Monday, October 24, 2016

Beauty and Attention, by Liz Rosenberg

It is 1954 in Rochester, New York, a city known for its cold winters, where summer sometimes comes early "and sometimes not at all." Libby Archer's father has just died and left her with a large Victorian-style house, no college education and a fierce desire to see the world and experience life. Pressured by her neighbors and friends to marry as soon as possible, the complex Libby yearns for more. In what she hopes is an escape to independence she flies to family in Ireland aboard an early transatlantic airplane.

Liz Rosenberg captures the suffocating, parochial environment of Rochester in the 1950s, as well as Libby's disappointment at the stifling mores found in Ireland and Europe. Mores such as marriage, which "she drew away as instinctively as a bird that finds itself in a vast cage. The bars were there, no matter how much she might try to ignore them."

Rosenberg writes in an afterword that "this novel is an homage to one of my favorite books: Henry James’s classic Portrait of a Lady, brought from the nineteenth century forward, with various changes, into the mid-twentieth." Is it ironic or sad that, seventy-five years after Henry James's Isabelle Archer fled upstate New York for the gossamer cages of Europe, Libby Archer also found herself entangled in that same web? Moreover, in 2016, sixty-years after Libby's flight, can we honestly assert that a version of this cage doesn't still exist? Beauty and Attention" is literature worth reading. Five stars.

(In exchange for an honest review, I received an advance review copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley.)

Paperback: 224 pages
Publisher: Lake Union Publishing (October 25, 2016)
Language: English

Crosstalk, by Connie Willis

Imagine a world where everyone is telepathic and able to read the thoughts of everyone else. In "Crosstalk, "Connie Willis demonstrates that this is not just a bad idea, it is insanity. Doing what she does better than any other modern author, Willis takes us deep into a potentially feasible technology and then moves that technology just one step further. The result is an absorbing, and fascinating story, with a large dose of humor.

Beautiful Briddey works at a technology company that makes smartphones. She has a big, loving, and very intrusive, Irish family, which includes Aunt Oona who always claims in a strong (but fake) Irish brogue that she has the “sight.” Briddey’s paramour, Trent, an executive at her company, insists that the two of them partake of the latest fad and undergo EED brain surgery, which is all the rage in Hollywood. This surgery, as explained to Briddey, is "a simple medical procedure so that we can sense each other’s feelings and communicate better as a couple.” Although her family, and her co-employee, techno-geek C.B., try to discourage her from doing it, Briddey ignores them. Her EED surgery, of course, causes unintended consequences. Briddey discovers that, because of her Irish heritage, the EED has given her unwanted telepathy. As her life veers off in a direction she never expected, Briddey discovers that true friendship and true love are not the by-products of technology.

As Willis did in "Passage," with near death experiences, and the "Doomsday Book" with time travel, in "Crosstalk" she uses technology to take us on a wonderful journey into unimaginable realms. I absolutely adored this book and I could not put it down.

(In return for an honest review, I received an advance copy from the publisher via NetGalley.)

Print Length: 512 pages
Publisher: Del Rey (October 4, 2016)
Publication Date: October 4, 2016
Sold by: Random House LLC