I’ve mentioned my approach to book reviews at the outset of my 2019 reviews, and while that statement remains rather accurate, I’ll add a few more thoughts for clarification. In general, a novel I find to be reasonably well executed gets three stars, regardless of whether I enjoy it or not. To get more stars, a novel needs to be exceptional in terms of character, plot, or writing craft (i.e., literary merit). While I tend to engage better with novels that have literary merit, I have rather traditional tastes. I respond best to novels that maintain what John Gardner called a “vivid and continuous dream.” As such, novels that employ innovative structures, or which allow the point of view to jump from character to character within a single scene or section, or which do anything else to throw me out of my dream state get a lower rating. Fortunately for me, there are many novels that stick to the Gardner approach, but unfortunately I am frequently misled into a mediocre book by a sterling review I come across on the internet or in a magazine. And of course, the blurbs on book jackets are almost never accurate. Nevertheless, I keep reading. My ratings for books I’ve reviewed during 2025 are listed immediately below, with the full review of each following thereafter.
Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout 3.5*
Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner 5*
Madwoman by Chelsea Bieker 4.5*
Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout
In this novel, the author explores a number of little incidents involving characters who live in Crosby and Shirley Falls, Maine. Central to all of these incidents is Bob Burgess, a retired attorney. The little dramas all involve ordinary, imperfect people who, aside from Matt and Diana Beach, live ordinary lives. Even the stories of Matt and Diana, who are victims of horribly abusive parents, don’t generate much in the way of tension or drama because the events that could be dramatic happen off stage. This is a quiet book.
According to the blurb from the Boston Globe noted on the back cover of the novel, “no novelist working today has Strout’s extraordinary capacity for radical empathy, for seeing the essence of people beyond reductive categories, for uniting us without sentimentality.” While there is truth to this description, I am nevertheless not one of this novels fans, for a couple of reasons.
Character Problems
First, some of the characters, especially Bob and Lucy, seem exceptionally simple-minded for adults who have lived long and successful lives. Consider for example:
“Oh Bob,” and she looked at him as she said this; her voice was quiet with understanding. And then she said, with excitement in her voice, “Look at the dandelions, Bob, look at them!”
And so he did. And they were just dandelions. He said nothing.
Lucy tapped him on his arm. “But, Bob, they’re beautiful! Don’t you just love them? I always remember when I was young and they would show up in the grass by the side of the dirt road we lived on.”
He stopped walking, and so did she. “Lucy, what exactly is it you like so much about these dandelions?”
She said, “Well, they’re yellow, and they grow in green grass, and the combination of green and yellow—Oh, I just love it!”
He stood looking at the area where the dandelions grew, and then he saw what she meant: their spots of yellow in the green. “Got it,” he said. And they kept walking. (p189)
Admittedly I have not read all of the novels involving these characters, so I probably missed the one where Lucy gets a lobotomy. And yes, that makes her rather unique in the pantheon of novel characters, but does not make her interesting.
When Simplicity Becomes Simple-Minded
Toward the end of the novel we come across what are apparently the novel’s key insights about human life. First, when Ms. Hasselbeck tells Bob about her daughter-in-law’s extra-marital affair and then her own, he says, “It’s just life, Mrs. Hasselbeck, that’s all it is. Life.” (320)
Shortly thereafter, when Lucy is visiting Olive, some leaves fall from a tree outside Olive’s window.
“Why are the green leaves falling?” Lucy asked, and Olive, glancing out the window, said, “Who knows?”
“Exactly, who knows anything,” Lucy said. (324-5)
Lastly we find Lucy and Olive sharing wisdom. Lucy tells Olive about a writer who discovered that she felt the same way about her widowed great aunt as she does about her new boyfriend: “I love her the same way I love my boyfriend.” Lucy goes on: “Love comes in so many different forms, but it is always love. If it is love, then it is love.” Olive then reduces the idea to “Love is love” and the novel ends with her thinking this painfully simplistic thought. (326)
In sum, much of what passes for deep human insight struck me as simplistic ideas that are poorly thought out and not particularly true.
Craft Matters
My other concern about this novel is with the writing, with is rife with authorial intrusions and muddled point-of-view. For example, when Margaret calls Bob to tell him she might lose her job, he tells her he’ll be home as soon as he can. Then we read: “When he stepped inside his home Bob saw Margaret on the couch; she was still sobbing—oh she was sobbing!—and her dress…” The phrase ‘oh she was sobbing!’ with its exclamation point struck me as an exceptionally poor stab at conveying emotion. The fact that the author is trying to represent the pitiful nature of Bob’s mind is no excuse. Then comes more of the same: “And Margaret herself looked terrible, her face splotched and puffy, the poor, poor thing.” Yeech. (229)
Immediately after this comes one of many authorial intrusions: “And yet, as is often the case, those of us who need love so badly at a particular moment can be off-putting to those who want to love us, and to those who do love us.” (189) This, I understand, is just the author’s style: she intentionally mixes in her intrusions to highlight whatever “truth” of human life she is illustrating. To my way of thinking, however, it’s an author’s job to reveal a character’s inner life through the individual’s words and actions, not by inserting descriptions and explanations that tell the reader what is going on.
Charm to the Rescue
Nevertheless, and despite my major reservations, I have to say that this novel has some charm, perhaps because it reflects great caring for the characters, and also because the characters are all sympathetic. Indeed, while there may be misunderstandings, as between Jim and his son, there is no villain in sight, no antagonist. This is life lite.
As I read, I noticed several times how a situation brought to mind the stories of Sherwood Anderson, who also wrote of the lives of simple people in small town America. Those are the stories to which I would direct anyone interested in reading a truly masterful illustration of the lives of ordinary individuals. 3.5*
Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner
Once again I was bemused by the startling inaccuracies in the blurb on this novel’s jacket. Its description of the protagonist as a “cunning woman” is arguable, since Sadie comes across more as promiscuous than cunning. Calling her a “spy” is partly accurate, but both of the exploits she describes in the book end in failure. Lastly, a “propulsive page-turner” the book is not—nor does the author intend it to be. About the only accuracy in this jacket blurb is its reference to dark humor, with which the novel is wonderfully endowed.
The plot of the novel is simple. Sadie, a sort of undercover agent for powerful corporations, is hired by some unidentified private French entity to spy on Le Moulin, a rural commune whose members are suspected of being eco-terrorists. If she can’t find any evidence of their intent to commit a crime, her assignment is to manipulate them into one. As it turns out, her manipulation is simplistic: she thinks she has convinced a commune member to perform a violent act during a local fair merely by suggesting it, and is then surprised when at the critical moment he refuses, telling her, “Are you nuts?” (388)
To Spy or Not To Spy
Although she takes her assignment seriously, Sadie has other interests which may contribute to her lack of effectiveness. One is sex, which she most often uses as a tool to manipulate various men. For all of her acts of deception she feels no regret, and in this regard she struck me as largely but not entirely a sociopath. At one point she says of the Moulinards, “You people are not real to me. No one is.” (358) But elsewhere she mentions feeling a “twinge of guilt” for coaxing an innocent boy into buying 500 pounds of fertilizer for a prospective bomb, a purchase that she knew could land him in prison for twenty years. (68) Nevertheless, throughout much of the novel Sadie acts as if encased in a hard shell through which honest feelings do not penetrate.
The Attraction of Neanderthals
Even more attractive to Sadie than sex, however, are the historical lessons and social philosophy offered by Bruno, a one-time radical who has given up the fight against capitalism. These commentaries come to us principally in the form of emails from Bruno to the members of Le Moulin, the agrarian commune, which Sadie has conveniently managed to hack. Initially these emails discuss certain characteristics of Neanderthal man that Bruno thinks might have been superior to those of homo sapiens. His studies of Neanderthals are one of the reasons he has rejected modern society and lives in a cave.
Throughout the book Sadie is captivated by Bruno’s emails. As the novel approaches its climax at the local fair, Sadie reads Bruno’s last emails, in which he questions whether his understanding of the proper way to live has been correct. His questioning has been stimulated by his growing suspicion that the people who created the cave paintings in this region of France (and elsewhere) were not depicting animals as targets of their hunt, but creating star maps “meant to anticipate the movement of the heavens.” (361) The importance of stars to Bruno becomes clear when he says, “When you look at stars, you merge into the flow of time, the right-now and the before and the to-come.” (366)
At the very end, Bruno challenges and rejects his prior belief that life in Neanderthal times was superior to modern life: “Was it better before? I honestly can’t say, he wrote. In looking back, what I really wanted was to know how we navigate with the knowledge we have. What future do we imagine for our present?” He concludes, “In my reassessments, he said, I have lost my bearings, and I will have to find new ones.”
Sadie’s Redemption
As she reads this last email of Bruno’s, Sadie is deeply touched by his abandonment of everything he believed, and his recognition that he needed to rebuild his beliefs. She is moved to address Bruno aloud, leading to a passage suggesting that she has broken out of her hard shell:
“The act of speaking, of hearing a voice, my own, in this empty house, pulled some kind of stopper. It let something into the room, some kind of feeling. The feeling was mine, even as I observed it, watched myself as if from above, from up near the ceiling of this room, a room I would soon leave forever, as I would leave this false life.
“There was a girl below, on the bed, in this room.
“She had tears on her face, this girl. And her face was my face, and her tears were my tears.”
To me this novel is less one about a spy infiltrating eco-terrorists than about a 34 year-old woman finding and redeeming herself. At the end of the novel Sadie is changed. Bruno’s honesty in recognizing his failure has helped her recognize her own. She quits her job and retires to a small village on the Spanish coast. There she lays on her veranda, “my star deck”, and looks up at the night sky. What she will do next is unclear, except for the fact that she turns down the offers for spy work that come her way.
A Fine Literary Achievement
There is much more that could be discussed regarding this novel. The writing itself is of a high literary order. I particularly enjoyed Sadie’s dry wit and dark humor. In sum, it’s important to read Creation Lake NOT as a “propulsive” page turner, but as one where the pages must be turned slowly, so that the reader can enjoy the depth of the ideas and the quality of the prose that the author offers. Please see my other reviews at www.robertschladale.com
Madwoman by Chelsea Bieker
Intense – this was the word that came up for me as I was reading this novel. More intense than any novel I’ve read since Everybody Knows (Jordan Harper) although in that case it was the author’s riveting language that provided the intensity while here it is the interior life of Clove.
Clove is an absolute maniac throughout much of the novel in her fearful protectiveness for her children and her devotion to health foods as a kind of armor against life’s never ending dangers. What distinguishes Clove is that the biggest threat she faces is one she can’t control or escape from because it resides inside her in the form of a childhood trauma. In the novel, she is finally forced to face it and figure out how to deal with it.
In terms of plot, Madwoman has little, but the reader doesn’t miss it. The character study of Clove is riveting. I was amazed at the way in which the author could portray the traumatic details of Clove’s young life in gripping detail for page after page and never repeat either events or their impact. Those remembrances plus her portrayal of Clove’s desperation and paranoia provide the reader with a powerful picture of the terror of living with a violent man, in her case her father.
The Long-lived Effects of Abuse
The novel drives home the fact that the effects of abuse remain long after an individual escapes that abuse. In Clove’s case she is living a comfortable middle class life in a nice Portland suburb but describes herself as living a double life. To all the world she is a happily married mother with two young children. To herself, however, she is living a life of lies, constantly seeking escape in online shopping and so crippled by her fear of being found out that she is unable to do the writing that insists she wants to do.
Abuse Is Not Simple
A highlight of the novel is that it makes clear that the relationships among this family were complicated; it was not a simple situation of a bad husband always abusing his family. On occasion Spider-Dick would do something nice for Alma and Clove, such as take them to the beach. For this and other reasons Alma would make excuses for him when he was violent. Indeed, despite his violence, Alma loved him and he loved her and Clove.
The Wheel of Love
Similarly Clove expresses on multiple occasions that she loved her father. After Clove escapes from her abusive home, her first lover, upon hearing of the things her father did, calls him scum. But Clove stands up for the man: “Scum didn’t seem to account for the good things about my father, which I found myself daydreaming about now that the immediate danger he imposed was gone—his humor, his charm, the way he sang “Blue Suede Shoes,” whirling me around the apartment.” The fact that nothing is simple, nothing is black and white in these relationships, rings true, and renders the novel that much more powerful.
If I had any quibble with this book, it was the way Celine showed up alive and well, and even more so the extent to which she cared for Alma, took up her cause, and sought out Clove even though she was living 700 miles away in Portland. I imagine all of this would have been more credible if Clove had only moved to, say, Sacramento, which would have made the task of finding her more reasonable for Celine. Despite this quibble, I also felt that Celine’s appearance worked well to bring the novel to a satisfying conclusion. In any event, this is my only concern with this powerful novel—the resolution to which was, by the way, both innovative and completely believable.
Entitlement by Rumaan Alam
Entitlement is the story of Brooke Orr, an attractive young black woman who quit her teaching job after nine years because it was not fulfilling. As the new employee at the Asher and Carol Jaffee Foundation, which has been established to give away roughly $4 billion to worthy causes, her exposure to wealth, and to Asher Jaffee, helps her realize not only what she wants out of life, but how to get it—or so she thinks.
The novels opens with a wonderfully well-written first chapter that introduces us to Brooke and makes amply clear her determination, ending as it does with this image of her intent on getting to work: “Brooke, all sinew, all muscle, all focus, ignored the pain and the sweat and, at Twenty-sixth Street, the oncoming traffic, because she had a place to be, she had work to do.”
The Wandering Middle
Unfortunately, after an excellent start the novel spends many chapters and pages on scenes that introduce characters but don’t accomplish much else. None of these characters plays more than a minor role in the novel; aside from her friend Kim, had these characters not appeared, the reader would not have missed them. This novel is solely about Brooke and, to a lesser extent, Asher Jaffee. Most of the scenes with other characters felt to me like a writer treading water.
Although I had a general idea of what the book was about from a review and the book jacket, I kept waiting for a plot to take shape. I finally felt that the novel was going somewhere when Brooke misuses her corporate credit card to buy clothes and other goodies for herself. But that occurs on page 170—a long time to wait for a plot clue.
Point of View, Anyone?
I followed this novel all the way through out of curiosity and because, toward the end, when Brooke began to act out her philosophy of going hard for what she wants, it became interesting. However, for much of the novel I was majorly disturbed by the author’s erratic switching of point of view. For example, on page 73, when Asher and Brooke are talking, the POV switches whenever the one speaking switches. Weirdly, instead of letting the reader interpret whathe speaker means from his or her words, we get a blurb of interiority that tells us how to interpret it.
While switching POV back and forth between the two speakers in a conversation is reasonably easy to follow, elsewhere there are multiple POVs mushed together. For example, on page 144, we get four POVs within the course of a few sentences:
“If that’s how you feel, maybe you can help out. As I assume you’re helping with the aforementioned wedding.” Brooke leaned back into the downy sofa. Her point had been made. Some barrier had been crossed. They were so keen for Rachel to be a part of the family, then let her hear.
“Look,” began Alex, peacemaker, the easygoing one.
“I don’t think that’s fair at all,” Maggie said. She hated how often things came down to money.
Rachel busied herself with the cheese straws. She felt hot in her cheeks.
Because of the way the POV jumped around, I frequently felt that I was losing the thread of the story, which was thin to begin with. For a while I wondered if perhaps I was reading an omniscient narrator, and occasionally I came upon a sentence that was indeed omniscient. For example: “She [Brooke] was too young to understand that how she felt was simply how most people felt, at least on occasion, when they were being most honest with themselves.” (103) Still, there were so few of these “omniscient intrusions” that it really isn’t possible to characterize the overall POV of the novel as omniscient.
A Commentary on Racism?
Brooke is black, but her adoptive mother and the rest of her family is white. She has grown up in a white world. Everyone who works at the Asher Jaffee Foundation is white. So when Brooke decides to act out her belief in her entitlement, am I meant to read that as a bad behavior that she’s picked up from living in a white world? I don’t think so; Brooke is too much an individual in charge of herself.
Comps
Brooke’s philosophy is very much in tune with the ideas of The Secret. At one point her brother Matthew says, “You’re doing that New Age thing. You’re visualizing.” In response, Brooke says, “I’m asking the world for more. It’s the only way I know. I’m ready for life to begin, I’m ready for more. But you have to ask, Eeyore. You have to ask, or it will never come.” (197)
This novel also reminded me of The Guest, where another young women also seeks to be supported by a man. In that novel Alex fails because of her own personality faults. In Entitlement, Brooke similarly fails due to her own personal faults. The faults are different, but the end result is the same. The difference is that The Guest is a marvelous read. I am at 3 stars for this novel because while the concept is excellent, and could have been immensely engaging, the writing, while excellent in places, is frequently awful.
Fire Exit by Morgan Talty
This is the kind of book that would be great to read in a comfy chair pulled up to a crackling fire in the midst of a big snowstorm, and when it doesn’t matter if you fall asleep reading because you can’t go anywhere, anyway, and you have to kill some time.
In this novel Charles, a white man who grew up on the Penobscot reservation, spends most of his time taking care of his mother or taking care of his derelict friend Bobby, or watching for Elizabeth, who lives across the river on the reservation. Elizabeth doesn’t know that Charles is her father because her mother Mary refused to marry him. She wanted her child to be recognized as part of the tribe, which meant she had to marry someone else who was at least one-quarter Penobscot. So she married Roger.
Why Is It Important to be a Member of the Tribe?
The novel doesn’t make clear what the benefits are of being a member of the tribe, so Mary’s motivation wasn’t clear. Would Elizabeth get free health care, college tuition, or some other benefit? There must be a reason. Simply being viewed as a tribal member hardly seems like a valid reason for Mary to do what she did. After all, she is only one-quarter Penobscot, and the Roger is only one-quarter, so Elizabeth is mostly white. Is being white inferior to being Penobscot? Is that why they want her to be a legitimate member of the tribe? Perhaps I missed it, but it seems that the novel never clarifies this issue.
In the novel, the we learn on the first page that Charles has decided, after twenty-plus years, that Elizabeth needs to know that he is her real father. He talks about acting on this decision with various people but never acts on it. As a result, the novel wanders along for over 200 of its 240 pages. Finally Charles tells Mary he’s going to tell Elizabeth that he’s her real father. He says that she deserves to know who she really is. Still, he never does tell her. However, Mary does, because she doesn’t want Elizabeth, who apparently suffers from depression, to have this news sprung on her. This leads to the novel’s rather brief climax.
Characters
None of the characters is particularly sympathetic except Elizabeth, and she has a very minor role in the novel. Charles is a part time lumberjack worker, although we never see him working. His only friend, Bobby, is an unemployed alcoholic. Louise, Charles’ mom, is both unpleasant to Charles, demanding, and senile. Mary, Elizabeth’s mother, treats Charles poorly, particularly in refusing to acknowledge Charles as Elizabeth’s father. Of all these characters, Charles is most admirable because he takes care of his mother, staying with her and taking her to various medical appointments. But otherwise he doesn’t do much, and so he too is neither very interesting nor sympathetic.
Craft Matters
The novel is told in a very plain style. There is nothing literary about it. Many sentences do nothing more than provide long and uninteresting descriptions of Charles’ routine living. For example: “For dinner that night, I made Louise canned soup. It was mainly broth, which she had some of but not all, and I made two sandwiches with cold turkey. I drank water, and then I made tea for Louise and me but she took only one sip of hers to swallow a Tylenol, and then her tea got cold and stayed cold all night on her nightstand.” (182) This sort of writing can be effective if loaded with subtext, but I didn’t detect much of that anywhere. Mostly the prose is ordinary.
In the end, the novel came together in a dramatic event which provided its only interesting plot moment. To me, that dramatic moment helped. I would have liked more of them.
Good Girl by Aria Aber
The style! The skill! The craft! Those are what make this novel exceptional. An award-winning poet, Aber’s facility with language is evident on every page. Readers whose primary interest lies in following a thrilling plot may not be especially taken with it, but those who love the beauty of language will share a feast. For me, Good Girl was a pleasure.
As has been said elsewhere, the plot is the coming-of-age story of Nilab, the daughter of an Afghan couple living in Berlin. Born in Germany after her parents emigrated in the 90s, Nilab in her teens is angry at her life—at its poverty and the racism she is subjected to. Although both of her parents were doctors in Kabul, in Germany they are not allowed to practice. As a result, her father is forced to take poorly paying jobs and they live in an old brutalist apartment building left over from the Soviet era. Their neighborhood is populated by drug addicts and neo-Nazis who are hostile and even violent to immigrants.
Nila’s Embarrassment, Nila’s Rebellion
Painfully, Nilab is embarrassed by her Afghan background, so much so that she changes her name to Nila. During her high school years, Nila is sent away to a boarding school, where she is further embarrassed by being a scholarship student, one of just a few among the mostly well-off students. Although she makes friends at the school, she never admits to being Afghan, but tells everyone her heritage is Greek.
The action of the novel focuses on Nila at 18, after she has finished at the boarding school and is back in Berlin. Strong-willed and rebellious, she despises where she lives and the people who live there: “I hated them. I hated everyone who had the same fate as I did.” (p 6). She insists on breaking away from her parents’ Afghan culture, and her principal way of doing so is through drug use and obliterating herself at techno clubs. At one such club, the Bunker, she meets Marlowe, an American writer of fading fame. Much of the novel follows their relationship, which is built on drug-taking, sex, and clubbing. Marlowe is dominating and abusive, but although she has broken away from her parents, Nila has not yet established her own strong identity. Consequently, she is submissive to Marlowe, in a way she refused to be to Afghan traditions. Much of the novel illustrates their toxic relationship, as well as Nila’s slow escape from it.
The Racists Down The Hall
The second focus of the novel is on the pervasive anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant racism pervasive in Nila’s world. “Swastikas tagged to our doors, the skinheads down the hall greeting us with predictable slurs. Their pink-gummed dogs on chains growled at us, techno blaring out of their apartment.” (240) This hate extends beyond Afghans to other Muslims, as becomes clear when the Qurbani brothers, Turks who operate a bakery in Nila’s neighborhood, are murdered and the bakery torched. A Syrian woman who is just passing by is also shot. The sick viciousness of the attack is amplified by perpetrators’ killing of the bakery’s resident cat, Jackie.
Interestingly, the chapter that reports the Qurbani killings and other similar atrocities that have taken place for years, carried out by the so-called Kebab Mafia, ends with this description of the many victims: “These men, whose faces resembled the faces of men around whom I grew up, men like my father and my uncles, men who I too had hated, men whose faces were so easy to hate.” (319) The manifold and poignant reveal here is both that she shared a hate for people who looked like her father, and by extension herself, but that she saw these men as “easy to hate.” It is as if they are partly at fault, as if they have made it “easy” for skinheads and others to maltreat them.
The novel explores this situation elsewhere, when Nila’s describes how even her mother hid her origin, telling the pharmacists she was from France. “The lies buttered us up. Allowed us entrance into a world of inclusion, where we looked down on the kind we really belonged to. Where we learned to resent ourselves with precision. Elen, an Iraqi girl from my neighborhood, told people she was from Colombia. . . . And there it was in front of me: the acknowledged shame of our origins.” (240)
Craft Matters
Throughout the novel, the author’s descriptive skills shine. For example, when we first see Nila enter the techno club, we read: “The Bunker was a shock of steel and concrete, glass and chains, with sixty-foot ceilings. A wall of warm air and muffled techno battered me, and within a minute my dress was lined with sweat, but the club was dark, and darkness was an authority to which I submitted. The music seemed to come from somewhere deep inside the earth, as if pulsating through he magmatic core—there was a logic to abrasive bass and insistent drum machines, but 138 beats per minutes never cohered unless you were grinding your neural pathways to a prehistoric pulp, so I hoped for a swift high.”
At one point Nila takes a class on Kafka and describes the scene: “Our professors were never the hot young people that students in movies had affairs with. Instead, they smelled of salami and old dust and possessed the aura of an old shoe.” (124) She mentions that Kafka is one of her favorite writers, and compares her life to Gregor’s in The Metamorphosis: “Who could understand the perils of a man trapped in his childhood room in unhuman form more than an Afghan girl trying to live?” (125)
She Is Who She Is
Eventually Nila comes to terms with who she is. When her father tells her that she cannot forget where she comes from, she dismisses him as always being “so dramatic”. But we read: “Of course, I couldn’t tell him that I hadn’t forgotten where I was from, that everything in my life had occurred exactly in this way because I couldn’t forget it. My Afghan blood, this district, this neighborhood, these prefab buildings in which we lived, the streets full of grayness, the icy black wind in the winters, the beetles lining our drawers in the summers, silverfish hurriedly crawling out of the drains, the bus stop where the skinheads hung out, the aisles of the discount supermarket: It was rioting inside me, and it made me who I was. It was all I could ever think about.” (344)
In the end, Nila tiptoes toward self-acceptance in a final lovely passage which ends: “I walked toward the column of light that spilled on the floor in front of my bookshelf. I pulled out the books that made me, searched all night for a word that might reflect myself, my story, back to me. I ran my fingers across the pages, and nowhere was a name like mine: Nilab. Nila, like indigo, like Nile, and ab, like water. Water of the Nile. My name, a strange percussion on my tongue. Not so special after all. The b I had been ashamed of all my life. A secret consonant to lean on, the hardness of a letter. But this, I knew, was the music inside me all along—a song waiting to be named. To name again, with care and purpose: each word a stone I take from the hem of my dress and lay out by the sea. Nowhere to go but here, where the water begins. Once I was a girl. I wanted to be free.” (345)
An auspicious debut from an amazing writer. ‘Nuf said.
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