Category Archives: The Great American Road Trip

The Princess of Las Vegas by Chris Bohjalian Rating: ★★★½ Publication Date: March 26, 2024 Genre: fiction Pages: 400 ReRead?: No Project: great American road trip A Princess Diana impersonator and her estranged sister find themselves drawn into a dangerous game of money and murder in this twisting tale of organized crime, cryptocurrency, and family secrets on the Las Vegas strip. Crissy Dowling has created a world that suits her perfectly. She passes her days by the pool in a private cabana, she splurges on ice cream but never gains an ounce, and each evening she transforms into a Princess, performing her musical cabaret inspired by the life of the late Diana Spencer. Some might find her strange or even delusional, an American speaking with a British accent, hair feathered into a style thirty years old, living and working in a casino that has become a dated trash heap. On top of that, Crissy’s daily diet of Adderall and Valium leaves her more than a little tipsy, her Senator boyfriend has gone back to his wife, and her entire career rests on resembling a dead woman. And yet, fans see her for the gifted chameleon she is, showering her with gifts, letters, and standing ovations night after night. But when Crissy’s sister, Betsy, arrives in town with a new boyfriend and a teenage daughter, and when Richie Morley, the owner of the Buckingham Palace Casino, is savagely murdered, Crissy’s carefully constructed kingdom comes crashing down all around her. A riveting tale of identity, obsession, fintech, and high-tech mobsters, The Princess of Las Vegas is an addictive, wildly original thriller from one of our most extraordinary storytellers.

Stop 5/50: Nevada

This was possibly the perfect book for my stop in Nevada. A book narrated by a Princess Diana impersonator, who performs in a seedy, off-strip casino, and gets mixed up with cryptocurrency-gangster bros.

I have somehow managed not to read a book by Bohjalian, even though he has written more than a dozen and several of them have been on my list for a long time. I enjoyed this one enough that I plan to continue to dip into his back list.

This book did have flaws. The middle section dragged. The main character, Crissy, and her sister, Betsy, made some frustratingly terrible decisions – even if they were necessary to move the plot forward. And the ending was abrupt and convoluted.

Overall, though, I enjoyed my visit to Las Vegas and felt that this book really nailed the slightly tawdry aesthetic of the less savory parts of the city.

Where I am going next: Utah, to begin my exploration of the Four Corners states: Utah, Arizona, New Mexico & Colorado.

Blackberry Winter
by Sarah Jio
Rating: ★★½
Publication Date: September 1, 2012
Genre: historical fiction
Pages: 286
ReRead?: No
Project: great American road trip

In 2011, Sarah Jio burst onto the fiction scene with two sensational novels--The Violets of March and The Bungalow. With Blackberry Winter--taking its title from a late-season, cold-weather phenomenon--Jio continues her rich exploration of the ways personal connections can transcend the boundaries of time.

Seattle, 1933. Single mother Vera Ray kisses her three-year-old son, Daniel, goodnight and departs to work the night-shift at a local hotel. She emerges to discover that a May-Day snow has blanketed the city, and that her son has vanished. Outside, she finds his beloved teddy bear lying face-down on an icy street, the snow covering up any trace of his tracks, or the perpetrator's.

Seattle, 2010. Seattle Herald reporter Claire Aldridge, assigned to cover the May 1 "blackberry winter" storm and its twin, learns of the unsolved abduction and vows to unearth the truth. In the process, she finds that she and Vera may be linked in unexpected ways...

Stop 3/50 was Seattle, Washington, in 2011 and 1933.

Unfortunately, this book was a disappointment, although I could absolutely see how it would work really well for a different reader.

I had two significant issues with the book, and both are related to the dual-timeline narrative structure. I find that this type of book is very hit-and-miss for me. There are books where I feel like it really works – Kate Morton’s books leap to mind for me here. But, there are also many more books and authors where I don’t feel like they really pulled it off.

This one fell into that category for me. Often when I read a dual-timeline book, I find myself absorbed in one of the timelines – almost always the historical one – and much less interested in the other one. In this book, I really wasn’t interested in either timeline. I selected it because I felt like it had a lot of potential, but when it came right down to it, Jio didn’t succeed in making me care about either of the main characters. Sitting here, writing this review, I can’t even remember the name of the present-day narrator and I just finished the book about nine hours ago.

The other major issue I had with the book was its “Lifetime Movie of the Week” quality of using massive coincidences to tie the two timelines together. These elements, to me, were simply laughably convenient and entirely unbelievable.

Seattle is a metropolitan area of 4 million people and the whole “hey, my bestie’s aunt just happens to have incredibly crucial information about an unsolved abduction from the 1930’s that I, a newspaper reporter, am looking into” was too much for my credulity to bear. It would have been fine – great, even – for a reporter to have solved an unsolved abduction without needing to incorporate that level of intertwined absurdity. I think that authors do that to try to heighten the investment of the reader, but for me, those sorts of machinations really take me out of a story and make me doubt the author’s confidence in her storytelling ability.

And, as a bit of an aside, another thing that bothered me about the book was the way that the author used the fact that a blackberry was growing on a grave as some sort of folky metaphor for being specially chosen. The thing is, though, as someone living in the PNW, I am all too aware blackberries are an invasive weed here. There is nothing selective about where blackberries grow – they grow fucking everywhere, as anyone whose neighbor has frustratingly allowed a huge goddamned blackberry bramble to take over their property line would know. Because it is a constant battle to avoid your (ahem, my) property turning into a replica of Sleeping Beauty’s castle once they have a foothold. I am speaking from real life irritating experience here. So, even though this is a really small thing, it just annoyed the hell out of me. I kept wanting to yell at the author “Trillium. Trillium is the metaphor you are looking for here…” even though it didn’t tie in with the whole blackberry theme.

I did enjoy the Seattle setting. I live in the Portland area, and I have always loved Seattle, and would spend more time there if my husband didn’t have such an irrational aversion to the University of Washington from his time as an Oregon Duck. So, even though the book was a bit of a dud for me, I enjoyed hanging out at Pike Place Market and other Seattle hot spots for a few hours.

Next destination is Idaho!

Girls and their Horses
by Eliza Jane Brazier
Rating: ★★★½
Publication Date: June 6, 2023
Genre: fiction
Pages: 400
ReRead?: No
Project: great American road trip

Set in the glamorous, competitive world of showjumping, a novel about the girls who ride, their cutthroat mothers, and a suspicious death at a horse show

When the nouveau riche Parker family moves to an exclusive community in the heart of Southern California, they believe it’s their chance at a fresh start. Heather Parker is determined to give her daughters the life she never had—starting with horses.

She signs them up for riding lessons at Rancho Santa Fe Equestrian, where horses are a lifestyle. Heather becomes a “Barn Mom,” part of a group of wealthy women who hang at the stables, drink wine, and prepare their daughters for competition.

It’s not long before the Parker family is fully enmeshed in the horse world—from mean girl cliques to barn romance and dark secrets. With the end of summer horse show fast approaching, the pressure is on, and these mothers will stop at nothing to give their daughters everything they deserve.

Before the summer is over, lies will turn lethal, accidents will happen, and someone will end up dead.

I decided to start my road trip in California because there is no better start to the Great American Road Trip than California, unless it’s New York, and I decided on California.

I ran across this book because I have been mainlining a podcast with Anne Bogel called What Should I Read Next. She also runs an internet “book club” called the Modern Mrs. Darcy book club, which is reading this book for May. It’s $15 a month to join, but I decided to go ahead and pay for a month to figure out if it is worth my time, which is where I ran across this book.

I’m not sure if I loved it or hated it, but I read it in one day.

It’s definitely a modern thriller mystery. Told from the perspective of various characters, we start after the murder, but spend about 2 pages there and then go backwards, to four months before. And the author does not fill the reader in on the identity of the victim. Until about 95%.

I spent most of the book periodically looking up and asking my dog “WHO THE FUCK IS DEAD.”

I thought I had an inkling at about 70%, but turns out I was wrong. And because this is a modern thriller, all of the characters suck. Like, I hated them all. Maybe I liked one. No more than two. Probably only one.

I will say that my daughter was a horse girl, and she competed at the 4H horse fair, but her experience in a barn in Oregon was worlds away from the cutthroat world and million dollar horses of this book. Thank god, because these people had more money than sense. Or character. But I was thoroughly engaged, and I was wrong about the ending, and that’s satisfying.

In the summertime, I often enjoy coming up with a theme for my reading. Past themes have included Summer of Spies (courtesy of a bookish friend) and the 20 Crimes of Summer. For the past few years, I haven’t had the energy to indulge myself in any sort of a theme.

This year, though, feels different. It is my first full summer as a retiree, and I am having a great time with my reading right now. I’m already 110 books in for 2024, 33 books ahead of schedule to finish the year at 204, which was my reading goal.

So, I decided that a summer reading theme would be a great idea for this year.

So, here it is: the Great American Road Trip.

My plan is to read as close to 50 books – one set in each U.S. state – as I can between May 16 and the end of summer on August 31.

I actually started the themed reading a few days ago, & have already made a virtual trip through four states: California, Oregon (my home state), Washington and Idaho. I’ll be getting posts up for those books in the next day or so.

Even though the four states I’ve visited so far are geographically adjacent, I’m not going to be travelling in any specific order.  I have already identified some library books that I’ll be reading, and my plan at this point is to hit a few more western states, and then I’ll be (virtually) flying to Florida and renting an imaginary car to explore the Southern US.

This is going to be a mood reading project. I am going to try to find books that have a strong sense of place attached, but all genres are fair game. There may be a few states where I linger for more than one book, if that is where my mood takes me. And while I’m hoping to hit all 50 states, if I find myself growing tired of this project, I will strand myself wherever I am and move on to other reading without a second thought!