The Supremes at Earl's All-You-Can -Eat

by Edward Kelsey Moore, Knopf March 2012

...a great beach read

Covering a 50 year span from the late 60s through the new century, this story covers the friendship of three African American women, Clarice, Odette and Barbara Jean.  The girls meet and bond in high school.  They hang out at the local eatery, Earl’s  All You Can Eat where they are quickly dubbed the Supremes.  We meet their spouses, Richmond, Clarice’s philandering husband, Lester, Barbara Jean’s much older husband and James, Odette’s rock solid partner. Still friends after all these years they continue to meet at Earl’s now with their husbands.

The story is told in two voices, Odette speaks in the first person and the rest of the story is told in the third person.  Oh by the way Odette sees and speaks to dead people including her mother and Eleanor Roosevelt.  Sounds kind of crazy but it works in this story.  The tale is really not plot driven but character driven.  The friendship among these women is the story.  They are now in their fifties and are all dealing with life changing events.  Clarice has decided that she will no longer accept Richmond’s infidelities.  Barbara Jean is haunted by an earlier relationship and the death of her son Adam and Odette has a significant health challenge.  How these women deal with these issues and help one another is the core of the story.  I forgot to mention how much humor is in this story, while not the  laugh out loud type it is surely fun.

I am sure that some people will criticize this novel as being made up of stereotypes but I don't agree, I think these women are warm, real, intelligent characters that show the best parts of female friendships.  A surprise for me was that the author was a man.  I liked this book a lot and was sorry when it ended.  A great beach read!

I read a copy of this novel provided by the publisher.

Where'd You Go Bernadette: A Novel

by Maria Semple, Little, Brown and Company, December 2012 

Lots of fun, a beach read in the best sense.

This wonderfully satiric novel is set in present day Seattle.  The Fox family – husband Elgin a widely successful Microsoft exec, daughter Bee (short for Balakrishna)a precocious 14 year old and mother Bernadette a genius architect suffering from  acrophobia – live an unorthodox life style in a deteriorating former girls convent school.  As the novel opens we are presented with the fact that Bernadette has mysteriously disappeared a few days before Christmas.  The story then jumps back in time to about 6 weeks before her disappearance.  Using emails, memos, FBI documents and first person narration by Bee we get to meet this widely funny cast of characters and get the story.

In a nutshell Bernadette, an award winning young architect, has retreated to her home and is unable to work because of her acrophobia.  While loved by her husband and idolized by her daughter, Bernadette has retreated into her own quirky world.  She employs a person assistant Manjula who resides in India to complete any tasks that would require her to leave her home.  Bernadette is in constant conflict with neighbors and helicopter parents at her daughter’s elementary school.  Her husband is so engrossed with his Microsoft project he fails to notice the spiraling out of control issues at home. Ecology issues arise when the next door neighbor demands that Bernadette remove blackberry vines that encroach on her property.  Things get wild after that! I don’t want to tell too much of this plot as it sounds so absurd but is in fact laugh out loud funny.  Bee using information that is slowly revealed to her in many forms works to try and find her mother. 

I liked so many things about this story – it unwinds at a fast pace, the characters are fully drawn and likeable, the unconventional methods used to tell the story, the portrait of Seattle, the Microsoft corporate culture so realistically drawn -  but mostly I liked that is was such a fun book.  In some deft plot mastery the author manages to pull together the minor plots that seemed extraneous to the story for a great ending.  I read afterwards that the author Maria Semple was a screen writer for Arrested Development; you can see this story presented as a TV series (think Portlandia set in Seattle).  Lots of fun, a beach read in the best sense.  

I read a copy of this novel provided by the publisher.

Lamb

Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal

by Christopher Moore
Harper Paperbacks
February 2003

This is a book I’d never pick on my own but it came with a strong recommendation from a friend. It’s tough to categorize this story, certainly it is humorous but there is more to it than that.
The story features Biff (aka Levi) a young Jewish boy who is Joshua’s (aka Jesus H. Christ) best friend. It covers the years of Joshua’s life from birth to the age 30 and since there is little in the gospels about these years the author has free reign to tell a story. It’s a pretty good story! Biff and Joshua meet and fall in love with Mary Magdalene (aka Maggie), travel extensively in Asia and the Indian sub continent, and after an absence of 17 years arrive back in Israel to begin Joshua’s work as the Messiah. While the pretext of the story might sound offensive to some, it really isn’t. Moore handles the formative years of Joshua in an irreverent but ultimately reverential way. The story moves quickly and is in many places laugh out loud funny – no really it is! Some of the humor is witty, some really witty and some sophomoric but still witty. But under all of the humor the author has taken care to show through the travels of Biff and Joshua the connections between Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism and Christianity. He also puts a really human face on Joshua in describing him as a young Hebrew boy coming to terms with his destiny as the Messiah. While the humor is constantly there the messages about friendship, love and duty are also strong. Because the humor can be nonstop I think this book is best read and savored in small segments.
The first three quarters of the book are imaginative and original but the story weakens when Joshua returns to Israel and the gospel story rules the narrative.  This book is great humor in the best traditions of Catch 22 and all of the P. G. Wodehouse stories. I’d strongly recommend it, I found it to be a nice change of pace from my usual read.