Review - - No Place I'd Rather Be

No Place I’d Rather Be

By Cathy Lamb

Publisher: Kensington

Release Date: August 29, 2017

Reviewed by Janga

 

Two years ago, with her happily-ever-after destroyed by tragedy, Olivia Martindale fled her hometown, Kalulell, Montana, her husband Jace Rivera, and the guest ranch they had created together and created a new life for herself in Portland, Oregon. Now, having quit her job as sous chef in a popular restaurant and terrorized by phone calls that play on her greatest fear, she returns to Kalulell and the cabin her grandfather built for her grandmother. She returns with Stephi and Lucy, the six and seven-year-old granddaughters of her late friend Annabelle. Olivia has temporary guardianship of the girls, and she hopes to adopt them if the rights of their parents are terminated. Meanwhile, the cabin offers refuge, and Olivia’s family (her mother, Mary Beth; her grandmother, Gisela; her sister, Chloe, and Chloe’s fifteen-year-old son, Kyle) offers abundant love and a strong support system.

When the attic roof springs a leak in a rain storm, Olivia repairs the leak and checks the damage to boxes in the attic. Among the damaged boxes, Olivia finds remnants of her grandmother’s past about which her daughter and granddaughters know nothing. Gisela has hidden the mementoes away because her past as a German Jew is too painful to remember. Olivia’s discovery, particularly the stained and battered, hand-illustrated cookbook that contains recipes from five generations of women in Gisela’s family, leads Gisela to share her memories with her family. They incorporate the recipes of these women from Odessa and Munich into their tradition of Martindale Cake Therapy, a family ritual that the Martindale women use as a coping device for problems large and small. This is a big book in subject and scope. It covers more than a century and includes scenes from four countries. It touches upon a wide range of issues—racial intolerance, child abuse, school bullying, and others. Cathy Lamb weaves together multiple story threads to create a novel that uses history and contemporary life, romance and familial love, and human creatures at their worst and their best to give her readers a book that is a triumph.

Lamb has a gift for creating characters whom I want to hug, to whom I want to listen, and from whom I learn. She outdoes herself in No Place I’d Rather Be. The Martindale women are strong and vital. Each has been wounded by life, but they have not been defeated. They love each other with a tough tenderness, and the giving and receiving of that love makes them stronger. Olivia learns from the example of the others, including the women who died before she was born, and gains the strength to accept losses.

This is not a romance novel, but the relationship between Olivia and Jace is a significant part of the story. Jace is a real heart-stealer, heroic in all the important ways. Gisela and her fighter pilot/doctor husband have their own sweet love story, one that has endured for decades. Stephi and Lucy are real kids, scarred by the abuse they suffered but remarkably resilient and bright and funny. I adored Kyle, Olivia’s nephew who has Asperger’s syndrome. I thought he stole every scene he was in. I also enjoyed the quirky townspeople, most of whom are likable and believable.

This book made me laugh, and it made me cry. It broke my heart by showing the irrational hatred that provokes human beings to destroy their fellows and caused me to rejoice by showing a love that prevails despite human evil. It is the kind of book that I read slowly because I didn’t want it to end. It is a book I will read again and again. I highly recommend it.

Review - - My Very Best Friend

My Very Best Friend

By Cathy Lamb

Publisher: Kensington

Release Date: July 28, 2015

   

Charlotte Mackintosh is a scientist by training but a writer by profession. Under the pseudonym Georgia Chandler, she has published nine wildly successful romance novels featuring Mackenzie Rae Dean, a time-traveling heroine who roams the world saving lives, taking lovers, and longing for reunion with her soul mate, the only man she truly loves. Despite her success, Charlotte is a reclusive writer who refuses to go on book tours or attend conferences, choosing instead to remain in her home on Whale Island, off the coast of Washington, where her closest companions are her four cats and her only visitors are her mother and her ex-husband and his current partner.

Born in St. Ambrose, Fife, Scotland, Charlotte spent the first fifteen years of her life in that village. The cherished only child of a red-haired, bagpipe-playing Scottish farmer and his American feminist wife, Charlotte enjoyed an idyllic childhood filled with her father’s stories and the imaginative worlds created by Charlotte, her life-long best friend Bridget Ramsay, Bridget’s brother Toran, and their friend Pherson Hameldon. The idyll ended abruptly with her father’s death. Charlotte and her mother left Scotland for America, and in the twenty years since, neither has returned. When their long-term tenant dies, Charlotte’s mother asks Charlotte to visit St. Ambrose to oversee the necessary repairs to the family cottage and sell it. The trip will also give Charlotte an opportunity to check on Bridget from whom Charlotte has not heard in several months.

Charlotte finds that the cottage where generations of Mackintoshes had lived has been turned into a pigsty. Just cleaning it out will be a horrendous task—and then there are more substantial repairs that must be made. Clearly Charlotte’s stay in St. Ambrose will be longer than she planned. That’s not a hardship, however, since old friends and new ones and Scotland itself give her the sense that she belongs in this place with these people. Best of all, Toran is just as wonderful as Charlotte remembers, and the thirty-five-year-old Charlotte is soon as much in love with him as the fifteen-year-old Charlotte was.

But all is not perfect. Bridget has disappeared, and despite all Toran’s efforts, including hiring a private investigator, no one has been able to find her. Charlotte also learns from Toran and through a series of diary-like letters that Bridget has written to Charlotte over the two decades they have lived on different continents that the life Charlotte thought Bridget was living has been all fabrication. Instead, Bridget’s life has been filled with horrors and pain, physical and emotional. Charlotte loves Bridget, but she wonders since she knew so little of Bridget’s real life if they truly were best friends. Life will bring devastating sorrow and soaring happiness before Charlotte finds the answer to her question.

Cathy Lamb’s first-person narrative mixes past and present, tears and laughter in a poignant tale about love on many levels. This is a story about love of place, love of family, love between friends, romantic love, and even the love that is self-acceptance--and each story thread touches the reader’s heart. Lamb takes her reader from moments of outright hilarity to moments of great tenderness to moments that may require a full box of tissues to read through.

This is not a perfect book. It is long (480 pages). I think it could have been pruned a bit without losing anything. Also, some of the transitions from present to past are disconcertingly abrupt. But there are so many things I loved about the book that its imperfections seemed negligible. In addition to Charlotte and her friendship with Bridget, the top five things I loved include:

        1. The things that made me laugh, really laugh--loudly. I’m not a cat person, but I found irresistibly amusing the image of Charlotte’s walks with her four cats in their assigned places in their pink stroller. Her flight to Scotland, the inebriated conclusions to the meetings of the St. Ambrose Ladies’ Gab, Garden, and Gobble group, and her conversations with her agent also left me giggling madly.

        2. The little things. The games of the TorBridgePherLotte fearsome foursome in memory and in reenactment touched me, and I thought the secondary romance between Chief Constable Ben Harris and Gitanjali Chavan was funny and sweet. I also found Ben Harris’s unwavering affection for Charlotte’s father endearing.

        3. Charlotte’s makeover. It is one of the best ever because Charlotte needed it for herself but not for Toran, who saw her as beautiful even when she was at her most frumpish.

        4. The solution to the disappearance of Father Angus Cruickshank.  I smugly thought I had it figured out, but I was off by a generation.

        5. Toran, a wonderful, heart-stealing character. I’m now convinced that the reason I’m single is that I never took a trip to Scotland.

Reading this list makes the book sound lovely and light, and it is. But it is also weighty and sometimes unbearably sad. Charlotte’s journey is both literal and metaphorical. She finds not only the love of her life in St. Ambrose but also her heritage and a self quite different from the person she was on her island. Bridget’s return to St. Ambrose raises the whole issue of what home is and how the prodigal is received as well as the issue of making judgments based on lies and illusions. The time-travel theme introduced with Charlotte’s romance novels (and I think their inevitable teasing reminder of another time-traveling heroine and her Scottish soul-mate) acquires quite another meaning as Charlotte and Bridget engage in their own time travels, individually and together.

As much as this is the story of all that Charlotte gains through her return to her native land, it is also a book about loss and how humans deal with grief. Charlotte experienced great loss at a young age, but the fact that she cannot visit her father’s grave reveals that she still has much to learn. By the end of her journey, she has learned this truth: “They never leave our hearts, the ones we love. . . . Their love lives on, breathes on, carries on, and eventually gives us peace, the memories holding us in a hug.”

If you like books that make you laugh and cry and fill your heart with characters you cannot forget, grab a copy of this book. As for me, I’m checking out Cathy Lamb’s backlist.

~Janga