Red Red Whine

Hi guys!   I am back from vacation and positively overwhelmed by the thought of filling everyone in on everything and whatnot.  So, until I muster up the energy, I will simply say that it was lovely.  Divine, actually.  I did NOT fulfill my dream of seeing an anteater in the wild, but all the monkeys and macaws and iguanas and butterflies made up for it.  As did the fruity freezy drinks.  Much fun was had, I must say.

In the meantime, I owe you guys a book review.  I hope my friends at HarperCollins don’t stone me for taking so long to do this one since I probably read the book a month ago (and have read several since), and I also hope you don’t hold my delay in reviewing it against the book itself.  The book is The Red Leather Diary: Reclaiming a Life Through the Pages of a Lost Journal, by Lily Koppel.

The concept is fantastic.  The author is a journalist with the New York Times who finds a dumpster full of old trunks outside her apartment building one day and finds herself compelled to dive on in and rummage through for goodies.  Along with some awesome vintage clothing, she finds an old 5-year diary that is written by a teenage girl from the years of 1929 to 1934.  Lily manages to open the lock, reads the diary, and manages to find the book’s original owner, a woman named Florence Wolfson (who is now retired, widowed, and living in South Florida.  The two form a friendship, flesh out the stories, and this book is born.

In many ways, I adored this book.   To begin with, I really adored the concept.  It reminded me of an unlikely friendship that I had for a while myself, when I befriended an older woman who sat next to me on a flight home from Dublin that made us both miss our connecting flight in Newark, causing us to spend the night in a random hotel in Newark on the airline’s dime.  My friend, whose name was Virginia, had never traveled alone before and was only doing so because the airline had offered free tickets to one passenger in exchange for getting bumped from an earlier flight to the flight I was on, and she boldly decided to send her husband home on his own so she could get free tickets for her son.  We got rooms next to each other, had dinner together, evacuated for a fire alarm together, and took the next morning’s flight home together, and in that time she regaled me with stories of her life’s adventures.  We stayed in touch through letters for many years, and although we’ve lost touch now, that glimpse that she gave me is something that I still treasure.

So, I suppose it was pretty much set in stone that I would love Florence and Lily’s friendship in a near-and-dear-to-my-heart sort of way.  I LOVED reading about Florence’s life and about that time period in Manhattan.  Florence is fantastic, which certainly helps.  She’s adventurous and rebellious and defiant and brilliant.

Still, I wanted to love this book even more.  I don’t know if it moved too slowly or if the format was a little off or what, but something was missing.  Still, it’s hard to pronounce The Red Leather Diary as anything but intriguing.

What have you all been reading while I’ve been away, hmmm?