Let's Bust a Recap : President Without a Party

And we march on through the United States presidents. John Tyler was our nation's tenth president (so we've finally hit the double digits—yay!) and the first vice president to assume the presidency after the death of the elected president, in this case William Henry Harrison who served as president a mere thirty-one days after his inauguration before succumbing to illness.

So, let's get into it, shall we? Despite being considered by most historians as a largely ineffectual president, I found Tyler fascinating and enjoyed learning more about him. 

I'm not sure if I've mentioned this on the blog or not, but before choosing what presidential biographies to read, I always consult Stephen Floyd's excellent blog in which he has chronicled his own (much more intensive) venture of reading through the American presidents. If you have even the smallest interest in reading a presidential biography of any of our nation's presidents, I cannot recommend his site enough in helping you choose what to read. And in the case of John Tyler, Stephen says Christopher J. Leahy's 2020 offering stands alone so Leahy's book is what I read.   

John Tyler was born in 1790 into one of the prominent First Families of Virginia and grew up under a father who was heavily involved in state politics. Owing in large part to the early death of his mother who died when he was only seven years old, he was profoundly influenced by his father and followed in his footsteps to become a lawyer and enter politics at a very young age. 

Throughout the course of his career, Tyler served in the Virginia legislature, the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate, the governorship of Virginia (like his father), the office of vice president (briefly), and finally as president of the United States. Between posts he practiced law, and after his term as president ended he settled down on his plantation and took his role as planter very seriously. During the War of 1812, he organized a militia company which he commanded with the rank of captain, but they never saw any action and he dissolved the company after two months. For the rest of his career, his political enemies mockingly called him "Captain Tyler" any time they wanted to insult him. 

Because Harrison was the first president to die in office and because the Constitution was maddeningly vague on the point of presidential succession, Tyler set pretty much all the precedents for assuming the presidency after the death of the elected president, and he did it decisively and aggressively. His precedent was finally confirmed in the form of the 25th Amendment in 1967—over 100 years after Tyler's death! I found this bit of history endlessly fascinating so indulge me for a moment while I hash it out with you guys. Tyler was kindof a throwaway choice by the Whig party to fill the slot as vice president on William Henry Harrison's ticket. While "Tippecanoe and Tyler too" is probably the most popular and memorable campaign slogan in history, no one expected Tyler to do anything as vice president or to go any further in politics after Harrison's time as president ended. From what I can tell, Tyler himself had no grand aspirations to become president. He didn't have the support to win that office on his own. Why the Whigs chose him is really a mystery to me, especially given the fact that Harrison was the oldest man elected president at a time when personal health and longevity weren't great given what was known in medicine. I have to wonder if Henry Clay didn't think he could somehow get himself into the role of president if William Henry Harrison died in office. 

Obviously, it didn't work out for Henry Clay, and because of Tyler's somewhat tenuous connection to the Whig party in the first place, his ascension to the presidency immediately after Harrison's death was pretty much the worst-case scenario for all involved. And because Harrison died so shortly after being sworn in himself, Tyler practically served an entire presidential term. Unfortunately, just about everything at the federal level turned into a political gridlock as Clay and Tyler duked it out in an epic power struggle for nearly all of Tyler's presidency, resulting in Tyler being formally read out of the Whig party a mere five months into his presidency. So Tyler ended up with the double ignominy of being an "accidental president" and being the only president without a party. Crazy, right?

But let's not end it there. He's actually a triple threat in infamy as he was also the only "traitor president"—the only man who served in our nation's highest office to actually renounce the Union at the onset of the Civil War. 

Despite all this, I kinda liked John Tyler. He was a strong states' rights advocate and a man of principle, and he stuck to his guns no matter what. The reason he got kicked out of the Whig party is because, ultimately, he wouldn't let Clay and the rest of the Whigs bully him into signing their pet proposals into law. He was a friend to the executive prerogative of veto, and you know what? I'm here for him. He considered the annexation of Texas the crowning achievement of his presidency, even though he signed it into law mere days before Polk took office. And let's just give it to him, because he worked on it for years, okay? 

On the personal front, buckle up because he was also our nation's most fertile president fathering fifteen children. He and his first wife Letitia had eight (possibly nine) children together, and seven of their children grew to adulthood. Letitia died while he was serving as president, and he got married only two years later—while still serving as president—to the beautiful young Julia Gardiner, thirty years his junior and, age-wise, smack dab in the middle of the lineup of his own children. Which is a little gross if you ask me, but they really seemed to love each other. They wasted no time and had seven children together. Tragically, in the midst of his second fatherhood, he lost three of his adult daughters in a pretty short span of time, two dying due to complications in childbirth and the third from an infection. While he was a devoted father, he was largely absent in all of his children's lives: the first time around owing to his political career; the second time because of his death. At the time of his death, Julia's oldest child was only fifteen and her youngest, not even two. 

One other fun fact about Tyler that I just have to include because hello! this whole blog is about books and reading is that in the middle of his presidency in 1842, he hosted a massive party at the White House to honor two famous guests: celebrated American author Washington Irving, and none other than Charles Dickens himself. What?! 

As for the biography itself, President Without a Party: The Life of John Tyler by Christopher J. Leahy is well-written and (I think) extremely interesting. While at times I did feel like Leahy got a little long-winded and could've been a little more concise, overall I thought he did an exceptional job. I appreciated how he took the time to sum up large sections of his writing with a simple question to boil down the topic he covered to his main point. It's not the best presidential biography I've read to date, but it's a long way from the worst. I would definitely recommend it if you have any interest in the life of John Tyler. 

I've still got two more presidential biographies on my list for 2022, and while it may be a bit of a stretch at this point in the year, I'm still hopeful of getting through them both before the year is through. If you had to choose one president to read a biography about, who would it be?

Let's Bust a Recap : The Lady's Mine

Finally. A new release from one of my all-time favorite authors. Francine Rivers is an auto-buy author for me. And if we're being honest, the only other author that has that honor is Robin Jones Gunn. It's an exclusive club. And when one of these two women announces a new release, it's preordered in two shakes and then there's a lot of impatience on the part of yours truly until Release Day. Thankfully, between finding out about The Lady's Mine and when it actually arrived in my mailbox, I had my birthday, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Years, a blizzard, and a full-time job to occupy my time. So we survived. But y'all. It has been four solid years since Rivers' last book The Masterpiece was published, and the fatalist in me always believes that the last book Francine Rivers or Robin Jones Gunn wrote will be the last book they ever will write again so I had all but given up hope that I'd ever get a new novel from Rivers. 

But I was wrong! Hooray!

The Lady's Mine is Francine Rivers' self-described "pandemic book" and for that reason, it is intentionally a lot lighter than the rest of her body of work. Set in the late 1800s, this book chronicles the adventures of Kathryn Walsh as she is disinherited from her posh Bostonian family for being a troublemaking suffragette and sent West to claim a paltry inheritance left her by her recently deceased uncle. She shows up in Calvada, a border mining town in the middle of Nowhere, USA determined to make her own way in the world. 

Now, let's not kid ourselves: Francine Rivers is a romance writer and the majority of her books do center around a romantic relationship of one type or another. And don't get me wrong: I'm here for a good love story. But in The Lady's Mine she really leaned into the romance. In most of her other books, there is a Main Issue the plot deals with that the romance is written to serve. However in this newest offering, it definitely felt like we were reading a Romance with a side of women's rights thrown in. And it was good. But it wasn't my favorite book by her for that reason. You could definitely tell that Rivers had fun writing it, and I did appreciate how light it was in comparison with her other books. Like, when I usually sit down with a Francine Rivers novel, I don't move again until I've finished it because I'm literally holding my breath till the end. With The Lady's Mine, I could breathe, you know? According to Goodreads, I took a whole week to read it. That's not to say we never dealt with any tough circumstances or tense situations, but in contrast with the rest of her work, this one was just fun. Rivers has described it as The Taming of the Shrew meets Oklahoma! and it was a rip-roaring good time. 

All in all, my favorite author once again delivered a novel I thoroughly enjoyed, and I'd definitely recommend The Lady's Mine if you're looking for a fun romantic romp. But if you've never read anything else by Francine Rivers, for the love of silver start with The Atonement Child or the Mark of the Lion trilogy. 

Do you have any auto-buy authors?

A Word for Wednesday

 "Other evils there are that may come; 

for Sauron is himself but a servant or emissary. 

Yet it is not our part to master all the tides of the world, 

but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, 

uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, 

so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. 

What weather they shall have is not ours to rule."

~from The Return of the King by J.R.R. Tolkien~

Let's Bust a Recap : The Optimist's Daughter

This was my first book by Eudora Welty and it's going to be a hard one to recap. There's a quote about Eudora Welty on the front flap of the dust jacket of this book:

"It is easy to praise Eudora Welty, but it is not so easy to analyze the elements in her work that make it so easy—and such a deep pleasure—to praise. To say that may, indeed, be the highest praise, for it implies that the work, at its best, is so fully created, so deeply realized, and formed with such apparent innocence that it offers only itself, in shining unity."

Robert Penn Warren said that, and his book, All the King's Men, has been sitting on my shelf unread for years. It's one of those in the canon of Southern literature that I feel compelled to read, but just haven't gotten to. Which puts him in the same category as Eudora Welty for me. I've been collecting Welty's work over the years for her place in that canon. She sits up there with Faulkner and Twain, and that's why her books are on my LIFE LIST. She was a brilliant woman who lived from 1909 to 2001, and she won about every award in the book. The Optimist's Daughter was her Pulitzer Prize winning short novel, and it was wonderful.

But why was it wonderful? That's where Robert Penn Warren's quote comes in. It's hard to analyze that. Originally published in 1969 as a long story in The New Yorker, Welty then revised it and published it as a book in 1972. On the surface, it's a story about a woman named Laurel Hand who comes home from Chicago to help her ailing father through the surgery and recovery of his eye. But after his surgery, which takes place in New Orleans during Mardi Gras, he continues to decline ultimately succumbing to death, and Laurel and her father's young second wife Fay have to take him home to Mount Salus, Mississippi to lay him to rest. 

But beneath the surface, Welty creates a rich sense of place in this short novel, and paints the reader a portrait of Southern life, of coming home to your people after a long absence. Being taken care of and loved. Coming to grips with your memories and identity. Dealing with grief and loss. All her characters jump off the page and right into the real world. Welty creates a beautiful melancholy in The Optimist's Daughter that must be experienced, not described. I can't say anything more than that it felt so authentic and real and lived. Welty truly does have a gift, and I'm looking forward to reading more of her work. 

Have you read any of Eudora Welty's work? Do you collect books from a specific genre that is important to you?

Let's Bust a Recap : The Unhoneymooners

I don't know if you can tell, but 2022 is officially the year I became a library user again. (Even though I still don't have my own library card.) Because I am now in a bona fide book club and my insistent appeals gentle requests to choose books from my unread shelf have gone unheeded by my book club friends, I have gotten very familiar with the online system of placing a book from the library on hold so that the nice library people (otherwise referred to by civilized human beings as "librarians") can find the book for me and have it ready at the counter to pick up when I go in. I'm sure you all have known this for years but it's a great system. I recommend libraries. 

But why am I babbling on about my fairly recent rediscovery of how great libraries are instead of getting on to the recap? Well, to be honest, The Unhoneymooners is holding on to my personal Worst Book of 2022 so far and I have very few positive things to say about it. Now that you know where I'm coming from, I guess we can get to it.

The Unhoneymooners written by the popular American duo Christina Hobbs and Lauren Billings was published in 2019 which means it was one of the books I saw all over Instagram for the very short amount of time that I had an Instagram account. So when my book club chose it for April, I recognized it immediately. I was not aware, however, that "Christina Lauren" was actually two people, and I am very curious how their writing process works. According to wikipedia—the source of all knowledge on the internet—the pair met in 2009 while writing fanfiction online and became coauthors in 2010. They've written a whole scad of books together, a bunch of which have made it onto the New York Times Bestsellers list, The Unhoneymooners in particular spending fourteen weeks there. 

So the premise is that Olive—who is perpetually unlucky—ends up taking her identical twin sister's dream, all-expenses-paid honeymoon to Hawaii after the entire wedding gets violent food poisoning at the reception. The only catch is, she has to take it with her bitter nemesis—the groom's brother Ethan. The two of them somehow manage to avoid the intense illness because of allergies and a general disdain for open buffets. 

And you see where this is going, right? Classic enemies-to-lovers trope. Except the reason Olive and Ethan were "enemies" in the first place is laughably flimsy at best. Like, when they met, she was eating cheese curds and he had a weird facial expression. Really?

So anyways, they have to go on this romantic vacation together and pretend to be married because of strict rules which state the trip is absolutely non-transferable and blah blah blah. (Because Olive's perpetually lucky twin Amy won the trip in a contest.) This doesn't present a problem for Olive and Ethan...until they run into Olive's new boss. And then Ethan's ex-girlfriend. 

The premise was fun and the book had a pretty promising start (minus the weak Olive/Ethan enemy scenario we're given), but it fell apart quite rapidly for me. Olive gives it up way too quickly so any romantic build was practically non-existent, and the writing went from funny to banal before we even made it a third of the way through. Every male character turned out to be a total scumbag, and my entire book club agreed that the ending was just plain awful. 

On top of that, the way sex and marriage were treated so casually and the pervasive crass language were absolute dealbreakers for me. This one was a definite miss. I'll give it one point for Olive's large Mexican-American family dynamic, but I cannot and would not recommend The Unhoneymooners to anyone, and I won't be checking out any more books by Christina Lauren. 

Have you read anything by Christina Lauren? Do you have a favorite romance trope? I'll admit: I'm a sucker for the fake dating trope. 

A Word for Wednesday

"Few other griefs amid the ill chances of this world 

have more bitterness and shame for a man's heart 

than to behold the love of a lady so fair and brave 

that cannot be returned."

~from The Return of the King by J.R.R. Tolkien~

Let's Bust a Recap : The Lunar Chronicles

I finished this series shortly before Cody and I finished The Lord of the Rings, and let me tell you: between the two, I came away with a serious book hangover. I've watched a lot more TV recently than I normally do because it's been hard to jump into something else.

If you had told me a couple months ago that I'd love a book about cyborgs and androids and a war between the Earth and the moon, I'd have laughed in your face. But here we are.

My BFF Christina got to select our book club's book for June, and she chose Cinder by Marissa Meyer. I was aware that this was the first in a series called the Lunar Chronicles, but I was under the impression that because these were fairytale retellings, each book in the series could stand alone. So I checked Cinder out from the library thinking it would be a one-and-done for me and came home in my blissful ignorance. 

My BFF Christina failed to mention that I would need Scarlet near at hand immediately upon finishing Cinder. And so on and so forth with Cress and Winter, the other two books in this series. Ergo, I found myself in great distress on a Friday night as I came to the end of Cinder and the library was closed. And then was equally distressed when I was able to check out Scarlet and Winter the next day, but had to wait for Cress to come in from another library in the interstate system. Because what if it didn't come in time??

We survived, obviously, but what I'm saying is: this series is seriously unputdownable, and if you are contemplating starting it, have all of them ready to go, for the love. And don't y'all even try to let Christina off the hook for this. This was not her first rodeo with The Lunar Chronicles. She knew. 

The Lunar Chronicles is a Young Adult dystopian series by Marissa Meyer which, if I had to sum them up in a few words, are like fairytales meeting Star Wars. 

And I'm here for them in a big way.

Cinder is the first book in the series and was originally published in 2012. The loose fairytale retelling is of Cinderella, but in Cinder our protagonist is a teenage cyborg mechanic living in the Eastern Commonwealth in the Third Era. A plague has been wreaking havoc on the Earth, and the prince-turned-emperor is having to make some tough decisions about forming a marriage alliance with the evil lunar Queen Levana. 

I mean, does it sound laughable? Yes. 

Did I love it? Also Yes. 

The second book, Scarlet, was published in 2013, and roughly parallels the fairytale of Little Red Riding Hood. In it, we are switching back and forth between Scarlet's quest to find her grandmother, and Cinder's escape from prison and subsequent fugitive life on the run from pretty much everyone in the universe. 

Oops. Did I forget to issue a spoiler warning? Consider this your notice for the rest of the post. I mean, I'm not giving up any of the big plot twists, but if you like to go into a series completely blind like I do, then it's high time you got out of here.

Eventually, Cinder and Scarlet end up on the same team together which leads us to the third novel...

...Cress. Published in 2014 and the novel mirroring the Rapunzel fairytale. We learn that a character we met back in Cinder has actually been trapped in a satellite doing hacking and spying for the evil Queen Levana, but she's more than ready and willing to join the side of justice and help Cinder if she can. This novel was just as fantastic as the other three but took me the longest to get through because we are switching back and forth between a lot of different perspectives which just slowed it down for me until they finally all ended up together. 

The series concludes in the epic 827 page Winter which was published in 2015 and parallels the Snow White fairytale. Winter is the winsome stepdaughter of evil Queen Levana, and she has slowly been going insane from the effort of refusing to use her Lunar gift of bioelectric manipulation. (I can't even get into it with y'all. You'll just have to read them to understand that.) When Cinder and her band of misfits dramatically show up on Luna to prevent the royal wedding between Queen Levana and Emperor Kai, Winter immediately and unquestioningly decides to help them in any way she can.

Oh. My. I can't even begin to tell y'all how much I got sucked into these books. I immediately added them to my amazon wishlist, and I guarantee these are ones I'll read again. The overarching story is excellent. The way Meyer brings these fairytales and characters together is flawless. The action and drama and romance are all on point. I couldn't get enough. It was very fun looking for the fairytale connections in each of the books, and I thought Meyer's parallels were strongest in Cress and Winter. Her writing is clever and funny, and I even texted my book club asking about another possible fairytale correlation that I was picking up on. (Iko as Pinocchio? Anyone? Anyone?!) My only bone to pick with Meyer is that I would have liked a couple more chapters in Winter to resolve Winter's personal storyline. I felt that in the culmination of everything, a few things I wanted to see happen with Winter (and her love interest, hey-o) were not settled in a satisfying way. Meyer has also published a collection of short stories entitled Stars Above about these characters, but as mush as I loved this series, I don't have very much interest in the short stories. I read one that was included in the copy of Cinder I got from the library, and it didn't do much for me.

Overall, would highly recommend these for a fun, slump-busting, escapist read. Once again, blessing all the stars that saved me from discovering these before they were all published and out in the world for me to zoom through as fast as I could, because if I was waiting a year in between for each new installment: Heaven help.

Have you read The Lunar Chronicles? Who's your favorite character from the series? Favorite couple? I'm here for the fandom. Let's talk all about it. What book surprised you with how much you enjoyed it?