Friends 'til the End if the End is the Middle

I know, I know.  What's up with the winter reading material?  Summer just started, and it's too early for Christmas in July.  But I have a good excuse for turning to holiday homicide.  It's because I was fleeing Sally Rooney.

Yes, Sally Rooney, acclaimed author of Normal People and Beautiful World, Where Are You, both of which I enjoyed, especially Normal People.  But when I got halfway through Rooney's debut, Conversations with Friends, which is about a college student having an affair with a married man, I had to put it down.  

The college student -- Frances -- is bleeding and in pain (whether or not as the result of sex with the married guy is unclear) and needs to be rushed to the ER.  Now, as you may know, I have a history of not doing well with books about blood.  Add psychological torment, and I'm a goner.  So I closed the book before I could feel that first nauseous twinge and reached for Mary Daheim's The Alpine Winter.  It was the only new, known quantity left on my shelf.  Also, if there's a story that'll cheer me up, then it's one about finding a body after eating turkey and unwrapping mittens.  Books -- much like life -- are all about tone.  And the tone of a yuletide murder peopled by even-keeled characters is preferable to the one of a girl in pain losing her mind.  

Still, I don't like being bested by a book.  It's only happened to me twice, once with The Help and once with a bargain book whose name I can't remember.  (Somehow, some way, I even managed to finish The Bell Jar.)  And I'd be lying if I said that I wasn't curious about how things pan out for Frances.  So maybe someday I'll pick up the thread of Rooney's Conversations again.  (I didn't throw it out like I did The Help.)  But for now I'm ensconced in Alpine and its small-town eccentricities.

Because sometimes cold comfort is the warmest kind.  

And some friends are best left behind.

Book Report: Bed of Roses by Nora Roberts

I've finished the second installment (third for me, really, since I started with book number four) in Nora Roberts's bride quartet series, Bed of Roses. This time the bride-to-be is florist and nice-girl-slash-man-magnet Emma. As I've mentioned in previous posts, the series centers around four friends who run a wedding planning business, each one with a different personality. But then, each member in a fictional group of friends seems to fall into a preordained category. Take Desperate Housewives, The Golden Girls, and Sex and the City.  In each clique you have the nice ones (Susan in DH, Rose in GG, and Charlotte in S&C), the intellectual ones (Lynette in DH, Dorothy in GG, and Miranda in S&TC), and the sexy ones (Gabby in DH, Blanche in GG, and Samantha in S&C). I realize my logic falls a little short because I left out DH's Brie and S&C's Carrie, but you get the idea. Anyway, Emma embodies the dual and seemingly discordant goody-two-shoes and siren stereotypes, which works for the most part. Still, she has the annoying habit of eating only slivers of food at a time. She says she does it to savor her food, but her behavior strikes me as the earmark of an eating disorder. (I'm not trying to be flip; I just hate stories that perpetuate the idea that women eat like rabbits.) Hmm. It's beginning to look as though I didn't really like this book after all, does it? And I didn't even get to the part about Emma's brute of a commitmentphobe boyfriend who takes offense to her doing nice things for him and - gasp - spilling cosmetics on his manly bathroom counter. But I suppose all's well that ends well because he falls in line with an engagement ring at the end.

Although romance novels are fun, the one-dimensional characters sometimes get on my nerves. But then, I'm bound to feel that way since I started reading the anything-but-one-dimensional page-turner The Help. More on that later. (Much later, as it's quite thick.)