Category Archives: book reviews

THE MONDAY BOOK: Talk Before Sleep, by Elizabeth Berg

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I started this book once several years ago and didn’t get far, so I didn’t expect it to impress me when I picked it up a second time. But sometimes you have to be in the right head space.

This is my favorite kind of book: character driven. A handful of women are gathering around their beloved friend who is dying of cancer. And the friends are kinda the stereotypes you see in those crises: the one doing all the organizing, demanding answers to tough questions; the one determined the friend Shall Not Die because she will feed her kale and such; the one taking it personally, etc.

The dying woman, Ruth, is drawn enigmatically, a stroke of Berg’s particular genius with characters. She recedes into one-liners and personality-pulsing moments, as the narrator takes up more space in how she is reacting to the impending death.

And the narrator comes out with some cracking observations. Here is one of my favorites: “I believe that the souls of women flatten and anchor themselves in times of adversity, lay in for the stay. I’ve heard that when elephants are attacked they often run, not away, but toward each other. Perhaps it is because they are a matriarchal society.”

The sweetness of women friends, the horror of a sad thing you cannot fix, the pushes and pulls on women’s time are all here. Berg has a way of pulling together an ensemble cast and not making any of them feel like they are mechanisms serving the plot.

The bickering between L.D., the kale-feeding lesbian friend, and Sarah, the get-the-funeral-arrangements-done buttoned-up-jacket friend, is adorable. So are the moments when Ruth lets fly on the narrator. This book may be about loss, but it has a lot of giggles in it as well. Perhaps they are sweetened by the inevitability of the bitter end to come.

The book also delves into a thing that happens with female friends: jealousy and envy when family obligations are involved. The narrator is abandoning her family temporarily, hoping she isn’t hurting her marriage personally. The dying Ruth has a brother who wants her to die at his house. The decisions characters make are embedded in the reality of the demands on women’s time and our extraordinary capacity to manufacture energy out of sheer need.

Highly recommend this book. You will laugh more than you cry, and sometimes the laughter will be in recognition.

The Monday Book: SIX OSTRICHES by Philipp Schott

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Guest review by Kate Belt from Portland, Oregon, whose passions include everything bookish, libraries, celtic Christianity, Presbyterian Church (USA), technology, Pacific Northwest, Pacific Ocean, outdoors, nature, and authors Brian Doyle and Madeleine L’Engle, both deceased.

Six Ostriches: A Dr. Bannerman Vet Mystery by Philipp Schott (No. 2 in the Series)

3 ½ to 4 stars for a fast paced read sure to please those who enjoy formulaic mysteries and also people like me who don’t, but sometimes find one that intrigues. The setting is in rural Manitoba, Canada. Main characters are Peter – a veterinarian who is neurodivergent with astonishing problem solving skills and his wife, Laura – a paleontologist by education & training and career knitter, their cat, and their dog, Pippin, who wins scent work contests. The plot is driven by the historical conflict between a radical Norse faction who believe that they, not the Indigenous persons who crossed the Bering Strait, were there first and deserve reparation for the land they had occupied. I knew little about the settlements in this part of Canada, so the best part for me was discovering Icelandic/Norse history and anthropology. The story takes a violent turn with animals and people turning up dead. This is your warning if these are your triggers.  I enjoy getting inside Peter’s fascinating brain when he is puzzling out the whodunit.

I can easily imagine the forested and lake setting Schott describes because my husband and I drove the Selkirk Loop, following the route we found in Sunset Magazine. We stayed at the bed & breakfast at Wedgwood Manor in Crawford Bay, in the area of the story’s fictional town. This was also the trip on which coming home, Jim zipped across 2 lanes of traffic on the old highway through Spokane, Washington. I thought he was avoiding a crash, but soon realized he had discovered a Starbucks!  Tells you how desperate we were for decent coffee by that time. Kudos to him for great scent work!

First in the series is Fifty-four Pigs, and No. 3, Eleven Huskies, came out May 14, 2024.  You don’t have to start with No. 1 unless you are a fanatic about reading books in order. I’m not. I discovered this series on a “Shelf Awareness” post and hoped I might finally discover a Louise Penny readalike. New Selfoss is not Three Pines, and Peter Bannerman is not Armand Gamache, but I will keep reading for awhile. I look forward to learning the stories of other recurring characters.