Minding Frankie by Maeve Binchy

Presenting a collection of disparate, unrelated characters and slowly drawing them together as if by magnetic force – typically through a single tragic or unfortunate event – is a vaunted storytelling technique, as tricky to pull off as it is tempting to an ambitious novelist or screenwriter.

Good cinematic examples of this type are the 1991 Steve Martin / Kevin Kline film Grand Canyon, and the 2004 Oscar-winner for Best Picture, Crash. In one of the finer novels of 2009, Hearts and Minds, Amanda Craig linked the lives of five people in contemporary London in a series of absorbing but not implausible events.

Regrettably, the enervated Minding Frankie is not in this league. It’s a rare misstep from a scorchingly successful author; translated into 30 languages, Maeve Binchy’s back catalogue of more than a dozen novels has sold 40 million copies, and the cover of Minding Frankie touts her as the ‘world’s favourite storyteller’ (how this has been determined is not disclosed).

The titular Frankie is a baby, born early in the novel to terminally ill Stella, who dies shortly after her birth, and ne’er-do-well alcoholic Noel, who lives with his parents, works in a dead-end job and is gobsmacked to the point of paralysis by the emergence of a baby from a single, drunken sexual encounter after a night of line-dancing.

As Noel reels, his American cousin Emily arrives for a visit, moving in with Noel and his parents Josie and Charles and swiftly proving to be in possession of a degree of level-headedness against which neither addiction nor an unplanned baby is any match.

In a nearby neighbourhood, Lisa has reached the end of her tether in a loveless family home. Chance encounters – a hallmark of Minding Frankie – see her embark on a one-sided relationship with a self-obsessed restaurant owner, and, more fruitfully, cohabit with Noel and baby Frankie, for whom she becomes a primary caregiver.

To ratchet up the dramatic tension, Binchy introduces Moira, a pinched and emotionally starved social worker determined to save Frankie from this mélange of semi-parents – and newly sober Noel doesn’t help matters by teetering on his wagon when faced with any threat to the stability of family life.

A host of supporting characters rounds out the somewhat colourless picture, and in fact, character is precisely what Minding Frankie is most lacking. The baby herself is a mere cipher – she could just as well be a puppy or a temperamental house-plant for all the emotional engagement Binchy has the adults demonstrate towards her. No character is more than two-dimensional, and several aren’t even that.

Where Binchy does display her trademark warmth and shine is in the slow journey to self-awareness undertaken by each major character and achieved with the help of others. Each is in some way crippled or damaged by their past and an emotional deprivation of sorts, and only by letting others in – with wee Frankie as the conduit – can they become fulfilled human beings.

It is as predictable as it sounds, but the Binchyian flavour helps – though Minding Frankie is far from her best work, and constant readers will expect more. The ‘it takes a village to raise a child’ truism can make for fine fiction. Regrettably, this isn’t it.

1.5 / 5 stars: ‘Tis tepid fare from the Irishwoman.  Click here to view more Easy Mix Book Reviews.

The Life and Times of a Brown Paper Bag by Kevin Milne

Vanity is not a character defect that longtime consumer advocate and Fair Go presenter Kevin Milne could be accused of possessing. The title of his memoir, an engaging and entertaining jaunt through his broadcasting career, is inspired by a quote from a Listener review: “In an age of glossy packaging, Kevin Milne is a brown paper bag.”

This is no false modesty on the part of Milne, who has suffered enough slings and arrows in 40 years in television to have long since abandoned concern for critical opinion; as he notes, with the hint of a sigh, when TVNZ CEO Rick Ellis was asked how long he thought Fair Go would continue, the reply was, “As long as it rates.”

There might be a conspicuous lack of sentimentality from the top brass, but Milne’s affection for the show, and pride in what it has achieved during his 25 years as a reporter, is palpable. Chapters with stand-out stories of crooks being nailed and good folk getting their just deserts make for reading alternately mouth-dropping and heart-warming.

Though he registers his gratitude – and surprise – at the results of a poll that put him second on a list of most-trusted New Zealanders, Milne doesn’t assume that the goodwill he has amassed from a quarter-century of appearing in living rooms as a consumer crusader means that anyone wants to know what he has for breakfast.

Thus, the book is heavily weighted towards the professional, with only a few of the 26 chapters touching on the personal – his early life and education, his meeting and courtship of Linda, the Briton who would become his wife, and his family life with three sons and a daughter.

It is, however, the personal that is most engaging, reminding the reader that for all his renown and celebrity friends, Kevin Milne is just a good egg, with virtues and flaws common to many New Zealanders. The flaws, in his case, are a dicky heart (watching the news of Bill Clinton’s heart bypass in 2004 prompted Milne to see his doctor, precipitating the diagnosis of an aortic valve problem) and a pituitary gland tumour for which he underwent brain surgery in 2009.

That made for a good story. Upon receiving the Best Presenter prize at the 2009 Qantas Awards, a category in which he had twice been a losing finalist, Milne took the stage and said of his fellow finalists, sports presenter Andrew Saville and then-Breakfast host Paul Henry: “Sav will be taking this like a man. Paul will be muttering to the person next to him, ‘This is the first time a tumour has ever won a Qantas Award.’”

It is not all light-hearted. Milne movingly describes the effect of the sudden death of his much-admired older brother at the age of 23, and reflects with evident sorrow on the premature deaths of several of his friends in the media world.

But through it all, he maintains a genuine wonder at his own good fortune and the company he has found himself in: describing a dinner with Richard Long and Judy Bailey, he says sitting across the table from them was like watching the 6pm news in 3D, and his rather graphic account of a later incident at Long’s home conveys, again, that lack of vanity. On the page as on-screen, Kevin Milne knows how to spin a yarn.

 3.5 / 5 stars: The engaging memoir of a beloved broadcaster.  Click here to view more Easy Mix Book Reviews.

The Dress Circle

When Mark Twain jestingly said, “Clothes maketh the man. Naked people have no influence on society,” he would have given equal scoff to the notion that fashion would one day become one of the world’s largest industries, generating hundreds of billions in annual profits.

As if to rebuke Twain’s mockery, the handsome volume The Dress Circle makes a sober and detailed exploration of the New Zealand fashion industry from the 1940s to today. Due in part to the effect of societal and economic shifts on industry and on how we dress, and also to the diligence of the authors in recording and depicting what seems like every fashion-related development of significance, The Dress Circle is also a remarkable record of our social history.

The book is the result of collaboration between Douglas Lloyd Jenkins, the director of the Hawke’s Bay Museum and Art Gallery and a renowned commentator on design history, fashion and textiles expert Claire Regnault, who works at Te Papa, and Hawke’s Bay Museum and Art Gallery curator Lucy Hammonds.

Each decade has its own chapter, which explores the particular trends and larger social events that influenced the fashion of the time. The 1940s, dominated by war and its aftermath, are the chosen starting point, it’s explained, because that is the earliest period from which New Zealand fashion can be reliably documented.

Later, the fashion landscape was revolutionized by Conde Nast’s launch of Vogue New Zealand in 1957; in the 1970s, the industry was given a welcome boost by the assistance to garment manufacturers by the Muldoon government, expanding markets and increasing manufacturing capabilities; the zeitgeist-dominating 80s TV show Gloss, with its Liz Mitchell-designed costumes; the growth of fashion journalism in newspapers and other mainstream publications in the 1990s.

Designers are given their due in a book in which any budding designer would be well-advised to invest. From mostly forgotten names, such as the 1940s designer Flora MacKenzie (who evolved from designer to brothel madam), to the rise of icons such as Kevin Berkahn, Patrick Steel and Trelise Cooper, the progress of the industry’s creators in the local and international arena is painstakingly parsed.

But all this careful research and recording would be nothing without images, and indeed, the photographs do justice to the authors’ meticulous writings. Each chapter opens with a double-page spread showing a contemporary model clad in an outfit of the period under discussion. The whole book is lavishly peppered with photographs from the time described or of period dress in the fashion collections housed and displayed in Otago Museum, Auckland Museum, Te Papa and others.

There is also the delightful spectre of the ‘hot’ models of each era: names such as Judith Baragwanath and later, her daughter Tiffany, a Patrick Steel favourite, and Whetu Tirikatene-Sullivan, who championed Maori fashion as a new Labour MP in the 1970s. One compelling shot shows a wasp-wasted young Queen Elizabeth, the Prince to her left, at the opening of Parliament in 1954, with the caption noting that she wore her Coronation gown without the original heavy horse-hair petticoats.

The production values are, fittingly, at the high end of the spectrum, and Random House deserves plaudits for making the investment such subject matter demands. The Dress Circle is required reading for any fashion aficionado or designer (would-be or otherwise), and a glorious walk down fashion lane for the rest of us.

4.5 / 5 stars: A glorious, glamorous record of New Zealand fashion.  Click here to view more Easy Mix Book Reviews.

Play Dead by Harlan Coben

It is rather curious that Harlan Coben opens Play Dead, a 20^th-anniversary reissue of the first of his mystery thrillers, with an introduction that hints at its unreadability. Is he being falsely modest? Self-deprecating? Or trying, in kindness and good faith, to guide the reader towards one of his later, better-constructed works?

That he is telling the truth in stating that he did not make any rewrites is clear. Play Dead is laden with cliché and soap opera-like interior monologues, creating a congestion that takes the book to an excessive 500-plus pages. Although these problems automatically relegate it to the thriller D-list, with adjusted expectations it is worth ploughing on for the pay-off.

What of the plot? We meet Laura Ayars, a preternaturally beautiful former model who now runs a successful business, and David Baskin, a basketball superstar who plays for the Boston Celtics, on their honeymoon in Australia. Madly in love, they have eloped after a whirlwind courtship and are unaccompanied by any relatives or friends.

The marriage is only days old when David heads out for an ocean swim – and fails to return. When a night has passed and there is no sign of him, a panicked Laura calls TC, a Boston police detective and David’s best friend, for help. TC gets on the next plane, but his best efforts fail. David remains missing, presumed drowned.

From here, the plot doesn’t so much thicken as veer wildly. Between an opening prologue involving an unidentified murder 29 years before David’s disappearance; brief passages depicting a unnamed character’s recovery from extensive cosmetic surgery; the apparently groundless resistance to the marriage by each spouse’s parents; and the emergence of a new basketball star with a game uncannily similar to David’s, the experience of reading Play Dead is like bumbling your way along a dangerously unkempt garden path. You know where you’re going, but getting there is a frustrating task.

I don’t want to be unduly harsh towards Coben: Play Dead indisputably shows the promise that he has since fulfilled, and for all the laboured unctuousness of the exposition he has evidently taken care with the plotting. The twist in the tale for which he is known is present here.

There are little delights to savour. The extraordinary obtuseness of one of his main characters, who can most charitably be described as as dumb as a bag of hammers, eventually stops being annoying and instead enhances the daffiness of the entire enterprise.

That, in the end, should be the expectation for what you might get from an afternoon with Play Dead – a residual sense of charming battiness. There are some ugly scenes and nasty people, but also firm friendships and true love of the candyfloss-and-paper-hearts variety. It’s worth reading for the schlock factor, and for the reminder that all good genre writers have to start somewhere, and a lot more skill and effort goes into creating a well-written thriller than the writers would have us know.

(If Play Dead leaves you with a weird filminess on the roof of your skull, wash it away with the sharpness of Caught, Coben’s 2010 thriller involving social media and missing children. It features every virtue and none of the flaws of his debut.)

 1 / 5 Stars: Days of Our Lives on crack.  Click here to view more Easy Mix Book Reviews.

The Killing Place by Tess Gerritsen

The titular ‘place’ of Tess Gerritsen’s pacy new thriller is stumbled upon by a hapless group of holidaymakers after, as befits a crime-driven novel in which suspense must be ramped up quickly and the pitch maintained, they suffer irreparable vehicular damage in just the fifth chapter.

Among those on board is Dr Maura Isles, a beloved recurrent Gerritsen character who has, against her better judgement, accepted the invitation of a weekend excursion to a ski lodge from a former classmate she has run into at a medical conference in Wyoming.

Now, in a snowstorm, the stranded quintet trudges along a lonely back-road looking for the slightest sign of civilization, and thinks it has found it in the form of a village bearing the sign KINGDOM COME. But the village is preceded by a two-mile long road, at the top of which is another sign – Private Road / Residents Only / Area Patrolled – suggesting that the Kingdom Come residents might not be warm and welcoming.

But needs must, and the book’s foreboding tone, set by the initial car accident in severe conditions, deepens further as the travellers arrive at a completely abandoned settlement. The garages hold cars, tables are set with plated food, windows are open and cupboards fully stocked. But where are the people? Why is the frozen body of a dog lying under a dusting of snow outside one house? And in another dwelling, where did the puddle of blood at the base of the stairs come from?

Back in Boston, where Maura lives, the apparent vanishing of the doctor prompts her friend, Detective Jane Rizzoli, to up sticks and head to Wyoming to assist the search team looking for the missing group. As the searchers work their way towards Kingdom Come, and evidence that the five may be lost for good is discovered, Jane is forced to rely on her instincts and a tight cadre of trusted colleagues as the reliably dysfunctional concept of the ‘religious commune’ hoves into the reader’s view.

Gerritsen’s style is unadorned, as befits the genre: there are few mellifluous descriptive phrases to demand re-reading and admiration. It is her characterization that is a great strength – after seven novels featuring Isles and Rizzoli, she is clearly comfortable with the pair and other than nudging them towards key plot points seems happy to let them take the lead.

They lack all the dimension of the key players of some of Gerritsen’s writerly rivals, but are permitted sufficient introspection and back-story to appeal to the imagination, and after all, an enthusiastic thriller reader only has to care a little for the protagonists to happily join their adventure.

Meanwhile, the sharpness of Gerritsen’s content can be attributed to her training as a medical doctor, and she has long balanced her practice with writing, logically producing (among the odd excursion into romantic suspense) a handsome back catalogue of medical thrillers in addition to the Isles/Rizzoli series.

In the case of The Killing Place, the end results of the characters’ quest for truth is surprising and unsettling, taking the novel, previously developing within a relatively narrow, personal frame, into the realm of the political and industrial. Even the most jaded reader will likely be shocked.

3/5 Stars: A solid thriller from a writer unafraid of venturing into the political. Click here to view more Easy Mix book reviews.

No Time to Wave Goodbye by Jacquelyn Mitchard

Jacquelyn Mitchard is treading familiar (and familial) ground in her new book No Time to Wave Goodbye. A sequel to her 1996 debut novel The Deep End of the Ocean, which spent 29 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, sold three million copies in its first two years of publication, and was chosen as an Oprah’s Book Club pick, No Time to Wave Goodbye re-enters the life of the Cappadora family 22 years after Beth Cappadora’s three-year-old son Ben was abducted.

The first book depicted Ben’s safe recovery, nine years later, from a home in a nearby neighbourhood, but as Mitchard now reminds us, he did not simply slide back into his place in his biological family. The lasting grief caused by the missing decade abraded the family ties, and Ben returned to live with the man he called dad – who had been genuinely shocked to discover that the boy he called Sam was not the real son of his now-deceased wife, whom he met when she was a solo mum to Ben/Sam.

Over the years, Beth and her husband Pat have battled, not always successfully, to come to terms with having to share their son, call him by another name and treat his ‘father’ with kindness at Cappadora gatherings. Evident fractures remain as the sequel opens and Ben, now a husband and new father, embarks on a new journey, as a documentary maker.

The project he has been working on with his ne’er-do-well brother Vincent and opera-singer sister Kerry is premiering in the tight-knit community in which the Cappadoras live. The opening chapters are alive with tension as Beth, who was not told of the documentary’s subject, watches a series of horribly familiar stories.

As a way of making peace with his past and telling the stories of other families like his own, Ben has found a group of families whose children have vanished in mysterious circumstances, apparently taken by strangers.

Beth’s shock is quickly replaced with pride, and as the documentary starts to gain national attention, the family is drawn closer than it has ever been.

The Cappadoras’ collective bliss reaches its peak at a prestigious awards event at which Ben’s film is recognized, but the same night another abduction occurs and lo, the decades-old nightmare resumes.

What follows is a dramatic shift in genre, excising Beth from much of the rest of the story and pitting Ben and Vincent against the elements in an action-thriller jaunt that I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find was inspired by the writings of Jon Krakauer or even Lee Child.

The story holds together and ends enthusiastically if somewhat implausibly, but it’s hard to laud a novel that makes quite so many demands on the reader’s suspension of disbelief, from the similarities between the past and present kidnappings to the awards event, the rescue effort and the final revelation.

It’s diverting and suspenseful and ultimately somewhat tiring. The Cappadoras are an appealing family of which many more tales could be told, but they might do well to stay at home and rest for a bit.

2.5 / 5 stars: The kids are all right.  Click here to see more Easy Mix Book Reviews.

My Name is Memory by Ann Brashares

The rather lovely notion of enduring passion across many lifetimes is at the centre of My Name is Memory, the seventh novel by Ann Brashares, perhaps best-known as the author of the Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants series for young adults. 

This new book is her second in the adult fiction genre, after 2007’s The Last Summer (of You and Me), and, clearly emboldened by her earlier successful renderings of the torment and complexity of teenagehood, she introduces her two main characters, Daniel and Lucy, as they experience a profound connection that comes to a climax at a high school ball.

The encounter, as fleeting as it is dramatic, leaves both Lucy and the reader baffled: who is Daniel and where did he come from? Why does he insist on calling Lucy ‘Sophia’? How can she be so drawn to someone she doesn’t even know?

Answers start to emerge in the following chapter, when the action jumps from present-day United States to North Africa in 541, and the tense from the third person to the first, with the narrator musing: “I was first born to the north of the city that was then called Antioch . . . I consider it my first life . . . I guess it’s possible that I’ve lived lives before that.”

This faltering voice belongs to Daniel, who has lived dozens of lives in succession and can remember them all. (The possibility that reincarnation is very common and that only the individual’s awareness of it is unusual is alluded to by Brashares but regrettably not fully explored.)

It is in this first life that he meets Lucy, then a nameless young girl who disappears inside a burning house that Daniel has torched in battle. Tormented, he searches for her down the centuries, finding her, in different women, in 700s Asia Minor and in England in the shadow of World War I. But how to engage Lucy’s memory of Daniel’s role in her previous lives, and what – or who – will intervene to thwart their love?

Aspects of My Name is Memory are reminiscent of Geraldine Brooks’ remarkable 2008 novel People of the Book, which tracked not a love affair but the journey of the Sarajevo Haggadah, a Jewish prayer book, through centuries of European unrest.

Brashares’ tale, hinging as it does on character rather than setting, is neither as well-researched nor as meticulously detailed as Brooks’, but both writers have a knack for moving swiftly through time and from place to place without discombobulating the reader. Considering Brashares’ action can leap from 2006 Virginia to the coast of Crete in 899 in the course of two chapters, it’s an admirable feat.

That said, if you’ve had any more than a glancing encounter with Audrey Niffenegger’s megaselling The Time Traveller’s Wife, it will occur to you, within a handful of pages, that Brashares is either unabashedly ripping Niffenegger off or out to prove she can do it better.

For this and other reasons – the pure romanticism, the dastardly villain standing in the way of true love – Brashares’ storyline will be familiar in a favourite-blanket sort of way. It’s nothing out of the comfort zone, but good to spend some time with – and proves a surprisingly tender read that is best undertaken in a minimum of sittings. 

3 / 5 stars: The seven ages of man’s yearning.  Click here to view more Easy Mix Book Reviews.