Sometimes when I read a book I really love I go on a quest to relive the experience. For example, when I read The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfeld, a gothic pageturner, I went on a gothic kick that lasted months and included highlights such as John Harwood’s The Seance, Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger and Jane Harris’ The Observations.
Sometimes this quest goes on for years and is never really satisfied. Three books in particular have led to fruitless searches for me: Rebecca by Daphne DuMaurier, The Magus by John Fowles and The Secret History by Donna Tartt. It occurs to me as I make this list that these books are somewhat similar. There’s a sense of mystery and secrecy and youthful innocence destroyed. All three of these books are among my very favorites and I’ve read them all more than once trying to get myself lost in them. They all have a strong sense of atmosphere and foreboding and they’re the kind of books I like to read for hours at a time.
But every now and then I run into a book that reminds me of one of my beloved books and even if it’s not the same, it brings back a similar spirit. That’s what happened when I read The Bellwether Revivals by Benjamin Wood. I don’t know if Wood has read The Secret History, (which is among my all-time top 5 most-loved books) but his novel brought back many of the same sensations I felt the first time I read The Secret History and I mean that in the best way. It’s not derivative, it’s more beautifully reminiscent.
Image via goodreads
So maybe I should actually tell you a little bit about The Bellwether Revivals. Oscar is from a lower-middle-class upbringing, a working family who never expected much of him. He escaped to start his own life and works as an aide in a nursing home. He isn’t happy per se, but he’s satisfied in the way a young person who’s making their own way is. He doesn’t feel demeaned by his work, or at least he doesn’t until he finds himself entangled with Iris and Eden Bellwether, two siblings from the upper class with a sense of entitlement and ease completely unfamiliar to Oscar.
Oscar and Iris form a romantic attachment but it’s never free of the influence of Eden’s eccentric musician brother, who is obsessed with playing the organ, music, philosophy and himself. They bring Oscar into a type of life he’s unfamiliar with, but gradually he becomes uneasy with his own lack of privilege and Eden’s strange narcissism.
The Secret History connections are definitely there. The protagonist who finds himself taken in by an “elite” group of sorts at a college. The mysterious leader who is more than he seems.
Ultimately, though, The Bellwether Revivals is its own unique story. Iris enlists Oscar’s help in finding the help she believes her brother needs. But the more Oscar takes part in her plan, the more he’s convinced Eden has strange delusions of supernatural grandeur, and the more he finds himself at odds with Iris, who is both a victim and a follower of her brother.
I do wish the book was a bit longer. I didn’t feel as though I got as much of an opportunity to get to know the other members of the social circle. But I found the plot very intriguing and though I’ve been rather lax in my reading lately, I found myself stealing time to read and find out what was happening.
The book starts with a strong tease of the danger and violence that will come later on in the story and I’m a big fat sucker for such things. Especially when the book will have a nice, long slow burn. The pacing is excellent and even when not much was happening, I felt drawn to see where things would go.
While I consider it a page-turner, The Bellwether Revivals is definitely in the “literary fiction” category. This wouldn’t be classified as a thriller, even though I found it thrilling.
This is Benjamin Wood’s first novel and I’m really excited to see what he writes next.
Thanks to Edelweiss and Viking Books for providing me an advanced e-galley of The Bellwether Revivals. It will be released on June 14th, 2012.
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I was really thrilled to attend the Drool Baby Expo. I heard about it last year but was busy at work and didn’t think I needed it since Graham was due to turn 2 and he’d just started therapy. But since I have a 3-month-old, now was a great time to go.
The Expo is put on by the great local-to-Boston toy and gear shop, Magic Beans. It is the kind of store that has the coolest toys AND that lets you haul a carseat out to your car to see if it will fit. (I’ve personally done it and they were sweet as can be.)
Baby stores can be full of useful information, but there’s something extra special about being in a room with 10 major stroller companies where you can see their wares in person and get a chance to ask every question you can possibly think of. And then add carseats, clothes, furniture, toys and pretty much any other baby item you can imagine and you’ve got a baby expo.
Drool really goes above and beyond. Not only were there a bajillion baby brands there, there were cupcakes and Pinkberry and drinks and manicures and massages and prizes. Pretty much anything you could ask for. If you didn’t make it, I’m sorry. But never fear. I have a recap for you with some of the great finds. And if you’re local, I’m pretty sure I can talk you in to coming next year.
I was happy for all the treats. You wouldn’t think all this baby-stuff-watching would take so much effort, but I was beat by the end of it! Good thing there was sugar around! These cupcakes came courtesy of legendary Brookline Bakery Party Favors.
All the big names were there. If you were stroller shopping, you were in luck. Bugaboo, Maclaren, Mountain Buggy, Phil & Teds, BOB and a bunch more were there. Plus there were a lot of vendors you never realized made strollers! But the real value of Drool Baby is the chance to talk to local vendors you may have never heard of.
For example, check out Tiny Hanger. They’ve got a store in Coolidge Corner and they’ve got The. Most. Adorable. Baby clothes.
They carry a variety of designers and artists who make clothes, toys and other kid items.
There’s the opportunity to get in touch with a variety of resources. Did you know Boston Children’s Hospital is doing a free car seat check event? Now you do! Friday May 18th at 1pm at the Stop & Shop on Centre Street in Jamaica Plain.
Or that JF&CS (Jewish Family & Children’s Services) offers support services for new parents?
Or have you heard of Boston Babywearers? A group that educates on babywearing, but also has a library of carriers so you can try one out before you buy?
And can I say how great it is to see so many of these small businesses? Lots of parent entrepreneurs with amazing products and services that came from their own experiences with kids.
A great example is the Zen Swaddle from Nested Bean. It comes from Massachusetts Mom Manasi Gangan, who created this unique swaddler after she spent hours rocking her young son who would only sleep in her arms. It has special pockets that simulate the extra pressure you give your baby on their sides and chest when you hold them and calm them. Tessa is not only one of their sleepy customers, she’s also the face on the package. (It took a matter of minutes for her to fall asleep once we swaddled her at the shoot.)
It’s also perhaps the prettiest swaddler I’ve ever seen. Super soft. And available soon from Magic Beans!
You can tell that Sage Spoonfuls is the next big thing in baby food. Their table was busy all night and I saw tons of entries for their raffle prizes. It helps that the woman in charge, Liza, and her husband Alex are great spokespeople for their product.
And seriously, how does she look just as good in person as she does in the promotional pictures?? We all have blenders, but I think the compact processor along with a simple storage system trumps a big fat blender and an army of Rubbermaid containers any day! I’ve read her impressive baby food book and it has pretty much any information you need on introducing and combining foods.
Tessa will be ready for solids soon and their system sounds awfully appealing for when I have to tackle two kid lunches instead of one!
There’s so much more, but I can’t show you all of it so I made you a Pinterest board instead!
I wasn’t just there for curiosity. I was on a mission for a carseat. Tessa has her baby bucket seat, it’s a Cybex Aton that I adore. (A post in which I profess my love for the Cybex Callisto stroller that goes with it is forthcoming.) But eventually she needs a convertible seat. And since we have a small car, it’s no easy feat.
Luckily the guys from Diono were there. They used to be Sunshine Kids, the makers of the Radian 65 that Graham has. Their new seats are combination carseat/boosters and last 10 years! One more great thing about Drool is you get discounts and offers you can’t get any other time. Diono offered 25% off, a free travel bag, free accessory and free shipping. Okay, twist my arm, will ya? (It helps that while chatting up Jamie the Baby Gear Guy about my search he gave Diono a thumbs up.)
On my way out I picked up my gift bag and WOW. It was the stuff dreams are made of. Definitely glad I drove because it was so loaded with goodies, I don’t think I could’ve carried it home on the T! I was just thinking that Tesser had a low supply of baby toys. Not anymore!
A final word: there may be other baby expos out there but the Magic Beans staff were so kind and helpful that I doubt anyone else would take better care of you.
I attended Drool Baby as a VIP guest free of charge. I DID pay for the carseat, though.
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When it comes to department stores, Macy’s is generally my go-to. Good prices, good brands. I don’t feel woefully inadequate, like I do when I walk through an overly fancy store. And I don’t feel underwhelmed, like I do in a super-discount-mart. When I got married, I registered and got my china there. They’re my long-time good buddies.
This summer Macy’s is rolling out their new focus on one of the hottest places South of the equator: Brasil!
They’re bringing in some of Brasil’s best designers to create pieces in their clothing, home and accessory lines. You can go online to check out designs by Francisco Costa, Carlos Falci, Marcelo Rosembaum, Isabela Capeto, Neon, Cecilia Prado, Art da Terra, Maria Oiticica, Romero Britto, Paula Hermanny, Sol de Janeiro and Phebo with everything from dresses to swimwear to jewelry to skincare.
(There’s even an app for that!)
To celebrate, Macy’s is rolling out Carnival-inspired celebrations at over 300 of their stores starting this Thursday! (You can check the calendar for a store near you here.)
Here in the Boston area, you can head out to the Natick Mall (hands down the best mall in the Boston area, as I’m sure you already know) for two events at the Macy’s in Natick.
First on Thursday at 6pm get into the Brasilian spirit with samba by Moves & Vibes and Jiu Jitsu by Capoeira Brasil Boston. Plus there will be a DJ on hand with authentic music and you can get a taste of Brasilian cuisine! (If you haven’t had it before, you are in for a real treat.)
Then you can bring the whole family on Saturday at 12 pm. Upstairs in the Kids Department there will be balloons, face painting and soccer! (But since this is a Brasilian celebration, we should probably call it football.)
On the main floor in swimwear, check out the swim fashion show. As an added bonus, anyone who purchases a swimsuit will get the chance to make a kanga style sarong.
And not to leave out the men, there’s a Virtual Soccer (Football!) Challenge in the Men’s Department where Dad can show off his skills.
It’s not all fun and games, Macy’s will also be donating a portion of your Brasil Boutique purchases to The Nature Conservancy to help their efforts to save the Amazon Rainforest, one of Brasil’s greatest treasures.
So if you want to have a little fun or do a little shopping, the Natick Mall’s Macy’s is the place to be this week.
I was compensated for this post by Charlene Chronicles.
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Right now, Tesser has green eyes.
I say “right now” because I don’t know if they’ll stay that way for long. She was born with the classic baby-blue eyes, but from the very beginning they looked a little different to me. When I was pregnant I said Tessa would look more like Eric, with dark hair and dark eyes. She still hasn’t moved beyond her baby hair, but her eyes have already started to change.
Her green eyes are sometimes brownish and sometimes goldish and sometimes greyish. There’s hazel eyes on both sides of the family and brown eyes on Eric’s side so we’re not sure where she’ll end up.
We seemed to have turned a corner in the last week or so.
All of a sudden Tesser grew out of her 3 month clothes. Everyone says this happens overnight. Everyone is telling the truth. One day they were too small and I suddenly had to work with only our small collection of 6 month clothes.
When people saw her, they’d say she was bigger and I couldn’t disagree. She’s finally showing her pudge and is starting to look chunky even with clothes on.
Around the same time she started napping better. And she became interested in THINGS. Until now she’s only cared to look at faces, but now she likes looking at things. Anything really. She has fallen asleep in her napper staring at her hanging toys or at a zebra-striped blanket I drape over her. It doesn’t happen often, but it happens. And with our stubborn girl, it’s a blessing.
Oh, and do you see those GIANT baby feet? They really are that huge. On my 6 month clothes shopping expedition I took her up from 0-3 month socks to 6-12 month socks. They barely fit. So that means next up is the 12-24 month socks. Which Graham has just stopped wearing, and still occasionally get mixed into his sock pile.
As if that wasn’t enough change, I decided it was finally time to start setting her in the bassinet to sleep at night. I’ve now gone two nights in a row with her spending only a little while each night sleeping next to me. It’s a nice change. I think I’m getting better sleep since I’m not constantly aware of her little body. Although I did wake up once frantic saying, “WHERE’S THE BABY??!!” only to realize she was asleep in the bassinet on the floor.
She outgrew her swaddlers so we had to go up to the big-baby swaddlers. She still must be swaddled to sleep more than a little while. I remember when Graham was little, he was often swaddled but only in his receiving blankets. I thought the special baby strait-jackets were silly and a waste of money. Until Tesser, our little Houdini, showed up. She is a master escape artist. If I don’t swaddle her just right, even in the really good swaddlers, she will pop out her arms in a jiffy.
But this is all a good sign that we’re pretty much ready to set up the crib. Which will involve reorganizing everything. So it probably won’t get done for months. But we’re ready.
Most of the time Tee has her squished up chubby baby face. But more and more we’re starting to get glimpses of what I call her “little girl face.” The one where her eyes aren’t mushed under baby cheeks and you can see her facial features starting to come out. It tends to show up in the evenings and I can’t explain why or how it happens but it completely changes her whole face. I love seeing it.
Our Tesser is not much of a talker. It’s not that she’s quiet, she can shriek and snort with the best of them. She just doesn’t seem to “talk” much. But every now and then she gets in a little bit of a talking mood. And since I am one of those parents, I must take an entire minute of video where she does virtually nothing.
Because Tee is our second child it is hard for me not to compare her to Grammer. She naps more, he talked more, she is happier, he was smaller, etc. When I look at Tessa’s green eyes, I inevitably remember Graham’s blue ones, which were a solid steely blue all through his first year, though they’ve now mellowed a bit with shades of grey, green and gold just like mine.
But still, I’ve never seen any eyes like Tessa’s. And I don’t know how they will look in a month or in a year. It’s nice to remember that she’s changing and growing and that she’s always uniquely herself.
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Recently Vulture published an article ranking all 62 books by Stephen King. (Including those under his pen name, Richard Bachmann, and those he co-wrote with others.)
I haven’t read anywhere close to all 62. In fact I’ve read only 17, that’s less than a third. I’ve read only one story collection and none of his Dark Tower series. But I have read most of his big and popular stuff so I feel like I have grounds for an opinion. (17 is still a lot of books, right?)
I found myself disagreeing with a lot of the rankings on the list. Sure, Dreamcatcher was not great. But #60 out of 62??? That seemed unduly harsh. I read it recently and it had real moments of brilliance and terror even if it got steadily worse as the book went on. (And, of course, major loss of points for a supernaturally-gifted boy with Down’s. That’s the kind of thing I expect from 80′s Stephen King.)
And Cell all the way down at #53? Perhaps I was influenced by low expectations or the fact that I listened to it on audiobook, but I found it to be rather enjoyable. I don’t know if you can call a horror story a romp, but there was a little bit of that.
At the top I found trouble as well. I think the vast majority of us can agree that IT is one of the most terrifying books ever written. However, I wouldn’t put it as #3. It suffers from huge flaws. Chief among them one of the worst endings of all time.
So I thought I’d put together my own list. It’s not a ranking, per se, but the way I view King’s fiction more in categories.
Ambitious but Hopelessly Flawed
Yup, this is where IT belongs. Its ambition is admirable. Its scares are real. But its flaws ultimately devalue a lot of the book.
I know there are a lot more of King’s books that I’d probably put here that I’ve avoided chiefly because I don’t want the disappointment, but there is one more that I’d definitely put here. (Pull out your pitchforks….)
This is the place to put The Stand. I am sorry, I really am, I know that many people list this as one of their favorite novels of all time. It is so big and has so much promise that it hurt to see it turn into a mess. I know a lot of people disagree with me, but there it is.
Fun But Forgettable
‘Salem’s Lot, Pet Sematary, Cell and Dreamcatcher would go here. All have their strengths and their scares. And they’re great fun for serious horror fans or for an airplane read. You could do a lot worse. I think it’s these books that people who don’t read King assume make up his whole oeuvre.
Solid, With or Without Scares
The thing is, people who don’t read much King may not realize how he’s evolved. Take exercise in narrative Dolores Claiborne, told in the first person as one long monologue, with regular flashes forward and back in time and a distinctive voice. It’s not a particularly scary book, it’s more about the real life horrors we encounter everyday than the supernatural ones. The same is true of The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, about a girl lost in the woods who survives through her devotion to the Red Sox.
Or some of King’s newer doorstops like Bag of Bones or Duma Key, both excellent ghost stories with a strong sense of place and character. (While reading Duma Key the whole world seems to exist in shades of Floridian coral.)
Or take a look at the behemoth Under the Dome, which takes a lot of King’s strengths (a multitude of characters in a small town who have plenty of baggage in their history, an unexplained phenomenon that throws everything out of whack, a long twisty-turny plot) and delivers it with gusto. It is not a ghost story. There aren’t really any monsters. The supernatural is mostly ignored. The joy of the book is watching the characters scheme and plot against each other or to help each other and to watch the chips fall. It’s some masterful storytelling. I particularly enjoyed the audiobook, ready by one of my favorite actors, Raul Esparza.
I’d also put some of King’s story collections here. I loved his recent effort Full Dark, No Stars, packed with tales just as dark as the title implies.
The Classics
I think more people are starting to catch on to King’s new and impressive abilities thanks to 11/22/63, which I was even able to convince my Mom to read. (She is not a King fan. It took some doing.) And now she is telling other people about it. It seems to be that kind of book that is spreading beyond the usual crowd. And deservedly so. King is getting better and better as years pass and his writing shows strengths it never has before.
And my favorite, Lisey’s Story, a book about marriage and family and love and imagination and storytelling and so very many things. Reading this book for me was like a revelation. It remains one of my very favorites and if someone is dissing King, I send them to it immediately.
Aspiring writers probably know that On Writing is one of the most-recommended books out there. There’s so much you can learn from it, whether you want to write novels or just blog entries. I own a copy and I’ll never get rid of it. It’s a homey book, too, where you feel like you’re having a great conversation.
Not His Best
King has admitted to spending a lot of the ’80′s in an alcoholic haze, which probably explains why a book like Pet Sematary, which has a horrific idea behind it, ends up with just a Passable grade. I assume it explains misfires like The Tommyknockers and Needful Things. Not terrible ideas, but reading them can occasionally be a chore.
There’s still a lot more King I want to read: Firestarter, Cujo, The Long Walk. And I need to re-read The Shining. It’s been so long that I’m not sure which category it would fall into. (It’s also a movie I love love love, so it’s hard to separate myself.)
Where do you fall on Stephen King? Do I really need to read the Dark Tower books? What would you rank as his best and worst?
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Find the Mess
My Life’s a Mess and That’s Okay
Jess is a procrastinator, a former working mom who is suddenly staying at home, a Dr-Dr's wife, a non-practicing lawyer, an Autism Mom, a devoted reader, a penny pincher, a coupon clipper, a new New England-er, a low-key agnostic, a nice girl, a top-notch speller, a hardcore blogger and a Twitter fiend.
The blog covers everything from coupon tips to Autism support to adorable toddler pictures to hilarious tales of my daily grind with the occasional review & giveaway thrown in for good measure.
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