Remarkable Creatures by Tracy Chevalier

I just finished reading the latest book by the author of The Girl With One Pearl Earring (one of my favorite books even though NOTHING happens!). Remarkable Creatures is about Mary Anning, the woman who discovered the first dinosaur fossil in England in the early 1800s, creating a major impact in the areas of science and religion. Because she is a woman and a member of the working class she is not initially given recognition for her discovery. Lord Henley, the local gentry who buys Mary's "crocodile", actually says, "Mary Anning is a worker...a female. She is a spare part." when confronted about taking credit for her discovery. Hard for us to understand today, but at that time women truly were treated as second-class citizens.
One of the things that I really liked about this book, was the different "voices" that Chevalier uses for the two women, Mary Anning and Elizabeth Philpott. Because she uses different conversational styles and word choices based on their social and educational backgrounds, the reader never has any difficulty knowing which of the women is telling each part of the story.
Chevalier is a master of creating stories around historical information (see also The Lady and the Unicorn, another great book). She brings her characters to life and, at the same time, shares information that you didn't learn in school.

Object Lessons by Anna Quindlen

This is the first book Anna Quindlen (author of Blessings) wrote. It's about an Irish Italian family and is set in a suburb of New York City in the 1960's. The story is told from the perspective of several family members, but primarily Maggie Scanlan. The story takes place the summer Maggie is 12 and is about the year, actually the summer, everything changed. Chief among those changes is that her grandfather John Scanlan, who rules the entire Scanlan clan through manipulation and sheer force of will has a stroke. Maggie's father, Tommy, is the only one of John Scanlan's children to openly defy his father by marrying an Italian woman and living in a home he chose and pays for himself, unlike his siblings who live in homes selected (and sometimes paid for) by their father.

Over the course of the summer, a series of events cause Maggie and her lifelong best friend Debbie to drift apart. Maggie's mother, Connie, discovers that she's pregnant with her fifth child! Connie reconnects with an old high school friend, Joey, who is overseeing construction of a new subdivision in the area. When he discovers she can't drive, Joey offers to teach her. Meanwhile John Scanlan hands Tommy the key to the new home he's bought for Tommy and his family.

Quindlen does a good job of depicting the 60's, including the social standards of the time, and the cultural setting of the strong Irish Catholic family. The one thing I find a bit irritating about her writing style is that she'll be in a particular scene, then she segues into a reminscence by one of the characters about something that happened to the point that when she goes back to the original scene, you've forgotten when and where you were. (This was her first book, so perhaps she got better at this over time.)

Overall this was an enjoyable read with fairly satisfying resolutions for most of the characters, sometimes surprising in the case of Maggie's grandmother Scanlan, sometimes comeuppance for her bitchy cousin Monica.