Mysteries and Thrillers by Bantam Dell
============================
This week's book:
PUCCINI'S GHOSTS
By Morag Joss
FROM THE BOOK JACKET:
The year is 1960. The place is a Scottish seaside town
utterly devoid of culture and charm. Here, Lila lives as
the third player in her parents' dramatically embittered
marriage. Until her flamboyant, irrepressible uncle George
shows up from London and her family decides to squander a
windfall on the most preposterous of causes: a civic
production of the Puccini opera "Turandot."
Lila knows nothing of opera and little of her uncle or the
dashing young man he hires to sing the role of Calaf. But
Lila does know passion. Because it's coursing through her
veins--and rushing blindly, wildly all around her. Now a
girl on the verge of womanhood is about to blunder into a
grown-up world where secrets are kept and exposed, hopes
soar and wither, and where crimes petty and great exact
the most chilling punishments of all.
*New to the book club? Just click on the Missing Read
link below for any emails you may have missed. Go to:
http://www.emailbookclub.com/miss/missbantam.html
To subscribe: http://tinyurl.com/3cck2n
(Today's book starts after the "Dear Reader" column.)
======================================
Dear Reader,
My neighbor stopped me the other day when I was out for a walk. His
son, Mack, was supposed to be writing an essay to submit along with
his college application, but 'Dad' was getting concerned, because he
hadn't seen anything written yet. So he suggested maybe Mack should
come over to my house Saturday to talk about his essay.
I was happy to help, but later that evening I got to thinking that a
senior in high school probably wasn't going to be too excited about
talking to the neighbor lady about writing--especially on a Saturday
night. Mack's topic was how reading Science Fiction had influenced
his life, so I decided to see if I could influence Mack to telephone
me. Early the next morning, I walked over to his house and left a
stack of Science Fiction books outside the door, with a note tucked
inside:
"Mack, I heard about the essay you're working on. Great topic, I'm
curious. The books are yours to keep. Hope you enjoy them, Suzanne."
It was kind of exciting, doing a little "undercover" work, waiting
to see if Mack would take the bait, and I was just about ready to
give up hope when finally at 1:30 in the afternoon my phone rang.
The books did their job. Mack thanked me over and over again, so I
quickly suggested dinner, and to my surprise, Mack said yes. It was
a date. Dinner and a discussion about writing, I'd pick him up at
six.
Mack was pretty quiet at first and I could tell he still wasn't sure
what he wanted to write about. So, I asked him how he liked to spend
his time, and after we talked about computers, Science Fiction and
his friends, he mentioned his dog.
He has a chocolate lab, but he still misses his first dog, who was
15 years old when she had to be put to sleep. And when I asked Mack
who took the dog to the vet when she had to be put down, Mack looked
down at the table and his voice got very soft, "My mom took my dog
to the vet while I was at school."
I knew he was holding back the tears and by this time, so was I, but
I told Mack that crying can be very inspiring. Sometimes when I'm
writing a column, I'm crying while I'm writing and I feel exhausted
when I'm finished.
I'd brought along a column about putting your heart into your
writing and I showed Mack a page of random notes I'd written before
I got the idea for the column. I wanted him to see what the
beginning of a column looks like before it's written--what a mess it
is--hoping it would make him feel a little less pressured. And in
the scattered notes, I pointed out the one line that ended up giving
me the idea for the "Putting Your Heart Into It" column.
Before we said good-bye, I told Mack no doubt about it, I was sure
there was a great essay inside of him and I had the feeling it was
about his dog.
'Dad' called the next morning, while his son was still sleeping,
"You certainly gave Mack a lot to think about, he was up most of the
night."
Apparently Mack was up thinking about his dog, because yesterday I
read Mack's story: "My first dog was my best friend for much of my
childhood. He was a sweet yellow Labrador with hardly any yellow..."
It was a wonderful story about a boy and his dog and a lesson
learned about life: "Sometimes the most painful thing we do, helps
the ones we love."
It was a story that left me in tears.
Thanks for reading with me. It's so good to read with friends.
Suzanne Beecher
Suzanne@BookedForBreakfast.com
Missing an email? Go to:
http://www.emailbookclub.com/miss/missbantam.html
=====TODAY'S BOOK=====================
Today We Begin a New Book!
PUCCINI'S GHOSTS
by Morag Joss (fiction)
Published by Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
ISBN: 9780385339780
Copyright (c) 2005 by Morag Joss
To reference this email: GHOSTS (Part 1 of 5)
======================================
Now I'm here I begin to sense the trouble I'm in. I'm back at the
window but the view has changed. I haven't switched on a light so
I'm standing in the dark watching night colours gleam through the
glass: silvered wet tarmac, darts of rain caught in the cloudy glow
under the streetlights and across the road, garden walls soaked in
warm, sodium glare. There are no streetlights on our side--they
belong to the new houses--but their orange sheen leaks as far as our
privet hedge, staining its green leaves brown. The old road is a
street now. At intervals across it there are lumps lying in wait to
slow the traffic; even at this hour one or two cars pass. The beam
of their white headlamps tilts and dips and steadies as they curtsey
over the bumps and then they pick up speed with the fizz of tyres on
the wet road, pulling their shadows after them. I follow the line of
streetlights stretching through the sky all the way back to the
bridge, receding spangles of orange distorted by the rain on the
window into a row of tiny bursting suns. Behind me, the room creaks
with damp, its emptiness sighs. But I will not turn round yet, nor
switch on a light. I know what it would show me. I shall carry on
standing here, looking out and feeling ridiculous.
What was the rush? Why did I drop everything and come immediately to
arrive so late at night, when tomorrow would have done? When they
rang to tell me he was dead I came at once as if, having just died,
he might be still within reach, somehow not quite gone. His death
reminds me of something obvious that I feel stupid for having
overlooked, that he was old and one day would die, and yet how can
he leave like this, a man who never did anything sudden in his life?
I talked to him in my head all the way here. I told him I was sorry.
I'm sorry, I say again now.
All I hear in reply is his tired voice, Och, Lizzie. His voice comes
to me, it seems, from a great distance. He sounds lost and cut-off
as if he has got himself stranded somewhere, though he isn't crying
for help; he is, if anything, resigned.
Och, Lizzie.
I can't tell if he means it as dismissal or forgiveness.
Maybe it isn't so ridiculous, my jumping to attention now he has
died; maybe it's an effect the newly dead have on the rest of us.
And am I acting any more suddenly than he did? Off he goes raising a
cloud of dust and up I start, needing to move in some direction or
another, as if giving chase. It's the kind of thing, scrupulously
misinterpreted to feed their hunger for a disgraceful tale, that
people round here get their teeth into. I can hear their voices,
too.
Doesn't see him for years but she's here fast enough to hear the
will read.
I don't know if he made a will. But even while I'm booking a flight,
packing, cancelling appointments, I think I make out a shape in the
dust as it begins to settle, some dark weight he left behind. It's
cumbersome, as heavy as history, and I have no use for it, yet I
can't leave it lying unclaimed. It's the past, and now it's mine and
I have to do something with it. He's not been dead a day but I
intend to be practical about it, as I will be about his other
things. Already they are no longer just his things but obstacles of
a kind, an affront to order, a challenge to the clarity of what
belongs where and to whom. I am unsettled by the sudden knowledge
that, for an interval at least, everything the dead leave behind is
still theirs and yet no-one's, though I'm not sure if this question
of ownership is a trivial or a profound matter. But what a strange
hurry I feel to bestow or destroy, as if his belongings might be
dangerous if they are not at once attached elsewhere. I don't care
where they go as long as I get them off my hands, and it's the same
with this story of our past. It's a shapeless load with one
straggling thread, its unsatisfactory ending, that trails from it
like a fuse. I want it tucked out of sight. I have to find somewhere
to dump it, some unvisited place in my mind, a kind of mental
cupboard under the stairs for a filled sack of worn-out memories.
They'll expect a show at the funeral. Not necessarily of grief, but
they'll expect me to make myself somehow conspicuous; I'm sure there
are still those who like to think I'm as bad as my mother. Thinks
she's the next Maria Callas your mum, everybody says so, Enid used
to say, smirking at the very idea, and I would snigger with
embarrassment because my mother did think that. Or believed she
might have been if my father hadn't ruined her chances, as she so
perfectly rewrote events. In my mother's mind she and my father are
Persephone and Pluto; he practically threw her in a sack and bore
her down into darkness although he, lacking any authority, makes an
improbable god of the underworld. But by the time I'm fifteen I
believe completely in her shuttered and powerless misery, which
seems irreversible. She lives here as if unable to break out of some
truly dreadful contract, under a form of house arrest that leaves
her in turn distraught and enervated. All that changes, of course,
but I cannot look round from the window now that this recollection
is upon me.
Behind me she sits, with Uncle George. They're lingering over
breakfast, I'm clearing it away.
I need a day off. The voice is tired, she tells him. I'm tired,
vocally.
I remember now, she's in a sulk because he has made her give up
cigarettes but is still smoking himself.
He says, But you don't know the part properly yet.
I don't want to get stale.
Come on, Florrie, he says, wise up. If Callas spends every hour God
sends preparing a role, why shouldn't you?
He's the one who sounds tired. He has his chin cupped in the hand
that holds the cigarette and threads of smoke are weaving up through
his hair, silvery blue into chestnut. With the spent match in his
other hand he is stirring a little paste he has made out of toast
crumbs and leftover butter on the side of his plate, black into pale
yellow, over a pattern of ferns.
Don't call me Florrie, she says, waving away the smoke. It's Fleur.
And don't talk to me about Callas.
She stands, sets her shoulders wide, looks through this window and
arches her eyebrows. Out pours the final phrase of "Vissi d'arte'"
from "Tosca," minus the words, for she doesn't know them beyond the
first two lines. I notice how unused her lips are to being
stretched, as if they haven't done enough laughing. Uncle George
looks away and smiles his private smile with one last drag on the
cigarette, which he stubs out in the paste of crumbs and butter. The
way it hisses a little seems to seal the point, as far as I am
concerned.
Of all those people who said my mother thought she was the next
Maria Callas, I wonder how many are still here.
When I arrived, I found the key where it's always been behind the
loose brick in the garage wall. I stepped through the kitchen and
into the back room that my father's life had shrunk to fit: one
armchair, the television, everything else on castors. At once I
snapped off the light and came in here to the dining room. In a
minute or two I'll find my way upstairs in the dark and grope around
for blankets in the landing cupboard. I cannot bear bleak electric
light scouring the corners and washing out shadows, showing me how
unchanged everything is.
I'll linger here just a while longer. In the silences between cars I
listen for the rasp of the incoming water of the Firth up the beach
not far behind the house, but maybe I only imagine I can hear it, in
the same way that I imagine the moon, invisible tonight behind
clouds, pulling the tide across the shore. I like such commonplace
movements as these: the coming and going of the sea, the falling of
rain, the passing of cars. In this dead room, from behind the glass,
I feel I am witnessing a kind of breathing.
(continued on Tuesday)
--------------------------------------
Please tell a friend about Booked For Breakfast.
I sure would appreciate it.--Suzanne Beecher
Sign up at: http://tinyurl.com/3cck2n
For more information about PUCCINI'S GHOSTS go to: http://tinyurl.com/2z3z5s
Distributed by: The Bantam Dell Publishing Group, 1745 Broadway,
New York, NY 10019
--------------------------------------
You are currently subscribed to bantam as:
aboone1.sscslp@blogger.com
To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-bantam-2432959J@book.dearreader.com
0 comments:
Post a Comment