NOLA Notes

Well, this getting hacked has made me want to whitewash my blog and start fresh.  So the Manifest Theme from WordPress is scratching my itch.  I am certain that soon the oh, so white everywhere will start to hurt my eyes and I’ll want to jazz it up.  But for now, this look seems right.  To write, to wit.

My muscles are getting softer and my bones more brittle.  Being the youngest gives me the ability to look ahead 2, 5, 6, 7 years and see what predicaments into which my body will be getting me.

My mother started to “shrink” about 15 years ago.  We laughed that we were all getting taller than her even though we were no longer growing.  Then arthritis, bursitis and bone spurs started to demand her attention.  Now she’s just undergone shoulder replacement surgery.  Overall, my family is healthy.  But there are certain, common, ailments that we are slightly more at risk over–like osteoporosis.

I feel like I am falling apart–that I will follow the slow road to decline if I don’t TAKE ACTION NOW.  I simply MUST exercise more, eat more green leafy vegetables, practice more yoga, walk my dog more often.  Because unlike my mother who has already lived to raise her children and see grandchildren and great-grandchildren, I must stay together just to be sure Sun gets through school with me still in tack.

I was not ready to be a mother until I became one, at the age of 38.  I have no real regret over not getting there sooner–it just wasn’t the hand I was dealt.  But being an older mother does bring with it a bitter-sweetness: I, personally, am a better mother BECAUSE I am an older mother–I am more mellow, wiser, more patient–but BECAUSE I am an older mother, I have great trepidation about Sun’s future without her parents.

In 40 years, when Sun in my age, she will have, at best, two elderly parents and no siblings.  When we die, she’ll be an orphan.  Not to be melodramatic, but coming from a large family, it greatly pains me to think of my darling Sun alone.  All alone.  When these thoughts creep in, and they do often enough, I push them away by having faith.  Faith that Sun will make the right kind of friends to see her through her entire life so that when we are gone, she’ll have her own family and a lifetime of good memories in which to seek comfort and love and strength.

But between now and then, I have GOT to get my ass in shape so that I can make the most of my life with the ones I love.

This lil blog got hacked.

The techies, quick to the fix,

their brains barely racked.

But the site took on some licks.

So as things get reset

to the way of my choosing

don’t get sad or beset.

Enjoy festive boozing!

Yes, go sip an egg nog

or a Ramos fizz gin.

Nibble a yule log

And let winter set in.

The second most positive experience of my life was fertility treatment.  (Law school was the most positive–this was my coming of age and I cherish every memory I have of this experience).  You’d think being pregnant, or giving birth, or being a mother rise to the top.  These merit highlights in my life.  Being a mother, I’ve learned, is the most love that is possible to experience.  But the actual five months of fertility treatment , well, it was chuck full of adversity.  But, oh, the mettle it tested!  In me, in CS, in us as one.  To learn that hope can be a deadly thing or the smallest dot on an ultrasound screen.

I write this because I currently have two dear women in my life going through fertility treatment.  It was first mentioned to me in whispers.  Don’t ask, don’t tell.  That’s the message women with fertility issues are given.  It’s not polite to discuss AT ALL.  In fact, it’s shameful and to be hidden. Well, I completely disagree.  Fertility issues are 99.9% (in my very unscientific poll) FIXABLE.  And often with just a slight adjustment of hormones.  There’s this concept that we are “playing God” by seeing a fertility specialist–by making the decisions each step of the process presents. But how is this any different from any other medical treatment we seek?  Isn’t putting in a stint for a heart patient “playing God”?  Or taking insulin for Diabetes?  How is adjusting hormones any different?

And even if it is different, even if it is “playing God,” what of it?  Aside from Octomom, folks getting fertility treatment tend to be making more informed family decisions than many of the folks getting pregnant un-aided.  Is it not “playing God” to be married with eight kids and having unprotected sex?

My very simply point is this: Infertility is a medical problem.  It is not a message from God.  And it is nothing for which to be ashamed.  And, in my own experience, it was hard and stressful and tear-filled.  And suffering in silence thinking I was broken made it much harder.  But I look back on those five months, those long, hard months, and I can’t help but smile.  Oh, the humor that IS fertility treatment!  The indignities one endures!  The laughs my husband and I still have over it all!  Oh, it was all so worth it.  Even had Sun not resulted from it all.  But she did.  Thank God.

Another funeral attended today

Squeezed between billable hours.

A life’s accomplishments recognized;

A day’s work to do.

Focus made on the small moments,

The quiet moments filled with love.

Allowing that one’s work is so much more

than the hours spent doing the job.

And permitting that pleasure is

successes and soirees and hard-won wins

to no less extent than it is

a family dinner with a green salad

followed by a well mixed drink.

I spoke with Laura Lippman last Friday.  She was engaging and articulate and has that special gift some people have that they willingly offer to others, if they’ll but pay attention.  Luckily for me, I was paying very close attention.

We were brought together to discuss Lippman’s new book, “I’d Know You Anywhere,” which I reviewed here over the weekend.  First up, I remarked upon her Katrina analogy to the villain in “I’d Know You Anywhere.”  She said of it:

As more people should know, the Mississippi coast got hit by a hurricane. New Orleans suffered the human inadequacies of poorly built levees.  With Walter, you have on the one hand these hints that his family was not as warm and supportive as they might have been of him, but they’re not sadists, they’re not unnaturally cruel; they’re just not great parents. And of course lots of people rise above that situation and manage to go on and have lives that don’t involve raping and killing people.  On some level, he’s probably a natural disaster; there’s something that’s probably innate that’s been wrong in his brain chemistry from the day he was born. But on the other hand he’s also somewhat created by his circumstances.  It’s the collision of what was innate in him, what was natural, and what circumstances he has come into and how he interacts with those circumstances.  So, he’s a lot like Hurricane Katrina when it hit New Orleans.  It was a storm that came into contact with human-made catastrophes waiting to happen.

I asked if when she was a newspaper reporter whether she reported on crimes.  She explained that although she was a full-time police reporter during her eight years in Texas, she was a feature writer for her twelve years at the Baltimore Sun.  She noted that although most of the crimes she writes about are based on true crimes, almost none of them are ones on which she ever reported.  She appreciates that one of the gifts she garnered from being a reporter is that she’s not shy about knowing how to find out things she needs to know for a story.  And this is not always a matter of calling a friend or contact.  “Sometimes you just have to go into things cold.  In one book, I needed to know a lot about the working life of a furrier.  And I certainly didn’t know any furriers, but having been a reporter, you know how to call people who know people.  And you sort of put word out ‘I’m looking for someone who knows this.’  And eventually someone says, ‘Well I know a guy.’ And you call this person up.  When you are a novelist trying to get stuff right, people are amazingly helpful and pretty good about some odd, cold phone calls.  Not so much when you are a journalist.”

So where does she draw inspiration about the crimes she writes if not from her days as a reporter?  From her past, as a “consumer of news, not a reporter of news.”  Generally, she is going back decades to pre-CNN/24 hour news days and to crimes that have stayed with her these many years later.  She prefers these generally unfamiliar crimes to provide her a good framework for the tale she will spin, the web she will weave, among the few facts she will retain from the true crime.

In asking her what drew her to write crime stories, I seemed to strike upon a topic about which Lippman had given a lot of thought (probably because she’s been asked the same question over and over). [Note to self: Don't ask crime writers why they write crimes stories.]  She concluded by telling me, “I came into it because it felt accessible and then I got there and realized I didn’t need to go anywhere.  I guess it would be akin to saying I came to live in New Orleans because my car broke down then I realized I was in a fabulous place.”  But in reaching that conclusion, Lippman had lots of advice to offer new writers.  Here’s what she had to say:

I had a friend say to me that for a lot of women who want to start writing, genre is often the avenue in because it seems less presumptuous.  You’re not saying, “I’m going to write the great American novel.”  You’re saying “I’m going to write just a mystery, just a romance, just a science fiction, just paranormal.”  And that was good advice; it really stuck with me.

One of the great things about the mystery genre for writers who are getting their feet wet is that there is framework.  There’s not a formula. There’s not a recipe.  There is no place where it is written down that you do this, this, this, and this.  But there is a framework that if you’ve been reading crime novels, you understand what the basic framework is.  There’s going to be a problem and your main character is going to solve it.

What’s different about genre fiction, and this is paraphrasing or fine-tuning something Raymond Chandler once said, is that mediocre genre fiction can still be successful in that there are lots of undiscerning readers who are perfectly happy with a book that takes them from Point A to Point C and does all the thing that the genre promises, whatever those things are, whether it’s a romance, mystery, science fiction, paranormal.  So very mediocre genre novels do get published. And what Chandler said and where I would disagree with him is he said you never read the ordinary or mediocre literary novel.  Well, I can’t speak for the times he lived in, I read mediocre literary novels all the time.  [I wondered at this point if she'd read my review of "The Story of Edgar Sawtelle."]

The mediocre literary novel is an out-and-out failure.  There’s nothing to recommend it except as a lesson in how not to do something.  The mediocre genre novel can be successful on its own terms because it does the very basic things that it set out to do.  Just because what is known as “literary fiction” doesn’t have the option of being mediocre and successful doesn’t mean that what is known as “genre fiction” doesn’t have the option of being as successful as a literary novel at its most successful.  There’s no ceiling on genre fiction.  It’s almost as if that when a crime novel, when a romance novel, when a science fiction novel is very, very, very good, then it has left the genre by definition of being good. I think that’s a fallacy.

There are great crime novels that are as good as most literary fiction.  I mean, in some ways I guess what I’m saying about why I came to crime fiction is because I thought I could execute at the low end of the scale. [Lippman laughed as she said this.]  “Well, I can write one of those mediocre books.” And then I got inside and saw that it’s open to the sky and I can go as high as I want and the only limit here is me. There’s not an inherit limit in the genre.

What are some of her favorite genre books, books she feels can “stand shoulder to shoulder with current literary novels”?  Dennis Lehane’s “Mystic River” and Kate Atkinson‘s books about her private eye named Jackson Brodie readily came to her mind.  And although she wasn’t sure he is classified as a crime novelist (“I don’t how you’d classify him, just that’s he’s wonderful”), she also praised the works of Daniel Woodrell.

We returned again to “I’d Know You Anywhere,” focusing more on its central theme, how well people really know each other, or even themselves:

I’m really, really crazy about the short stories of Ellen Gilchrist, a fine southern writer.  One of her early stories has a character who is obsessed with her own reputation: What do people think of me? And I thought that was such a fabulous insight into the mind of a teenage girl.  I think teenage girls are fascinated with what is their reputation. How are they known? What are people saying about them? “Oh, God I hope people aren’t talking about me but what would be even worse is that no one is talking about me.”  Teenage girls in particular tend to be interested in famous people, and I think it’s natural that even as they are following and worshiping and thinking about some famous person they’ve never met, they can’t help wondering if people are thinking about them, following them, paying attention to them, asking themselves, “How am I known?”

She took care to explain that “the word ‘KNOW’ was a very deliberate choice in the title” of her new book: “it’s all about how we’re known and how we know others and what it means to know anybody.”

We may not really know each other and ourselves as much as we think we do, but what I do know is that I have thoroughly enjoyed the odyssey that has been the last six weeks beginning with my receipt of an email from Lippman’s publisher, the likes of which I usually ignore.  And regardless of whether “I’d Know You Anywhere” goes in the annals of fiction under “literary” or “genre,” it is very fine fiction.

Don’t forget, I have two hardbacks to give away of “I’d Know You Anywhere.”  For a chance to win one, just leave me a comment telling me some of your favorite mystery writers, private eye works, or other mystery genre books that were STILL with you long after you were done reading them.  Laura Lippman will be doing a reading at the Garden District Book Shop next Saturday, October 9th.  Get your comments in by tomorrow, September 30, so you’ll have her book in time to attend her reading and get her to sign it!

Laura Lippman’s “I’d Know You Anywhere,” opens on the tranquil domesticity of the Benedict family, Eliza and Peter, and their two children, Iso (short for Isobel, aged 13) and Albie (8).  But by the end of Chapter One, the first fissure of that sense of utter calm and peace is revealed: Eliza receives a handwritten letter from a woman writing on behalf of the man who kidnapped Eliza when she was 15.  Walter is now on Death Row with his execution date looming.  The letter says that Walter had seen Eliza’s picture in a magazine and that even after all these years, “[s]till, I’d know you anywhere.”  The letter goes on to explain that Walter feels he owes Eliza an apology and would “love to hear from [her].”

And so we are off.

This isn’t your typical Whodunit.  We know from the outset Walter did it, was caught, and was given a strong punishment.  We know early on that what he “did”  was rape and murder.  Young girls.  Only one of which survived: Eliza.

What we don’t know, what Eliza herself does not know, is WHY her.  What good did Walter see in her and not in the others to spare her life?  Or, from the 15 year old Elizabeth’s point of view, what didn’t he see in her?  What made her so different from the other girls way back then?

Much of the book swaps chapters from current day to 1985, when Eliza was 15 and still “Elizabeth.”  Coincidentally, the Summer of 1985 was also the summer that *I* was 15.  Elizabeth came from a good, middle class family; she was a touch shy.  She didn’t need nor seek to be the center of attention.  She liked that her older sister was the drama hog of the family because the energy always seemed focused off of Elizabeth and that was just fine.  And oddly, the same was quite true for me at 15 as well.  The Elizabeths of the world aren’t better or worse than other teenagers, but they just don’t KNOW exactly who they are yet and they’d prefer the spotlight not to be on them as they figure it out.

We follow Walter before he meets Elizabeth; as he kills his first victim.  We follow as Elizabeth takes a shortcut through the woods and crosses paths with Walter and is kidnapped.  We follow as Elizabeth’s hair is cut to disguise her look, and her clothes get worn day after day becoming soiled and unkempt.  We follow as Elizabeth struggles to work out who Walter is and how she can do things she believes will extend her time with Walter as a plan to extend the time when he will kill her.

Meanwhile, we watch in present day as Eliza struggles with not wanting to open further any line of communication with Walter.  Walter persists, however, and each unannounced missive from Walter shakes Eliza more: to whom else did Walter give her address? How far will he (they?) go to get her to hear him out?

Getting a letter from Walter was like some exiled citizen of New Orleans getting a telegram signed ‘Katrina.’ Hey, how are you?  Do you ever think of me? Those were some crazy times, huh?

Eliza decides to take his call, to hear his apology.  Why?  Because even these 20+ years later, Eliza still questions who she is, who she was, and how to allow herself to be okay with being “the lucky one.”  Well, that plus he promises he’ll tell her details of other girls so that other families can have peace.

But does Walter have yet another plan of manipulation of Eliza up his sleeve?  Will she unwittingly take his bait and play right into his hands?

Mystery aside, Lippman is a good writer.  Her characters are fully developed and evolving.  The relationships she describes are real.  So real, I wondered if Lippman was the mother of a teenage girl; if her parents were psychiatrists (as Eliza’s are).  Here’s a passage relating to Eliza’s father, Manny:

Manny was always careful to use the most neutral words possible–experienced not suffered, or even endured.  Not because he was inclined to euphemisms, but because Eliza’s parents didn’t want to define her life for her.  “You get to be the expert on yourself,” her father said frequently, and Eliza found it an enormously comforting saying, an unexpected gift from two parents who had knowledge, training, and history to be the expert on her, if they so chose.  They probably  did know her better than she knew herself in some ways, but they refused to claim this power.  Sometimes she wished they would, or at least drop a few hints.

Or this description of the woman who has befriended and is helping Walter:

Barbara knew from scared little mouses.  Mice.  She had been one, behind her cranky facade.  She had skittered to her car in the morning, worried it wouldn’t start, skittered into the school, tried to teach history to bored seventh and eighth graders, skittered out of the Pimlico neighborhood at day’s end, cooked dinner, fretted over calories and fat and cholesterol.  Graded papers in front of the television, usually falling asleep there.  Rinse, lather, repeat.

See? Not scary. Well, definitely scary but not macabre.  Bottom line, Lippman understands people.  She gets that we aren’t just “good” or “bad.”  That there are many shades of gray.  And the true gem of this story is NOT the crime or the mystery.  It is the artfulness that is Lippman’s insight and writing.  “I’d Know You Anywhere” is layered and goes deeper, more introspective, than others in its genre.  And to me, that is a beautiful thing.

Tomorrow, I’ll post about my conversation with Laura Lippman about her writing, Eliza and Walter, and other interesting topics.

As I posted yesterday, I have two hardbacks to give away of “I’d Know You Anywhere.”  And all you have to do for a chance to win is just leave me a comment telling me some of your favorite mystery writers, private eye works, or other books of intrigue that were STILL with you long after you were done reading them.  Laura Lippman will be doing a reading at the Garden District Book Shop on October 9th.  So this little giveaway ends Thursday, September 30, so that you’ll have her book in time to attend her reading and have her sign your new book!

Every so often, I get an email via this blog to receive a free copy of a book if I am interested in reading it and would consider writing a review of it.  I’ve always turned these offers down, mainly because each book’s description, for one reason or another, did not, well, blow my skirt up.  And I would feel bad if I got the free book then couldn’t bring myself to finish it or I did finish it and did not have anything positive to write about it, and how awkward that would be.  This email proved to be the exception:

Award winning author Laura Lippman is back with another gripping tale of suspense, her new stand-alone novel I’d Know You Anywhere, on sale 8/17. This is sure to be Lippman’s biggest hit yet, and a must-read for anyone who loves a good mystery and psychological suspense novel!

I love “gripping tales of suspense” and am a sucker for a “good mystery and psychological suspense novel.”  I did my research, found the author and publisher were legit, and asked for the book, which went on top of my night stand queue as I finished another novel.  Meanwhile, a co-worker mentioned the compilation “New Orleans Noir,” a new one to me, when I asked him to name some of his favorite NOLA fiction for my Top Ten NOLA Reads post.

Two weeks later, I had finally started reading “I’d Know You Anywhere,” and the next day my co-worker brought me his copy of “New Orleans Noir” to read.  I casually flipped through the pages and the name of one of the contributing author’s caught my eye: Laura Lippman. What the?  Was she from NOLA?  If so, how had I never heard of her? Hrmm.

That night, I continued reading her book, putting aside the oddity of her appearance in the Noir book.  “I’d Know You Anywhere” is about a woman, Eliza, who was kidnapped when she was fifteen by a man, Walter, now on Death Row for raping and killing other young girls.  Walter has extended contact to Eliza, and of course such a thing has Eliza rattled.  She discusses it all with her husband, Peter.  And then I read this passage:

Over time, of course, she had told him more, in greater detail.  Peter never wondered why she was the lucky one.  He took it for granted that she was, and he was glad for it.  “We don’t ponder why lightening strikes where it does,” he said once.  Later, after a London-based magazine had asked him to file dispatches from New Orleans on the first anniversary of Katrina, he had written beautiful passages about the levees, human-designed and maintained systems that had failed spectacularly.  He described how arbitrary water was, destroying one neighborhood, while leaving another relatively intact.  He never said as much, but Eliza believed he had written those words for her, that it was a sonnet of sorts, more proof that Peter understood.  Walter was a natural disaster made catastrophic by human failures.  She had been on one side of the levee, Holly on the other.  Don’t ask why.

Ok. SERIOUSLY. Who *IS* this Laura Lippman?  People don’t just toss out Katrina analogies, or at least not thoughtful, positive ones full of retrospection, without there being that love that NOLA evokes in people.  Knowing nothing more of Lippman at this point, it was clear she KNEW New Orleans, that she *got* the city and her denizens.

So, the researcher in me kicked into high gear and I dug around.  She started her writing career as a newspaper reporter.  She married her second husband several years ago.  Her husband has occasional business in New Orleans.  Consequently, they bought a second home here.

There it was. Her New Orleans connection.

Oh, and her husband? He’s another former news reporter (they both wrote for the Baltimore Sun) whose business in New Orleans happens to be making HBO’s “Treme.”  Yup, Ms. Lippman is Mrs. David Simon.

I swear this string of coincidences ala Six Degrees of Separation is so typical of New Orleans, I had to laugh.  How many times, HOW MANY TIMES, do you meet someone new and within a short period of talking about where you each went to high school and what part of town you each grew up in (THE New Orleans questions), do you realize that your older brother dated your new friend’s sister?  Or her aunt is your cousin’s wife?  Or she taught your nephew Freshman Social Studies?  Everyone in this damn town is connected to everyone else.  And usually in far less than six degrees.  And now the same is true of Ms. Lippman, who still feels new to the city.

I finished her book AND have had the opportunity to talk to her (!) about her book, her New Orleans, and much more.  I’ll tell you about all of that in the next couple of posts.

Do you find this intriguing?  A “gripping tale of suspense”? Does this sort of mystery get you excited? Well, “I’d Know You Anywhere” may well be the perfect read for you.  And I have TWO hardbacks to give away.  If you want a chance to win, just leave me a comment and tell me some of your favorite mystery writers.  Or private eye works.  Or other books of intrigue that were STILL with you long after you were done reading them.

Laura Lippman will be doing a reading at the Garden District Book Shop on October 9th.  So this little giveaway ends Thursday, September 30, so that you’ll have her book in time to attend her reading and have her sign your new book!

Really, this is grand book with a great mysterious NOLA connection. Once you read it, you’ll WANT to hear her read it.  I know I do.  So leave those comments and come to the reading!

A lot of reading has been going on over here this summer.  The latest selection, however, warrants comment.

“The Story of Edgar Sawtelle,” by David Wroblewski came recommend via an odd route.  I have a friend in Colorado that sends me two books every year—one for my birthday, one for Christmas.  On the whole, I find the books she recommends readable but I truly only like about a third of what she gives me.  She knows this and takes it as a challenge.

I have another friend with whom I work, and his wife, we realized, loves all the same books my CO friend sends me.  Now if my CO friend sends me a book, the more I hate it, the more I *know* my worker-friend’s wife will LOVE it.  So far, these two who have never met have batted 100%.  Why I ever thought a book my worker friend or his wife would recommend would be something I’d like, I can’t explain.  But when my friend dropped “Sawtelle” on my desk, I was hungry to read it. And anxious to like it.

Thus I set out to read a story that from the book’s own description did not call to me.  It was about a boy and his dogs.  But it *was* a coming of age novel and I LOVE those.

The first hundred or so pages, it was slow going.  This unique breed of dog; their training; life on a farm. Nice enough writing.  A hint of a mystery.  I truly found the descriptions of training the dogs worthwhile.  Having a dog that knows one command (Sit!) but takes it more as a suggestion, I can appreciate that dog training is an art.  And not easy to write about and not be unreadable.  (See, that’s nice, right?)  At about the 150 page mark, something happened.  Finally.  But it took another 150 pages for something ELSE to happen.  So now at page 300, I am just in it to finish it.  Again, highly readable.  A nice paragraph here and there.

Then the climax is getting set up.  The end is near!  Loose ends will be tied!  Mysteries solved! Order restored!  I was never so happy to get to that end.

Until I got there.

And then the train came off the rails.

Seriously, the ending of this book MAKES NO SENSE.  I care not whether I spoil anyone on the ending, but I don’t care enough about the story to dredge it out here to ask you, dear reader, if the ending makes sense to you.  I asked my friend about the ending.  He admitted he’d forgotten how it ended.  If I had doubted his sincerity, he may be dead now.  But I believed him.

To try to make sense of this nonsense (and the twitter failing me), I googled reviews.  Seems this book was, ehm, similar to? apropos of? a poor adaptation of? Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” and “King Lear.”

Now, I am no Shakespearean expert, although I did take a college English course on just his works, and I am certain I read both plays.  But I have no real recollection of them.  The bottom line for me is, Story Is as Story Does.  You were inspired by Shakespeare.  Great.  Get in line, fella.  So were many other writers.  This story was ever so slow moving.  And the end did not fit.  What it DID fit was making sure it had a Shakespearean tragic ending.  But that isn’t enough.  A story, its beginning, middle and end, must stand alone, apart from its inspiration.  Shakespeare aside, this story should carry itself.  It didn’t.  And to say the ending needed to be as it was to be a truly Shakespearean tragedy is, well, tragic, and a disservice to Shakespeare.

And just for the record, I hate happy, puffy heart endings.  Sad, tragic endings? Bring it.  So it isn’t that I didn’t like the sad ending.  It’s that this particular ending left way too much unexplained (does Trudy ever learn Claude killed Gar?  That Edgar was suspicious of Claude and thus his behavior the night with Page Papinou?  Does Trudy even continue the kennel?  She and Edgar couldn’t handle just the two of them.  How was she to go it alone?  Do those records he died for serve ANY purpose after he’s dead?  What was the point of Forte???  Why do we follow Essay and the dogs into the woods but no further?  What becomes of Glen, an innocent that was manipulated by Claude and lost at least his vision as a result? For whom did Claude initially buy the poison?  Gar? Their father?  Was Claude “away” in the service or jail? If jail, for what?)  Following dogs into the woods to “make their own choice” in the midst of so much left unresolved is about the worst ending ever to a story.

Since I DID find it readable, and since I DID finish it, and since it DID piss me off enough to stay on my mind for a day and get me to write about it, I won’t give it a turkey.  I’ll be generous and give it one AND A HALF stars.  Out of five.

If you have read this book, PLEASE leave me a comment!  Agreeing or not (especially if not!) so I can gnash my teeth in earnest about the ending without spoiling or boring those that haven’t read it.

New Orleans, for all her charms, is but one amazing experience Louisiana has to offer.  For this long holiday weekend, we took advantage of another: the fishing camp.

We are in Intracoastal City, LA. South of Lafayette is the best I can tell you as to where it is.  Think End of the Earth.

Boathouse

The camp has been raised since sustaining MAJOR damage in Hurricane Rita, then more with Ike.  Now it sits twelve feet above the ground.  Downstairs, a screened porch.  Upstairs, two bedrooms, two bathrooms, stocked kitchen (and bar), den, dining room (with sofa bed), screened porch, and un-screened porch.

There’s also a boathouse, and piers galore.

But what is its most valuable asset is its very being.  Its smell; its opportunity; its soul.  And all of us here this weekend get it.  Those swampy waters are in our Louisiana veins as thick as blood.  This place calls to us, primordially and with force.  And we answer the call, happily and with glee.

The days here are long, filled with fishing, crabbing, and all manner of alligator taunting.

The evenings are more relaxing than the days.  Meals slowly cooked (usually by the menfolk), slow sips of cocktails.  The camp has a large screen TV and wireless internet (my friend *is* civilized, after all), but these amenities get about 20% of their potential use.  Better than the sound of television is the sound of cicadas, crickets, and passing boats.  Or the simple sound of silence.

Yes, this is a vacation I have had countless times in my life so far and never, ever tire of it.

There was so much to do today.  Drop off library books, laundry; donate blood; make arrangements for spending the weekend at my friend’s fishing camp; buy wine glasses and cookbooks.  It was a loose script of a day; the kind Sun and I like.

As we drive into the French Quarter, the rain started to come down in buckets.  The streets began to flood as I was looking for a parking spot.  Rain in the French Quarter is something I LOVE.  It quiets and cleanses the streets.  It slows folks down even more.  After finding a spot close enough, we hop out of the car and immediately step in puddles over our ankles.  And the pelting rain is soaking our clothes.  We dash the block and into La Maison d’Absinthe.  Sun and I look at each other, each looking like we were fished out of the River, and laugh.  We look ridiculous.  And for what? Wine glasses.

Last time I was here, I’d spied these fleur de lis wine glasses that match the glassware we registered for when my husband and I married.  I bought the only two they then had and this was my return trip to get six more.  When the clerk gave me the total, it was too low.  I repeated the amount to her as a question.  She explained everything in the shop was TWENTY FIVE PERCENT OFF.  I swooned.

But for already having so many items from here, I’d have been in SERIOUS trouble.

Tara and Brian, this one’s for you two.

They had cool rock glasses similar to the wine glasses I was buying but with dragonflies on them.  Had they had them with the fleur de lis, they’d have been mine.

I kept scouring the store for anything that I may have overlooked in the past or that I now cannot live without.  Many items tempted me.  Mostly this one:

I don’t burn the sugar that goes into my absinthe.  I don’t always even include sugar.  But this cool match holder/striker, oh, how I coveted.  And now I am scratching my head as to WHY I passed it up.  Dammit.  Soon, it shall be mine. Maybe tomorrow? Ugh.

Once we had our glasses wrapped securely, the rain had stopped.  Of course.  We walked back to our car with the water glistening all over the Quarter.

I wish I could say our next stop, Kitchen Witch, was as equally decadent.  But, sadly, it was not.  I really, really want to love this store.  But their local collection is just so-so, and their customer service needs serious tweaking.  For example, if your website says you have a book in stock, and I cannot find it, and your clerk cannot find it, the proper clerk protocol is NOT to hand me a business card and tell me to call next week because you expect to order some soon.  And in the past, when I’ve called to check their inventory and they’ve had to call me back, THEY NEVER HAVE. Ever.  Yes, this has happened more than once.  In a world where we can find rare, out-of-print books online so readily, a brick-and-mortar store has one advantage: physical contact and thus the opportunity for top notch service.  Kitchen Witch is SO not that place.  They could be.  And I hope they want to be.  But will I be calling next week to see if the book I can order online came in? Sadly, no.  Not unless it coincides with my return visit to La Maison d’Absinthe; in that case, I MIGHT give them yet another chance.