The Sun Down Motel by Simone St James

I have been meaning to read The Sun Down Motel since reading Lark's really fine review (larkwrites.blogspot.com) back in 2020.  I don't know why I didn't get to this novel sooner but now that I have I definitely plan to read more from Simone St James. 

The Sun Down Motel takes place in Fell NY, a small upstate town that has had more than its share of murders:  Betty Graham, Cathy Caldwell and Victoria Lee to be specific.  All murdered between 1978 and 1981 and all unsolved.

And then in 1982 Vivian Delaney age 20 arrives in Fell and takes a job working as the night clerk at the Sun Down Motel. It's an eerie place with very few customers and it's haunted.  Viv wants to quit soon after she arrives but her family situation back home is not good and she needs the money.

And what also keeps Viv in Fell is learning about the murders of Betty, Cathy and Victoria.  Viv is bothered by the fact that these women have been forgotten and that their killer has not been caught.  Viv decides to do some investigating of her own.  And then Viv goes missing.  

Fast forward to 2017 and 20 year old Carly Kirk is working as a night clerk at the Sun Down.  Carly has come to Fell with a goal in mind, finding out what happened to her Aunt Viv thirty five years ago.  No one in her family ever talked about Viv's disappearance and as Carly tells us:

"It was only after Mom died that I got mad. Not at Mom, really—she was a teenager when Viv disappeared, and there wasn’t much she could have done. But what about everyone else? The cops? The locals? Viv’s parents? Why hadn’t there been a statewide search? Why had Viv been allowed to vanish into nothingness with barely a ripple?"

The chapters in the Sun Down Motel alternate between Viv's point of view in 1982 and Carly's in 2017.  I liked both women and their determination to solve these murders.  The novel has a larger theme which deals with missing women and how people should care more.  Viv and Carly do care and they are not willing to be bystanders, particularly Viv!

In addition to Viv and Carly The Sun Down Motel has a number of interesting and well drawn characters: the police officer Alma Trent, a local photographer Marnie Mahoney and Nick Harkness a young man who is staying at the Sun Down in 2017.  Nick agrees to help Carly find out what happened to her Aunt Viv and there is good chemistry between them that I think readers will enjoy.

So what did happen to Viv?  Who killed the missing women?  Is Carly in danger for trying to dig this up thirty-five years later?  All I can say is that the last 80 pages of the book tied it all together in a scary believable and page turning way.  I did not see the ending coming and it was well done.

Thank you Lark for recommending The Sun Down Motel.

Love's Philosophy by Percy Bysshe Shelley

The fountains mingle with the river

   And the rivers with the ocean,

The winds of heaven mix for ever

   With a sweet emotion;

Nothing in the world is single;

   All things by a law divine

In one spirit meet and mingle.

   Why not I with thine?—

See the mountains kiss high heaven

   And the waves clasp one another;

No sister-flower would be forgiven

   If it disdained its brother;

And the sunlight clasps the earth

   And the moonbeams kiss the sea:

What is all this sweet work worth

   If thou kiss not me?

From reading The Outcasts I got the sense that Percy Bysshe Shelley could be reckless and rather thoughtless but he also had a generous nature.  He died young in a boating accident but as with Mary Shelley he was a brilliant writer and his poetry lives on.

The Outcasts by Sarah Stegall

The Outcasts by Sarah Stegall is a historical novel about a famous literary event that occurred during a three day weekend in the summer of 1816.  The story takes place in the Villa Diodati in Lake Geneva, Switzerland where Lord Byron and his friend Dr. John Polodori are staying.  In a house nearby resides Percy and Mary Shelley and Mary's step-sister Claire Clairmont.  The weather has been bad and so Byron invites the Shelleys and Claire to his villa.  After dinner Byron challenges his friends to write a ghost story and 18 year old Mary Shelley in response to a vision she has that night will begin writing Frankenstein, one of the great classics of English literature.

But what else happened during that famous weekend?  Sarah Stegall has done a very nice job filling us in.  She lets us know through Mary Shelley's eyes what Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Polodori and Claire Clarmont must have been like and what Mary was like as well. 

Lord Byron age 29 is the oldest member of the group but he is no role model.  Claire Clairmont, Mary's step-sister, is 17.   Claire regards Byron as her soul mate and she is sure he will feel the same once she tells him about her pregnancy.  Mary tries to get Claire to see reality but there is no reasoning with Claire.  Meanwhile John Polodari has dreams of running off with Mary which is futile since she only has eyes for Percy.

And that is the one relationship, Percy and Mary Shelley, that is working out.  But there are some difficulties.  The Shelleys are unable to go back to England because two years prior Percy (who was already married) eloped with Mary taking Claire with them since she wanted to be part of the adventure. Percy loves Mary but a part of her cannot help but worry.  Percy is a believer in free love and other revolutionary ideas.  He left his first wife to elope with Mary, might he one day get tired of Mary as well?  What would Mary do, a single mother on her own, with no family since her father, the radical philosopher William Godwin, has disowned her.  

Percy and Mary have an infant son William but they still grieve for their first born daughter who only lived eleven days.  In a moving passage in The Outcasts Percy goes outside into the storm trying to catch lightening in a jar. Mary is frantic he will be killed.  But later she thinks about the lightening and wonders:

“I thought she was sleeping,” she whispered, lost in the memory. Shelley took her hands. “Our little one, our first. I thought she was asleep .... But in the morning, I knew she was dead. And the doctor said she died … of convulsions.” The tears started behind her eyes; her hands shook. Shelley gripped them firmly. “If we had known, if you’d been there, maybe with your … your jar. Maybe you could have revived her, maybe you could have saved her.” She kept her voice low, but it was not low enough. “I don’t know,” Shelley said. “I don’t think it would have worked. She was too frail, my love. Too early.”

I read this passage and another in which Mary writes a letter to her father that he won't answer and I could see what might have inspired Frankenstein, a classic about a doctor trying to reanimate life and a creature being rejected by his creator/parent.  

Sarah Stegall has done a fine job with The Outcasts and as a companion non-fiction work I also recommend The Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron and Other Tangled Lives by Daisy Hay.  Both books shine a light on the British Romantic era in literature, a period just before the Victorians, that extended from 1785 - 1832.  The Romantic era included such  great poets and writers as Mary Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, William Blake,  John Keats to name just a few.  I plan to read more on this subject.

The Importance of Rereading

This month I am participating in Jane Austen July and the group readalong is Northanger Abbey (1817).  I read this book for the first time in 2020 and for me it was a bit of a let down.  But now reading it again for Jane Austen July I am having a better experience.  Participating in a readalong helps because other readers are pointing out things I missed in the novel the first time.  

And finding out new things can be true of rereading even without a group read.  Maybe 20 years ago for example I read Agnes Grey by Anne Bronte. I didn't care for it.   But since that time I have had life experiences that have changed how I look at things.  I have also gone on to read Anne Bronte's masterpiece The Tennant of Wildfell Hall and a book about her life and so I came to Agnes Grey this year with a new perspective and I enjoyed the book the second time around.

Rereading doesn't always go so well though.  Sometimes we pick up a book that meant so much to us and when we reread it the magic is gone.  For me rereading Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck was just such an experience.   I had loved this novel when I was a teenager.  I quickly went on to East of Eden and Grapes of Wrath which I didn't particularly care for but that didn't matter because Steinbeck would always be a favorite of mine thanks to Of Mice and Men.  But decades later Of Mice and Men didn't hold up for me upon rereading.  That said, I am not giving up on Steinbeck and am planning a rereading of The Grapes of Wrath.  It's Steinbeck masterpiece and I probably first read it when I was too young.

Rereading confirms how we feel about a book in good ways too.   I read Pride and Prejudice in my twenties and my forties and loved it even more the second time around.  I was also quite pleased that my rereading of The Good Earth by Pearl Buck held up so well.   The same is true for A Separate Peace which I first read in high school.  I knew it was a book about jealousy, guilt and regret set in 1942 at an elite New England boy's prep school.  But what I had missed as a teenager when I first read the book is what a big role World War II plays in this novel.  The boys at the prep school are 16 and 17 and upon graduating they will be enlisting and going overseas and it gives A Separate Peace a sad and haunting quality.

Going forward I plan another rereading of Pride and Prejudice and I plan to reread Wuthering Heights and Crime and Punishment.   Crime and Punishment is a masterpiece and along with Pride and Prejudice ranks as one of my all time favorite books.  I also need to reread Wuthering Heights.  I recognized the brilliance of this book the first time I read it decades ago but I have never been sure of what the deeper meaning was and what Emily Bronte was trying to say.  Maybe a second reading will make things clearer.

Rereading is so important and if anyone has books they reread and either loved, hated or learned new things from the reread I would love to hear your experiences.

The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan

The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan (1989) is a book I have been meaning to read for a long time.  Not sure what held me back.  I did see the film which I really liked and maybe I figured the novel would be pretty much more of the same and therefore uneccessary.  But now I have read The Joy Luck Club and I am glad I did.  

The Joy Luck Club is set in 1980's San Francisco and China during the 1930's and 1940's.  When the novel begins Jing Mae-Woo's mother, Suyuan Woo, has passed away and Jing Mae's father asks if she would like to take her mother's place as a member of the Joy Luck Club.  It's a club her mother and three friends started in 1949 when they were young Chinese immigrant women recently arrived in America.  Every week the four would meet at each other's homes, bring food, sit down to a game of Mahjong and tell each other stories about their lives in China, the hopes for their children and their fears as well.  

Fast forward to the 1980's and these women are now in their sixties and their daughters are in their 30's. The lives of the four daughters have hit a rough patch, each in a different way.  The mothers are worried and feel their daughters have become too American and have forgotten what they have tried to teach them about Chinese culture and tradition.  How are their daughters going to navigate the world if they don't know what their mothers have been through?  It's a universal regret.  We often don't ask our parents about their lives when they were young and when they are gone we wish we could.

But in the Joy Luck Club we hear the mothers' stories and for me the story that stood out was that of An-mei Hsu and her daughter Rose Hsu Jordan.  When An-mei Hsu was a young girl in China her mother, who was forced into the life of a concubine, committed suicide.  Rose Hsu Jordan is also trapped in a bad marriage to a husband who does not respect her and who is not faithful.  Rose is afraid to leave him and her mother An-mei Hsu says: 

"I know this, because I was raised the Chinese way: I was taught to desire nothing, to swallow other people’s misery, to eat my own bitterness. And even though I taught my daughter the opposite, still she came out the same way! Maybe it is because she was born to me and she was born a girl. And I was born to my mother and I was born a girl .... That was what people did back then. They had no choice. They could not speak up. They could not run away. That was their fate. But now they can do something else"

I also liked the story of Suyuan Woo and her twin baby daughters that she was forced to leave behind in China when the Japanese invaded.  As in the movie this story has a very touching ending forty years later.  

But the two remaining mothers, Ying-Ying St Clair and Lindo Jong are more problematic as role models.  Not every mother is a fount of wisdom and sometimes you have to unlearn from your parents as well.   So I am glad I read The Joy Luck Club.  It's one of those books that new readers will be discovering fifty years from now and not many novels have that distinction.

Nomadland by Jessica Bruder: Surviving America In The Twenty-First Century

Nomadland by Jessica Bruder has been on my TBR list for some time now but I have stayed away because the subject matter scared me a bit.  Normally I love books about  people who hit the road in their vans and discover what they want in life. 

But that is contingent upon the van dweller having had a choice with regard to living in their van.  The men and women profiled in Nomadland had no such choice.  As to how it could get to that point, Jessica Bruder explains it well:

"Among the people I met, some had their personal savings wiped out by bad investments or saw their 401(k)s evaporate in the 2008 market crash. Some hadn’t been able to create enough of a safety net to withstand otherwise survivable traumas: divorce, illness, injury. Others had been laid off or owned small businesses that folded in the recession. And though workers under fifty were a minority, I met them too ... problems compounded by student debt and degrees that turned out to have little practical value. Many hoped life on the road would be an escape from an otherwise empty future"

In another part of the book Jessica tells us that vandwellers may seem similar to the hobos and Hoovervilles of the 1930's but there is a key difference:

"For the nomadic Dust Bowl–era refugees who were once snubbed as “Okies,” self-worth meant keeping alive the embers of one precious hope: that someday the status quo would return, moving them back into traditional housing, restoring at least an iota of stability. Along with many of the wayfarers he came to inspire, Bob saw things differently. He envisioned a future where economic and environmental upheavals had become the new American normal".

As I began Nomadland I was concerned it would be a grim read. But I found it to be a thought-provoking and fascinating book about an off the grid and growing subculture here in the US.  Vandwellers have their own blogs, stores, meeting places. They have created cities like Quartzsite, Arizona, a ghost town during the summer but full of life every winter as hundreds of thousands of people arrive in cars, vans and RV's to set up camp, socialize, find work and help each other out.  

Non-fiction books come and go but I predict Nomadland will last because of the excellent journalistic job Jessica Bruder did, living and researching the vandwelling life for two years. But also because social security, salaries and savings accounts are increasingly not keeping up with the skyrocketing cost of apartment dwelling even if all you require is a studio.  This problem is not going away and Nomadland will be relevant for many years to come.

20 Books of Summer Challenge

This year I have been slow in the number of books I have read.  Maybe a dozen since the year started.  And so Cathy at 746 Books hosts a yearly Summer Challenge.  The goal is to read 20 books between June 1 through Sept 1. But it's a no pressure challenge and so I have decided on 10 books to be read this Summer.  All from my TBR list:

Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan

Road Not Taken by Rona Jaffe

The Maid by Nita Prose

Emma by Jane Austen

Outcasts by Sarah Stegall

Magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkington

H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald

Nomadland by Jessica Bruder

Changing Tides by Michael Thomas Ford

Tourist Season by Carl Hiassen

I am excited about this challenge and I hope everyone is having a great summer and happy reading!