“He asked me to keep everything,” Sandra said.

George wasn’t listening. “Do you see this? A paper clip!” The silver wire clipped several scraps of paper to a recipe for petites meringues a l’ananas. George pulled it off, and showed Sandra the rusty impression left behind. “This is criminal.”

Book Review:

Review by Lynn Harnett (AUG 21, 2010)

One of Goodman’s favorite authors is Jane Austen and it shows in her subtle, wryly witty social comedies. This latest takes place on both coasts between 1999 and 2002 and centers on two California sisters: responsible, ambitious, principled Emily and flighty, vegan, philosophical Jess. The title character, though deceased, plays a beguiling role in the plot.

The major part of the action takes place in and around Berkeley. Emily, 28, has founded an up-and-coming dot-com company. Jess, at 23, is floundering in grad school, majoring in philosophy, working in an antiquarian bookstore, taking Incompletes in her courses. She’s also very caught up in Save the Trees, though she has a phobia of heights and can’t participate in any of the redwood occupying.

Their mother died when Emily was 10 and Jess 5, and left letters for each of them to open on their birthdays, up to age 25. Emily treasures her letters but Jess, who barely remembers her, had read them all on her twelfth birthday and found them wanting. Still, passages from the letters sprinkle the narrative. Their long-departed mother had high hopes for them and much advice. Emily worries that Jess has not found the “profession” her mother hoped she would; Jess counters with barbs about Emily’s high-energy boyfriend, Jonathan, another ambitious dot-com founder who lives in Boston and seldom sees Emily.

“’Find someone musical,’ Jess quoted, for she was not above citing Gillian’s letters in a pinch, and she knew Jonathan could not carry a tune. ‘Find someone giving. Find someone who will sacrifice for you.’ “

Emily and Jonathan both have imminent IPOs. All the young techies are giddy with prospects of immense wealth. On a trip to see Jonathan, Emily, worried that her love isn’t enough, impulsively decides to share a company secret. “She would prove herself to herself. Satisfy his curiosity and confide in him, share her work, her life, her most secret joy.”

Jonathan, when Emily demands a similar confidence, lies. And thereafter, he struggles mightily not to seize her new secret for his own company. Will his better instincts win out? The reader suspects not. The reader also knows the bubble is about to burst – even the dot-commers have some inkling – and our omniscience contributes to the suspense. Will they get rich? Will it all come to nothing? Goodman is good enough to make us care.

Meanwhile Jess can barely be bothered to scrape up the money required to get in on Emily’s IPO. She shows up late for work at the bookstore and scares customers away with her strong opinions. But George, the proprietor, a 41-year-old retired Microsoft multimillionaire, can’t keep his eyes off her, despite her infuriating habits and greasy boyfriend from Save the Trees. His wit is dry. “ ‘Three months,’ George said as he was locking up. ‘I didn’t realize Save the Trees had been around that long.’ “

George has never married, though he insists he wants to. His girlfriends say he refuses to commit; George says he hasn’t found the right person. The bookstore is more a hobby than a business, though he can be cutthroat where sales and acquisitions are concerned. George is also a bit of a curmudgeon. He has eschewed the technology that made him rich and is known to fulminate about the end of Western Civilization. He hits his hectoring stride while on a jog with a friend, who picks up the pace, “hoping to outrun George’s rant.”

“ ‘What was it Jess said today?…’ George panted, trying to keep up. ‘Ruskin is a dogmatic, self-indulgent, sexually repressed misogynist with an edifice complex.’

Nick smiled. ‘Sounds just like you.’ “

The manic excitement of the dot-com frenzy contrasts with George’s deliberate preservation of the past. Chips and get-rich-quick schemes versus venerable books and timeless architecture. Jess finds both worlds materialistic and does her best to stay destitute while longing for the peace of mind lack of debt can confer.

The cookbook collector comes into the narrative haltingly, a book at a time. When the collector’s niece finally admits George to the collection, Jess finds herself entranced as well, as much by the notes and drawings interleaved with the recipes as the gorgeous, worn books themselves. Once George gets over his horror at the desecration, he too finds himself curious about the collector, a man with whose obsession he can identify.

There are a lot of secondary characters –including a couple of Hasidic rabbis – and Goodman involves us in each of the subplots they inspire (although the bookshop always beckons). Even the characters we don’t much like – or at least disapprove of – come to life on the page. One of the Austen-like things she does is to allow her characters to gently thwart our hopes through willfulness, misunderstanding, timidity, occasionally even by accident or fate. But they grow and learn. Jess, researching the cookbooks, looks at her mother’s letters with new eyes. “What was it about them? What was it she had overlooked before? Their secrecy. The obliqueness of the language drew her in, where before it had confused and bored her.”

The writing is unflaggingly delightful, and Goodman doesn’t let wit stand in the way of weighty issues. Among the ponderables are values, ethics and the meaning of life – or at least the meaning of how we choose to live. A wonderful novel, with all its plots resolved, some in ways that won’t please everyone. Readers of Goodman’s other novels will love this one and fans of Cathleen Schine, Helen Simonson, Marian Keyes, or Penelope Lively should enjoy it as well.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 125 readers
PUBLISHER:	The Dial Press; 1 edition (July 6, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Lynn Harnett
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Allegra Goodman
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Authors you may also like: Cathleen Schine Penelope Lively

Bibliography:

• Total Immersion: Stories (1989)
• The Family Markowitz (1996)
• Kaaterskill Falls (1998)
• Paradise Park (2001)
• Intuition (2006)
• The Other Side of the Island (2008)
• The Cookbook Collector (July 2010)

“Ohhhhhhhhhh!” she cried, rolling her head and grabbing Mary with one hand, Kitty with the other. “My last hope, gone! Instead of throwing my eldest in the path of eligible bachelors, they’re to be thrown to the unmentionables! And so go the rest of us, girls—to a potter’s field or down a dreadful’s gullet, one or the other! And all because your father started taking orders from some ponytailed stripling who doesn’t even have the sense to cook his fish!”

Lydia and Kitty joined in with weeping of their own, and even Mary’s eyes took to watering behind her spectacles (though Elizabeth suspected this had more to do with the way her mother was crushing her hand).

When Elizabeth glanced at Hawksworth to gauge his reaction to the spectacle, she was surprised to find him intently gauging hers.

Book Review:

Review by Ann Wilkes (MAY 13, 2010)

In Dawn of the Dreadfuls, Steve Hockensmith takes Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and adds a generous helping of dry humor and zombies. What’s not to love? Here are the first two lines, which promise much more fun to come:

“Walking in the middle of a funeral would be, of course, bad form. So attempting to walk out on one’s own was beyond the pale.”

And Hockensmith doesn’t disappoint in this prequel to the Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

At the ill-fated funeral, Mr. Bennett clears the church except for the vicar and his girls. His four daughters learn their father is more than just a long-suffering, hen-pecked man with a saving sense of humor. He’s expert at killing zombies. In fact, it’s a skill the secret order expected him to pass down to his children.

Mr. Bennett knows that a zombie incursion begins with just one zombie. Ignoring the shrieking protests of Mrs. Bennett, he throws all his wife’s flowers out of his dojo-turned-potting-shed to begin training his children in the deadly arts.

Soon, a handsome young warrior, trained in the East and sent by their father’s secret order of zombie hunters takes over their training. Lizzy makes up for her lack of skill with more than her fair share of determination. Under Master Hawksworth’s tutelage, Lizzy becomes a formidable foe to the many zombies who dare cross her path.

Unlike most Victorians Lizzy encounters, Dr. Bertram Keckilpenny is untroubled by her training outfit, straightforward manner, hunting skills and lack of squeamishness. When Lizzy meets him, he is made up to look like a zombie to test his theory that they are no danger to each other and to people they mistake for their kind.

Lizzy’s life is complicated by these two men and keeping her sister, Jane, safe from the philandering Lord Lumpley. The Lord makes a pretense of courting her naïve sister. Elizabeth Bennett manages all this while saving England from zombies.

I enjoyed seeing Mr. Bennett get his day, having a vital purpose rather than just hiding away in his library. Dawn of the Dreadfuls kept me amused for days. I didn’t want it to end.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 78 readers
PUBLISHER:	Quirk Books; Original edition (March 23, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Ann Wilkes
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Steve Hockensmith
EXTRAS:	Trailer for the book Quirk Classics web page for more mash-ups Ann Wilkes interview with Steve Hockensmith
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More Jane Austen fan reads: Beginner’s Greek by James Collins The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Fowler More Zombie fiction: Cemetery Dance by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child Not sure if there is a Zombie in this one, but check it out anyway: The Devil You Know by Mike Carey

Bibliography:

Holmes on the Range series:

• Holmes on the Range (2006)
• On the Wrong Track (2007)
• The Black Dove (2008)
• The Crack in the Lens (July 2009)
• The World’s Greatest Sleuth (January 2011)

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies series:

• Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith (October 2009)
• Dawn of the Dreadfuls (March 2010)

More Quirk Classic Mash-ups:

• Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters by Jane Austen and Ben H. Winters (September 2009)
• Android Karenina by Leo Tolstory and Ben H. Winters(June 2010)