The Other Family by Joanna Trollope

The Other Family is the latest from Joanna Trollope who has been writing fiction for more than thirty years--The Rector's Wife, A Village Affair, Marrying the Mistress among many others.

From Booklist (via amazon)
When popular crooner Richie Rossiter dies, his longtime partner, Chrissie, is left bereft and angered that she never got Richie to divorce his first wife and marry her, providing security for her and their three daughters. In addition, money becomes a serious issue since she was his manager. Then she learns that Richie amended his will to leave a treasured piano and the rights to songs he wrote early in his career to his first wife, Margaret, and their son, Scott. Chrissie, who refused to ever fully acknowledge Richie’s first family, is left to wonder whether he actually loved her, while Margaret finds herself enormously relieved to discover that she was remembered. The prolific Trollope skillfully engineers a heartwarming story of renewal and hope as she brings the two families closer together. Scott reaches out to Chrissie’s youngest child, providing her with both comfort and a link to her dad’s childhood in Newcastle. Hurt feelings and issues of abandonment vie with the impulse to forge ahead and to heal in this intelligent and moving novel of modern family life.

Passages
On a tea caddy
Tamsin was taking tea bags out of a caddy their father had brought down from Newcastle, a battered tin caddy with a crude portrait of Earl Grey stamped on all four sides.  The caddy had always been an object of mild family derision, being so cozy, so evidently much used, so sturdily unsleek.  Richie had loved it.  He said it was like one he had grown up with, in the terraced house of his childhood in North Shields.  He said it was honest, and he liked it filled with Yorkshire tea bags.  Earl Grey tea--no disrespect to His Lordship--was for toffs and for women.

On Dawson, the cat
Today, he had ignored his breakfast.  It was untouched and he had removed himself to his favorite daytime place, stretched along the back of the sofa in the bay window of the sitting room, to catch any eastern sun there might be, and also any passing incident.  He would not, Margeret knew, involve himself in anything that required exertion, but equally, he liked to know what was going on.

On ablutions
A bath, an application of this and that to her face, a prolonged session with the immense variety of toothbrushes the fierce young hygienist at her dentist now insisted on, a vigorous hairbrush, a well-laundered white cotton nightdress with picot edging--they all added up to something that, some days, Margaret looked forward to almost from the moment she woke in the morning.

My first experience with Joanna Trollope was in 1999 when she was writer-in-residence for Victoria magazine and her novella Daughter Number Three was serialized in that publication.  Since then, I have been entertained by several of her domestic dramas, but alas, not so with The Other Family.  The story dragged on and meandered, and I found some of the characters annoying.  This was a story of a family's grief and their journey to reconciliation; unfortunately, I did not care enough about the characters to take comfort in the resolution of their story.

Rating:  2.5/5 (Fiction Scale)
Source:  Library
Dedication:  To Jason
First Line:  Looking back, it astonished her that none of them had broken down in the hospital.

Two by Marisa de los Santos

May brought an incredible back-to-back reading experience for me with Love Walked In and Belong to Me by Marisa de los Santos. I have a few passages of note on both books, but as for reviews, I am going to direct you to Lesley's Book Nook for her reviews of Love Walked In and Belong to Me--Les has captured the essence of both these books in her wonderful reviews!

Love Walked In

Passages

Words to live by:

I've always been more than a little proud of myself for having been fourteen and deeply benighted about almost everything, but having had the sense to recognize what is surely a universal truth: Jimmy Stewart is always and indisputably the best man in the world, unless Cary Grant should happen to show up.

How a story "feels" (haven't you lovingly stroked a book?):

On the third day, just before they went home, the kids in Clare's class took the holiday gifts they'd made for their parents off the walls and out of the cases in which they'd been displayed. Clare took down "Annike and the Bears" and slid her palm lightly across the cover. A story is only words living inside a person's head, she thought, floating and invisible. But she'd written the words down and make a book, an object that took its place in the world of objects.

On self-help books:

...the question turned me into a first-name-only, hypothetical character in the pages of a self-help book. Exactly the kind of book we all disdain because it reduces to formulae our irreducible human selves, but which we at least think about buying (thus abetting the book's piranhalike devouring of the New York Times bestseller list). That time we had a terrible cold and were listlessly switching channels on the tiny television we hardly ever watch and even forget we have, we happened upon Oprah discussing such a book and found that, as much as we hated to admit it, the book rang true--at least some it rang somewhat true, truer than we'd ever expected.

On love:

There's a kind of holiness to love, requited or not, and those people who don't receive it with gratitude are arrogant beyond saving.

On journal writing:

Getting the word right mattered, but so did describing his voice when he talked and capturing the feeling that filled her as he spoke and after he spoke. She thought about that word "capture," how it put a writer on par with a fur trapper or big-game hunter, and how it implied that stories were whole and roaming around loose in the world, and a writer's job was to catch them. Except of course that a writer didn't kill what she caught, didn't stuff it and hang it on a wall; the point was to keep the stores alive.

Belong To Me

Passages

On the first (real) day of fall:

The next day turned out to be the first day of fall, one of my favorite days of the year. I'm not talking about the actual autumnal equinox, which had come and gone a week earlier and had felt pretty much like all the summer days preceeding it. What I mean by the first day of fall is that day when you suddenly understand with your whole body that the season has changed. When the air feels snappier against our skin and the sky's blueness turns wistful, and the humming of insects shifts pitch, and you just know like you know your own name that summer is over.

On cell phones:

...my admittedly old-ladyish uneasiness with cell phone culture (you know what I mean, it blurs the boundaries between the public/private realms, discourages quiet introspection, results in abominable driving, fills the world with silly noises, et cetera)....

On the action of love:

"What are we going to do?" As soon as I said it, I understood its power, this single, simple question, what I had spent the last two days stumbling toward. I asked the question, and what had frightened me so much was suddenly no longer a threat. It was something for us to do together, to make part of us.... Everything turned on the word "we," a synonym for love, the thing that saves us all.

On brain vacations:

...you could get used to the not-thinking, the haphazard floating through days, your brain lounging around like a tourist in a loud shirt, grasping nothing heavier than a magazine and a drink (umbrellaed, water beaded, pineaple hanging off its rim like an elephant ear), lulled by the sound of seagulls and ocean waves.

Love Walked In

4.5/5 (General Fiction scale)

Plume [Penguin Group imprint] (2005)

Trade Paperback

307 pages

Finished: June 2008

Dedication: For David Teague: You;re the Nile, You're the Tower of Pisa

Belong To Me

4/5 (General Fiction scale)

Wm. Morrow (2008)

Hardcover

388 pages

Dedication: For Charles and Annabel, my sleek brown otters