Hudson Valley Bookshelf

Hudson Valley Bookshelf soon celebrates its first anniversary as a Hudson-Valley-area-interest book blog on the AboutTown website. In that time we’ve reviewed some three dozen books and tried to keep the local area apprised of book-related events. Below are condensations of three recent reviews that you can find in full on the website. Other recent reviews not included here are Sheila Buff’s review of Rin Tin Tin by Susan Orlean, and Sachi Feris’s review of My Reach by Susan Fox Rogers, and Edie Meidav’s review of Saddled, by Susan Richards. Check us out and offer your comments and/or email us at paul@abouttown.us.

California, Unbound
By Rachel Cavell

Lola, California by Edie Meidav. Farrar, Straus & Girous. Hardcover, 452 pages, $28.

Lola, California by Edie Meidav, writer in residence at Bard College, is unwieldy and brilliant. It attempts nothing less than an encapsulation of the rapturous dystopia along the western coast of our nation. Part parody, part bildungsroman, the book attempts to distill the essence of California. It recounts the tale of two girls, Lana and Rose, as they trip, Lolita-like, into adulthood, through a vertiginous series of flash-backs whirling us between 1988 and 2008. Maliciously grinning, Oz-like, over each page of this book is Lana’s father, Victor Mahler, a professor at Berkeley with an ego larger than the state itself.

Together, the eponymous “Lolas” represent the many faces of their surname. Like California, Meidav’s world is not entirely vacuous and unprincipled—it is also gloriously, heartbreakingly, full of promise. In this, Meidav’s language is so evocative that it reaches off the page to stroke an unsettled soul. If Meidav’s crime is one of exuberant overload, this is perhaps the price she pays for carrying more of the world on her shoulders than anyone could hold. Let’s hope that Meidav’s sentence is commuted—that she has many more years to work through her extravagantly luminous prose.

Farewell to Maeve
by Cait Johnson

Red-Robed Priestess by Elizabeth Cunningham. Monkfish, hardcover, 314 pages, $25.95

Elizabeth Cunningham’s novel Red-Robed Priestess is the final book in a series of four about Maeve, the fiery Celtic Mary Magdalen. I know people who swear their lives were saved and/or changed by one or more of the Maeve Chronicles; I myself have been known to reread the Passion of Mary Magdalen, second in the lineup, whenever I need a bracing reminder about shamelessness and female power. For many of us, Maeve is an adorably mouthy role model, who shows us how to be independent but loving, fierce but tender, who urges us to embrace our inner warrior witch (which only figures, since she’s the daughter of eight of them) and embody the divine feminine with panache.

Red-Robed Priestess sends our favorite heroine off in true Cunningham style, with her trademark blend of vigorous, beautifully-crafted prose, the occasional luminous poem, and gloriously anachronistic language that lets us know right up front that Maeve is talking to us, now, in the 21st century, thank you very much. There is delightful humor even in this book about (among other things) Boudica’s last stand against the Romans. But this is really a quest novel, as the 60-something Maeve searches for her now-adult first child, who was taken from her at birth. Because Maeve has the gift of second sight, she brings us with her into hair-raising battles and scenes of family dynamics that are difficult, to say the least, with a richness of multiple perspectives.

Cunningham’s writing about place is permeated with sensual immediacy, and she brings history to life there in the most riveting way. Even if you’ve never read the other books, Red-Robed Priestess stands on its own merits—but let me give you fair warning: Maeve has a way of getting delightfully under your skin.

Page Turner from the Distant Past
by Paul Schaefer

Ghost on the Throne: The Death of Alexander the Great and the War for Crown and Empire, by James Romm. Alfred Knopf, hardcover, 368 pages, $28.95.

The death of Alexander the Great in 323 B.C. left an ancient world bereft of a leader with almost mythic power. The resulting vacuum spread treachery, brutality, and bloodshed across three continents. Heads were lopped, bodies piled up and the vagaries of chance made it seem as if the gods were engaged in a tug of war. Alexander’s life story is often told, but very few readers know about the tumult that divided his empire after he died just before his thirty-third birthday.

It is a complicated story, but one that James Romm, professor of classics at Bard College, tells with such clarity that it becomes a thrilling tale for the general reader. Romm handles dozens of names, places and events that might easily confuse a reader who is not familiar with the period. He does it by writing short set pieces that narrate all the separate actions going on at different times around the empire and then arranging them in a logical order that allows the reader to understand the story as a whole. If you are a history buff, a person who loves stories of adventure and war or simply someone who likes a good tale, buy this book and settle in for a page-turning read. Ancient history has rarely been this entertaining.