Tender Story of Love and Friendship Set Against Early Moviemaking Magic

Songs of Willow Frost
by Jamie Ford

I'm not opposed to historical fiction. In fact, I find most of what I know about bygone eras has come to me through novels. That said, this month's Off the Shelf selection was an unexpected kind of historical fiction. One in which the history was new to me but the scenes were very familiar. 

I should have expected that the author of Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet would have a gift for juxtaposition, but it caught me surprise nonetheless.

Origin 

Like last month's selection, I purchased this title at a consignment store in Columbia. I paid $6 for it as a hardback. This past week, my editor and best friend Jodie and I were talking about purchasing used books. Since the author does not receive royalties from this practice, we are not big fans of it. In the case of a consignment store, however, the publisher isn't receiving payment either, just the previous book owner. I'm not sure where I stand on that.

Maybe I would just hate to think of my own book being parted with in such a way.

In any case, I pulled Songs of Willow Frost from the shelf for February and it only took me until the very last day of the month to actually finish it.

Summary

This story is about William, an 12-year-old Chinese boy in Sacred Heart Orphanage outside Seattle, Washington, in 1934. The opening scene is such a good one, we get an immediate sense of exactly what orphanage life is like. There's a kind of hard-knocks-life feel to it that it seems familiar. William's friendships with a Native American boy, Sunny, and a blind girl, Charlotte, are some of the best parts of this book. 

Willow Frost is the Chinese film star William believes to be his mother. We get the two reunited and her story in two flashback sections of the book, telling us about her life after her father and brothers die of Spanish Flu and her mother must remarry a real jerk to protect them. The Spanish Flu seems familiar -- plague, quarantine, face masks, fear -- but this era of Seattle history is not something I've studied.

Once reunited, William and Willow each face important choices related to what they're willing to continue to accept and that might be my biggest challenge with the book. Neither William nor Willow seems to have agency until it is far too late.

What I loved

There's some good details about the conditions of city life in Seattle at that time and the drudgery that was life in and around the stock market crash. The businessman who employs Willow to sing on the sidewalk outside his music store as a marketing effort is a good, benevolent character. The nun in the orphanage is also a great character who gets a chance at forgiveness and redemption, one she makes good use of. I also liked the early history of moviemaking and film production. Good research showed through there.

There's a child's sense of confusion in the narrative that surrounds William, Sunny, and Charlotte. I think Jamie Ford does a good job of giving us their naiveté even as dangerous as it is. But Willow's equal naiveté is less gratifying.

What I didn't like

I wanted Willow to have more moxie. Especially after reading Ford's Author's Note regarding his late grandmother who was a strong "Alpha Female" in an era when to be so strong was not easy or welcome. I wanted Willow to make plans and struggle through failure. But she waited around. A lot. Kind of like William did. Maybe there's a beautiful parallel there, but it was frustrating and even boring in some places.

Should you read this

I liked Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet better, but Ford is a talented storyteller and spending time with anything he's delivered would be worthwhile.

So what did you read off your shelf in February? Leave a comment to share.

Self-Inflicted Mid-Life Crisis Wrapped in Beautiful Prose

Off the Shelf Challenge 2021 - January

One Last thing Before I Go

Jonathan Tropper

I write in my books. It’s why I’m not a very good library user. In this month’s Off the Shelf pick, I worked really hard to not write in it. For two reasons: one, I wanted to read it for the sake of reading and two, I felt like I’d probably just end up highlighting whole sections of such beautifully written prose it routinely broke my heart.

This is the first entry for the Off the Shelf Challenge and I wasn’t sure what format these posts would take so I’m going to try this one and see if it does what we need it to do. I’ll accept your feedback, dear reader, in the comments below.

Origin

Where I bought the book is the first note I make in the book. I write where and when I purchased it on just about every acquisition. So I flipped this one open to see where and when and … nothing. I apparently didn’t record that. 

So here’s what I know about this book: the copyright is August 2012 and this is a hardback version, so it’s probably of that year. The cover price says $26.95 US but on the back is a label printed by a local cycle-up consignment store called Roundabouts that priced the book at $8. The label also says 11/19/2015 which I can guess was when the book was acquired. I apparently purchased it sometime after that.

Summary

This book follows Silver, a fifty-something former musician who is estranged from his ex-wife and daughter. He’s living in a sad apartment complex with dozens of other former husbands and earning $70 a week for ejaculating into a cup as part of a scientific research study. The sadness of Silver’s existence is quickly established - he’s a has-been musician from a one-hit-wonder band, and more like a passenger in his own life than an active participant until he’s diagnosed with an operable but life-threatening heart condition.

The book is a third-person close narrative with alternative viewpoints of Silver and his daughter, Casey, a recent high school graduate, whose own medical crisis pulls Silver back into her life while intersecting with his new diagnosis. We also get a few segments from the POV of Denise, Casey’s mom and Silver’s ex. The fragments of this former family and the way they try to repair the ties and heal old wounds are the primary occupation of the novel.

What I Loved

The prose is perfect. Phrases like, “When you grow up in a rabbi’s house, God is part of the package, an amiable resident ghost, floating about in corners, sitting in the empty dinner chair, peering in through the curtains after you get tucked into bed.” I can only imagine all of Tropper’s work reads this way: regular language elegantly constructed for just the right impact. 

There’s also this meta-understanding of the language when Silver begins saying aloud his internal thoughts. It’s a manifestation of his sickness, and serves to break barriers between himself and others, so it’s a great device. But it also calls attention to the way the thoughts are constructed -- they are not the same as dialogue -- and yet they’re used as dialogue. Which is so simple a device as to be obnoxiously brilliant.

In one encounter, after the device has been well established, Silver approaches a woman he’s been admiring from afar. The internal monologue reads, in part, “He senses a profound kindness in her, a softness he wants very badly to know and protect… He could be a better man for her.” The woman looks strangely at him and replies, “You know you’re saying this out loud, right?” to which he responds, “I do now.”

The reader is left to wonder if Silver thinks of himself in third person: “he senses,” and “he could,” or if he’s monologued the passage as, “I sense,” and “I could be.” And this trick, this device, is so compelling that when it’s used strategically throughout the book, it endears us both to Silver and to the story itself. Not to mention as he’s being honest and revealing secrets, the character is also forcing other characters to respond and spurring the plot forward.

So, like I said, brilliant. And simple. So simple I’m jealous of it.

What I didn’t like

We don’t have any reason to like Silver, he’s a self-admitted screw up who doesn’t really know why he let his family slip away and his life fall apart. Now, as he’s diagnosed with a failing heart, as his daughter is in crisis and his ex-wife is about to remarry, he seems to want to make a comeback and although he admits he doesn’t deserve a second chance, we nonetheless hope he gets one.

I don’t like that we don’t get the details of the marriage’s demise. We never see the moment when Denise kicked him out. We’re given the same kind of apathetic summation of the events leading up to his being in a kind of effortless fog for seven years that Silver himself feels and I was frustrated by that. I get it -- life isn’t one mistake that ruins us. It’s a series of careless declines, things we decide not to do, that leaves us desolate. But such a realization is both depressing and lets both Silver and Tropper off the hook.

Should You Read This?

I’d recommend it. I picked it up Sunday and was done Wednesday evening. It’s easy to stick with, engaging and well-written. It’s not particularly groundbreaking but that’s part of what makes it so good - its smallness is self-aware and it echoes one of those universal truths that one only learns after years of believing otherwise: It’s never the big things that matter. It’s always the accumulation of small things that really determines our satisfaction with our own life.

What did you read this month? Leave the book’s purchase link in the comments and answer the prompts: Origin, Summary, Liked, Didn’t, and Would you recommend it. 

Selling Myself in Bits & Pieces

I’d like to say I haven’t blogged here since November because I’ve been crushing it in the 41^st year.

In some ways, I have. Since January, I’ve added three titles to my resume:

• Project Manager at the McNair Center for Entrepreneurship,
• Adjunct Instructor in Entrepreneurship at the Darla Moore School of Business, and
• Co-Host of the radio program Start Something, Columbia.

We’re waiting to hear this month about funding for a new women’s business center in Columbia for which I would be Co-Director.

I’m still Managing Partner of Clemson Road Consulting (formerly known as President of Clemson Road Creative) and I’ve been the Lead Organizer for 1 Million Cups Columbia for about six months.

What do all these titles do for my 41^st year goals?

Well, I’ve been adding up live events with conferences, summits, and meetings in support of my new titles. I’ve also been writing dozens of blogs for various outlets. Today I’m sitting down to write out two-dozen thank-you notes to all of those people who wrote us letters of support for our women’s business center grant application.

Where I’m killing it: 40 books by female authors.

In 2017 I read 73 books and so far this year I’ve read 25 books; the majority of these books have been women authors. In fact, I might want to try reading some men in 2018. I definitely need to add more non-fiction to the list but that’s the case every year.

Visiting new places and visiting my Papa are goals that have both suffered from my lack of funds. I’ve been so low on cash that a lot of things (pedicures, wine) have fallen off my regular expenses. I know Papa doesn’t begrudge me the visits but I have always equated driving with freedom and to not be able to travel has been a soul-crushing reality.

The purpose of the 41^st year was always to find some measurable things I could do, some ways to spend my time that would equate to impact. I have to say that the work I’m doing these days seems more impactful than anything I was doing before.

I feel like I’m turning a corner. Cresting a wave. Climbing the S curve.

Since last March, I’ve given more workshops, submitted more writing, and applied for more opportunities than I have in the past. I’ve been working my sales plan with three principles: 1) people need to know me, 2) people need to know what I do, and 3) people need to trust I can do it. When we get all three, we earn business.

The business is coming. The future is bright. The 41^st year feels like just the beginning.

Confessions of a Book Club Slacker

I joined three book clubs this summer. It’s not a big deal because I read voraciously and the three clubs are very different.

The first, through the Richland County Public Library, reads book-clubbable-books. We read The Postmistress, Before I Go to Sleep, The Language of Flowers, Unbroken, State of Wonder, and The Good Daughters.  

http://www.momswhoneedwine.com/

The second group, Read Between the Wines, is just what it sounds like: an excuse to drink wine. We read Emily Giffin’s latest, little-known author Mariah Stewart’s Coming Home, and a John Grisham novel called The Litigators. We’re not reading a book in November because it’s the holidays. Yep. Easy peasy.

The third group is an online group of writers and we read writing craft books. We read On Writing by Stephen King, Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott, and Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, and are now reading The Right to Write. I’ve become moderator of this group and find myself more attached to the group’s success than before.

In November the Clemson English Alumni group decided to read Cloud Atlas and meet here, in Columbia, to have a discussion on the book. Book club four? Sure! I’m in.

Try Over-Committing Just Once

It was at this point that book club FAIL occurred.

How I spent 3 hours returning a library book

I was turned away from the polls. Here’s how it happened. I parked at the library and walked over to the middle school, my voting precinct as identified by a web search. 

I had with me the library book for book club. I had only just started it and book club meets next week (oops).

I stood in line for two and a half hours. I’ll spare you the details of how cold it was. I had on my Ugg boots and a fleece. 

There is a time for every purpose.

I won’t mention how everyone wanted to complain but didn’t. We all know how ridiculously lucky we are that we are allowed to vote and that we were safe at the voting place

We also know there are procedures for voting. I thought I’d followed them. I thought I had gotten my new driver’s license and registered to vote at the same time.

On the website where you would change your voter registration it says, “change your driver’s license first” with a link that carries you away from the voter registration.

I never went back.