The Street of a Thousand Blossoms by Gail Tsukiyama

The Street of A Thousand Blossoms by Gail Tsukiyama
448 pages
Published August 2008 by St Martin's Press

In 1939 Japan, two orphans are being raised by their grandparents. Hiroshi shows early promise as a sumo wrestler. Kenji has discovered the art of making masks for the Noh theater.
But when Japan draws the U.S. into war, the boys' dreams must be put on hold. Meanwhile, the young daughters of a great sumo teacher are also suffering through the war. After the war, the lives of the girls and the young men become intertwined with the young men's lives when Hiroshi is chosen to begin training as a sumo. The story follows these young people for nearly thirty years as the young men pursue their dreams in very traditional fields as their country moves into the future. Along the way we also get to know their grandparents, Kenji's sensei, and the girls' father.

Although the novel is epic in time span, Tsukiyama tells the tale in small stories. Her prose is simple and she recreates a vivid portrait of Japan as it struggled to recover from World War II. The New York Times called the book tense, but I never really felt that Tsukiyama achieved a sense of tension; I saw pretty much everything coming before it happened. I learned a lot about sumo wrestling and Noh mask making but I felt like Tsukiyama gave a little too much attention to these things at times. None of the sumo matches felt any different from the others and I was never in doubt as to the outcome. Some of the peripheral characters got a lot of attention (Kenji's sensei, for example); this sometimes took away from the main stories. For all that was going on in the book, this was a slow read; and at over 400 pages, I really had to push myself to get through it. Once again, I felt like the book could have been shorter and not lost a thing.

Lisa, at Breaking the Fourth Wall, seemed to feel about the same way as I did on this one. Here's her review:
http://breakingfourth.blogspot.com/2009/03/book-review-street-of-thousand-blossoms.html.

Everything Austen Challenge--Bridget Jones's Diary

Have kicked off the "Everything Austen" challenge rather unexpectedly. Last night I was channel surfing and came across "Bridget Jones's Diary" just as it was beginning. I must admit that my husband was not thrilled to be watching it yet again and I still wasn't exactly clear about how it tied in closely enough to be counted for the challenge, but we watched it anyway.

Now let's be honest--even if it weren't for the challenge, there's a good chance I would have made my husband watch this movie again. It's got Colin Firth and Hugh Grant in it for heaven's sake! And this time, when I was looking for it, I finally got the connection to Pride and Prejudice (aside from the fact that Firth's character is named Darcy). The movie opens with Bridget and Darcy both being at a party where he is plainly bored and finds her foolish while she finds him a bore. Hey, me thinks, this is the first dance in P&P. Then Bridget hooks up with Daniel Cleaver, who, it turns out, has a bit of a bad history with Darcy. Well duh, I think; of course he is Mr. Wickham from P&P. Sure enough, it turns out that Cleaver/Wickham is a total cad who has lied about his history with Darcy and Bridget/Elizabeth Bennet wises up and chooses Darcy, who, come to find out, is quite a nice guy when you really get to know him. One down, five to go!

What The Dead Know by Laura Lippman

What The Dead Know by Laura Lippman
400 pages
Published February 2008 by Harper Collins Publishing

Thirty years ago two teenage sisters disappeared from a shopping mall and their bodies were never found. Now a disoriented woman, involved in a car accident, claims to be one of the Bethany sisters. But after that admission she clams up. Where has she been and why hasn't she made contact sooner? And what happened to the other sister? There's no evidence to support her claim and every lead she gives the cop investigating her claim leads to a dead end. Eventually details begin to come out involving a beloved detective, years of sexual abuse and the murder of the other sister. But when the girls' now elderly mother comes to town, a terrible truth is revealed.

This story skips back and forth in time and Lippman does a wonderful job of it, never losing the thread of the current investigation while exploring the background. The Bethanys are an odd family; the parents relationship is strained and the girls' upbringing causes two very different reactions from them resulting in a very believable relationship between them. The disappearance of the girls results in the breakup of the parents marriage, as they each deal with the situation in different ways. There are a lot of characters in the book, including the police detective that originally investigated the disappearance, a social worker who takes in the mysterious woman, and the detective now trying to unravel the mystery. Lippman does a fine job of fleshing out all of these characters. This will keep you guessing until the last chapter but it does take a while to wrap up. 

 More Lippman is definitely in my future.

Happy Fourth of July

On July 4th, 1976, my parents hosted a Fourth of July breakfast for a few of their neighbors to celebrate the bicentennial of our country. It was a small group; my mom made pancakes for everyone on her patio with her electric griddle. For twenty more years they hosted the breakfast. Every year it grew larger, every year it became more festive. When my parents grew tired of hosting it, another neighbor took over hosting the event because it had become such a cherished part of the neighborhood. Several years ago, my brother began hosting a breakfast in his neighborhood. 

 This year, I decided it was time for my family to begin the tradition. We had a mix of family, neighbors, and friends. We had all the necessary brunch food, festive decor, and shooting off of fireworks after breakfast. But for my children, no Fourth of July breakfast would be complete without the talk my father, the former American History teacher, gives every year. This year he reminded us that the founding fathers, determined to break away from England, chose to do it in a way that laid out for the rest of the world the reasons for their decision in Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence. On July 2, the brave men of the Second Continental Congress voted in favor of independence. Despite the great risk, these men put their names to a document that ended this way: "...we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor." My father ended his talk by asking us if the people of this country were still willing to make this pledge, hoping that we all were. I hope you all had a wonderful Fourth of July but made sure to take some time to remember the reason for the celebration.

Friday Favorite

My Friday Favorite this week is William Styron's "Sophie's Choice," which was made into an equally wonderful movie starring Meryl Streep and Kevin Kline. 

This is really three stories wrapped into one. It's the story of a young Southern man, Stingo, who moves to New York with aspirations of becoming an auther. He moves into a boarding house where he meets the charismatic Nathan and a Polish immigrant, Sophie. The relationship between Nathan and Sophie is the basis for the second story and Sophie's past is the basis for the third story. I just found the characters in this book to be incredibly well-written and Styron writes about the anguish of the characters in a way that really kept me glued to the book. In chronicling Sophie's past and how it affects her in the present, Stryon has written one of the great Holocaust novels. When you find out what Sophie's choice was, I defy you not to gasp; it's truly heartbreaking.

Out this week is a meta-list of the Top 100 books of all time compiled by Newsweek after they looked at lists put together from ten other sources including Modern Library and Oprah. Check it out here: http://www.newsweek.com/id/204478/.

Literally just delivered to my door, a box of books I ordered from Barnes and Noble's clearance sale. I got: Baker Towers by Jennifer Haigh (The Condition), P.S. I Love You by Cecelia Ahern, The Art Thief by Noah Charney, Things I Want My Daughters To Know by Elizabeth Noble and Heyday by Kurt Anderson (of NPR fame). So excited to dig into them but must read through my library books first. Discipline is the order of the day!