Author Archives: Rosemary Wolfe, NoChargeBookbunch

About Rosemary Wolfe, NoChargeBookbunch

Avid reader; published writer; itinerant walker; experimental cook...and a Doctor - Ph.D.

Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld

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I fell in love with Curtis Sittenfeld’s writing when I read The Thirteenth Tale. Although I told everone to read it, now I can’t remember what is was about and I still struggle spelling her name. In her latest book, a Reese Witherspoon book club pick, Romantic Comedy starts as a primer on the popular live weekly comedy variety show, Saturday Night Live.

If you have watched SNL, you will recognize the format, and appreciate the behind the scenes tutorial. Sally Milz is a ten year veteran comedy writer for the show, who provides the insider information about fellow writers and staff. The target episode has Noah, a thirty-something handsome singer who is both hosting the show and providing the musical numbers for the show. As handsome as he is, he may be wearing a wig, but this does not stop Sally from making a connection as preparation for the week’s show progresses. Sadly, Sally inadvertently insults him – in a not so funny way – and the burgeoning romance fizzles.

Two years later, enter Covid and Part 2, with Sally and Noah emailing each other. Mel Brooks could not have written better dialogue, and sometimes I felt I was reading one of his parodies, or maybe it was a farce? At any rate, the laughs are subtle and the romance intensifies. With Noah secluded in Los Angeles, with a housekeeper, chef, and trainer, and Sally in Kansas City with her eighty year old step father and his dog, their emails are long and comfortable, revealing past relationships, attitudes, and secrets (most times funny) about themselves. I have been in both LA and Kansas City, and I doubt I would have wanted to spend Covid isolation in either place, but maybe the chef would have helped. They decide to actually talk on the phone, and eventually set up a meeting.

As Part 3 begins, Covid is still in the air, so Sally drives to LA, supplied with protein bars, hand sanitizer, masks, and water. Secluded in the bubble of Noah’s beautiful estate, they finally provide the love scenes – until, predictably, the paparazzi invade their privacy and Sally’s step father’s bout with Covid prompts her return to Kansas.

All ends well, and as with any good romantic comedy, they live happily ever after. A fun romp and timely. This may be the first novel written during Covid that not just acknowledged its impact on lives but also had the characters emerging better for it.

The Golden Spoon

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I’ve always enjoyed baking more than cooking. Maybe it’s not being responsible for someone maintaining their well being but being able to offer an added pleasure. Maybe it’s the sugar.

From Off the Shelf:

“Mixing murder, baked goods, and a famous television show creates the perfect recipe for a delicious mystery. THE GOLDEN SPOON follows the six bakers invited to compete on TV’s hottest baking show, Bake Week, which takes place on the grounds of the striking Grafton estate in Vermont. But when the competition turns deadly, everyone is a suspect. Smoothly blending each character’s storyline together to create a shocking twist,”

If you are a fan of the Great British Bake Off – which always inspires me – you will enjoy Jessa Maxwell’s treat.

Earth’s the Right Place for Love by Elizabeth Berg

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I fell in love with Elizabeth Berg when I saw her title “The Day I Ate Anything I Wanted,” and each of her subsequent books have given me a level of comfort. This one – Earth’s the Right Place for Love – made me cry. If you remember Arthur as the old man in Berg’s novel “The Story of Arthur Trulove,” you might appreciate the prequel in Berg’s latest novel but the story stands on its own as a lesson in grief and moving on.

Arthur is an inexperienced sixteen year old in unrequited love with the beautiful brunette who eventually becomes his wife. A horrific accident irrevocably changes Arthur’s life but cements his kind and determined outlook on life.

Although there’s no way to know what life will bring, Berg uses her characters to keep readers open to possibilities, and promises all will be well, if we can just be patient.

I Have Some Questions For You

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On days when I only want to stare out the window and can only manage cheese sandwiches and yogurt (and of course chocolate) for sustenance, I can justify never leaving my couch if I have a page turner like Rebecca Makkai’s I Have Some Questions For You – a complicated mystery focusing on one death with so many tangential subplots.

Bodie Kane, a successful podcaster, returns to her New Hampshire boarding school alma mater as a visiting lecturer and finds herself investigating, with her students, the death of her roommate twenty years earlier. Bodie is convinced the school’s athletic trainer Omar Evans who was convicted is not the murderer. As she investigates fellow students and the music teacher who seemed a little too friendly, Bodie remembers incidents from her time as a poor student among wealthy and entited class mates.

Gabino Iglesias for NPR notes “it is a dark, uncomfortable story about murder, racism, sexual abuse, grief, the nature of collective memory, privilege, the way humans want to be at the center of tragedy even when they’re not, and feeling like an outsider. This is a novel about questions, with the biggest question of them all – Who killed Thalia Keith? But as Makkai cleverly inserts choice news clippings of other cases with implications for miscarriages of justice into the main plot, she raises more questions stretching into the failures of the American criminal justice system, the public’s obsession with stories of violence, and influence affecting outcomes. Was the man who has served more than twenty years in prison really the murderer? Is it too inconvenient to change the verdict?

Although the story morphs into a legal thriller in the last half of the book, Makkai carefully keeps bringing the reader back to reality. She tells who the real killer is, but she does not tie up loose ends. There is more for the reader to think about than whodunit.

Forbidden Notebook

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Years ago a good friend advised me to destroy my journal pages soon after I wrote them, especially if I had used them to vent anger or frustration. Of course, I did not follow her advice. In the introduction to Alba de Cespedes Forbidden Notebook, Jhumpa Lahiri reminds the reader that “ whether intended for publication or not…(diaries and notebooks) are all dialogues with the self. They are instances of self-doubting and self-fashioning. They are declarations of autonomy…”

Recently I found a few old journals in a stack of papers I was going through to decide which could be shredded or tossed. When I read through them, I understood why Jane Austen had left instructions for her sister to destroy her notes after death. I realized I did not want anyone reading my thoughts from years ago when what seemed insurmountable then, feels irrelevant and unimportant now. So I finally took my friend’s advice and shredded them.

The book takes the form of a series of diary entries made by 43-year-old Valeria Cossati in Rome in 1950. She is wife to Michele and a mother of two grown-up children, Mirella and Riccardo. She also has an office job.

One Sunday morning she goes to the tobacconist to buy cigarettes for her husband when she notices a pile of notebooks in the window – “black, shiny, thick, the type used in school”. When she asks to buy one, the tobacconist tells her it is forbidden, as by law he is only allowed to sell tobacco on Sundays. She pleads and he gives in, insisting she “hide it under her coat” so the guard doesn’t spot it. At home Valeria continues to keep her notebook hidden from her family.

By the end of the novel, Valeria decides to destroy the journal, but she can’t eliminate so easily the self- knowledge she’s gleaned from writing it. She writes: “I know that my reactions to the facts I write down in detail lead me to know myself more intimately every day,..The better I know myself, the more lost I become. Besides, I don’t know what feelings could stand up to a ruthless, continuous analysis; or who among us, reflected in every action, could be satisfied with ourselves.”

The book written in 1952 has just been published in a new translation, and its focus on women’s rights and struggles still resonates today. Clare Thorp in her review for the BBC says: “The things that she discovers, she sees, it’s what we all struggle with still, and that was a little alarming. Immediately you’re just so pulled into it and engaged, it’s just amazing. I just feel like everybody should read this book.”

As Valeria struggles to find a safe place for her notebook and her private thoughts, it’s hard not to think of Virginia Woolf’s famous line of a woman needing a room of her own. In Valeria’s world, as with many women, there is no place for her husband and children to see her other than who she is in relationship to them. Having her own life and thoughts is unimaginable and unacceptable to them. The notebook becomes the place where she explores who she really is and is her only private space.