Hut's Place

Weekly Words About New Books in

Independent Bookstores

November 17, 2024

A Family-Themed Holiday Tale From Beloved Irish Storyteller, and A Call For Living a Life Based on Sharing and Gratitude

The Time of the Child by Niall Williams. This lovely Christmas-themed story about second chances and familial love takes place in the small Irish village of Faha, the setting for Williams' hugely popular and bestselling novel This Is Happiness. The slow-burn narrative takes place over the course of the month of December in 1962, where town doctor Jack Troy and his oldest daughter Ronnie find their everyday lives upended when a baby is left in their care. The Troys are quickly smitten and hide the baby to prevent her from being placed in an orphanage. Seeing an opportunity to make up for his role in ruining Ronnie's relationship with first love, Noel Crowe, Troy concocts a far-fetched plan to reunite the couple and keep the baby. As the winter passes, father's and daughter's lives, the understanding of their family, and their role in their community are changed forever.

Kirkus Reviews, in its starred critique of The Time of the Child, called out the author's writing skills: "This sequel to Williams’ much-loved This Is Happiness (2019) is set in the same town several years later: Christmas season 1962, a period when small-town machinations of all kinds come to a head.These are presented in Williams’ signature prose style: sinuous sentences that may seem at first a bit hard to follow but in short order reveal themselves to be full of music, humor, and insight. Like the work of writers from James Joyce to Anna Burns, Williams’ novel is one of those books that teach you how to read it, ultimately staking out its own linguistic territory in your brain."

The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World by Robin Wall Kimmerer. What a holiday treat - the author of Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants delivers a short but inspiring vision for how to orient our lives around gratitude, reciprocity, and community, based on the lessons of the natural world. Kimmerer asserts that we live in a time when our economy is rooted in scarcity, competition, and the hoarding of resources, and we have surrendered our values to a system that actively harms what we love. But do we have to live in such a world? Kimmerer proposes an alternative, using the serviceberry's relationship with the natural world as her muse: "Serviceberries show us another model, one based upon reciprocity, where wealth comes from the quality of your relationships, not from the illusion of self-sufficiency."

In its starred review, Booklist noted, "Kimmerer's deeply rooted, wise, and inspiring reflections coalesce into a fresh approach to connecting ecology, economics, and ethics... [Readers] will learn a lot about ecological ways of living from Kimmerer's nature-rooted wisdom and beautifully clear writing."

P.S. In a rather extraordinary putting-your-money-where your-mouth-is gesture, Kimmerer is taking her book's message to heart and redistributing her wealth to her local community by donating all of her proceeds from The Serviceberry to land trusts--organizations that conserve nature from development and destruction.

Now In Paperback, Emotionally Compelling Family Saga Pays Homage to Little Women

Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano. Those of you with Apple TV may know of Dear Edward, Napolitano's prior novel and now a streaming series. That's a pretty big deal, but Hello Beautiful can claim plenty of glitz of its own. Oprah Winfrey made the book her milestone 100th book club pick last year, and it went on to land on several Best Book of the Year lists in 2023. Here's a description from the Oprah.com website:

'Inspired by the classic Little Women, Hello Beautiful is the story of four inseparable sisters who live in Pilsen, a working-class neighborhood of Chicago. Sylvie is the bookworm, Cecelia is an artist, and Emeline is the patient caretaker of them all. When Julia, the eldest sister, marries William Waters while in university, a new era for the Padavanos begins—including weekly family dinners and, soon, a baby. But when a trauma from William's past resurfaces, it jeopardizes not only the couple's carefully orchestrated plans but the sisters' unshakable devotion to one another."

Napolitano writes about the love and grief that families can produce in equal measures. William is raised by parents mourning the death of his older sister too much to pay him any familial attention, and it's only his love for and ability to play basketball that provides any real solace. When he meets Julia, life takes a turn for the better, but the scars from William's upbringing are never quite out of sight.

In its review of the book,The Washington Post wrote, "Hello Beautiful will make you weep buckets because you come to care so deeply about the characters and their fates. . . . [Napolitano] compels us to contemplate the complex tapestry of family love that can, despite grief and loss, still knit us together. She helps us see ourselves--and each other--whole."

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WHY THE COLUMN?

Hi, I'm Hut Landon, and I'm a bookseller in an independent bookstore in BerkeIey, CA.

My goal here is to keep readers up to date about new books hitting the shelves, share what indie booksellers are recommending in their stores, and pass on occasional news about the book world.

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