Red Baker, by Robert Ward … I picked this up the day Ben Whitmer suggested it on Facebook. He thought I’d enjoy it and he was right. I absolutely did enjoy it. Originally penned 25 years ago, Red Baker drops an exclamation mark on what so many blue (and now white) collar workers across this country are experiencing—the loss of their jobs, whether through technology, outsourcing or in- country cheap labor (not to mention a steady decrease in salary in a country that likes to boast about how good everyone has it here—we’re talking 30 consecutive years of a decline in wages for the middle and poor classes).
The Gin Closet … Leslie Jamison’s debut novel is a gritty work that drives the reader across the country in an attempt to solve a family puzzle (or two); a missing daughter/aunt/sister. Matilda (Tilly) was the directionless odd daughter compared to her determined and focused sister, but how (and why) does a mother let a daughter go? The opening scene is a grabber for sure; Stella (not me) finds Lucy (her Grandmother) on the floor—she’s been there for a while. While being cared for, Lucy mentions her missing daughter. Stella is Tilly’s idealistic niece and after learning from her grandmother about a missing daughter, an aunt Stella never knew about, she wants to know more. Stella has been anorexic (definitely not me) and has been on the bad end of a relationships with a married man (pregnancy = abortion). Before her grandmother (Lucy) dies, Stella confronts her overly focused/rigid mother (Dora) about her Mom’s missing sister (Matilda/Tilly), then seeks Matilda to tell her in person (before her missing aunt receives a cold letter from a lawyer) about the death of her mother … and a journey begins.
Tilly has lived a dire life. Prostitution and booze haunt her. Prostitution served as a means of survival, the booze as a means to dull her pain. Tilly is also a mother and an extremely perceptive person. In fact, Tilly sums up Stella (and herself) very accurately with these passages:
She was looking to help. That much was clear. She wanted to help Haitian kids, her whore aunt, everyone. She was still trying to figure out what her life was becoming, like it already had a shape and all she needed to do was squint hard enough to see it.
Every week for months, we got something in the mail from Haitian Smiles, a free calendar or a despairing letter, all of it addressed to Stella by name. I cared about them, too, those smiling and not-smiling thin folks down south; they just didn’t know it.
Tilly is a great character and so is Stella. She’s also a very perceptive woman, especially as regards the emptiness in her own life. When the entire process of her abortion is regurgitated for Tilly’s sake, from her married lover’s cowardly wishes to the actual termination procedure, the reader is reminded this is no fairytale being told.
There are no spoilers in TK reviews, so you’ll have to read to find out how Stella’s trip to visit an aunt she never knew existed turns out. What she finds upon arrival is an overweight, alcoholic aunt. What she (Stella) learns includes: Tilly’s past prostitution; that she has a cousin, Tilly’s successful son who lives in San Francisco, and things heat up another notch. Read this one, amici. It’s more than worth the price of admission.
A novel loaded with gravitas, poetic and gritty, The Gin Closet is an engrossing read start to finish. A TK Very Highly recommended read.
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“Bursting with humor, banter, and cringeworthy first dates, Sonali Dev’s The Vibrant Years is a joyful and fun read, but it’s also very much a timely tale about a group of underestimated women demanding respect and embracing their most authentic selves.” ―Mindy Kaling | Learn more
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