Issey considers himself a masterful and elegant thief. He’s just as meticulous with his lockpicking tools as he is with his ankle boots and slimming turtlenecks. He’s also easily confused, stupid, and maybe not so good at being a thief. Unforeseen circumstances bring him back to his childhood town, the wonderland that is Vermont’s Bell River Valley. With the holidays on the horizon, he sets his sights on the town’s open doors. But just as his thieving begins, with accompanying shapewear and accessories, something unexpected happens—he falls backwards into becoming the town hero. The sudden hero role ushers in wealth, adoration, and a love interest so mysterious he hardly knows her name. However, before he can get too cozy, an uninvited associate from his past reappears—as does every last item Issey has ever stolen. Second Pocket First shoehorns comedy, crime, and small-town charm into this delightful romp as Issey must decide between old habits and a sudden devotion to the town’s goodwill.
Gregory Grosvenor grew up in Ansbach, Germany. He moved to the US, earning an MFA from Old Dominion University. For two decades, he has taught writing and the art of the short story at various colleges in Virginia, Maryland, and Massachusetts. Grosvenor currently lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts with his three cats, Dinah, Theo, and Bramlet Abercrombie
My thoughts: Required to go home and sort out his mother’s house after she remarries and leaves town, useless thief Issey is stuck in Vermont, where his brother and sister-in-law still live, no car unless he steals one, one old friend he’s not actually that keen on, not much to do. So he starts taking things, stupid, little things, like a lighter, a bracelet, a diary.
Then he’s accused of taking three horses from the local riding school. Except he knows he didn’t do that particular job. After a very confusing night in the snow, he somehow finds the horses and is suddenly the town hero. Except he has no idea how he did that.
The local sheriff is still suspicious of him, especially after he starts “finding” things people have lost, like it’s a magical power. Then his old boss shows up and things just keep getting stranger. Poor Issey has no idea why things keep happening to him, or what his sister-in-law keeps doing showing up at the house. He’s confused, not very bright and everything he returns to its owner, has started reappearing too. What is he going to do?
Quirky, funny and a bit confusing, so you feel like Issey, this was an interesting read about a man who really should find something he’s actually good at.
*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in this blog tour, but all opinions remain my own.
To protect their lavish allowances, four charismatic sisters in their thirties try to seduce, cajole, and mislead their less well-off neighbor Benjamin, who their father has hired to investigate an attempt to smother him while he was in the hospital recovering from a car crash. Their feckless brother responds by threatening Benjamin with a shotgun, while their socialite mother falsely confesses to the crime.
Trying to dominate everyone is their father, a wheeling, dealing, helicopter-flying entrepreneur who is afraid he might have hallucinated the smothering, even more afraid that it might have been real, and terrified that he might be losing control of his family and fortune. Desperate, he implements a devious and dastardly scheme . . .
Played out on the fashionable Connecticut shore and Manhattan’s Upper East Side, the shenanigans of the entitled rich don’t prevent Benjamin from finding the truth, and maybe even love.
“A knotted and frequently engaging tale of deception and family secrets.” – Kirkus Reviews
“In his literary debut, Leonard Orr demonstrates that he is a superb writer of spare, precise, and compelling prose. At the core of Entitled is hyperwealth and how it embroils a family. Like the The Great Gatsby, Orr’s gripping novel brings romance, selfishness, familial enmity, irony (even a touch of humor), and terrible tragedy to these lives of privilege. I highly recommend it.” – Peter Carry, writer, editor
“The twisted plot of this surprising whodunnit is a hunt for who didn’t do it-who it was that tried but failed to kill the rich and ruthless old patriarch. From the start, however, those suspects include even the old man’s loved ones. Set among the strivers and connivers of New York’s upper 1%, Orr’s engaging tale is a feast of family dysfunction, privilege, and secrets.” – William C. Rempel, bestselling author of The Gambler and At the Devil’s Table
“This is an intelligent, strong, intricate narrative, carried along by characters who are well drawn and complete, at least for the purposes they play in this narrative. While Benjamin claims much of the spotlight, Charlie Cantling’s presence is remarkable in its various roles – catalyst, antagonist, egomaniacal patriarch, with personal traits that all point to meanness and manipulation. Beyond that, four distinctive sisters, a woebegone brother, and Benjamin’s own brother come across as the various components of a complex mélange, each with his or her own psychological damage stemming from Charlie’s machinations. There’s a sophistication to all this that is quite refreshing, and very well done.” – Greg Fields, author of The Bright Freight of Memory
Leonard H. Orr has written for The Village Voice, The New York Times, and other publications. A graduate of Swarthmore College, he has also been an editor and investment manager, where he’s been a witness to the ambition and entitlement and sorrow his novel portrays.
He lies in a hospital bed, bandaged to the nines and attached to the latest instruments of artificial life. Images flicker before him, and fluttery lines on a video screen vouch for brain activity, but few would call it thinking. In his fractured world he doesn’t hear the beep of machines nor feel the stab of needles. He doesn’t remember instructing his driver to stay ahead of the Friday night traffic before it peaked. He doesn’t recall the rise in the road that hid the jam ahead, doesn’t recall the curse of his driver when the car reached the top of the hill, the scream of the brakes, the veering off, the tumbling.
The police have measured tire marks, a coroner examined the driver’s body, and chemists have parsed the dead man’s blood. They found a routine case of too much velocity and not enough time and redirected to more opaque disasters.
Visitors to the hospital are where the murk sets in. Men Charlie Cantling hired for the corporation—and a few women—arrive, look grim, and muse aloud about his chances and, in silence, about their jobs. They’d love to redo the pyramid of who reports to whom, each with a different design, but ancient arrangements leave them neutered and send them to lunch with headhunters. Real power resides with Cantling’s children, who arrive bringing a minimum of tears and some aptitude for scheming. With Charlie likely dying, they’ll need cold blood for decisions to come, and over the years, with their father’s help, they’d acquired it. Some have seen the family lawyer, who advises inaction and waiting for further advice. Some, whom Cantling would call them ungrateful, have lawyers of their own.
When he’s little changed day to day, the flow of visitors thins, for this protracted dying is somewhere between nuisance and tragedy, and doctors still can’t restore the dead. Then the surprises begin. His bones begin to mend, his limbs and organs start to function, he has moments of near-lucidity. The doctors admit he has chances, but early progress is crucia, and his may have been too slow. He’s in his late sixties and his health was good, but setbacks or stagnation are still major risks. The most reasonable hope is he’ll stabilize, neither paralyzed nor mobile, not numb and not alert, sometimes sensible, often not, born to command and commanding nothing.
In his lucid moments the doctors warn him: because of drugs and trauma, you can’t trust what you think you know, can’t tell the real from the imagined. About his brain’s wilder renderings—wingless flying, jumps in time, cameos of the dead—he agrees. One scene from the present is too coherent to shrug off and so vivid that in druggy variation it repeats again and again. He’s on his back in his hospital bed and half-awake. Suddenly, there’s a pillow on his face, a strangely heavy heap of fluff pressing on nose and mouth. He fights. The weight feels huge, relentless. He struggles to breathe but sucks in fabric and stuffing. He’s suffocating. His hands rip at forearms above him. I won’t let these bastards win, he thinks. Never. He writhes and swings his head, finds a pocket of air—and breathes and steels himself for further struggle.
The weight lifts. “Tough old guy,” whispers a voice he can’t identify. “The man’s mind doesn’t work but his body keeps fighting. We’ll have to find another way.” “It would be the right thing,” someone whispers, “for him”. “Yeah,” the first voice whispers, “for him and everybody else.
As his strength returns and his drug-induced delirium subsides, he notifies the authorities and calls for guards and cameras. He exults and he rages. Phantoms or not, the whisperers have lost. Their chances have died, and he hasn’t.
It takes him weeks to fully recognize his mistake.
My thoughts: This is a blackly comic novel about an obscenely wealthy family fighting over control of the family company and therefore the money, even though the patriarch isn’t actually dead. Yet.
Their unfortunate neighbour, Benjamin, gets dragged into the family drama, partly because helicopter wielding Charlie wants to buy his house, but also because he suspects one of his family tried to finish him off while he was lying in his hospital bed and he wants Benjamin to find out who it was.
But the Cantlings are all liars and deeply divided, they try to either get Benjamin on their side or threaten him, or both. He can’t get out of it, his boss is very keen to keep Charlie as a client, his brother keeps getting in the way (he may or may not have slept with multiple Cantling sisters), he’s tired of being threatened at gun point, and running out of ways to get the Cantlings to answer his questions.
I really enjoyed the absolutely over the top nonsense this privileged family got up to, talk about sibling rivalry. And the honey farm was hilarious. Benjamin was empathetic and stuck in the worst situation of his life. Nothing he did made anything better for himself, and he just couldn’t get out of it, even after ending up in the hospital. Very entertaining.
*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in this blog tour, but all opinions remain my own.
Germaine Kiecke was a foundling, an orphan. Now she is a successful art academic who defines herself by her profession and prefers to experience the world through art and an augmented reality game called Happy Family. But when the artist Tom Hannah, the creative force behind the game, moves to Spain, surrounds himself with high walls, three large dogs, and a runaway who teaches him to think like a tree, his existential melt-down threatens all Germaine holds dear.
James has written two novels, The Wrong Story and An Other’s Look, and a novella, Fizz. He has had published a number of prize-winning short stories and a travelogue of his journey through Central America. He has a Master of Studies in Creative Writing and is a member of the Society of Authors, English PEN and the International Flann O’Brien Society. He is an occasional presenter on Frome FM’s On-Air Book Group, a contributor to Carers UK’s creative writing campaigns and was an ambassador for a Shooting Star – a charity for babies, children and young people with life-limiting conditions.
My thoughts:
This was a strange, darkly comic novel. Everyone in it is slightly unhinged, most of the plot takes place in a depressing Spanish village, where the characters essentially act appallingly apart from Germaine, who observes all of this chaos with a sort of detachment, despite being the nexus in some ways for all of the people being there.
Despite this, I actually really enjoyed this book, crazy subplots and all. The characters are well drawn, I could really see them all running around in the hills, driving clapped out cars and being chased by an assortment of dogs.
ramblingmads 