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

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.

Small Mercies by Dennis Lehane

An eminently readable page turner by Dennis Lehane, Small Mercies is a murder mystery/revenge fantasy set against the implementation of school busing in Boston in 1974.

The story is told largely from the perspective of Mary Pat, the mother who engages in a no-holds-barred search for her missing daughter. But the novel also exposes the perspectives of the working class Irish community of South Boston, which is very insular and self-protective. While “Southies” have a few admirable characteristics, including a strong sense of community and a willingness to look after each other’s welfare, they are also portrayed as being wholeheartedly racist. As the novel opens, Southies are already preparing massive demonstrations against the school busing, which is set to begin in a week or two.

Racism and Busing

The novel offers a few reflections on racism that are noteworthy. In particular, Mary Pat comments several times that the busing which will be imposed on her community has been ordered by the well-to-do people living in upper class neighborhoods, whose own children will never be subjected to busing. Interestingly, Mary Pat’s own racism moderates somewhat over the course of the book, as she is forced to admit that a black co-worker’s son, who was murdered by white kids, was a decent kid, as are his parents. In fact, she reacts violently against a group of Southie women who shanghai her into participating in an anti-busing protest, partly out of her perception of their racism.

But the busing issue isn’t the driving force in this novel. Instead, the plot revolves around Mary Pat’s maniacal search for her missing daughter and, once she finds out what has happened to Jules, her relentless pursuit of those responsible. Her actions provide a reader with vicarious gratification, since she manages to wreak havoc on at least some of the routinely untouchable thugs of her neighborhood—men who definitely deserve the punishment she doles out. At the same time, Mary Pat’s actions, although consistent with her personality, seem to stretch credulity.

Powerful Writing

What most impressed me about this novel was the effective and at times powerful writing. All of the characters come across as believable if not likeable. Additionally, the author maintains tension throughout, slowly revealing pieces of the puzzle so that a reader is kept both interested and hungry to learn more. The sentence level writing is excellent both in its descriptive details of the setting and in its insights into Southie culture, which is largely working class white culture. Lehane observes, for example:

“They aren’t poor because they don’t try hard, don’t work hard, aren’t deserving of better things. . . people who go to work day in, day out, and give their ungrateful prick bosses ten hours of work every single eight-hour day. . . They’re poor because there’s a limited amount of good luck in this world and they’ve never been given any. If it doesn’t fall from the sky and land on you, doesn’t find you when it wakes up every morning and goes looking for someone to attach itself to, there isn’t a damn thing you can do.” In Mary Pat’s world, then, luck rather than effort creates success, so most people accept their lives, and the drugs and poverty that go with them, and don’t try to improve. (Nicely, Ken Fennessey, Mary Pat’s ex-husband, is one of those who do.)

The Insular Culture

Elsewhere Lehane offers another insight into the poverty of Southie culture: the close-mindedness of its people. Mary Pat notices it even in her own sister: “She knew that no matter what evidence she presented to Big Peg that Marty Butler’s crew had killed Jules, Big Peg would reject it. Marty isn’t just Southie’s protector. He isn’t just Southie’s favorite son. Marty isn’t just the rebel for them all who thumbs his nose at the outside establishment. Marty is Southie. To believe Marty is evil—not merely criminal, not a practitioner of hijinks and shenanigans, but just running an underworld that needs to be run by someone, so why not him?—is to believe that Southie is evil. And Peg could never do that.” (127)

Although Mary Pat and her quest hold center stage in the novel, another thoughtful commentary is offered by Bobby Coyne, an Irish cop from nearby Dorchester. Thinking about prejudice, Bobby knows that it extends beyond prejudice against African Americans, but to many oppressed groups: “Call them gooks, call them niggers, call them kikes, micks, spics, wops, or frogs, call them whatever you want as long as you call them something—anything—that removes one layer of human being from their bodies when you think of them. That’s the goal. If you can do that, you can get kids to cross oceans to kill other kids, or you can get them to stay right here at home and do the same thing.” (113)

Black Rage Belongs Here Too

Lastly, I was impressed by the way Lehane reveals the rage that black Bostonians feel toward racist white people. When Mary Pat goes to Dreamy Williamson’s home to show her respect for the Williamson’s loss of their son, Dreamy thanks her for her sympathy, but lets Mary Pat know how she really feels:

“You raised a child who thought hating people because God made them a different shade of skin was okay. You allowed that hate. You probably fostered it. And your little child and her racist friends, who were all raised by racist parents just like you, were sent out into the world like little fucking hand grenades of hate and stupidity and, and, and you can go fuck yourself, Mary Pat, if you think for one second I’m okay with that. Or that I forgive. I do not forgive. So go back to your neighborhood and sit with your monster friends and get yourselves all worked up to stop us from attending your precious school or whatever. But bitch, we’re coming whether you like it to not.” (252) Lehane, who is from Boston, is brutally honest in revealing the poverty of both body and spirit in so many of the residents of South Boston. While his use of the N word and other obscenities may be the kind of thing that the PC police would censor, the realism they add to the novel are sufficient justification for their presence. This is a powerful novel that reveals devastating shortcomings in American society—then and now.

The Antidote by Karen Russell

This is a novel about memory and grief, and history and guilt. A take on the age old American theme of the sins of the fathers. In the end, each of the main characters comes to terms with their personal grief.

In the novel’s opening, the men of Uz, including Harp’s father, are engaged in clubbing a horde of jackrabbits to death, and Harp’s father forces him, at six years old, the participate. Harp remembers: “Your father puts the club in your hands. And after that, you are always afraid.” At the end, Harp remembers this day, and tells us, “The club has always been in my hand. I had only forgotten I was holding it.” But then we read: “You can put it down now, my father sighs inside me.” He goes on: “I don’t want to live this way any longer, swinging in a sightless panic to defend the box into which I was born, repeating the story that it’s necessary.” He adds, with a hint of possibility: “I wonder what other memories are coming home to the people of Uz. I wonder what might happen in the wake of such a restoration. We are full of days again.”

Asphodel’s Mama

Harp’s niece, Asphodel, comes to terms with a different trauma: the loss of her mother. “I have fought so hard to keep from thinking about It. The absence of my mother, the way It swells to fill everyplace and the entire future. . . I learned something in the root cellar, riding out the storm, something that sounds very obvious but came as a shock to me: A thing doesn’t hurt you so much if you draw it close as it does when you keep pushing it away.” Extending her epiphany, she realizes that the grief she feels is also love. And then she is aided in her desire to open herself to her mother when Cleo Allfrey gives her a photo showing her mother at age 10. She thinks, “We did look alike.” After this, she writes, “Dear Mama, What does it mean that I am certain you are with me? Sometimes I doubt God, but never you.”

The Antidote’s Son

Similarly, the Antidote/Antonina finally achieves closure with the help of the Scarecrow. Putting her earhorn to the Scarecrow’s chest, she hears her son, who was taken from her at birth, say, “Mama?” And then: “In an instant I had to learn more than I could have borne in a long lifetime—I saw your death first, your body flying through the windshield.” But then she visualizes more of his life with the family that adopted him, and realizes, “You lived a good life, a hard life, a short life. I felt so happy to find You here, hidden right in front of us, needle in the haystack, scratch on the negative, glint in an eye.”

Cleo’s Camera

Cleo Allfrey’s resolution involves not another person, but her own vision. Doubting that vision, and having been harshly criticized by her boss in Washington, she is on the verge of quitting her vocation. But she sees rays of light shooting out of the fallowland, and thinks, “It looked like nothing so much as the unborn light in my developing tray.” And she remembers the words told to her by fellow photographer Dorothea Lange: “Make the work you want to make.” And it seems she will.

Craft Matters

From a craft perspective, the writing throughout is top notch. While the novel unfolded slowly, the quality of the sentence level writing was enough to keep me engaged all by itself.

History Repeats Itself

Although the novel’s central character is the Antidote, the most powerful character is Harp. He discovers that his father deposited a memory in a witch like the Antidote, and eventually finds that witch and recovers the memory. What he learns is that his father and other Poles came to America after being deprived of their land and rights by the Germans, but that in settling the Great Plains, they did to the original inhabitants exactly what the Germans had done to them. As Harp knows and the novel shows, this wrong has never been corrected.

In a similar vein Harp realizes that the original inhabitants, the Pawnee and other Plains Indians, would never have treated the land in a way that caused dust storms and the destruction of the soil. The Indians understood, perhaps from close observation, and perhaps because of a less exploitative approach to farming, how to conserve the land. But that understanding was lost when they lost the land.

We Were the Universe by Kimberly King Parsons

In this novel the narrator, Kit, endures the heat of west Texas, a precocious child, a mother who hoards, and her own powerful sex drive. Underlying these matters, and dominating Kit’s life, is a deep and abiding grief for her sister, who died about 3-4 years earlier. Coming to terms with Julie’s death is Kit’s challenge, and the plot of the novel.

The novel is largely a collage of scenes where one or several of the above elements manifests itself in a little drama. What stands out more than anything in these scenes is the author’s dark humor. One example:

“I gravitate toward garbage books, fictionalized accounts of real-life mistakes and large-scale disasters: crashed oil tankers, Chernobyl, people getting deep into debt and then getting killed for it. I like the slow unfolding of ruined lives. I want to look up from what I’m reading and feel better about my failures.” (106-7)

Central to Kit’s enduring grief is the fact that she was unable to prevent her sister’s addiction. “She did not care what happened to her, and I could not force her to.” In fact, Kit was captivated by Julie’s descent, as were others. “It was the reason people liked to watch her sing. . . Watching someone walk away from themselves, fearless—even I had to admit—it was thrilling to see.” (153)

An important theme is the responsibility of the mother. Kit’s and Julie’s mother was spotty in her support, and active in encouraging Julie’s alcohol addiction. Kit, knowing this, is a helicopter mom for her own daughter, fearful for Gilda’s safety. Perhaps because of this, Gilda at age three is not only precocious, but bossy. Kit can’t really control her. Gilda still insists on nursing, and Kit allows it. Kit’s challenge with Gilda mirrors the challenge she faces with Julie.

My one quibble with this novel is that, because it lacks a strong plot, it seems to wander at times. Nevertheless, the writing craft is top-notch, and the author’s dark humor earns and extra half star. 4.5 stars.

American War by Omar El Akkad

This novel begins in 2075 and follows the Chestnut family as they suffer for it. The MC is Sarat, the daughter who eventually fights for the Red against the Blue in a second American Civil War.

The principal cause of the war is the prohibition on fossil fuels imposed by the federal government in response to climate change. Southern states refuse to accept this law, and civil war ensues. This premise is intriguing but unconvincing. What is the point of the North giving up fossil fuels without the rest of the world doing so as well? As written, it seems that at least the Middle East and Africa are still pumping oil because what other source of wealth could have forged the Bouazizi Empire? In short, the fictional world isn’t very credible.

What I liked about the novel was the fact that it suggests a second Civil War could occur. Now that we beset by a second Trump administration, which is carrying out its own civil war against existing norms, the novel offers a helpful warning on both the ease with which disruption can occur, and the horrendous costs it can impose on ordinary people.

Craft Matters

From a craft perspective, I appreciated the author’s descriptive abilities. Scenes and settings are often presented in the kind of detail that makes them believable. I also appreciated that the author focuses on the impacts of the war on a family, rather than military battles.

I noticed as I read that I wasn’t feeling anything for the characters. Stepping back, I realized that this was because so much of the novel is told from an omniscient point of view. Apparently this is because the novel is told retrospectively, by Benjamin, after he acquires Sarat’s diaries. But this wasn’t necessary. The author could have shifted to a close 3^rd person narration after the Prologue. Had he done so, Sarat could have come alive.

Here One Moment by Liane Moriarity

Here One Moment is an entertaining novel that combines a cozy horror mystery story with comments on the question of free will versus determinism in human life. The plot is straightforward: on an airplane flight from Tasmania to mainland Australia a woman approaches passengers one by one and announces their cause and age of death. The woman then slips away when the plane lands, and the passengers are left to wonder if her predictions will come true.

Throughout, the writing in the novel is smooth and easy to read, with good character descriptions and an occasional well-wrought simile. The voices of the narrator and some of the passengers are distinct for much of the book, although I felt that their distinguishing characteristics faded towards the end. Not that the novel is literary; the writing is mainstream commercial writing, if well done.

The author also offers trinkets of wisdom here and there. At one point the narrator, Cherry, asks her fortune-telling mother why her customers were mostly women. Her mother answers, “Because women are much more in touch with their intuition,” while her less romantic and more cynical aunt Pat says, “Because women have less control over their lives.” (390)

A Change in Focus

Interestingly, the thrust of the novel changes as it goes along. Initially, we seem to be in store for a mystery-thriller where we the readers are caught up in wondering if the passengers who have been predicted to die in the year or so after the flight will in fact die. The likelihood of this grows greater as one young women does die as predicted, and then two elderly people also die as predicted. These events ramp up the tension.

At the same time, the longer the novel proceeds, the more it becomes obvious that the focus of the story is not on the predicted deaths, but on the narrator herself, Cherry, and the events of her life that brought her to the point of making the predictions she did. Here, I think is where the novel fizzles. No more of the predicted deaths occur, and readers are not treated to the excitement of tense moments when characters’ lives are hanging in the balance. Instead, we learn that Cherry’s predictions on the plane were caused by some sort of mental health episode brought on by grief over her husband Ned’s death, and were possibly triggered by dehydration.

Quibbles

To me, the story of Cherry’s life isn’t particularly captivating. We get a great deal of detail about her life so that we know her well. Unlike the rest of the characters in the novel she is reasonably well filled out. But she’s ordinary. I didn’t dislike her, but neither did I particularly like or care about her. I am at 3.5 stars for this novel, rounded down. Initially I was at 4, when the prospect of an intricate plot involving death predictions began to unfold. But then it faded, as noted above, and my appreciation for the novel diminished as well.

Veronica by Mary Gaitskill

It is hard to write a meaningful review of this particular novel without discussing what is going on, so there will be spoilers below. Best that people not read my review until after reading the novel.

In this novel we follow two related stories. In the first we see Alison, a young woman from New Jersey, rise and fall once as a model in Europe, and then rise and fall a second time in New York and Los Angeles. In the second we watch the development of Alison’s relationship with Veronica, in which a relatively shallow friendship grows deeper as Veronica’s life is sucked away physically by AIDS and socially by the abandonment of her by her friends, who fear the disease.

The two strands of the novel do not really provide a plot for the reader to follow. This stems from the fact that the story is told by an older Alison who is, in the present, looking back at her life when she was a very young adult in the 1980s As she shares her tale, it comes to us in brief passages that reflect the way her mind picks through her remembrances. There isn’t any real tension that develops because the author’s objective isn’t to depict Alison’s struggle for success or Veronica’s struggle against AIDS, but rather to depict them living their lives, and the chaos and beauty that doing so entailed.

Alison as Main Character

Despite the title of the novel, the MC is Alison. I found her sympathetic throughout, and hoped she would succeed as a model. She does for a while, twice, and then doesn’t because of reasons beyond her control. In Paris, an unscrupulous manager steals her money and effectively bars her from European modeling. Later in the U.S., an auto accident in Los Angeles in which she is seriously injured ultimately leads to the end of her modelling career once and for all. Neither of these life-changing events are her fault, but she suffers the consequences.

Craft Matters

Much is made of the writing style the author employs. While there are many long paragraphs written in fairly ordinary language that detail Alison’s experiences , elsewhere the writing is associative and imagistic. With her expressive language the author manages to inject expansive, unexpected and even strange meanings into her prose. For example, during a time when she is modeling again, not drinking too much and in general has her life under control, we read:

“In an inexplicable way, I savored my ordinariness, my affinity for the office girls and waitresses I had briefly moved among. My living past still lingered about me, but faintly, like the roar inside a seashell, and my longing for it was a dull arrhythmic spasm, or murmur, in the meat of my functioning heart. Sometimes, in certain pictures, I thought I could see this hollow phantom world tingle in the air around me, making you want to look at the picture, sensing something you can see. In these pictures, I was what I had once longed for: a closed door you couldn’t open, with music and footsteps behind it.” (160)

Walking in Nature

A unique element in the novel is the series of scenes in which Alison images herself walking in nature. Initially in these dream-like segments her mind wanders through thoughts of life and death. Trees begin to look diseased to her, possibly reflecting her familiarity with Veronica’s disease. Toward the end when she is running on a high plateau she says, “I want to know who she was, but I can’t because I didn’t look in time.” This theme of failing to look and thereby failing to see the other person lies at the heart of the novel. Also central is the idea that death is a kind of love and this love-in-death is what Alison believes Veronica achieved:

“I imagine Veronica’s spirit stripped to its skeleton, then stripped of all but its shocked, staring eye, yet clinging to life in a fierce, contracted posture that came from intense, habitual pain. I imagine the desiccated spirit as a tiny ash in enormous darkness. I imagine the dark penetrated by something Veronica at first could not see but could sense, something substantive and complete beyond any human definition of those words. In my mind’s eye, it unfurled itself before Veronica. Without words it said, I am Love. And Veronica, hearing, came out of her contraction with brittle, stunted motions. In her eyes was recognition and disbelief, as if she were seeing what she had sought all her life, and was terrified to believe in, lest it prove to be a hoax. No, it said to Veronica. I am real. You have only to come. And Veronica, drawing on the dregs of her strength and her trust, leapt into its embrace and was gone. (217)

Connecting Through Music

In its last chapter, the novel ties up its themes and Alison’s life in a way I found affecting. After the memorial service for Veronica, Alison listened to Rigoletto with her father, a man she had never understood. Much later, recounting this experience, she has an epiphany: “When we listened to Rigoletto together, he had not ignored me. He had sent me a signal through his music. A signal so strong that twenty years later, I finally hear it. I hear him crying out with grief for his daughter who was taken away from him and violated by people he found alien and terrible. I hear him crying out for Veronica, too, another daughter taken and violated fatally. I hear him signaling a grief so private, I knew nothing about it, even though it hurt so much, it made him cry out.” (222)

Similarly, Alison comes to new understanding, metaphorically, of people with AIDS. In the next-to-last dreamlike scene in nature, she comes to a man near a waterfall: “We say hi and I stand near him for a minute, watching the movement of the water. I say, ‘Those trees there.’ I point to a sick ocher tree visible in the canyon. ‘There must be something really wrong with them to make them look like that. But they’re so beautiful—it seems funny the disease would make them beautiful.’

“’They’re not diseased,’ he said without looking at me. ‘They’re madrones. They lose their bark in winter. It’s normal.’”

The Wicked Little Girl

The novel is bookended neatly by a folk tale of a wicked little girl. In the opening, the girl ruins bread meant for her mother in order to prevent her shoes from being muddied. As a result, she sinks into a world of demons and deformed creatures, and suffers horribly, and everyone thought she deserved it. Alison is told this tale by her own mother, and says: “I did not hear it in words only. I felt it in her body. I felt a girl who wanted to be too beautiful. I felt a mother who wanted to love her. I felt a demon who wanted to torture her. I felt them mixed together so you couldn’t tell them apart.” In this brief passage, the author deftly foreshadows the entire of the novel. (4)

At the end of the novel, the author returns to the tale of the wicked girl. The tale ends with the wicked girl learning to feel. She is filled with remorse for what she did, and becomes a bird that flies free. Alison sees herself in this story and tells us: “I sank down into darkness and lived among the demons for a long, long time. I became one of them. But I was not saved by an innocent girl or an angel crying in heaven. I was saved by another demon, who looked on me with pity and so became human again. And I pitied her in turn, I was allowed to become human, too.” (227) Metaphorically, her caring for Veronica saves her.

Alison is Redeemed

And in the last few sentences we see a redeemed Alison leaving nature and coming home, and living an ordinary life. “I will take the bus home and talk to Rita, standing in the hall. I will call my father and tell him I finally heard him. I will be full of gratitude and joy.” (227)

A challenging, highly literary read that I ultimately found worth the effort.

The Last King of California by Jordan Harper

This novel is kind of a coming-of-age novel, where the “coming” for the protagonist involves running a gauntlet through a violent crime family of drug dealers and ex-prison inmates.

The protagonist here is Luke Crosswhite, a name that can’t help but evoke thoughts like ‘double cross’ and ‘white supremacists.’ The novel opens with Luke returning home to the Combine, a criminal gang created by his father in the San Bernardino desert mountains. Luke was taken away by his mother’s family when he was a child, after his father viciously murdered a man and was sent to prison.

The other main characters are Callie, Luke childhood friend, and her boyfriend Pretty Boy. Callie and PB want to escape the Combine and make a new life, while Luke wants to stay and find himself and his place in the world. The problem for all three of them is that it isn’t a very pretty world, not easy to escape and not easy to live in.

To a large extend this novel is a character study. The minor plot involves an attempt by another gang called Aryan Steel to make the Combine subservient to them. The inevitable conflict between the two gangs creates the opportunity for much bloody violence.

Craft Matters

To me, the best aspect of this book is the author’s use of language. He does a great job of portraying the way the gang members talk, the way they think, and their brutal code of honor. Although not IMO up to the incendiary standard of Harper’s Everybody Knows, this is an insightful study of the complex dynamics of a California crime family.

The Women by Kristin Hannah

The Women tells the story of three female nurses who served in the Vietnam war during 1967-68. The MC is Frankie McGrath, a young woman from a relatively wealthy San Diego family who volunteers for Vietnam right after finishing nursing school.

Frankie is an innocent at the outset of her tour; in some respects she reflects the innocence of America at large, which thought it morally and geopolitically necessary to oppose communism wherever it appeared. But once in country Frankie changes, as she is faced with treating the terrible wounds that guns and rockets and bombs can cause. She survives because she has to, but it isn’t easy.

The novel does a fine job of portraying not just the medical horrors that people like Frankie encountered, but the danger she and her two nurse friends, Ethel and Barb, were regularly subjected to. While the three of them made it through the war unharmed physically, two of Frankie’s love interests were killed, and we see the shock she felt.

The Complex Nature of the War is Not Ignored

In addition to the ever-present threats of war, the novel takes time to show the camaraderie of the medical staff, their selfless willingness to provide medical care to Vietnamese civilians, and their growing awareness that the war is misguided, even as they continue to support it.

The second half of the novel is less dramatic than the first half, but is equally important. It shows Frankie back in the States after her two tours of duty, suffering from PTSD. The fact that the American public grew to oppose the war, and disparaged returning soldiers, made her trauma that much worse. Indeed, it takes years for Fie to recover.

Craft Matters

From a craft perspective, the writing quality is middling; a good edit would have helped. But the pacing is fast, and the story definitely held my interest. Though the second half lacks the intensity of the scenes of Frankie in country, its presentation of the political fallout, and the struggle of returning Vietnam veterans to find their own peace, is heartfelt and impressive. Everybody knows about the war, but its long-term effect on people who were traumatized is a story too infrequently told.

This is a four-star read for me: five stars for the story, three for the writing craft.

There Are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak

This historical novel takes us from the banks of the Tigris River in Ancient Assyria to the banks of the Thames in 1840, then back to the Tigris in 2014, and again to the Thames in 2018. Each time, water plays a crucial role in the lives of the main characters and those around them.

Water is kind of a magical conceit in this novel. Water, and in particular a single drop, plays many roles. More than anything, it links people across time, and symbolically shares knowledge and culture.

A Playful Conceit

The book begins with a single drop of water falling on the head of King Ashurbanipol in ancient Assyria. Next the drop turns up in 1840, as a snowflake that falls upon Arthur, a boy born on the banks of the polluted Thames River in London. Later it comes to Narin, a young Yazidi girl, where it’s meant to come with the water used to baptize her, and later appears in a tear of Zaleekah, who moves onto a houseboat on the Thames to escape her husband.

Now, one of the playful aspects of this conceit is that the raindrop is depicted as being alive from the beginning. It’s fearful of falling to the ground, but also enjoys the feeling of freedom and weightlessness as it does – kind of the way people are fearful of a hangover but enjoy get drunk. Okay, bad analogy.

Another tidbit: water is described as holding the secret of infinity, which is another way of saying the secret of life. The importance of water to life is a key theme of the novel.

Craft Matters

From a craft perspective, the language in the novel is a pleasure to read. And yes, it’s sometimes slow going, but it’s also rich in the kinds of details that bring the characters and their historical worlds to life.

Beyond its language, the novel is also a feast of ancient and modern history, along with a serious helping of modern studies of water as the essential lifeblood of civilization.

Finally, I need to praise the novel for also depicting the crisis developing across the globe caused by over development and climate change. Someday soon we will find that these problems can no longer be ignored, and the author deserves credit for raising the alarm.

Colored Television by Danzy Senna

Colored Television is so well written that even when it wandered a bit toward the end it was engaging.

Plotwise, MC Jane, a non-tenured professor at a mid-level college in LA, is spending her sabbatical year finishing her second novel while living in Brett’s—a friend from college—mansion in the hills. A project that’s taken her ten years, her 150,000 word opus crosses centuries in bringing to life the history of mulatto people in America. Entitled Nusa Nusa, the novel’s publication will, Jane believes, not only earn her tenure but provide the kind of financial security that will allow her to live the solidly upper middle class life she longs for. Things look good for Jane at first until her novel is panned by her agent and another editor. Startlingly, they advise her never to write about biracial characters again.

More Jane

One of the things that makes Jane a fun character follow is her fast and loose relationship with the truth. Sometimes her lies are simply sins of omission, as when the well-to-do moms who bring their daughters to Ruby’s B-day party think that the house she’s living in is hers, and she doesn’t correct them. “Because what did it matter? She and Lenny and the kids would be gone soon. They might as well leave a good impression.”

At other times her lies are purposeful, as when she calls Brett’s agent, hoping to replace her failed novel with a career in television writing. “In the email . . . Jane told three lies. The first was that Brett had told her to be in touch. The second was that Jane had a television show idea she couldn’t wait to share with Marianne—a pitch for a show that was ‘particularly relevant at this historical juncture.’ Whatever the hell that meant. . . The third lie was that she’d just finished a major novel . . . Okay, so this was true. . . Hers had been a major failure.” (91-2) All of Jane’s lies—including many to her husband—have the effect of adding a sweet tension to the novel: I felt sure her house of cards/lies would sooner or later come tumbling down on her.

As the novel progresses, Jane lands an interview with Hampton Ford, a TV producer with money to burn on a new series that he desperately wants to focus on mulatto people, exactly Jane’s area of expertise. In describing Jane’s dealings with Ford, the author creates a brilliant satire of the Hollywood entertainment machine, most of which is darkly humorous—sometimes outrageously so.

Craft Matters

Dark humor is, in fact, a highlight of this novel. Sometimes it involves nothing more than Jane’s culturally appropriate silliness. At one point she rushes to get dressed because Ford is coming to her house late at night with something urgent to discuss. She mentions almost in passing that she’d been in her pajamas when he called, “scrolling her phone for celebrity news.” Celebrity news? (209)

Elsewhere her humor appears to be a distinctly black black humor—not surprising, since the characters are all either black or biracial (except for one of Hamptons goofy assistants, a white kid who is devoted to his go-fer job “because this is where the culture is made.”) For example, after Hampton takes his daughter to a birthday party at the Kardashians, he starts talking to Jane about the Kardashians’ kids. “True is gonna have major issues. Dysmorphia. We’re not talking just some Beverly Hills nose job. We’re talking a full-on Michael Jackson race lift.” (188)

Throughout the novel, despite her little lies and occasionally inconsiderate behavior (e.g., drinking all of Brett’s expensive wine, and never returning his calls or texts) I was rooting for Jane. I wanted to see her achieve her dream of buying a house in Multicultural Mayberry. She is, after all, a good mother and honest when she says, “Black people didn’t want to be white, they just wanted to have what white people have.”

Money Counts

Perhaps what most appealed to me was that all of Jane’s problems come down not to racism—although she and husband Lenny discuss it repeatedly, to the point where Lenny wants to leave the U.S.—but to money. “Money—real money—was what they needed now. . . . The thing about being a woman, a mother, a wife, was that if you wanted to be any more than those things you had to hire another wife. Somebody had to be the wife in the family. Rich women got to pay somebody else to be them—a stunt double to make it look like they were doing everything well when, in fact, they were doing only the fun parts. Money would grant her the help and the home she needed to raise her children and to do what she really wanted to do, which was to tell stories—and age richly.” (175)

Kind of like what everybody wants, more or less. Good to know.

There is much more than could be said about this sly novel. But probably the best thing I can do is to urge you to read it and see what you think.

The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami

The Dream Hotel is a dystopian sci-fi novel that offers us a picture of a future where technology which can benefit public safety may also, in the hands of profit maximizing private entity, result in unjust and undeserved punishment.

The novel is centered around Sara Hussein, who at the outset is detained by agents for the Risk Assessment Administration (RAA), after its high-tech surveillance system decides that she is a danger.

The RAA Nightmare

At the outset she’s placed in Madison, a retention facility for women similarly detained, for the minimum period—21 days. One of the perversions of the RAA system is that, although the women are told that compliance with the rules is the way to earn release, good behavior is largely ignored. On the other hand, the least little resistance to the facility’s self-serving rules quickly leads to the extension of a woman’s retention period.

In truly Orwellian fashion, the women’s dreams are monitored. Any signs of aggression that appear in their dreams can also lead to an extension of their retention period. The fact that the women have no control over their dreams is irrelevant, as is the fact that the unfair treatment to which they’re subjected might well produce the anger expressed in their dreams.

One of the nightmarish aspects of the novel were the sections of emails/texts to the oversight agency, where we learn that the RAA system frequently makes errors by saying that Sara is sick, unavailable, has no money in her account, etc., when none of these are true. And when the RAA’s systems crash, and deprive women of previously scheduled release hearings, those hearings aren’t re-scheduled. It’s just too bad for the retainees affected.

Craft Matters

This novel is well written, with prose that effectively conveys the absurdity of Sara’s situation, the Catch 22 nature of the prison system, and the overall oppressive nature of the technology that sends her there. At times the story did seem to run a bit slow, but it’s not intended to be a thriller, but a thoughtful novel of scary ideas, and a warning of what may be coming.

This is a scary novel because the surveillance system it describes does not seem very far beyond the capability of our existing world with its everywhere cameras, facial recognition systems and AI-managed data profiling. Monitoring dreams is new, but already scientists are learning how to link computers with brain implants, so it may not be far behind. And given the totalitarian tendencies of the current federal administration, it behooves everyone to question and resist intrusive, coercive technologies.

The House on Buzzards Bay by Dwyer Murphy

In The House on Buzzards Bay, six friends from college gather for a reunion at an old beach house owned by Jim, one of the group.

The first half of this novel is a slow burn. Strange things happen, like noises in the old house, or the appearance of a coyote, and they lend a spooky atmosphere to the novel. But no real plot emerges.

One odd event does occur fairly early on. One of the six friends, Bruce, just vanishes, and nobody thinks much of it. They decide he’s gone to visit some other group, or returned home. Even though they find his wallet in his room, nobody thinks to report him missing to the police. Possibly this disinterest on the friends’ part is intended to ramp up tension in the novel by creating a double mystery: the mystery of Bruce’s disappearance combined with the mystery of why no one cares. But for me it simply defuses the incident, neutralizing its potential tension.

Finally around halfway through, a mysterious stranger shows up. Camille tells them she knew Bruce in France, and he invited her. Bruce, however, had never mentioned this to anybody. Nevertheless, Camille is young, cute and sexy, so they take her in and make her part of the group.

At this point I thought that the plot was finally going to get going, but no. Nothing much happens until Camille disappears. Apparently she packs up and leaves in the middle of the night, telling no one and leaving no note.

Craft Matters

From a craft perspective, the writing is competent, not literary. The story is distinguished by half-mysteries spooned out by Jim, our first-person narrator. For example, the mysterious death of Jim’s parents is mentioned but never explained. A boy arrested for breaking into homes says that Jim is his lawyer, Jim meets with him, and then that story thread vanishes. We see coyotes that show up and just stare at him, fires that appear inexplicably, and Jim making herculean swims around the bay. These oddities add to the spooky atmosphere, but not the story.

In the end, the mystery of Bruce is revealed, but in a way that seems to be a tacked-on tell. I’m at 2.5 stars.

Typewriter Beach by Meg Waite Clayton

Typewriter Beach is a novel with dual timelines, the first in 1957 and the second in 2018. The central characters, Isabella Giori and Leo Chazan, appear in both time periods, although in 2018 both are 61 years older, and Leo has in fact just passed away

The History of the Hollywood Blacklist

Looming throughout this historical novel is the nightmare of the Hollywood blacklist. During the 1950s Red Scare perpetrated by Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), many Americans were accused of being communists merely because they came into contact with others who had indeed shown an interest in communism. (Communism in the 1930s was not yet a failed economic system, and seemed to some as a legitimate alternative to the largely unregulated capitalism of the early 20th century.)

Hollywood screenwriters, in particular, drew the attention of HUAC. Many had their reputations destroyed by the accusations of the committee. Frequently writers were asked to name others as communists as a way of proving their loyalty to the United States. Those who were named as communists, or who refused to name others, could be indicted, sent to prison, or blacklisted. Those who were blacklisted could no longer work in Hollywood; they lost their livelihood, friends and their passion. In this novel, Leo Chazan was one of those who refused to name names, and was blacklisted. He continued to write screenplays, but could only sell them through other people who agreed to front for him. The amount he could earn this way was a fraction of what he previously earned.

The Special Relationship of Leo and Iz

In Typewriter Beach, Leo is living in a tiny cottage in Carmel, 300 miles north or Hollywood. Into his world Isabella is delivered by one of the studio moguls that she works for. Iz and Leo form a friendship that verges on romantic love, but becomes a different type of love. Indeed, I felt that the exploration of different types of love was central to the novel, and was both sophisticated and touching.

The relationship of Leo and Iz continues for the rest of their lives. After Iz becomes an established actress, she buys the small cottage in Carmel across from Leo’s. They remain

close, and after Leo passes, Iz becomes friends with Leo’s granddaughter, also a screenwriter. Together they work to restore Leo’s reputation and that of other blacklisted screenwriters, and to promote the opportunities for women to work in Hollywood.

Craft Matters: Eight Fingers on Eight Keys

From a craft perspective, I appreciated the depth which the author achieved with the characters, along with the descriptions of the Carmel coast. Most impressive was the way she exposed the terror of the blacklist and its effects on Hollywood. Too, the periodic commentary on the importance of writing to a writer, and to the rest of the world, was brilliant. For example:

“That’s what a movie or a book, a good story, can do. Eight fingers on eight keys, and people all over the world laugh or cry, people all over the world look at others a little differently, with more compassion and sympathy, forgiveness.” (249)

My one quibble is with the author’s frequent use of complex and complicated sentences – those that while grammatically correct seem to involve more than one subject. But this just reflects my own preference for simple clarity in writing.

I’m at 4.5 stars, 5 for the story and 4 for the writing. And despite my quibble with the writing, I strongly recommend this novel to everyone, both for its historical political lesson, and as a

reminder of the way politicians can use the power of the state to diminish the freedom of the rest of us.

The Bombshell by Darrow Farr

The bombshell in this novel is the main character, Severine. Severine is a spoiled, French-American 17-year-old who is living in Corsica with her wealthy and accomplished parents. She has big dreams of becoming a Hollywood actress, and doesn’t appreciate the fact that her parents intend for her to go to college and become a conventional success, like them.

One evening, while she is out riding her bike and listening to her Walkman, she’s kidnapped by Soffiu di Libertà, a militant group struggling for Corsica’s independence from France. Severine fully expects her father, a high government official, to have her rescued immediately. But her abductors demand the release of a member of their revolutionary group in exchange, and when the government refuses to cooperate, the militants refuse to release Severine.

As time passes, Severine goes from being irate at the militants for holding her, to sympathizing with their cause, and becoming attracted to their leader, a former school teacher who intrigues her with his intelligence and knowledge of revolutionary books. Eventually Severine becomes not only a member of their group, but effectively their leader.

For much of the novel Severine is humorously appealing as a character because of her giant ego, her arrogance, and her sexuality. As she directs the militants’ activities over the summer that she is with them, she decides that ever more violence will be necessary to achieve Corsican independent, leading to some surprising events. Nevertheless, Severine always remains engaging, and the writing craft here is excellent.

Worst Case Scenario by T.J. Newman

If you think about what might be the worst disaster that might possibly occur, it would be difficult to imagine anything worse than the one offered in this novel. The story begins with a 757 jetliner with 295 people aboard crashing into a nuclear power plant. After that, multiple threads emerge, and the author does a good job interweaving them.

The main thread involves a race against time, as the workers at a nuclear power plant struggle to prevent a reactor meltdown. A second thread involves another race to save a toddler boy who’s been trapped in a minivan that’s left hanging off a bridge and directly above a pool of burning jet fuel.

All of this comes at us with great suspense. The author often ends a chapter at a moment of crisis—some solution abruptly fails, or a new threat emerges. The effect is to keep us hanging on and turning pages.

Personally, I thought the characters were reasonably well developed, especially for a thriller. Because of this, the heroics at the end were credible.

One thing I particularly appreciated was the way Newman provides tons of verisimilitude when it comes to describing fire fighting gear and nuclear power plant operations. The fact that she does it without overwhelming the reader with technical details is a nice touch.

My only reservation is that the novel is largely without literary flair—things like metaphors and similes and symbolic imagery won’t be found. Nevertheless, it’s good escapist fare. Take a look, see what you think.

Bring the House Down by Charlotte Runcie

In this novel, Alex and Sophie are two colleagues from a major London newspaper who are sharing a flat in Edinburgh while reviewing shows and exhibitions during the annual Edinburgh Festival Fringe. One evening Alex, whose focus is on the theatre, attends a one-woman show about climate change. Judging the show to be very bad, he quickly pens a scathing review, sends it to his editor, and goes to a pub to relax. At the pub he runs into Hayley Sinclair, the woman who wrote, produced and acted in the climate show. Although he recognizes her, Alex chats with her and ends up bringing her back to the flat, where they spend the night together.

In the morning, Hayley discovers the review that Alex wrote and is beyond angry. Her reaction is rather unique: she totally revamps her show, making it about Alex and the way he treated her to poorly. In addition, she invites other women who have been mistreated by Alex to join her on stage, or to send in letters and emails about their experiences, some of which she reads as part of the show. Her revamped show is such a hit that every night is sold out, and the show is even live-streamed over the internet.

While Alex’s behavior and Hayley’s reaction are the heart of the action in the novel, they’re actually a stepping off place from which to explore several important questions. For example: how far should Hayley go in destroying Alex’s reputation. Even more interesting is the question of to whom do critics owe their reviews: the artist who created the show, or the audience viewing it? If the former, Hayley argues that a review should give the artist credit for the costs, in terms of money and emotional battering, that artists risk when offering their shows to the public. But Alex—and then Sophie—argue that a critic writes for the audience, and owes the artist no special consideration. It’s because he adheres to this philosophy that Alex most frequently gives productions one star in his reviews, and occasionally five stars, but nothing in between. A drama either succeeds or fails: one star or five stars.

Much more happens in this novel, which is told in the first person by Sophie, Alex’s colleague, who is sharing a flat with him during the Festival, while both do reviews. Sophie has major issues in her own life with her husband, who has confessed to have an affair, which has left her wondering if he loves her, or whether they should split up. Beyond that major question, she wonders whether she wants to continue as a junior culture critic, or take her career in a new direction. The novel deals with these questions almost as a counterpoint to the more philosophical questions related to criticism.

From a craft perspective, this novel is a literary pleasure. It moves quickly with wit and humor until the closing chapters, where it brings its themes to closure, and seems to get a little heavy doing so. 4*

Recursion by Blake Crouch

Recursion, by Blake Crouch, is about memory, false memory, and not being careful what you wish for. The novel begins with Barry, a New York City cop, becoming aware of something called False Memory Syndrome after he meets woman on a ledge of a 40-story building. So distraught is she over as memory of having lived another life that she can’t bear to continue living in her current life, and jumps.

Not long after this, as Barry investigates the woman’s life, he is led to a secretive office in Manhattan. Trapped in a weird scientific lab, he is told to recall a strong memory. When he remembers the night his daughter was killed by a drunk driver, he finds himself sent back in time to that night. Slowly realizing what has happened, he races after his daughter and prevents her from being hit.

The Good and the Bad

At the same time that we read about Barry saving his daughter, we learn about a brilliant scientist named Helena who invents a technology that she hopes will encode and thereby save the memories of her Alzheimer’s addled mother. But instead, when she tests it, she and all the rest of reality are sent back to the moment that the memory occurred and live a new lifetime from there. It’s just like what happened to Barry.

Eventually, Barry and Helena meet, and Barry learns how Helena was conned into developing her technology by a man who understood the power it could give him. Eventually the frightening potential of her invention becomes evident. For one thing, the government finds out about the technology and wants to use it to go back to save people and prevent wars. But other people and other governments have different ideas, and when the plans for the technology are stolen, major mayhem ensues.

Craft Matters

From a craft perspective, the novel was competently written. Although not literary, it is nevertheless filled with tension from the outset. Interestingly, the Sci-Fi thriller is matched with a deeply felt love story, which enhances the two main characters in a way that is uncommon in science fiction. The only downside in the novel is that the explanations about how Helena’s technology works seemed (to me) to be obscure, so that I’m not sure I ever completely all the details of how it worked.

Nevertheless, this novel was a cut above most science fiction, and an enjoyable read. 3.5 stars.

My Name is Emilia del Valle by Isabel Allende

This historical novel takes place in the late 19^th century, and is centered around a young woman by the name of Emilia del Valle. Emilia is the “illegitimate” daughter of Molly, a former novice nun, and a wealthy Chilean aristocrat by the name of Gonzalo Andres del Valle. When del Valle abandons Molly, she forms a relationship with a good man called Papo, and together they raise Emilia.
As she grows into adulthood, Emilia longs to become a writer, which is not a career open to women at the time. Nevertheless, with the help of Papo, she publishes several dime novels under a pseudonym. Subsequently, she wrangles a position as human-interest writer for the Daily Examiner, a San Francisco newspaper.

Proving herself as a competent writer, Emilia is first sent to New York, and later to Chile, to cover the revolution of 1891.With her goes Eric Whelan, another reporter, who is supposed to report the serious war stories, while Emilia reports on the war’s human toll. One of the reasons that Emilia asks to cover the war is that she knows that her biological father is Chilean. While she has no real feelings for him, her mother Molly has insisted that she track him down and let him know how much she despises him.

As a character, Emilia is exceptionally self-confident and assertive. She never lets society’s norms stop her from pursuing her career.

Craft Matters

From a craft perspective, the novel does a good job of recounting the difficulties that Emilia faced in becoming a reporter, and later the dangers involved in reporting on the war in Chile. Indeed, the descriptions of the violence that occurred are vivid and memorable.

One aspect about the novel that I found a bit odd is that it’s written as if it’s a memoir. As such, it’s more a recounting of events than a dramatization. I got used to it after a while, but a novel with few scenes, and brief ones at that, is never going to be wholly engaging. 3*

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Pell Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaefer and Annie Bowers

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society is an epistolary novel, meaning that it consists of letters between the characters in the novel. The main character is Juliet Ashton, a young woman who, during the Second World War, wrote a semi-weekly series of humorous columns for a magazine which were then combined into a successful book.

By happenstance, Juliet is contacted by a man on Guernsey Island and learns of a literary society begun on the island during the Second World War, when it was occupied by German soldiers—the sole portion of Great Britain to be so occupied. Juliet comes to know some of the islanders through correspondence, decides to write a book about their literary society, and travels to the island to do so.

Craft Matters

Okay, so why read this book? Well, the letters are written in an inviting, folksy style. The foibles of both the writers and their subjects are always on display, providing abundant if subtle humor.

History Matter

Another good reason is to learn some history. Guernsey Island sits in the English Channel much closer to France than Britain, and consequently came under German occupation for five years during the war. The stories of the privation endured by the local population, and the heroism of one young woman, are worth hearing.

This is not a new novel, and a romanticized version of the novel is available on Netflix. Nevertheless, if you haven’t seen the Netflix version, or would like to experience the complete story in its original form, take a look.

Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout

Character Problems

When Simplicity Becomes Simple-Minded

Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner

To Spy or Not To Spy

The Attraction of Neanderthals

Sadie’s Redemption

A Fine Literary Achievement

Madwoman by Chelsea Bieker

The Long-lived Effects of Abuse

Abuse Is Not Simple

The Wheel of Love

Entitlement by Rumaan Alam

The Wandering Middle

Point of View, Anyone?

A Commentary on Racism?

Comps

Fire Exit by Morgan Talty

Why Is It Important to be a Member of the Tribe?

Characters

Craft Matters

Good Girl by Aria Aber

Nila’s Embarrassment, Nila’s Rebellion

The Racists Down The Hall

Craft Matters

She Is Who She Is

Small Mercies by Dennis Lehane

The Antidote by Karen Russell

We Were the Universe by Kimberly King Parsons

American War by Omar El Akkad

Here One Moment by Liane Moriarity

Veronica by Mary Gaitskill

The Last King of California by Jordan Harper

Craft Matters

The Women by Kristin Hannah

The Complex Nature of the War is Not Ignored

Craft Matters

There Are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak

A Playful Conceit

Craft Matters

Colored Television by Danzy Senna

More Jane

Craft Matters

Money Counts

The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami

The RAA Nightmare

Craft Matters

The House on Buzzards Bay by Dwyer Murphy

Craft Matters

Typewriter Beach by Meg Waite Clayton

The History of the Hollywood Blacklist

The Special Relationship of Leo and Iz

Craft Matters: Eight Fingers on Eight Keys

The Bombshell by Darrow Farr

Worst Case Scenario by T.J. Newman

Bring the House Down by Charlotte Runcie

Recursion by Blake Crouch

The Good and the Bad

Craft Matters

My Name is Emilia del Valle by Isabel Allende

Craft Matters

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Pell Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaefer and Annie Bowers

Craft Matters

History Matter

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