our shared reading and conversation experience, more needed than ever.

Health issues are present at any age, but certainly shape the reality of aging for most of us, and to be supported with medical care, and a strong community is a gift I wish for all of us in this, and every, stage of life. I am delighted to share group member’s smart comments on the final books of our last season.

Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood

Crushed by the seeming hopelessness of the broken world, the narrator of this novel, who works in species conservation, despairs at the ways we are destroying the planet, one another, and ourselves. 

She leaves her life in Sydney, including her marriage, iand checks into the retreat house of an enclosed convent on the Monaro Plains in New South Wales. 

As the Guardian reviewer notes,
“retreat she certainly does. For a while she just lies on the floor.”

Eventually, she participates in the life of the convent – joining the other women doing daily tasks of preparing food, cleaning, turning up to mass and the hours of office. There’s no epiphany, no  conversion narrative, just a quiet story of people tending to things. 

Liz L. writes:

I enjoyed this book.  It felt very meditative and stream of consciousness but had enough character development and emotional content to keep me interested and reading.

I was fascinated that the narrator was unnamed.  I didn’t even realize it until I was thinking about the book for group discussion! I loved the relationships that the narrator had with the other women in the retreat center and with Sister Helen Parry and with her mother.  I loved the stream of thoughts and remembrances and ideas that seemed to flow from the narrator in a constant river.  It felt very real and real life – like something I do at times when I remember the past.

From Patricia:

In an interview for the Booker Prize, Charlotte Wood, the author of Stone Yard Devotional,said,

“I wanted to master what Saul Bellow called ‘stillness in the midst of chaos.’

I think Wood accomplished this masterfully. The major voice in this novel is an unnamed woman. We learn that she has left job as a manager in an environmental non-profit. The narrator very briefly also mentions a husband she is leaving, but the novel is not larded with the details of her adult life before she visits the abbey on the Monaro plains in New South Wales. After a few short visits to the abbey, she returns and simply stays. We follow her as she shares the life of this community

of cloistered sisters. The silence and simplicity of her life in the abbey allow her to examine memories of her childhood. As she, with the other sisters, confronts a plague of mice and the tensions surrounding the burial of Sister Jenny, a nun who left the abbey for missionary work in Thailand, the narrator slowly finds a measure of peace with herself.

Annette writes: 

Like others in our group, I read this novel in several sessions because there was no plot to carry me forward.  Shortly before our Zoom meeting I realized I had had about ¼ in of pages left to read, right where the unnamed narrator and Helen Parry, the activist nun, drive around together stopping for a moment at various places where significant things happened in their youth.

My inability to sense where the novel was going relates to something the author said, as reported in LitHub. “There’s a lot of teaching and admonishing and explaining that goes on in contemporary fiction and I was sick of it… I have this setting of silence and stasis which is not good for a novel… I’m kind of writing a still life painting.”  Her friend Jude Rae, a painter of still-lifes, gave her advice for achieving an appealing movement. 

Toward the end it seems that the narrator and Helen express their feelings about their mothers.  The narrator has become more aware and respectful of her mother’s activities to better the world and also sees them a failure.  Both the narrator and her mother tried to do good (through environmentalism and helping refugees, among other things) but they tended at times to distance themselves from addressing local troubles.  The narrator’s mother had never visited Helen’s mother.  The narrator had joined in cruelty to Helen at school, and in adulthood chose to imagine that the man by the side of the road who disappeared down a covered drain was a worker and everything was ok.  

In interviews, Charlotte Wood talks about bush fires, COVID, the mouse plague and floods—all evidence of imbalance.  As a middle-class white woman who wants a moral way to proceed in the world, perhaps she lays out some considerations in this novel.  

Local vs worldwide activism; kindness vs effective disruption (privileged generosity vs dangerous activity); responsibility vs despair; direct activism vs talking/convincing others; and exploration of retreating into silence and routine to confront oneself, to do the least harm, or to do nothing. 

The stark setting in New South Wales, beautiful to some and terrifying to others, was described in a visual way (like a still-life?) that provokes emotion and thought:  the old cemetery with trees and the newer part a lawn with orderly identical headstones and faded plastic flowers here and there; the boulders in the larger landscape; the weather in which scenes in the novel take place. 

Local place names in such variety would provide orientation to inhabitants of a nearly undifferentiated expanse; but in this novel they seem enigmatic, part of the mood. 

Posted on by Kirsten T. Saxton

Senior Book Notes

Love and Missed by Susie Boyt (2023)

This short novel, about 150 pages, tells the story of Ruth, who raises her granddaughter Lily, because Lily’s mother/Ruth’s daughter, Eleanor, is addicted to drugs. 

After someone dies of an overdose in Eleanor’s apartment, Ruth hands her daughter an envelope of cash and takes Lily home with her, and Lily, as she grows, is a delightful and loving, if overly self aware, well behaved child, and the relationship between her and Ruth is touching, powerful, and hopeful.

We all agreed we are glad we read Susan Boyt’s beautifully written novel. Several readers found it compelling and read it in one big gulp, while some of us found it so  intense  we had to read in small installments. This poignant novel is filled with so many insights that those of us who take notes or use post its, found phrases and words to savor on nearly every page–far too many for us to share.

We all admire Ruth, the mother of a daughter who at age thirteen begins to fulfill every parent’s fears–turning to drugs and addicts and avoiding and refusing all of Ruth’s attempts to connect, to please her, to alter her own behaviour in hopes of connecting. 

Boyt’s portrayal of Ruth and her estranged daughter is clear eyed, non-judgemental and heartbreaking. We soon realize that this story will not include an amazing recovery, rehab program, or fairy tale ending, but Ruth is able to rescue the already addicted emaciated baby Lily, and the story of her raising Lily is filled with love. Like Tillie Olsen’s stories, Boyt captures the sensual quality of a baby’s skin, the intoxicating pleasure of skin on skin, laughter and delight despite Ruth’s serious insecurity, and doubting herself.

One reader did a bit of research on the author learning she is one of Lucien Freud’s fourteen children and though not an analyst as our last author was, had trained as a bereavement counselor. 

We discussed the stereotypes of children of addicts, the notions that the body never forgets trauma, and we appreciated the book’s depiction of a healthy life ahead of Lily who is fifteen at the novel’s end. Lily might be described as a parentified child, aware from her reading and experience that her mother is lost to her, but the generosity of her grandmother and her grandmother’s community, despite economic and emotional hardship, leaves us hopeful for her future.

We talked about the title, taken from a tombstone and the many ways it can be parsed. How do you read the words? 

This is British writer Susie Boyt’s seventh novel, and the first to be published in the United States, and I hope its success means more of her books will be available here. I have a sense many of us will be looking for them. hungry for more of her insightful stories.

Posted on by Kirsten T. Saxton

Senior Book Notes

Cat Brushing  by Jane Campbell 2022

In her debut collection of short stories, Cat Brushing, 80-year-old British author Jane Campbell aims to set the record straight about “women of a certain age.”

I will share from the The San Francisco Chronicle review of the collection at some length, as I found it useful context, and you may as well:

what began in 2017 as an impromptu sketch piece inspired by a two-week holiday in Bermuda with her eldest son and daughter-in-law turned into a no-holds-barred collection of 13 dirty, doughty and often wickedly funny stories that cover everything from common misconceptions about aging (no, grandmothers aren’t only there to serve their grandchildren, and, yes, their thinking processes can be just as deep and nuanced as they were at a youthful 30) to erotic desire (or the long-overdue liberation from sexual obligation) to retaining agency as “an oldie.” The best part? They’re all narrated by mouthy women who are through with being patronized.

This, like most of the reviews I read, suggest the collection is rather delicious fun, using terms such as “wickedly funny” or “delightfully shocking.” However, upon reading the collection I was struck that many of the stories offer a pattern that is far darker: elderly female characters finally do what they want, which feels cathartic and empowering but only briefly, as most of the stories close bleakly, with the women bound under the judgment of others.

I wondered how we would respond, given our status as elderly readers,some of us older than Campbell when she published the stories about women in our age cohort.

I had purchased the hardcover copy soon after its publication, but set it aside and so listened to the stories because of my macular degeneration. Then, at our meeting, I had trouble getting onto the zoom link and missed the first part of group discussion. Discombobulated by the problems, I forgot to take any notes.

However, in response to my plea for help, Diane, Annette, and Patricia provided excellent notes, making it possible for me to give you a glimpse of our group’s responses to the collection.

At least three of us did not like the collected stories overall, but  altered our dissatisfaction as we listened to other group members.  One common complaint was the recurrence of abrupt negative endings that overwhelmed what had been a generally positive or capacious take on the older woman’s experience.

Many of us noted the ways the collection demonstrates how traumatic childhood experiences, such as incest or extreme emotional distance from a parent, do not disappear with age.

We also noticed that Campbell kept our focus on the elderly woman’s experience by providing indirect clues rather than didactic explication or description, and that these clues got us thinking about the likely relationships between the character and significant people in her life. 

Some of the most shocking stories portray women choosing dramatic deaths–from cutting in the bath to be discovered by visiting adult offspring who are more distressed by the mess than the loss of their parent to the suicide of a woman whose youthful affair has remained the love of her life in memory but was just a fling for the man she has stalked. These stories prompted conversations about the potentially stark differences between individual memories of events and the pain that such differences can cause.

We appreciated the tender story that opens the collection in which Susan, a bedridden elderly woman is ready for death until she unexpectedly experiences desire for Miffy, the young caregiver and rediscovers the importance of touch. We were struck by how the story’s description of loving touch, outside the “norms” of traditional erotica or caregiving, contrasts to the superficial programmed way of caring portrayed by others.

We were somewhat amused by the Schopenhauer story’s ending in which the woman manages to destroy her robot caaretaker, and we discussed this hostile substitute for human companions and helpers. Those of us who had read Ishiguru’s Klara and the Sun noted the strong contrast with Kim and Klara, yet how both were designed to be a companion for a lonely human.

We speculated that Campbell’s long career as an analyst may have influenced her fictional portrayals. I had purchased her first novel, published two years after the short story collection, and after our discussion I found it in my library. Freudian analysis plays a central part, and is nearly a character of its own, both in that novel and in Cat Brushing. In the end, we agreed that, Campbell’s text provokes thought, if not pleasure.

.A link to the titular story from London Review of Books: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v39/n21/jane-campbell/story-cat-brushing

Posted on by Kirsten T. Saxton

The Snow Child

by Eowyn Ivey (2012)

“Like many fairy tales, there are many different ways it is told, but it always begins the same. An old man and an old woman live happily in their small cottage in the forest, but for one sorrow: they have no children of their own. One winter’s day, they build a girl of snow.”

The Snow Child is based on  the Russian folktale Snegurochk, which means “Snow Maiden,” about a couple who build a child out of snow.

The novel is set in Alaska in 1920; it tells the story of Jack and Mabel, a couple trying to forge a new life in the wilderness where they moved a little less than two years after their only child was stillborn. They are homesteaders, clearing land and hoping to farm it in order to claim the land as their own.

Place is central in this novel. Ivey was raised in Alaska and still lives there; and as The Guardian review notes, the novel, her debut. “is so saturated with wilderness atmosphere that you almost feel you’ve been there yourself.” Her love for this challenging landscape shines through, and we appreciated her narrative’s tremendous capacity to situate us in a place none of us are familiar with. 

When Jack is injured, Mabel, who arrived in Alaska with book learning and a skill for fine work,  steps up to the physical challenges of sowing potatoes and reeling in fish. We appreciate her strength. 

Mabel and Jack both develop over the course of the novel, and Jack is portrayed with as much tenderness as Mabel.  The Snow Child narrates the growth of both partners within a single marriage over a long period as gender roles and preconceived notions gradually loosen in the shared hardship of their new life.

One day, the couple playfully builds a snowgirl, but the next morning she is gone. Instead, they start to catch glimpses of a small blond girl off in the trees. The novel’s fairy tale origins are strong, and at times you find yourself wondering if poor Mabel and Jack will be sucked into some occult fairyland of deathless ice maidens, Angela Carter-style. Or will they simply buckle down to mending their damaged relationship, bonding over the muddy rows of potato seedlings in a more heartwarming result? 

Retelling fairy tales allows a writer to experiment with setting and character development, but always in the background is the plot of the original tale. Although Mabel’s sister assures her that she can write new endings, as readers we cannot escape the outlines of the tales that have been pulled into the light. We know in our bones that the Snow Maiden, that elusive girl who offers them a new chance, cannot exist in “real life”– she thrives in the ice and snow and freedom of living on her own in nature. The baby boy she births helps Mabel and Jack and ties up the story’s loose ends but it is a mere fantasy ending that we did not feel replaced the far more convincing ending of the original tale.  The novel’s conclusion wraps all up in a magical heartwarming fashion that left us unconvinced.

However, our conversation was lively, and as we listened to each other we each recalled details that made the characters and the setting feel real and nuanced despite the end result of a bit too sweet of an ending.

In case you are interested: there is a musical is based on this tale! Check out the NPR story:

https://www.npr.org/2018/05/02/606509836/snow-child-conveys-alaskas-wild-magic-in-musical-form

Click for a four minute listen

Posted on by Kirsten T. Saxton

Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows

Balli Kaur Jaswal (2018)

The premise of Balli Kaur Jaswal’s Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows is pretty compelling: Nikki, a young British-Punjabi woman, takes a creative writing job at her local temple, hoping to emancipate the community’s women with her modern ideals. She finds the women she’s teaching are barely literate widows who have no interest in her grand plans. But these women, who’ve spent their lives in the shadows of fathers, brothers, and husbands, have incredibly rich inner lives and some very interesting, and very spicy, stories to tell.

What really stands out about this novel is how it centers women who are typically ignored—in this case, older widows in the Punjabi community. As one reviewer put it, Kaur Jaswal gives voices to women who are generally voiceless, and she lets them talk about sex, no less. It’s a bold move that crashes through conventions and insists that every woman, no matter how invisible she may seem, has stories worth telling and deserves to be heard.

When we met on Zoom, I wasn’t sure how the conversation would go. I’d listened to the audiobook and found myself experiencing a weird mix of embarrassment, fascination, and unexpected interest—probably thanks to my Evangelical upbringing. The creative fruit and vegetable metaphors amused me (banana and cucumber I’d heard of at bridal showers, but aubergine and eggplant were new!).

However, what really drove our discussion was not the novel’s sexy shock value; instead, we dove into its many layers—arranged marriages, oppressive gender roles, double standards, generational cultural clashes, and even a murder mystery woven throughout.

As reviewers have noted, this book is wildly ambitious. It’s an immigrant novel in the tradition of The Joy Luck Club and White Teeth that offers serious commentary on the daily subjugation of women, as well as a murder mystery, a romance, and so forth. That’s a tough balance, and sometimes the book felt overwhelming with its multiple plots and stories-within-stories.

We noticed the generally negative portrayal of men in the novel, which contrasted with the actual Sikh men some of us have known. It made us think about how few fully realized, decent men appear in women’s fiction generally, perhaps because of the generally oppressive nature of the way various social systems uphold misogyny and the real risks women face from those systems, both at a general and personal level of violence or erasure.

We loved certain characters who felt fully developed (though honestly, most of the widows blurred together after a while, which we found a problem). The climactic scene of the older women’s collective capacity to rescue the younger more modern woman was powerful. However, the novel wraps up rather quickly with all loose ends tied up: it felt a bit too tidy.

The book deserves praise for its sympathetic portrayal of women across generations—the widows, the younger women, and their parents—all struggling for independence, love, and achievement in a larger society marked by racism, sexism, and materialism.

Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows may not be perfect, but it’s a novel that makes you think, laugh, and see the invisible women around you in a whole new light.

Posted on by Kirsten T. Saxton

Senior Book Notes

Three Things About Elsie  Joanna Cannon (2018)

There are three things you should know about Elsie. The first thing is that she’s my best friend. The second is that she always knows what to say to make me feel better. And the third thing…might take a bit more explaining.

Eighty-four-year-old Florence has fallen in her flat at Cherry Tree Home for the Elderly. As she waits to be rescued, she thinks about her friend Elsie and wonders if a terrible secret from their past is about to come to light. If the charming new resident is who he claims to be, why does he look exactly like a man who died sixty years ago?

Booklist describes the novel as

a tender and charismatic look into life in a nursing home. Cannon effortlessly captures the home’s slow routines, along with the ways that staff and residents coexist but often know little about each other . . .

When we met on Monday afternoon to discuss this novel, we all agreed we were glad we read it, but, perhaps predictably in a novel that focuses on the confusions of memory and truth, each of us had questions about the actual facts of the plot. 

We were not all sure what was actually “the truth” about Elsie, or about Florence, and we differed about certain “facts” in the novel about the past.

Spoilers ahead! Don’t Read if you don’t want to know what happens!

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For example, we asked each another: When did it first become obvious to you that Elsie was not a resident of the home? When did Elsie die? Did she die in the fire Florence mistakenly believed she had caused? 

Several of us realized Elsie was not present in the retirement residence but did not realize she died in the fire. We all knew Elsie was Florence’s best friend, that they were very close friends, but not that Flo’s only love was Elsie, that after Elsie died, Florence never married or had children because she, Elsie, was her true love.

We talked about the retirement home, our own determination to avoid such places if possible, the patronizing tone of Miss Bissel and Miss Abrose toward the residents, the tendency to disbelieve those who are forgetful and tending toward dementia.

We agreed that Cannon’s characters–both residents and staff–were believable and well drawn. We praised her handling of the braided plots, Flo’s memories as well as the mystery plot. We appreciated the writing, and all of us had favorite lines, too many to record even with the help of post-its or underlining. 

The ending felt forced for some of us. Rodney’s arrest after so many years, the likelihood that he would end up at the same retirement home as Florence after so many decades. And that he would have access to her flat in his attempts to undermine her testimony about the past by accentuating her dementia. 

We speculated about the significance of the jet black amulet Flo notices beneath the baseboards from her fallen position on the floor.

We recognized the plot resembles what I label “deathbed bookends” in my book of old ladies, and yet we did not want to critique Cannon as we hadSusan  Minot for using this plot structure. After a bit, we realized Minot  had placed as the emotional center of her novel an unrequired sexual encounter from the protagonists’ past whereas Cannon provided a much fuller portrait of Flo’s current life and explored the aftermath of trauma.

Around the edges of our focus on the novel, we exchanged some of our own experiences: from visiting family members in such retirement homes, to differentiating between dementia and normal cognitive lapses, to experiences being patronized by younger people who call is by diminutive labels or refer to us in third person.

We liked Flo, and we wondered when she  began considering Elsie was present, when Elsie was part of herself. Was the third thing about Elsie that Elsie had died? Was it that she loved Elsie? What do you think?