Book: Mothers and Daughters (2011) by Rea Meadows

(WIN a copy of this book when you leave a comment)

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Destination: Austin Texas

Book: Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakthrough (2010) by Ruth Pennebaker

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I realize it is a little late for you to be getting these books as Mother’s Day gifts (Yes it IS two days away), however there is never a bad time for giving a gift to Mom.  Are you listening, kids?

It is a truth universally acknowledged (apologies to Jane Austen) that the most complex relationship on the face of the earth is that between mothers and daughters.  The complexity deepens because each mother, of course, is also a daughter.

Book Cover

Therefore, in the novel Mothers and Daughters, Rae Meadows covers fascinating,  if well trod ground.  I read this new novel a couple of months after enjoying Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakthrough by Ruth Pennebaker, and realized they would make a nice pair of books to peruse as we ponder the subject of mothers.

Mothers and Daughters follows three generations (and baby makes four) of mother-daughter relationships.  By far the most riveting one takes place in the late nineteenth century.  We follow the drastically changing life of Violet from the streets of New York to the Midwest. Her single mother copes as best she can, living off the favors of men, but finally gives up her daughter in the hope that Violet will have a better life if adopted from the orphan train by a Midwest family.

Children on orphan train, picture from site of the National Orphan Train Complex in Concordia Kansas

The orphan trains actually did transport thousands of poor waifs from Eastern cities to midwest and western families, with very mixed results. An enormous amount of literature has been produced based on the orphan trains. You can find a list of books, as well as lots of history at the Orphan Train site linked above.

This part of the 3-generational history fascinated me.  Meadows captures the street life of the scabby-kneed, scruffy children who live on the streets with their false bravado and survival skills, and the fear and confusion of the children who get aboard the train. But the novel is not just about this slice of history.

Violet’s grand daughter, Sam, the story’s main focus, lives the life of the intellectual class in Madison Wisconsin. Unlike her maternal line, Sam has the choice of whether to become a mother and after one disastrous attempt, is now doting on an infant daughter.

Sam and her mother Iris never grew particularly close, but Sam felt she knew her mother better when she went to stay with her in “God’s waiting room” in Florida where Iris had moved not long before her illness and death.

As readers we get to know the entire story of Sam’s grandmother Violet and most of Iris’ story, but the novel leaves Sam searching for clues–belatedly realizing that these women were complex people–not just mothers.

Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, which I read on my netbook’s Kindle app, also treats three generations–Caroline (15), the mother Joanie (about to turn 50), and grandmother Ivy (in her seventies). But Mothers and Daughters is a walk in the park compared to the lives that Pennebaker has created. Pennebaker has a sharp eye for the way that people function–or dysfunction. She not only creates an amazingly accurate teenager, but captures Ivy’s  frustration at being treated as irrelevant in old age. Ivy tries vainly to stay up to date by learning to use a computer, even while she clings to beliefs and habits that her daughter Joanie thinks are hopelessly outdated.

The various problems and personality differences would be bad enough if these three were living separately, but they are living under the same roof where they predictably get on each other’s nerves.

I am a regular reader of Pennebaker’s blog, The Geezer Sisters, where she amuses her many fans by slicing open her own emotions and reactions to life’s frustrations. Yes, amuses.  The humor in the novel is subtler than the sardonic essays on her blog, but it is there in characters who act out in ways we have only fantasized about. But somehow as you are reading, the actions seem completely real and justifiable–if sometimes pretty funny. Later you may think–are these women ALL nuts? Yet she leaves the three women with hope for growth and self awareness and even some understanding of the others.

Thank goodness you (and I) are not expected to choose between these two books on a very similar theme. The writing style is different, the characters  have markedly different backgrounds, but the novels have in common that irritating, hurtful, consoling, all-embracing relationship between mothers and daughters. So take your pick–New York to Wisconsin and Florida or Austin, Texas.

If you leave a comment during the week after this is published, you will be entered in a random drawing to win a copy of Mothers and Daughters. Sorry about the other book–as I said, I read it on my Kindle app. (Only U.S. residents, over 18 are eligible. Thanks.)

Mothers and Daughters was given to me by the publisher for review.  I purchased Women on the Verge for my Kindle app. If you click on an Amazon link anywhere on this site and buy anything at all while you are shopping there, A Traveler’s Library earns a few pence. Thanks again.

Do you have  a mother-daughter relationship that would make for a comic novel, or a Greek tragedy? And do you have a story about orphan trains?

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Heron in Everglades

Destination: Florida

Book: Nature Girl, 2006, by Carl Hiaasen

I have a lot of serious, thoughtful books in my travel library. Carl Hiassen didn’t write any of them.

Hiassen’s books, like Nature Girl, are fun, quick reads with delightfully over-the-top characters. Oh, they do have  themes satirizing contemporary political foibles. One gets the feeling that Hiassen, a reporter and article writer, can let his opinions flow more easily in fiction about news items he might have covered as a journalist.

Quoting his web site biography:

Tourist Season, published in 1986, was Hiaasen’s first solo novel. GQ magazine called it “one of the 10 best destination reads of all time,” although it failed to frighten a single tourist away from Florida, as Hiaasen had hoped it might.

Sounds like I should be talking about that one, but frankly, I ran out of time to read another of Hiassen’s gems, so am reporting on a book that Ken and I chose to listen to in the car on a long trip a couple of years ago. (I checked Nature Girl out of the library to check details, because, frankly, Hiaasen’s novels don’t stick with you any longer than cotton candy.)

However, I do know that the book kept us giggling, and I’m not even going to try to tell you about the plot and multitude of subplots.  Well, all right, since you insist, the “girl” of the title plots to get even with telephone solicitors by taking one of them out into the wilds of Florida. She heads for Dismal Key with a couple of bizarre characters following her. There her little party (the phone solicitor guy and his girlfriend) run into a Seminole Indian who is trying to live in nature. That’s most of the entanglements, but you’re own your own to try to untangle them.

The book takes place in the 10,000 Islands area lying just outside the Everglades National Park, which is swampy and jungly and scary to most people. We visited the Everglades and found the area endlessly fascinating, except that the mosquitos came in such huge swarms that we had to run from car to motel room and then crank the AC down at night so the little menaces would fall asleep before we did.

Another recommended Florida mystery writer, Randy Wayne White wrote Sanibel Island, which I read while in Florida on my first visit several years ago.We had visited the delightful west coast of Florida, and loved Sanibel Island, so I grabbed his book. He focuses on the problems of over-development, and his characters are not quite as wacky as Hiassen’s. Between White and Hiassen you can travel all over Florida without actually setting foot in the state, although I’m not recommending that.

The Music Road Trip has a couple of suggestions for music from the non-touristy parts of Florida today, Jeanie Fitchen and Del Suggs for your listening pleasure on the road trip.

A previous post about Florida talked about the grand hotel built by a railroad magnate in Tampa.Two other Florida writers I like: Ernest Hemingway (he had a house in Key West which you still can visit) or Zora Neale Hurston, who wrote her autobiography, Dust Tracks on the Road about growing up in Florida and collected folk tales from people in her small town. You can read both in the American Library edition that I talked about earlier.

Photo from Flickr with Creative Commons License. Please click on the photo to see more about the photographer.  I have included a link to Nature Girl so you can buy it at Amazon.  Every purchase helps keep A Traveler’s Library going. Would you believe 109 clicks went to Amazon from my site this month and nobody bought anything?Hmmmm…..

What have you read about Florida? And I’m looking for recommendations for Arkansas and Illinois, if you’d like to play along.

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On Tuesday, I borrow the phrase Travel Tuesday from Twitter, put down my books and talk about my own travels.

Henry B. Plant Museum

Destination: Tampa, Florida

Attraction: The Tampa Bay Hotel

I have a very bad habit of accumulating stuff.  I don’t just accumulate it–I have to have it where I can see it–preferably reach it at a moment’s notice–because if I didn’t love it, I wouldn’t have it, now would I?

But I don’t  come within a mile-long, terrazzo-tiled , gilded woodwork hallway packed with furniture of those dudes in the Gilded Age. Not only did they stuff their places with stuff, but the stuff was all curlicues and fringes, and inlays and embroidery and painted scenes, and plaques made of woven hair.

I tend to wander around establishments of that era with my mouth hanging open, wanting to ask the original owners, “What WERE you thinking?”

That was my experience at The Tampa Bay Hotel, a railroad resort that Henry Plant, the “King of Florida” built. If it weren’t for Plant, Florida might never have become the tourist magnet that it is today.   Plant made his money from the railroads and steamships, but had to create somewhere for people to GO on those trains and boats, so he built hotels. The rail line runs right by the back  door of the Tampa Bay Hotel and the steamships could pull up close by.

Outside, the hotel stretches for a city block along the water front, corners adorned with minarets and a casino* topped by a dome with the same pointy top as the minarets. The Ottoman look reflects people’s image of Florida in the late 19th century–exotic.

*Casino was a place for performances, kind of a cross between the Roman Coliseum and a theater. It was not a gambling establishment.

Incidentally, before you get any ideas, you cannot stay there any more. Part of it is restored and furnished as it was during the golden days, so that you can ooh and ahh your way through a guided tour of the Henry B. Plant Museum. The rest is used by a college. Good, practical arrangement. One suspects that Henry would approve.

Inside, the style is kind of a “you name it” basketful of French, Egyptian, Greek,  Renaissance–41 trainloads of decor, according to the brochure.  I was with a group of travel writers, and we were hustled through the rooms before we could get explanations. Yes, I can recognize a chair and a table, but the designers of the day spent their time dreaming up unique visual gems that take some explaining 100 years later.

Still, I can see myself swishing into the Writing and Reading Room in my long white gauzy cotton skirt, to sit at the tables in a room flooded with light, and writing “Wish you were here,” to all my envious friends who could not be in this exotic place.  And perhaps I would be fortunate enough to be ensconced in one of the tower rooms with cross ventilation of ocean breezes, where I could hear the clacking of the leaves of palm trees outside. I might not have been able to afford it, though. This luxury suite cost $15 a night!

You can get visitor information at the Henry Plant museum’s web site.

Do you like the style of the gilded age, with its trainloads of tchotchkes?

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