Archive: Author: rkwallace

I met Britt-Marie in another Fredrik Backman novel. I didn’t particularly like her in “My Grandmother asked me to tell you she’s sorry” because we mostly saw her fastidious busybody side, but there were a few hints of her big heart. It’s the heart that wins in this sequel. Britt-Marie has left her cheating husband and taken a job as caretaker of a soon-to-be-closed rec center in a dying town. Everything is crumbling around her so badly that she makes friends with a rat as her dinner companion. There are real threats like drugs and unsupervised children, but somehow Britt-Marie straightens it out the same way she rearranges messy silverware drawers. Ya gotta love her.

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From Newt Gingrich to Donald Trump columnist Milbank follows a well documented trail of Republicans repeatedly choosing winning at all costs, abandoning truth, honor and the American Way.
Unfortunately it’s not the party that has been destroyed, as the title implies. The party may well continue to win leaving the destruction of the country in its wake. I remember every event listed here, from the lies about Vince Foster’s suicide to Trump calling newspapers the Enemy of the People. I never really thought how the Gingrich name calling strategy and all the other lies worked together to create a party that celebrates liars like Trump. As Milbank points out, Trump doesn’t create the lies he simply tells people what they want to believe.

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Loved Backman’s previous novel “A Man Called Ove” and this has a lot of similarities. Both books are about the interactions of a community of people. This story is from the point of view of 7-year-old Elsa whose seemingly crazy grandmother dies leaving the girl with a series of letters to deliver. The recipients are characters in the fairy tales Grandma has been telling the girl but it turns out all the characters in the fantasy are people in the building where they live in Sweden. I found the fantasy too convoluted so I kept skipping chunks when the girl would try to relay the fantasy so perhaps I missed a little of the foreshadowing but I read enough to get the gist. The pace really picks up at the end with a lot of real danger and an unfortunate demise. Elsa is a tough talking kid, wise beyond her years. It’s impossible not to love her.

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The danger of listening to a really good book on audible while driving is that I almost ran out of gas. The trip went so fast! Ann Patchett is a great story teller and Tom Hanks did a fantastic job bringing the scenes to life. This story of a fabulous Pennsylvannia house and the people who lived there over about a century is told from the point of view of Danny Conroy whose mother leaves him and his older sister Maeve in the care of their real estate mogul father after he gives her a fantastic 1922 mansion that she despises. She’d rather help the poor and heads to India. An evil step mother soon enters the scene with daughters of her own. Before you know it Dad is dead and Danny and Maeve are kicked out with little more than a trust for Danny’s education. The siblings develop a close bond, spending hours year after year sitting outside their former home and remembering better times. Although the tale generally follows a chronological timeline, it is being told by the grownup Danny hitting his memories so things get out of order sometimes or he jumps ahead and divulges his divorce from Celeste before he’s even revealed their marriage. This bugs me a little but I suppose it adds to the realism of Danny telling the story. The house casts such a huge shadow over all these lives even extending into the next generation. You can see it in your mind and hear the voices and imagine the train rides. Very well done.

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