Tag Archives: women’s fiction

Review: Painted Hands by Jennifer Zobair

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Painted Hands

About the book (from the author’s website):
Muslim bad girl Zainab Mir and her best friend Amra Abbas have thwarted proposal-slinging aunties and cultural expectations to succeed in their high-powered careers in Boston. What they didn’t count on? The unlikely men who shatter their friendship, including a childhood friend who turns out to be more traditional than he let on, and a right-wing politico with career-threatening secrets of his own. When the personal and the geopolitical collide, and a controversial prayer service leads to violence, Zainab and Amra must figure out what they’re willing to risk for their principles, their friendship, and love.

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My Thoughts:
When I was in high school I read everything Allen Drury had written up to that point. Many of them had written before I was even born, so they were a bit dated, but they gave me a love of political fiction that remains to this day, and probably explains my lingering obsession with The West Wing as well. It is this love that was the main reason I accepted TLC’s offer to read and review Jennifer Zobair’s first novel Painted Hands.

I started reading the book a few days ago, and I’ll confess to being a bit worried that I’d have to read a ton of neo-con propaganda when I noticed the bit about the lead character, Zainab, working for a Republican politician. My fears were quickly quelled, but I didn’t have a chance to really absorb the book until yesterday, when I planted myself at my kitchen table with a pot of coffee, one too many English muffins, and NPR playing on the radio. (In fact it was a program featuring Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie talking about why having a single story is a bad thing – and it was the perfect complement to Zobair’s book.)

The practical upshot of all this: Painted Hands is one of the best books I’ve read all year. All of the women – Zainab, and her best friend Amra, especially, but also Rukan – feel like the sort of women you might run into if you live and work in a major city. They are three-dimensional, and may share common religious roots, but are distinctly different women, as they should be. Amra’s anglo friend/colleague Hayden is as well-developed as the others, and her story, too, is compelling. Likewise, the men in the story are all fully-formed. Chase, the right-wing radio personality and Mateen, the childhood crush turned potential love interest are complex, each with their own desires and flaws.

On the NPR show this morning, the creators of Toy Story said that one of the first rules of storytelling is to make the reader/viewer care. Jennifer Zobair did this with every character she created. Even with the characters I didn’t like, I still wanted to know what their story was, and whether it would end well.

Jennifer Zobair

More than just making me care about her characters, however, Zobair’s writing let me glimpse a culture other than my own. Spending my formative years with just my mother, and growing up in a liberal family where the ultimate dinner table whining would be an accusatory, “But MOM! He made a Sexist Statement!!!” the whole notion of HAVING to get married is as foreign to me as putting cheddar cheese on pizza was the first time I encountered it in California, and I’ve never had to live with proscriptions against any kind of clothing or makeup (except blue eyeshadow, but that really should be illegal in most cases anyway).

In Painted Hands, however, we get to see the way Islam is practiced in a variety of American families, and what it means to have one foot in the modern world and another in a conservative religious tradition. As someone who wasn’t raised in any particular religion (we are culturally Catholic, attended the UU church on and off, and, as an adult, my Baptist husband met me half-way and we’re Episcopalian), getting a peek into any spiritual practice is fascinating to me.

I’m very fortunate to have a circle of friends and acquaintances from many countries, cultures, and religions; for those who don’t, or even if they do, Painted Hands is an excellent introduction to Muslim-American culture, wrapped in a great story.

Goes well with… a really good korma (I like chicken, but vegetarian is good) and iced mint tea.

Connect with Jennifer Zobair:
Web: JenniferZobair.com
Twitter: @jazobair

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Review: The Naked Gardener, by L B Gschwandtner

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The Naked Gardener
The Naked Gardener
L B Gschwandtner
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Summary (from Amazon.com):
In a remote forest of northern Vermont, Katelyn Cross takes five women on a wilderness canoe trip where they hope to come up with ideas for saving their dying town. Although the river is not always what it seems and the women have not left their problems behind, a painting ritual creates a new way to look at the world – and themselves. Artist Katelyn Cross loves Greg Mazur and he loves her. He wants to be married but a previous relationship that went sour has made Katelyn overly cautious about any permanent commitment. And what about Greg’s first wife? He lost her to cancer and Katelyn worries that he’s only looking for a replacement. What’s a girl to do? Canoe down a river with five gal pals, camp out, catch fish, talk about life and men. The problem is, a river can be as unpredictable as any relationship and just as hard to manage. On their last day, when the river turns wild, the women face the challenge of a lifetime and find that staying alive means saving themselves first while being open to help from a most unlikely source. As Katelyn navigates the raging water, she learns how to overcome her fear of change in a world where nothing stays the same. When Katelyn returns to her garden, she’ll face one more obstacle and the naked gardener will meet the real Greg Mazur. What readers are saying about The Naked Gardener: Lyrical … Scandalous … Empowering … Exhilarating … Honest … Sensual … Fun … Gentle … Pleasurable … Transporting … Timeless In her first novel, award winning writer L B Gschwandtner explores the push and pull of love, a woman’s need to maintain her individuality within marriage, and the bonds that can make women stronger even when the world feels as if it’s breaking apart.

I’ve known L B Gschwandtner through her wonderful website The Novelette for several years now, but only in the very cursory way that people who occupy overlapping circles do. I’ve participated in her contests, she’s visited my blog, etc. Even so, when she announced the publication of her first novel, I had to read it. Lucky for me, it’s available for the kindle for less than a dollar, though it’s totally worth the print-edition price of $10.99.

I actually started reading The Naked Gardener the day I downloaded it, a couple of weeks ago, but I had a stack of review books with deadlines that had to come first. I revisited it over the weekend, and ended up staying up to the wee hours because the story caught me, and held me so tightly that I had to finish it immediately. I really loved the idea of Katelyn naked in her garden – it struck me as something my mother would do, and I liked the women Katelyn befriends. I think Maze could be interesting but we heard about him more than we heard from him, and while that’s fairly normal in a story that focuses on women, I hope he’s a bit more present in the next novel.

If you’ve ever wanted to run away to a rural farm, have a canoe adventure, or just share stories with a bunch of new friends, or even if you’ve already done all those things, this novel is one you’ll enjoy, both for the obvious story, and the deeper one, about finding yourself, facing your fears, and learning to accept and love yourself as you are, not as you wish you were. I can’t begin to speculate about the best diet pill for women, but I am fairly certain that Katelyn, Erica, and the rest of the women in this novel would never touch them, but would instead take off down the river, or start a project, or have another candid conversation, and never care that dieting might be in order.

I don’t think you have to garden naked to appreciate The Naked Gardener, but I’m certain that it will inspire many of us to try it at least once. I don’t have a garden, but I do have a very private back yard with just the right amount of sun (at least at this time of year)…this book reminded me of why I love that privacy so much.

Goes well with freshly-baked artisan bread and local honey.

Review: Life’s A Beach by Clare Cook

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I picked up Clare Cook’s novel Life’s a Beach because I was in the mood for a book to give me a jolt of laughter the way thoroughbreds get a jolt of energy and nutrients when given horse supplements. I was not disappointed.

Ginger is a fun-loving, woman a bit older than I am (specifically, in her early forties), with a sister about to turn fifty. She’s still living in her parent’s garage apartment (she hates the term FROG – finished room over garage), with her cat named Boyfriend and her non-committal boyfriend, a glass-blower named Noah. Glass is a trend in Ginger’s life. Between real jobs, she’s been trying to find herself, and her current incarnation involves making sea glass jewelry.

Against the background of her mother’s entree into the Red Hat Society, her father’s unwillingness to downsize and sell the family home, and her sister’s upcoming birthday, Ginger is a breath of fresh air, but living in denial, so when her eight-year-old nephew Riley gets tapped to be an extra in a horror movie, she is more than willing to go to the set and act as his guardian.

Clare Cook, who previously gave us Must Love Dogs, sends us on a wonderfully funny, sometimes sappy journey to the shore and beyond, all the while holding up a rather forgiving mirror to those of us who know that fifty really is the new thirty.

Review: Love and Biology at the Center of the Universe, by Jennie Shortridge

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Love and Biology at the Center of the Universe
Jennie Shortridge
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When I first picked up Love and Biology… at Half Price Books, I thought it would be exactly the kind of read I was looking for. After all, it’s about a woman who flees her troubled marriage and goes to work in a popular bakery/cafe in Seattle. “Oh,” I thought, “there will be rain and coffee and romance and she’ll find herself and be independent.”

Well there is rain, and coffee, and romance, but somehow this novel isn’t quite what I hoped. I mean – I don’t hate it, I just think the characters need depth. Mira Serafino, for example, is very much a stereotype of Italian-American women of a certain age (one older than my own), with a young daughter (young but grown – we’re beyond the age of acne treatments), a teaching position she doesn’t seem to particularly like, and a marriage in which she’s grown complacent, and her identity seems completely centered on home and hearth.

There’s nothing wrong with that, but I was hoping for something in the vein of Bread Alone and got something more like Francesca’s Kitchen.

So I did what I always do when a book doesn’t fit: I set it aside to re-read later. I picked it up again recently because I needed bathtub reading, and was able to get more into Mira’s story – and the coffee shop scenes are well written, but I can’t shake the feeling that this book could have been something more, or that I’m missing the point.