The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets
by Eva Rice

From Publishers’ Weekly:
An impulsive taxi ride with a stranger in 1950s London indelibly changes Penelope Wallace’s life in Rice’s sparkling debut. At 18, Penelope lives with her younger brother, Inigo, and her terribly glamorous, young widowed mother in a drafty, rundown, English estate house in the countryside. With the loss of the man of the house, financial pressures mount, threatening sheltered Penelope’s family manse—and what’s left of her family’s place in society. She finds a kindred spirit in the outspoken posh Londoner, Charlotte Ferris, who has a “great gift for circumnavigating normal behavior,” when they both reveal their passion for American singing sensation Johnnie Ray. After agreeing to accompany Charlotte’s aspiring magician cousin, Harry Delancy, to his former girlfriend’s engagement party to make her jealous, Penelope begins her journey through a world of smart parties, fashionable teas and simmering romance.

When I was thirteen in the late 1960s, I came upon a stack of my mother’s old records. They were 33s but they looked like 78s, so their “quaintness” immediately intrigued me. But more important than how they looked, was how they sounded: from them came the dulcet tones of a man of whom I had never heard–Johnnie Ray.

I loved listening to those records but despite my best efforts, my friends never came to share my enthusiasm for Johnnie. Even their parents gave me odd looks. So I was delighted to be able to share the thrill of Johnnie with the two young protaganists of The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets, Penelope and Charlotte, who eventually score front row seats for Johnnie’s London concert.

I greatly enjoyed this book–and not just for Mr. Ray’s high-jinks.

English society, with its class system, has long fascinated me. It was interesting to see how far removed from its center Penelope was, living a train ride outside of London. Despite the fact that her family no longer has any money, she’s accepted into this society on Harry’s arm because of her family home - Milton Magna, the albatross that shapes the future of Penelope, her brother and her mother.

Rice makes the contrast between the glittery parties and simple country life, between having money and having a name, between English and American class systems. She shows how American music and culture overtook England long before the “British Invasion” of America in the 1960s.

My mother’s older sister, Loretta, had married an American soldier…and had moved to the United States after the war….My mother liked to give the impression of being appalled by her sister’s willingness to embrace a country she considered deeply vulgar, but secretly she was envious as hell, and who could blame her? She and I were fascinated by stories of refrigerators in every kitchen, proper washing machines and spin dryers, drive-in movies and Coca-Cola. (My brother) Inigo (was) obsessed by the new wave of American music…

The only complaint I have is that, after making me salivate at the dresses on the cover of the book, there was very little detail about the party clothes. I’d really liked to have known more than just it was “sparkly mint green dress”!

But don’t let that minor problem stop you from reading this delightful novel. Four stars.

P.S. If you want to see & hear Johnnie Ray, there are some videos on YouTube under several misspellings of his name. Coincidentally, we just finished watching the 1954 movie There’s No Business Like Show Business (we found it at Zip.ca, Americans might try Blockbuster.com ) in which Ray has a couple of solo numbers.

Reading Challenges: The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets satisfies five of my reading challenges: the Typically British Reading Challenge, the Historical Fiction Reading Challenge, the New To Me Authors Challenge, the Support Your Local Library, and 100+.

Chapters-Indigo link for Canadian readers:
Lost Art of Keeping Secrets

Or better yet, buy from a independent book seller.

Buy from an independent book seller by searching this site that has links to independent booksellers across North America.

P.S. If you click through the affiliate links in the book titles, you may notice a different cover. I like to see the cover that’s on the copy I read - and it’s usually different than Amazon.com because they display the American release, and I read the Canadian. Again, the links are affiliate links so I will receive a small percentage of any purchase you make after clicking through from this blog.

Technorati Tags: The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets, Eva Rice, Penelope Wallace, Inigo, Milton Magna, Charlotte Ferris, Marina Hamilton, Rocky Dakota, Johnnie Ray

We’ve had rain and temps above freezing all week, and last night when I went to bed, there was no snow to be seen. I thought I’d show you a real contrast from last week.

Alas, this is what I awoke to. That’s a main highway out there. There’s a wind gusting to 50 mph from the south (?!), which is the other side of the house, that blowing a icy mist of snow across the roads.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald; Graphic novel version by Nunzio DeFilippis & Christina Weir; Illustrated by Kevin Cornell

When Fitzgerald penned Benjamin Button in 1922, he enthusiastically called it “the funniest story ever written” and hoped to write more pieces like it and The Diamond as Big as the Ritz. Publishers and the public, however, had a different idea as evidenced by an anonymous letter by a reader in Cincinnati:

Sir–I have read the story Benjamin Button in Colliers and I wish to say that as a short story writer you would make a good lunatic. I have seen many peices (sic) of cheese in my life but of all the peices of cheese I have ever seen you are the biggest peice. I hate to waste a peice of stationary on you but I will.

I had a somewhat more favorable reaction to the story of the unfortunate Mr. Button, who was born an old man and grew younger rather than older.

I was unable to find a copy of the full text of Fitzgerald’s story, but the graphic novel edition purports to be “complete with Fitzgerald’s original text”. I suspect that the text included was indeed the author’s but I’m not convinced that it was the full text of the story since Fitzgerald tended to be wordy. Nonetheless, there was more than enough, along with the illustrations and the speech bubbles, to tell the story in detail.

The 2008 movie starring Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett was a tour de force of digital enhancement. It won Academy Awards for Art Direction, Makeup and Visual Effects, as well it should have. (Rent DVDs online with Zip.ca or Blockbuster.com )

Critics were divided, some (NY Times, Variety) seeing it as a wonderful film and others, not so. I’m on the side of the Times.

Generally, I like movies that are based on books to stick fairly closely to the original. In this case, I’m willing to make an exception. Other than the title and the general concept of a man “aging” younger, there are NO similarities between Fitzgerald’s story (hereafter called the “book”) and the film.

In the book, Benjamin was born in a Baltimore hospital in 1860, as fully grown adult–a seventy-year-old man–who can talk & thinks like an adult. He’s raised by his father, spending company in his early days with his elderly grandfather. When he is in his early twenties, and appears about fifty, he marries a younger woman who likes “older men”. As the years pass, Benjamin loses interest in his wife as she becomes middle-aged and he grows younger.

His troubles applying to Yale (at 18 but looking 60), his time in the army during the Spanish-American War that began in 1898, his subsequent years as a football hero at Harvard (at 60 but looking 18), and his attempt at re-enlistment in 1914 for the Great War are wryly comically portrayed by Fitzgerald.

As the years progress, Benjamin hands over the family Wholesale Hardware business to his son Roscoe, and as an moody adolescent ends up living with Roscoe and eventually attends kindergarten with his grandson as he thinks more and more like a child.

The movie has Benjamin being born in 1918 in New Orleans as a wizened baby who is literally thrown away by his father and lands on the steps of an old-age home where he is taken in by one of the attendants and raised as her own.

The old age home is a clever device - who would question an old man there, even if he acted like a three year old, which he did, since the movie version has Benjamin born as a child physically and mentally. That works until until dementia sets in when he looks about 12 years old. Then the script picks up the book’s version of his regressing intellect & knowledge.

The love story that is central to the movie version is completely an invention of the screenwriter, and is completely opposite to what happens in the book.

And the movie version made the elder Mr. Button’s fortune the result of buttons, rather than hardware. You decide if that clever or if it’s cheesy. I rather liked it. After all, the whole story is a fantasy.

Differences aside, I greatly enjoyed the movie and much of my enjoyment came from the period sets throughout the twentieth century. Some critics make the charge that the movie is too long, coming in at just under three hours, but I think that it needs that time to progress through the decades and to tell Benjamin’s story: a man who seemed not greatly affected by major history (other than the World Wars) and who just seemed to have life happen to him, rather than to make life happen.

Brad Pitt played Brad Pitt - in various make-ups and with a multitude of digital enhancement, both to look young and to look old. Cate Blanchett, also the recipient of age-altering techniques, was far more credible as Daisy (a tip of the hat to Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby name for his wife Zelda).

Although I was initially disappointed that I was able to get only this graphic issue of the story, I found the book to be a pleasure to read (and to re-read). It, no doubt, is true to the original story and makes it accessible to both younger and older readers alike.

The book reminded me of the Illustrated Classics of such books as the Prince and the Pauper that my brother & I devoured in the mid-sixties. But they were comic books. This is an elegant, 5.75 x 8.25 inch hardbound edition whose sepia toned pages are a treat to read.

My copy is overdue from my local library.

Benjamin Button satisfies three of my reading challenges: the Read the Book, See the Movie Challenge, the Support Your Local Library, and 100+.

Chapters/Indigo link for Canadian readers:
The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button And Other Jazz Age Tales

Or, even better, buy from an independent book seller by searching this site that has links to independent booksellers across North America.

P.S. If you click through the affiliate links in the book titles, you may notice a different cover. I like to see the cover that’s on the copy I read - and it’s usually different than Amazon.com because they display the American release, and I read the Canadian. Again, the links are affiliate links so I will receive a small percentage of any purchase you make after clicking through from this blog.

Technorati Tags: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, F. Scott Fitzgerald, graphic novel, Cate Blanchett, Brad Pitt, 2008 Academy Award for Make-up, 2008 Academy Award for Visual Effects, 2008 Academy Award for Art Direction, growing younger, Hurricane Katrina, on-line movies in Canada, order movies on-line in Canada, DVDs by mail in Canada, DVDs by mail, Blockbuster online, Zip.ca, Nunzio DeFilippis, Christina Weir, Kevin Cornell

An e-mail invitation has me thinking about getting a group together this weekend and going sleigh riding. There’s more than one place within 20 minutes of our house where we could do this, but one of my favorites is the Sugar Moon Farm.

Husband and wife team, Scott Whitelaw and Quita Grey have a thriving maple syrup business in the Cobequid Mountains in Earltown NS. They use these gorgeous draught horses in the sugaring work and in winter, before the sap starts to run, for sleigh rides through the woods. There are also hiking trails for snowshoeing and crosscountry skiing.

We often take friends to the “sugar shack” for breakfast, and sometimes go, just us, if we have a weekend morning available.

In the city, one can just keep warm in winter, at a movie theater or a bowling alley or a mall. Those venues are at least an hour’s drive from here.

Want to sleigh ride, snowshoe, or hike in the beautiful outdoors? No problem. This is the sort of winter activity that is often easily available in the country.

What about you? What kind of winter activity do you enjoy: city or country?

Disclaimer: I am NOT an affiliate of Sugar Moon Farms nor am I in any way compensated by them. I received an e-mail about the sleigh rides from them today and decided to share because I simply love the place!

Technorati Tags: Sugar Moon Farm, draught horses, draft horses, maple sugaring, sugar shack, maple syrup, sleigh rides, all-you-can-eat pancakes, Chef’s night, hiking trail, Nuttby Mountain, Earltown NS, Rogart Mountain Trail

One of the things that makes me feel so cozy here in our little village is the presence of a full-time dentist. And, serendipitously, she is also a really good dentist.

Last night I broke another tooth (it seems that my teeth are crumbling away on me, but that’s another story) and needed emergency “looking-at”. Unfortunately, Dr. Whitman was booked solid with a waiting list of ten already. That’s the risk of Read the rest of this entry »

Not being camera-savvy, I couldn’t get the picture beyond the window this week. The lens would record only the ice on the pane.

At 4 p.m., it’s as dark as night, the wind is howling and blowing the trees and the sleety rain horizontal.

What a change from last week!

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Such irony: on Saturday, I offered a sample of the small things that had given me pleasure in the past week. One of the items I chose was “no traffic lights within a 40 minute drive”.

Yesterday morning, I turned left out of my driveway and almost immediately saw a traffic light on our road.

Read the rest of this entry »

The headlines here are exclaiming over the coyote attack earlier this week, when a young woman visitor from Toronto was killed by two rogue males while she was on a hiking trail in Cape Breton. Read the rest of this entry »

Business isn’t so brisk at some old country service stations, so we had to slow down and get a look at the “mechanic” here, especially since the taillights had been on the previous evening.

Incidentally, look at the hills in the background. We’re in the Cobequid Hills, part of the Read the rest of this entry »

Bill’s daughter, Laura, has arrived from Vancouver with her 16-month-old son for an extended visit. Of course, we love having them here, but for me, there is an added bonus: the country through a city person’s fresh eyes & ears.

One of our first crisis arose this morning. I heard out of my bedroom window that overlooks the side deck: “Come in here! Get those bugs off you!” with a touch of panic. Worried that we had an infestation of late mosquitoes or spiders, I peered out to find my window screen dotted with the culprits: ladybugs.

Photo via “How to Start a Ladybug Garden”

During the night, Read the rest of this entry »

Okay you city gals. You ran some errands at lunch today.

Me too: picked up a sandwich, signed for a registered letter, paid some library fines. Remembered to drop off dry-cleaning, pick up eggs, and return a movie. Drove by this.

I never promised you the country was classy.

Technorati Tags: pumpkins, decorating with pumpkins, butt cheeks

Sometimes I wonder how I can have read so many books in my lifetime and never have heard of some authors that apparently have quite a following.

One of those authors is Miss Read, the pen name of Dora Jessie Saint, an English novelist, by profession a schoolmistress who began writing for several journals after World War II and eventually produced a series of novels from 1955 to 1996. In 1940 she married her now late husband, Douglas, a former headmaster. Read the rest of this entry »

When you live in an old country house, you have to come to terms with dealing with wildlife of many sorts. One of the most common is the tiny mouse who is scurrying this time of year to find a warm place for a winter nest.

So I wasn’t totally unprepared to open the door this morning to see what the dog was barking at, to find a wee mousie cowering in the corner of the deck against the door jamb. Read the rest of this entry »

For all of my pre-country life (50 years), I lived in homes heated by natural gas. It was just as the ads say: clean, easy & relatively inexpensive. The gas supplier also sold the furnaces & provided maintenance service. We never gave heating a second thought, really.

When we moved here, we had a rude awakening. Read the rest of this entry »

Hurricane Bill is barreling up the Atlantic coastline and due to brush Nova Scotia tomorrow. It is, of course, the talk of the town.

The year we moved here (2003) was the first year in a very long time that Nova Scotia had been affected by a hurricane to any extent. But that September, Hurricane Juan Read the rest of this entry »

One of the most rewarding ways to use your larger outdoor living space in the country is to gather your family members for a reunion. Perhaps it’s a small group that gets together annually, or a large one whose far-flung members attend every two or five or even 10 years.

Whether large or small, a reunion is a wonderful opportunity to knit families closer together through shared stories. In the much-underrated 1990 film Avalon, a Russian immigrant to 1940s America relates the disintegration of his family ties. In his young manhood, his children gathered at the feet of older relatives during family gatherings and listened to tales of their heritage and history. As television took hold of society in the late ’50s, children and adults alike opted for the entertainment of television personalities, instead of the stories of their roots.

And just as the art of listening to stories has gone by the wayside, so has the art of telling them. Here’s how to re-start a tradition of storytelling at your family reunion. Read the rest of this entry »

For the rest of my week, see my blog at the Grace in Small Things site.

1. Clean sheets

2. Two paying gigs in two nights!

3. The Fabled Pig ham sandwich

4. Sent home on glass plates

5. That we’re trusted to return.

Wage a battle against embitterment and take part in Grace in Small Things .

[tags]grace in small things, Fables Club, Fabled pig[tags]

The front page of the daily paper in our nearest town carried this picture last Thursday morning. The picture is in color and measures 7½” x 9″.
As you can imagine, it WAS the front page story. Page 3 continued with the headline: “Tatamagouche sunflower thief has business owners up in arms” over a smaller b&w photo of one such owner displaying the holes in her flower arrangement.

Six years ago, Read the rest of this entry »

John Payzant was born in Halifax Nova Scotia on Canada’s Atlantic coast. But, like so many Atlantic Canadians, he spent most of his working life in Toronto Ontario as an investment dealer on Bay Street, considered to be Canada’s version of Wall Street.

In 2004, he decided to trade in city life and move to the small town of Lunenburg near his birth city. Lunenburg’s historic waterfront is also on the Atlantic.

Since his city friends thought Read the rest of this entry »

Hilary Clinton’s now-famous quote — “I believe in a zone of privacy” — made at a press conference to promote her 2003 memoir, Living History, referred to the media’s exposure of public figures.

But in the country, privacy is about your neighbors. Our nearest visible neighbor is across a field about 150 yards from our house. We lost a couple of trees in Hurricane Juan (2004) and Read the rest of this entry »