One for the Books
Review: Be my ‘guest’
Two new books with similar titles —The Guest List and The Guest Book—could not be more different.
By Mary Louise Ruehr
It happens more often than you think: Two or more books are published around the same time with the same theme or the same setting or similar titles. A friend suggested I read The Guest Book, and then I noticed The Guest List was popular online, so I tried them both. They couldn’t be more different.
The Guest List by Lucy Foley is sort of a murder mystery thriller. I say “sort of” because we don’t even know who died until the murder takes place near the end of the book.
This one reminds me very much of an Agatha Christie. It’s British, set on a creepy secluded island off the west coast of Ireland, with a boatload of mostly not-nice characters to sort through. Family and guests gather for the expensive high-society wedding of a TV celebrity and a magazine owner. They all have to sail over from the mainland on boats, and now a storm is kicking up, so they can’t get back. Oh, and it’s dangerous to walk around on the tiny island, because of quicksand and treacherous cliffs. Gossip has it that the venue may be haunted, and the rising storm builds plenty of eerie atmosphere: “There’s a noise outside. It’s a strange noise, a keening. It sounds more human than animal — but at the same time it doesn’t sound entirely human either.” Ooh. Shudder.
—Read Ruehr’s review of Connie Schultz’s The Daughters of Erietown
The present timeline is after the murder has happened, so most of the story is told in flashbacks, from multiple points of view. We meet the bride and groom, of course, their family and friends, some of the hotel staff, and the boat captain. Many are hiding secrets, and several are deeply troubled. And somebody has been sending cryptic messages to the bride, telling her not to marry the groom.
I really don’t want to tell you more because the smaller details reveal who did what to whom. I was able to figure out part of the whodunit midway through (which I enjoy, because it makes me feel like a detective!), but the whole thing comes together quite suddenly at the end — very Christie-esque. But I found some of the coincidences unlikely, and in my notes at one point I wrote “This is unnecessarily long.”
The Guest Book by Sarah Blake is a fine piece of literary work. I could quote lovely passages from it all day. The only problem is that not a lot happens. Plot-wise, it could have been edited down to less than half its length (which is my newspaper background talking). So this book isn’t for everybody. But if you like a thought-provoking book you can sit with and savor for days, it may be for you.
Basically, here’s the deal: The wealthy Miltons — he’s a banker in New York City — buy an island in Oyster Bay and build a big house there, where they welcome their friends as guests.
The multi-generational family saga provides shifting timelines, which is not my favorite thing in a book. In fact, I was glad I kept notes, because I got confused several times, especially since people are named after one another. In one timeline, a banker is involved with Nazis in pre-WWII Germany. (The war and pre-war events resonate with today’s politics.) In another, a young woman has a forbidden lover. There’s an ongoing battle with and discussion of bigotry on several levels: classism, anti-semitism, racism, name-an-ism. It even gets a little preachy. One of the lessons young women of privilege are taught is that “One ought to walk straight and keep one’s hands to oneself when one spoke, lest one be taken for an Italian or a Jew.”
But as to the writing itself, it’s first-rate, as when a Jewish woman in Germany watches a Nazi officer disparage her husband: “At her husband’s name on the man’s lips, a light shut off in Elsa’s face as if a hand pulled closed a door at the end of a hall.” At a wedding, “the long bare arms of Kitty’s bridesmaids lifting their champagne glasses lazily upward in the toast had reminded Kitty of swans at twilight, swimming effortlessly, beautifully curved and silent.” When it rains in the city, “The skies plummeted down from the tops of the gray buildings and the rain spattered on the pavement in castanets of water, snapping out a beat.” I could read beautiful stuff like this all day!
The next generations don’t inherit just the family’s money; they inherit its history and its secrets. In the end, the story is all about relationships, overcoming the past and bigotry. But read it for the language.
While we’re on the subject of similarities, two recent works of fiction are based on the real-life Appalachian pack-horse librarians: The Giver of Stars by Jojo Moyes and The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek by Kim Michele Richardson. These are popular book club selections, and I must say I enjoyed both immensely. The basic subject is the same, but the plots are very different, and it was interesting to see it from two perspectives. Both are about strong women of courage. They remind me of another book about a courageous woman, The Women of the Copper Country by Northeast Ohio’s own Mary Doria Russell. Russell wrote one of my all-time favorite reads, The Sparrow.
There you have it. That should keep you busy for a while! Happy reading!
©2020 Mary Louise Ruehr
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