The Two Hotel Francforts

The Two Hotel Francforts David Leavitt 3.5 / 5	Published 2013 First Sentence "We met the Frelengs in Lisbon, at the Café‚‚ Suiça."
Publisher's Description: It is the summer of 1940, and Lisbon, Portugal, is the only neutral port left in Europe—a city filled with spies, crowned heads, and refugees of every nationality, tipping back absinthe to while away the time until their escape. Awaiting safe passage to New York on the SS Manhattan, two couples meet: Pete and Julia Winters, expatriate Americans fleeing their sedate life in Paris; and Edward and Iris Freleng, sophisticated, independently wealthy, bohemian, and beset by the social and sexual anxieties of their class. As Portugal’s neutrality, and the world’s future, hang in the balance, the hidden threads in the lives of these four characters—Julia’s status as a Jew, Pete and Edward’s improbable affair, Iris’s increasingly desperate efforts to save her tenuous marriage—begin to come loose. This journey will change their lives irrevocably, as Europe sinks into war. Gorgeously written, sexually and politically charged, David Leavitt’s long-awaited new novel is an extraordinary work.
Dear Reader, I got this book as a Netgalley offering a while back, and had entirely forgotten how the little blurb described it.  So I again went in cold, and I find I really enjoy those books about which I have very little expectation!  The story centers around a couple of weeks relatively early in World War II, when residents from all over Europe were attempting to flee the continent and the Nazi persecution.  Many ended up in Lisbon, as Portugal was neutral at the time, and there was a port where boats could bring people to America or several other far-flung parts of the globe.  (Surprisingly, there was also a World's Fair happening there at the time, which I would have thought would have been postponed due to the growing conflict in nearby countries.)    Two couples meet accidentally while at a cafe, waiting on the boat to America to arrive.  One of them is a couple of American expatriates who had vowed never to go back to the States after they had moved to Paris many years earlier.  The other couple was a mystery-writing team, famous for their British novels written under a pseudonym.  They meet due to an accident involving broken glasses, and begin their adventures together largely due to their both being bored  out of their minds during this "holding pattern" they are forced into.  The couples are particularly tired of their own partners, having traveled through very trying times (and many years before) with each other, so they pair off by gender and have themselves quite a bit of fun.  For a while, anyway.  The closer the date of the ship's arrival, the tenser things get, and things come to a head right around the time the ship is pulling into port.  I don't want to give too much away, but this did recall to me a bit of The Great Gatsby, with its sparkling environs and the posh characters that all swirled around each other, privileged and bored and unhappy all in their own way (to brazenly misquote Tolstoy).  There also definitely lurked something more sinister behind everyone's facade, and those secrets spilled out over the course of the book, culminating in a partly-surprising ending (it was, after all, hinted at right from the start!).  What I found pleasantly surprising was that the part the reader thought would be the denouement of the novel ended up being passed over in a cursory manner, while the author then went on in the epilogue to explain pretty much all of the meat of all the characters' back-stories.  Oddly done, but well done, I do think.  Yours, Arianna

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The Bookstore

The Bookstore Deborah Meyler 3.5 / 5	Published 2013 First Sentence "I am early; I can walk down Broadway for a while."
Publisher's Description: A witty, sharply observed debut novel about a young woman who finds unexpected salvation while working in a quirky used bookstore in Manhattan.Impressionable and idealistic, Esme Garland is a young British woman who finds herself studying art history in New York. She loves her apartment and is passionate about the city and her boyfriend; her future couldn’t look brighter. Until she finds out that she’s pregnant. Esme’s boyfriend, Mitchell van Leuven, is old-money rich, handsome, successful, and irretrievably damaged. When he dumps Esme—just before she tries to tell him about the baby—she resolves to manage alone. She will keep the child and her scholarship, while finding a part-time job to make ends meet. But that is easier said than done, especially on a student visa. The Owl is a shabby, second-hand bookstore on the Upper West Side, an all-day, all-night haven for a colorful crew of characters: handsome and taciturn guitar player Luke; Chester, who hyperventilates at the mention of Lolita; George, the owner, who lives on protein shakes and idealism; and a motley company of the timeless, the tactless, and the homeless. The Owl becomes a nexus of good in a difficult world for Esme—but will it be enough to sustain her? Even when Mitchell, repentant and charming, comes back on the scene? A rousing celebration of books, of the shops where they are sold, and of the people who work, read, and live in them, The Bookstore is also a story about emotional discovery, the complex choices we all face, and the accidental inspirations that make a life worth the reading.
Dear Reader, This was a really interesting book, because the entire time I was reading it, it felt quite a bit like "chick lit", but it really was quite far from that light-hearted, utopian genre.  Maybe that's because the premise is that of a young woman living in New York City, who finds herself pregnant by a man she believes she loves.  The book had a lot of those moments where you felt as if maybe she'd realize that the pensive, kind man with whom she works is actually the right one for her, but the book doesn't turn out as perfectly packaged as most of those sorts of girly books do, so I ended up enjoying it more - because of how real it felt.  It wasn't a princess and fairy tale book, really.  It was about real life, and how imperfect it often ends up being, but how you can find joy and love even when things don't turn out how you expect. Esme Garland is an English expatriate who is doing her graduate work at Columbia, focusing her studies on fine art.  She is an intelligent, very independent young woman who yes, sometimes makes mistakes.  The book felt so very intellectual (often mentioning books and artists who I'd never heard of), which was a bit jarring to me, beacuse it also did feel like chick lit.  I found this to be especially the case when Esme and the father of her child are planning to make a go at it, and you can see that they are just not a good fit for each other.  It made me feel frustrated, because you could really tell that she didn't in fact love Mitchell, but she was forcing herself to feel those feelings because she wanted to make things work.  Mitchell was the classic asshole boyfriend who thought only of himself.  His selfishness was apparent right from the get-go, and you'd have thought Esme would have seen right through it - and would not want to raise a child in that sort of environment.  But, I suppose that is also true to life: sometimes even the smartest girls end up trying to find the knight in shining armor, even when we know that's not how reality works.  Esme just kept gamely trying to make things work, but the reader could really tell that it was a losing battle.  Mitchell did seem to try at times, enough to make Esme feel special and as if she perhaps was choosing the right person to start a family with, but he often tempered his kindness with cruelty, most likely to protect himself.  Again, very real, very true to life.  Nobody is perfect, for sure, but it was clear that whoever Mitchell was perfect for, it certainly wasn't Esme.  He could never have been happy in a relationship where someone else gets the glory sometimes.  He needed to be the center of his world. My favorite parts of the book were, fittingly, those that took place in the bookstore.  The rag-tag cast of characters that made up the employees and regulars of the shop were a wonderful mixture, and again felt very real.  The author herself actually worked in a bookstore, and said she drew heavily on the characters she encountered there.  Esme finds a kind of family, which is important to someone who feels so alone and so far from home.  The others rush to take care of her, each in their own ways, and I think without them she might have been lost, overwhelmed.  I also of course loved the smattering of book discussions, and the feeling of actually being inside that ecclectic shop, piled high with books and strange knick-knacks. Overall, I do think I enjoyed this book.  I still can't get over that it felt like it was written specifically for women, which is why I can't rate it more highly (I like a book the transcends that sort of thing), but I do think I will recommend it to others, especially those who enjoy the "chick lit" genre.  I think it is a nice, more intellectual departure from the normal fare found there, but would still be enjoyed by someone who loves those kinds of female-oriented books. Yours, Arianna

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