A Safe Place

Empty Mansions: The Mysterious Life of Huguette Clark and the Spending of a Great American Fortune by Bill Dedman and Paul Clark Newell Jr. took some time for me to finish. This isn’t my typical read, but I selected it after seeing the title listed on a friend’s post of current reads. I stuck with the book, even though I got bogged down a bit with my reading.

This book delves into the lives of the extremely wealthy Clark family with special attention to daughter Huguette Clark. It starts with a “tour” of her three mansions, all sitting empty, as she lived her final years in a NY hospital room. The homes are described in great detail.

Readers are then taken back in time to discover how Huguette’s father accumulated his wealth (and her life leading up to hospitalization). Their wealth is unlike anything I can even imagine, gained by shrewd risk taking in the upcoming industries of Clark’s time, copper and railroad to name a couple. Huguette grows up with great affluence, living in France, Butte (I think?) and New York. She eventually owns mansions in California, Connecticut and three huge apartments in a prime New York building spot overlooking Central Park.

Huguette has a unique personality, collecting and pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into dolls, doll houses, art and music. Not to mention the millions she gives to charity and to those people in her inner circle. Her primary nurse was gifted millions of dollars while taking care of Huguette in her final ten-twenty years or so of life (I forget the exact number). Huguette lived a long (over 100 years) and mostly secluded life with extended family erupting after her death to fight for an inheritance.

A standout moment for me is toward the very end of the book. The author recounts a memory of Huguette reciting a French poem about a cricket and butterfly. A cricket enviously watches as a beautiful butterfly flits about. Children chase after the butterfly until eventually catching it and tearing it apart in their desperate need to have it. The cricket decides it is happier in its safe, hidden world. I think this is the perfect lens to appreciate Huguette and her choices.

People who enjoy true family histories and reading about the lifestyles of the extremely wealthy will enjoy this book.

After the Crash

Dear Edward by Ann Napolitano – it may sound odd, but this is a book I tried to savor. I became immersed in the characters and Edward’s story and wanted to make it last.

Edward is the sole survivor of a plane crash. He was with his brother and parents flying from New York to their new home in California when the plane went down.

After the crash, Edward goes back to live with his aunt and uncle in New Jersey. Edward is numb. Seen as a miracle and an oddity by all, he survives each day in a trance. He is able to find comfort from his neighbor Shay, a girl his age who tells it like it is. Her frank, open company seems to be Edward’s only comfort.

Years pass before they discover locked duffel bags in his uncle’s garage. These bags hold hundreds of letters written through the years to Edward from family or friends of the plane’s deceased. All have special messages or requests for Edward on behalf of their lost loved ones. These letters have a profound effect on Edward. They begin to fully awaken him (while ironically allowing him his first real sleep in years).

Throughout Edward’s story after the crash, readers are given glimpses from during the flight. We gain knowledge of some of the other lives that are lost. Each character has his/her own unique addition to the story. These people are rediscovered in the letters.

The characters and events are interesting and satisfying. It’s hard to even begin to imagine how life could possibly go on after such a traumatic event. Healing takes time. And breakthroughs can occur in unexpected ways.

Ups and Downs

Front Desk by Kelly Yang is a close to firsthand account (based on the author’s note) of the lives of Chinese immigrants doing their best to provide for family in the face of adversity.

Mia’s parents moved from China a couple years before the story begins, and ever since have moved and changed jobs several times. The book centers on their time running a motel in California. They work around the clock every day of the week. The motel owner is an unpleasant, demanding man who has them working for nearly nothing, and his son is in Mia’s class. This in itself creates some unique conflict.

Mia is a pretty amazing kid. She works the front desk so that her parents can clean and manage the rest of the motel. She befriends their permanent residents while managing yet another new school. She dreams of getting her family off the poor roller coaster, an analogy shared by her friend Lupe, and decides to enter a writing competition to win their own motel. In order to do this, she needs to face insecurities her mom has instilled in her about writing in English. Mia learns that working on her writing is worthwhile; she has a powerful voice.

Mia is a witness to discrimination, dishonest and at times violent customers, poverty and her own struggles with trying to fit in. There is no denying that her character is destined for greatness based on her strength through all of life’s obstacles. Readers will find out how she helps her family and others.

This is an inspiring and important story.

Horror and Hope

The Tattooist of Auschwitz by Heather Morris is a book that I will never forget.

Lale volunteers himself to go to a working camp as a representative for his family, but he ends up at the Auschwitz Birkenau concentration camps. By a strange twist of fate (and there are many), he is chosen to assist the tattooist until eventually becoming the full-time tattooist. He must tattoo the number on every person entering the concentration camp. This is a job he does in order to survive. It is how he first sees the woman, Gita, who becomes his true love and his reason for pushing on.

Lale and Gita’s relationship might be the truest love story I’ve ever read. They fall in love amidst the death and horror around them, and their love for each other gets them through terrible years in the camp. Together, they survive the atrocities that they witness.

Lale has a powerful personality and charm; I grew to care and admire him greatly throughout the book. He has intuition of when to be assertive or quiet, when to take risks or not, and a genuine care/interest in helping people that gets him out of near-death situations (more than once).

Lale and Gita endure three years as prisoners before finally gaining their respective freedom. It takes some time, but Lale is able to reunite with Gita so that they may live their promise with one another.

I wish my words could properly capture my response to this book. It’s a story of the concentration camps during WWII, a love story, a survival story, a story of terrible loss, horror and hope. It’s everything.

Manipulation

A Stranger in the House by Shari Lapena is built around the idea of how well you can really know someone. Tom and Karen Krupp have a seemingly perfect marriage until the night Tom comes home to find Karen missing. She ends up in a terrible accident that night in a bad area of town. Afterward, she has no recollection of why she was there in the first place. Tom is happy that she survived the crash, but now he can’t help but feel uncertainty toward his wife. What was she really doing?

All would end up fine except that a man was murdered during the time frame of Karen’s accident. Most concerning is that there is evidence tying Karen to the murder scene. Tom begins to find out that Karen isn’t exactly who she claimed to be. The murdered man is in fact someone from her past who she would have reason to kill. Tom must come to terms with Karen’s past while also dealing with their odd neighbor Brigid; she is someone Tom has had his own encounters with before meeting Karen.

Brigid hasn’t been completely honest either. She obsessively watches Tom and Karen from her home across the street. She has ulterior motives for wanting Karen to be convicted as a murderer. Ultimately, Karen and Brigid have met their match in each other. Both have unpleasant secrets, they are out for themselves and they are determined not to let anyone get in their way.

There are hints of the movies Single White Female and Sleeping with the Enemy in this book, but there are plenty of differences to keep things interesting.

Twisted Paths

Run Away by Harlan Coben includes everything I love about a book. It kept me turning pages (I finished it in two days); it’s action packed with interesting characters and surprising twists.

Simon Green is sitting in Central Park when he sees his apparently homeless/drug-addicted daughter playing music for money. She is dressed shabbily and is clearly not doing well. He attempts to approach her, but her boyfriend intervenes. All goes horribly wrong. He needs a lawyer for the fallout after punching her boyfriend Aaron, which goes viral almost immediately (“wealthy man punches homeless man”). Meanwhile Paige gets away. Readers will gradually find out how Paige ended up in this situation in the first place.

Some time passes after this incident before Aaron turns up viciously murdered. The police are looking at Simon and his wife as suspects. Meanwhile, a private investigator from Chicago ends up crossing paths with Simon. Both are searching for missing people connected by Aaron. They begin working together (as Simon’s wife recovers from an almost fatal gunshot wound) to investigate the whereabouts of their missing people.

Readers will be taken down the crazy paths of murder and missing people investigations while also switching to follow the actual murderers. Discovering the motives behind the multiple murders along with various family secrets all bring readers to the ultimate destination: answers. And it is quite the trip.

A Loyal Friend

The Truth as Told by Mason Buttle by Leslie Connor was recommended many times over in a library group that I follow. The author also wrote All Rise for the Honorable Perry T. Cook, which is a 2020 nutmeg nominee that I recently finished.

This book gave me a tough time for a bit. I had this overwhelming feeling that something (else) bad was going to happen. There are a couple bullies in this book, Matt and Lance, and Matt is so rotten that I was afraid of what he might do. Mason is a kind and likable character with many tough obstacles to overcome. I didn’t want anything else bad to happen to him!

Mason has been solitary since his best friend Benny passed away. He struggles in school with his only respite being in his special education teacher’s room, otherwise known as the SWOOF. Here, he is learning to use the Dragon which is a machine to help him write his story. Gathering his thoughts to write by himself isn’t a possibility, neither is reading.

Mason befriends a new student named Calvin. They bond in their attempts to escape the school bullies and they have a project building a cool hideout. Things take a terrible turn when Calvin goes missing after an encounter with Matt and Lance. It turns out that Mason has been under investigation for his former friend’s death, and now eyes are on him again because of Calvin’s disappearance.

Eventually everything is righted, but waiting for resolution is nerve wracking! Calvin and Mason’s friendship reminds me quite a bit of the main characters in Freak the Mighty (a novel I enjoyed teaching in 7th grade ELA class). In both cases an unlikely duo find strength in each other. Their loyalty helps them to overcome the “evildoers” around them. This book mixes positive and negative; and luckily, good prevails in the end.

Worlds Collide

Estranged by Ethan M. Aldridge is my final Nutmeg nominee!

This book is a graphic novel, telling the story of two boys switched between worlds at a very young age. The Human Childe (no name) is raised by King and Queen of an underground fairy realm, while the fairy child Edmund, is raised by a human family. Both struggle with fitting in.

Worlds collide when the evil Hawthorne breaks up a royal party to take over the throne. She turns the king and queen into rats, and the Human Childe decides it is time to find his changeling. He ventures into the world above with his walking, talking candle/paige named Whick.

The Human Childe sees what life would be like in the human world, having a short time with his parents and sister Alexis before the underworld creatures start looking for him. He knows they won’t stop unless he is able to overthrow Hawthorne, and he knows he can’t do it alone. The Human Childe, Whick, Edmund and Alexis go back underground to fight Hawthorne together.

They face challenging foes during their travels. During their adventure, they realize what family really means and they find where they truly belong.

Making Music

Daisy Jones & The Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid recounts the rise and fall of the famous, seventies rock band of the same name told through a series of interviews. The quick switches from one character to another threw me off a bit at first. Once I settled into the format, it was as though I was watching a rock documentary, along with all the craziness and drama you would expect of a typical rock band.

The band is founded by brothers Billy and Graham Dunne as The Six, which included Warren, Karen, Pete and his brother Eddie. Meanwhile, Daisy was making a name for herself in California. Her incredible beauty and charisma gave her lots of attention in the music industry. Once The Six move to California, their musical paths cross. Daisy collaborates on a chart-topping song with The Six. It’s at this point that they decide to combine their acts.

Seven people trying to work together provides the drama you would expect. There are power struggles between multiple band members, sexual tensions along with drug and alcohol abuse. Through all of this the band creates a groundbreaking, memorable album together. Even though Billy is married to his long-time sweetheart Camila, the chemistry between Daisy and him is undeniable. Readers will follow the roller coaster ride of this band, and find out what made them break up in the middle of an extremely successful tour.

The author perfectly captures the voices and essence of what it might feel like to be part of the music industry. All the song lyrics at the end add an impressive touch. This group and its members feel as real as can be. Anyone into making and/or listening to music will enjoy diving into the lifestyle through this book.

Murder Mystery

Conviction by Denise Mina takes readers on a roller coaster ride of secret identities, murder and mystery.

Anna wakes up early to a “normal” day in which she engages her guilty pleasure, starting a new mystery podcast series called “Death and the Dana.” The day quickly becomes abnormal when her husband Hamish and supposed best friend Estelle announce they’re in love. The lovers immediately leave for vacation, taking along Hamish and Anna’s two young daughters.

Anna spirals out of control, with nothing but the podcast to keep her tethered to reality. As it turns out, Anna has a personal connection to two people in the podcast. One of the people, the rich and powerful Gretchen Teigler, already attempted to kill Anna when she was known as Sophie.

Estelle’s jilted husband Fin joins Anna as they embark on an odd adventure together. Both are feeling hurt and angry by the sudden betrayal of their respective spouses. Fin, a former rock star with anorexia, begins documenting their attempts to solve the podcast mystery. In doing so, Anna’s secret former life is exposed.

Fin and Anna have several near death experiences while traveling to important sites and people from the podcast, before finally solving the Death and the Dana mystery. Overall, this is an engaging read with some surprises along the way.