With the unknowable expanse of the North Atlantic Ocean as the ever-present backdrop to their lives, three woman trapped in unhappy marriages collide With the unknowable expanse of the North Atlantic Ocean as the ever-present backdrop to their lives, three woman trapped in unhappy marriages collide in a small Irish village—the fictional Ardglas—in Couny Donegal. This is not a 19th century or post-WWII portrait of an isolated community trapped in ambered tradition. This is 1994, in that peculiar time where Ireland's slow-to-budge past is poised to accelerate into a transformative 21st century.
Divorce is on the ballot again in Ireland, having been defeated in past referendums by a nation clinging to the directives of its most prominent governing body: the Catholic church. Although sentiments are rapidly changing, it's not a certain bet that the referendum will pass. In the immediate meantime, marriage has become a trap for Izzy. Her two children have grown, yet her minor politician husband won't allow her to return to running a small business in town. Izzy keeps her frequent depression at bay by befriending the parish priest and taking a series of self-improvement classes at the community center. The latest is a writing class, taught by poet Colette Crowley. The most popular topic of Ardglas' vibrant rumor mill, Colette abandoned her husband and children to have an affair with a married man in Dublin. She's back, having also abandoned her lover to reclaim her role as loving mother, but her husband won't allow her to see the youngest of their three sons. Determined to stay, Colette rents a cottage from the Mullens, Dolores and Donal. Dolores is unexpectedly and bewilderingly pregnant with their fourth child, conceived when Donal is in between affairs and feeling a twinge of guilt for his constant betrayals.
These women intersect in ways both tragic and redemptive. The strength of the narrative lies in Alan Murrin's ability to reveal the complexities of their marriages, their inner lives, and their deep ambivalence at breaking up their families as each woman searches for meaning and possibility.
The plot remains fundamentally character-driven, moody and thoughtful, rich with portraiture, until the final quarter of the novel when it bursts into melodrama and reads more like a domestic thriller. It's a bit jarring, really. As are the male characters, which are all—with the tepid exception of the parish priest—villainous, vacuous, and pathetic. The portrayal of men feels mean-spirited and heavy-handed and detracts from the more compassionate and nuanced aspects of an otherwise deeply compelling story....more
The deeply-conflicted reviews are the hardest to write. Had I not been so enamored of Julia Phillips' debut Disappearing Earth and so eagerly antiThe deeply-conflicted reviews are the hardest to write. Had I not been so enamored of Julia Phillips' debut Disappearing Earth and so eagerly anticipated Bear, perhaps I could land more firmly on my conclusions. But even without the anticipation, I believe I would still waffle between awe and frustration.
As she did in Disappearing Earth, Phillips brilliantly establishes mood and theme with a wondrous landscape. Whereas her debut was set on a harsh and unforgiving terrain of a vast Russian peninsula, Bear unfolds on the gently pastoral and boreal paradise of San Juan Island, its splendid isolation broken by regular ferry crossings that convey tourists from the Puget Sound mainland. It's a fairy tale setting, perfect for a novel that opens with lines from the Brothers Grimm story, “Snow-White and Rose-Red.”
But the idyllic setting has become a prison for late twenty-something sisters Sam and Elena. They've resided their entire lives in the small enclave of Friday Harbor with their mother, who is dying of a pulmonary disease. Despite living on property that would fetch at least half a million on the real estate market, the women live in near-poverty. The mother's illness has all but bankrupt the family, which survives on Elena's wages as a server at the golf club's tony restaurant and Sam's meager take-home from working concessions on the ferry. The sisters are trapped by the need to care for their mother, whom they adore but whose illness has lingered years longer than they imagined.
Sam sustains her hope by leaning into the plan the sisters created in the early days of their mother's diagnosis: once she passes, they will sell the house and property and finally be free to live wherever they choose, never having to worry about money again.
Then one day, Sam is on the ferry deck after her shift, gazing out across the Salish Sea, when she sees the inexplicable: a grizzly bear swimming toward the island.
Is the bear a threat or a savior? How the two sisters respond to the bear's presence becomes the story's central conflict. But because our perspective is limited to Sam's point-of-view, it became this reader's central frustration.
Phillip's spare prose captures Sam's stasis and emotional claustrophobia perfectly. Sam's world, despite the beauty in which she lives, is gray and dull. She spends hours every day in a grim cafeteria on a huge boat that treks the same watery path day after day, heating pastries in a microwave and handing out sugary coffee drinks to tourists who look right through her. She's having a summer fling with another ferry employee, but there's no substance to their relationship. Sam seems to be waiting it out with the same resignation she regards every other aspect of her life, including her mother's terminal illness, her sister's exhaustion, the indifference of their small town. Her weariness becomes our own. There is little relief in this moody and grim narrative.
Elena, by contrast, is reanimated by the bear's appearance. The bond between them is transcendent, but we view it only from afar, through Sam's horrified eyes. We're never let in on the secret, just left to guess at the meaning of their electric connection through the opaque but heavy-handed symbology.
Without question, Bear is impossible to put down. The fairy tale motif ribbons dread through the hyper-realism of a tourist Mecca recovering from pandemic depression. You know it won't end well and the novel's final third is riveting, leading to that inevitable ending. But, no spoilers here!
This is a tightly-controlled story with little redemption. I admire Julia Phillips' narrative mastery, even if the story left me cold and defeated.
There are some details that jarred me, calling into question the entire premise on which the novel hinges. Anyone with the mother's level of income would be eligible for AppleCare, Washington State's health insurance program for low income residents. The daughters would not have been responsible for footing the bill for their mother's care. That's simply not how it works. Mom would have qualified for AppleCare and would never have seen a single bill.
I live not far from the novel's setting, in a community that is also dependent on the state ferry system. Washington State Ferries lost many employees during the pandemic, creating a staffing crisis that affects full functioning even today. Anyone who had a Merchant Marine certification would not have been denied a job with the WSF. Ferry concessions, which are contracted out to private businesses, were discontinued due to staff shortages during the pandemic, but the WSF was, and remains, desperate for willing, certified ferry workers. So, no....more
Because a friend warned me away, because I didn't want to read yet another pandemic-era novel, because Ann Patchett has been hit and miss wit4.5 stars
Because a friend warned me away, because I didn't want to read yet another pandemic-era novel, because Ann Patchett has been hit and miss with me over the years, I returned Tom Lake to the library unread a few months ago. It popped up again in my holds queue and I collected it again, telling myself "only if I have time." In one of those rare moments when my TBR stack was thinning out, I read the first few pages. And then a few more after that. And then...
And then I was ever so glad I did not miss out on this lovely novel. Reading it was like standing in the warmth and glow of a campfire at dusk—with all its nostalgic zen. Patchett captured perfectly the strange early months of the pandemic, when it felt like the world was falling apart and yet some were able to exist in a bubble of isolated calm that for a few moments felt like a gift.
Lara is isolating on her north Michigan farm with her husband, Joe, and three adult daughters, Emily, Maisie and Nell. It is the height of cherry season, but without their usual seasonal laborers, Lara and Joe have only their daughters to help bring in the harvest. To pass the long hours in the orchard, the sisters press Lara to tell them the story of her summer stock romance with a young actor who later became a megawatt movie star, and her own brief rise as a Hollywood starlet. In a subtle nod to Chekhov and an homage to Thorton Wilder's Our Town, Tom Lake is a novel about family, farming and theatre, a coming-of-age tale told by a mother to her beloved daughters, full of romance and tragedy.
The story shifts between two timelines—Lara's past as a college student-turned-actress and the wildly romantic months she spent at Tom Lake, a northern Michigan summer stock theatre, that led to her decision to abandon her acting career just as her star was on the rise—and the present, within the loving but complex relationships of her nuclear family.
A quietly-plotted novel in a bucolic setting with characters who adore one another might seem devoid of tension, but Patchett layers the warmth and humor with sorrow and longing, and an edge of impending tragedy. At times, the transformation Lara undertakes — from ambition to acceptance —feels a little forced, the circumstances too staged, but the reading experience is so deeply pleasurable, it hardly matters in the end.
The tenderness of Tom Lake may not be for everyone, but I loved its quiet grace....more
I admired this more than I enjoyed it. A sort of Irish A Weekend at Bernie's dark comic caper with rural hoodlums as anti-heroes instead of frat boy sI admired this more than I enjoyed it. A sort of Irish A Weekend at Bernie's dark comic caper with rural hoodlums as anti-heroes instead of frat boy sales execs. Violent, sad, weird, but with a great female lead, Nicky, who is the bright spot of intelligence amidst boys who consume too much sugar, beer and weed. Lots of tracksuits. A funny little dog....more
Would that I were still in a book club: Leaving is the perfect book club read. The questions it raises about morality, familial relationships and pareWould that I were still in a book club: Leaving is the perfect book club read. The questions it raises about morality, familial relationships and parental responsibilities, love and passion in later life, the maddening choices the characters make—all ripe with possibilities for rich discussion and dissent. And then there is that ending. Oh, that ending. My heart.
Leaving is a quietly devastating love story between Sarah Watson, who divorced many years before and has remained more or less content in her singledom, and Walter Jennings, an unhappily married architect. Sarah and Walter had been college sweethearts forty years earlier, but Sarah dumped Walter, misreading his joie de vivre for capriciousness. By the time they meet again—a chance encounter at the opera—Walter's vivacity has faded to resignation. He married a pretty, lively young woman who turned out to be insipid and shallow. Sarah, however, blossomed on her own. She lives with her beloved dog, Bella, on a beautiful property north of New York City and works as a museum curator. Both have adult children: Sarah, a daughter in New York who is too busy raising young children and working full-time to have much time for her mother, and a son who lives on the West Coast. Walter has a daughter in her mid-twenties who emerged from a withdrawn, Goth phase to become her dad's best friend.
Sarah and Walter fall in love—again—and talk turns quickly to a life together. Walter moves out, begins divorce proceedings, the lovers negotiate if Sarah should move to Boston or Walter to New York, and then something, more specifically someone, throws up a seemingly-insurmountable barrier.
What transpires is a family tragedy operatic in scope but intimate in emotion. I found myself caught between tenderness for these two lovers rediscovering their former intimacy in aging bodies with sagging skin and poochy flesh, navigating expectations and exasperations of grown children and the prurient interest of friends and colleagues, and frustration at the paths they choose.
Leaving is beautifully crafted, with elegant prose and perfectly timed pacing that flows and ebbs with hope and bewilderment. Sarah is the more rounded, sympathetic character; Walter seems more like a vehicle for the points Roxana Robinson wants to make and the plot points she needs to hit. But it is still a breathtaking story. Highly recommended contemporary literary fiction.
A note about the many striking copy-editing errors: I don't hold the author at fault for these. There's an editorial team which pores over a manuscript before the final copy is sent to the printer. It's hard to understand how these got past a copy editor, a line editor, and a proofreader, particularly at a publisher as prestigious as W.W. Norton. But there you have it: caveat emptor....more
Mercury begins promisingly enough: a lovely young thing moves into a hardscrabble western Pennsylvania town and catches the eyes of a pair of handsomeMercury begins promisingly enough: a lovely young thing moves into a hardscrabble western Pennsylvania town and catches the eyes of a pair of handsome brothers who revere their mother and submit to carrying on the family roofing business started by their mercurial father. They vie for the new girl in a Cain and Abel rivalry that's also tied up in some sort of Oedipal complex with their mother and a King Lear-ish fever dream of a father.
The prose is often deft and sharp, but also too often florid. Burns is fond of describing everything in threes: "She was exhausted, and dirty, and frightened." "The bloodshed wasn't like her monthly period; it was urgent and clotted and woeful." and of making dramatic, declarative statements that are meant to be harbingers of doom: "Marley went to her husband, did as she'd always done, and made his stains, his pain, her own." "Elise was a woman who had opened her home and her table, yet not her heart, because she had no room left in it. Her husband and her boys had taken it all." Because these fraught ruminations happen so often, they weigh the story down with angst that wrests away plausibility. I was both deflated and bored soon after the halfway mark.
Mercury stumbles over its attempts to ratchet up the tension by plowing heavy emotion into every scene. It's 315 pages of melodrama, with characters who are miserable, deeply enamored of their misery, and have made it their personal missions to make everyone else around them just as miserable as they are....more
A dash of Mad Men, a soupçonne of Seinfeld, a generous helping of Where'd You Go, Bernadette and the one Fredrik Backman novel I've read that I can't A dash of Mad Men, a soupçonne of Seinfeld, a generous helping of Where'd You Go, Bernadette and the one Fredrik Backman novel I've read that I can't recall the name of, a sprinkling of Boys in the Boat, with a cast of quirky characters who I swear I've seen in various novels from Gail Honeyman to Julia Claiborne Johnson to Kevin Wilson, Lessons in Chemistry cooks up to be a tasty morsel but still left me wanting ...
Although the prose is polished to a brilliant sheen and the voice is dynamically theatrical, I thought the story lacked depth—a flaw the author tried to make up for by sheer force of plot. It's a very busy book and it's easy to get distracted by all the wow sorts of things happening: an adorable dog with a massive vocabulary! an adorable child with an even more massive vocabulary! an evil orphanage staffed by evil priests! suicide! a kitchen torn out and replaced with a chemistry lab! rape! a cooking show! women love chemistry! domestic emotional abuse! pregnancy out of wedlock! most men are fools! anyone who believes in god is an idiot! an atheist minister! a brilliant female scientist who is not only beautiful but on the spectrum! rowing! rowing? yes, rowing! secrets! the dog!
I didn't love this. It is undeniably entertaining, but the whole does not equal the sum of the many parts. The anachronisms-in facts and in behaviors- are jarring, as are the many stereotypes and simplistic characters. I found the whimsy, the farce, the madcap energy at odds with the heavy-handed soapboxing that almost felt like the author was breaking the fourth wall through Elizabeth's internality. It would be satire, but it takes itself far too seriously for all that.
I love quirky characters and oddball narratives. This is all that, but something is off in the recipe. A half-baked Alaskan......more
There's a bit of something for everyone here: a multi-generational family saga spun out in parallel narratives with a mystery, and a love story, at itThere's a bit of something for everyone here: a multi-generational family saga spun out in parallel narratives with a mystery, and a love story, at its core. Fans of Kate Morton will be delighted to settle into a lush, women-centered narrative that is written in a breezy, accessible style. It's the perfect read for a winter vacation, when the warmth of Australia's Adelaide Hills and the sparkling Sydney Harbor will remind you that summer and sweet tea are only a few months away.
Journalist Jess Turner-Bridges, who left Australia for London twenty years ago, is notified that her grandmother Nora is in the hospital after a bad fall. Jess, who was raised by Nora after Jess's mother Polly moved up north to Brisbane from Sydney, races home. Her grandmother, fading and confused, utters some strange things that set Jess to sleuthing their meaning. She soon learns that Nora's sister-in-law Isabel and her three of her four children died together on Christmas Day 1959 under mysterious circumstances at their mansion in the Adelaide Hills of South Australia. The fourth child, an infant girl, disappeared and was presumably taken by wild dogs. The tragedy was kept under wraps in Australia, but became the subject of a best-selling true crime novel in the United States. Jess, with a tattered copy of the book in hand, follows the clues until they lead her to the shocking truth.
Which isn't all that shocking, because you figure out pretty much early on what's happening. At least in part. The triple-pike, double back-flip, aerial split twist at the end might catch you by surprise, but it was also an eye-rolling flourish that didn't stick its acrobatic landing.
Although enjoyable, this book is too dang long. I love juicy, immersive, doorstop novels, but in this case, there is so much unnecessary description, and getting from there to here blahblahblah that adds nothing to the emotional depth. I nearly abandoned Homecoming early on when Morton took us to the airport with Jess for her flight to Australia and we had to move through every moment of her journey from check-in through security to the departure area—for no reason. Just words. Yet another example of a bestselling author who is apparently able to bypass the editorial process. Just check out how many times the adjective "fractious" is used to describe a fussy baby. At least five. This alone tells me that there was not an attempt to do a deep edit before it went to print.
I'm grousing, but stuff like this drives me to distraction. I'd give the novel 4 solid stars for an entertaining story, but it loses one for poor editing....more
There is an Austen-esque quality to the first half of Birnam Wood that endeared me to the novel, a chatty interiority that delves deep into the characThere is an Austen-esque quality to the first half of Birnam Wood that endeared me to the novel, a chatty interiority that delves deep into the characters' thoughts and motivations, that lingers in their pontifications. Pages pass with scarcely a paragraph break, thick hunks of prose like a monster club sandwich you can't get your mouth around without it falling apart.
It also meant I could read this only a few pages at a time before my attention began to wander, waiting and wondering where the promised "thriller" bits of this purported thriller would surface. When they do, it's a rush to a finish that is too replete with coincidence and cinematic flair to maintain the resonance of the novel's earlier thematic seriousness.
And yet. There is something deliciously satisfying about this odd social satire, a mannered consideration of young white leftists mired in their sanctimony and social justice jargon married to a bustling Le Carré thriller with a billionaire villain who can alter text messages on other people's phones and cause earthquakes with his greed. Eleanor Catton spares no one as she offers several characters their full turn on her stage, shifting points of view from chapter to chapter to give us the full 360° of this drama.
The premise is relatively simple: Birnam Wood is a gardening collective in Christchurch on New Zealand's South Island that reclaims unused land, without permission, to grow vegetables. It's meant to have a "horizontal" governing structure, but its leader is clear: one Mira Bunting, a charismatic, self-absorbed but dedicated young woman who knows how to charm or intimidate to get her way. Her foil is best friend Shelley Noakes, a self-deprecating but highly efficient worker bee who is mulling over the prospect of walking away from an endeavor she's patiently devoted years of her life to. Mira learns of a large farm several hours’ drive south that's been abandoned by its owners after a massive landslide has cut it and the neighboring town off from the rest of the region. She figures she can install a growing operation there before anyone is the wiser. What she doesn't count on is an American billionaire who also has his eye on the property to set up his apocalyptic bolthole. But he takes a shine to Mira and decides he'll underwrite Birnam Wood, presenting the guerrilla gardeners with a keen dilemma: the enemy, an American capitalist who made his fortune from surveillance technology, is giving this struggling little collective the opportunity to go legit and become a sustainable non-profit.
That's all you'll get for the plot from me. Catton goes on to turn this into a stylized thriller that is both laugh-out-loud silly and heartbreakingly tragic. Damn masterful, really. It's a swervy, deliberately inconsistent novel made up of parts that tumble together until they click into place with maddening inevitability, like her Booker Prize winning The Luminaries, which I adored to the stars and back. Birnam Wood captured less of my imagination than it did my admiration because its parts don't snap together quite as firmly into a cogent whole, but it is still a wow of a read....more
Sister Angeline was known as Meg to her parents and younger brother and the few friends she had in her Chicago school. But in the wake of tragedy, sheSister Angeline was known as Meg to her parents and younger brother and the few friends she had in her Chicago school. But in the wake of tragedy, she leaves her life and her name behind to join a convent. She is just sixteen, but already the larger world is too much. Sister Angeline takes a vow of silence, believing that loneliness and isolation are her crosses to bear for the suffering she has caused.
Within a few years, the Chicago diocese has run out of money and Sister Angeline is transferred a convent on a remote island off the coast of Washington state. But this is a convent unlike any Sister Angeline has heard of. Light of the Sea is run by five nuns who have a different approach to manifesting their faith: they eschew tradition, defy canonical law, live in yurts, wear jeans, sing, and agitate for social justice.
At first bewildered by the nuns’ radical behavior and views, sheltered and shy Sister Angeline clings to her habit and the strictures of her religion. But gradually her new family's warmth and unconditional acceptance begin to dissolve the barriers of shame and grief the young woman erected to guard against complete collapse.
Angeline is breathtaking. It is a page-turner that is simultaneously tightly-plotted and generously conceived. Not only will Angeline herself swell your heart; the caretakers of Light of the Sea — Kamika, Alice, Gina, Sigrid and Edith — inhabit their own stories that become vital parts of an inevitable whole. The residents of Beckett Island, though few, have a profound impact on Light of the Sea as well, working either to protect the unique convent or to destroy it entirely.
Written with prose that is poetic and pristine, situated in a landscape that comes vividly alive as a character unto itself, offering deeply resonant themes of faith, spirituality, grief, forgiveness and resilience, Angeline will unsettle with its mysteries, charm with its characters, move with its pain and restore with its grace. Anna Quinn has written a beautiful, unforgettable story....more
With the long-focus lens of time, we know the shameful history of Ireland's Magdalene Laundries —the Church-run, state-approved workhouses for "fallenWith the long-focus lens of time, we know the shameful history of Ireland's Magdalene Laundries —the Church-run, state-approved workhouses for "fallen women" that operated with impunity across Ireland for over two centuries. Thousands of women were incarcerated for the sin of having sex before marriage, some simply for being too flirtatious or desirable. Unwed mothers, including those impregnated by rape, fared the worst: the newborns were taken away as soon as they delivered, the babies' fates unknown by their mothers. Countless women and children perished in the Laundries, which were an open secret throughout Ireland. The last Magdalene Laundry closed in 1996, several years after unmarked graves were found, a community demanded answers, and survivors began speaking out.
Claire Keegan's exquisite, heartbreaking Small Things Like These is set during the Christmas Season, 1985, just a few years before the horror of the Magdalene Laundries was exposed to the greater world. Bill Furlong, owner of a small, busy coal and timber business and father of five school-aged daughters, is exhausted. He works hard to provide for his family, to be an upstanding community member, and still hold something aside for his neglected soul. Approaching middle-age, Bill struggles to make sense of his choices and wonders what else the world can offer him besides the daily grind of work.
A troubling incident shatters into his life like a bottle smashed in a dark alley at night: while delivering an evening load of coal to the local convent, which serves as a girls' school and a laundry, he comes across a group of young women in the chapel. They are barefoot, dirty, and afraid. One begs him to take her to the river where she can drown herself. A nun intercepts the exchange and he's led away, confused and horrified.
When Bill tells his wife what happened at the convent, she shuts him down, warning him to stay silent. Then the Mother Superior invites him over for tea and offers him a large Christmas bonus. But the convent unwittingly offers up another secret and Bill is forced to make a choice that will change his life forever.
This slim novella contains multitudes in its Dickensian-like, timeless feel. There is the sense of a fable within these snow-covered holiday streets, Bill's quiet musings, and the spectre of evil on the hill. Bill's own origin story has a fairy tale aspect: He was raised in the village's "big house," the estate of a Protestant widow who extended kindness to his single mother who bore Bill out of wedlock. He now wonders what terrible fate his own mother may have escaped by the kindness of the widow and his memories are laced with gratitude for his sheltered upbringing and shame over the secrecy of his father's identity.
It is a marvel that Claire Keegan creates such depth and intensity in so few pages. Each sentence is carefully, beautifully crafted, like literary jewels. She creates a world in miniature, an Ireland in soft-focus that is slowly revealed to have a hard-edged, cruel core, a heart of darkness in the midst of gentle, pastoral charm.
Mary Beth Keane's skill is such that the writer disappears and the characters take over, writing, it would seem, themselves forward. During a week wheMary Beth Keane's skill is such that the writer disappears and the characters take over, writing, it would seem, themselves forward. During a week when the village of Gillam is shut down by a series of blizzards, Malcolm Gephardt learns the fate of his marriage and of his business. He's been married to Jess, a lawyer who works 60-hour weeks in New York City, for fifteen years and he's as good as married to The Half Moon, the bar he bought in a shady deal from a long-time associate of his dad's. Malcolm loves each to distraction but at start of the novel, it seems he's lost both to bad decisions and bad luck.
He and Jess fell for each other at first sight and married quickly when Jess became pregnant. That first unintended pregnancy was lost to a miscarriage and gave Jess a chance to finish law school and begin a demanding career. Soon enough, she was ready to try again, but her body had other ideas. Years of heartbreak followed one miscarriage after another, the couple spent thousands on fertility treatments and IVF, and by the time we meet them, Jess has left Malcolm, their marriage depleted by grief and disappointment.
Then there's the gut-punch reality that Malcolm is in over his head with The Half Moon He can't pay the bills and his note is being called in by a man who sends big guys in dark suits to sit like thunderclouds at the bar.
As bad as this is, Malcolm knows if he can just work things out with Jess it'll all come right. She's always been everything that's right with his life. That is, until his friends let slip that Jess hasn't exactly been pining away alone.
Through flashbacks and shifting perspectives, the novel explores the nuances of marriage and the complexities of growing older and accepting that so much of life is beyond your control. Despite its heavy subject matter, Keane's deft touch brings laugh-out-loud moments that endear you to these characters, their friends and family, making their predicaments familiar and believable.
There are subplots about a missing bar patron and the threat posed by The Half Moon's dire financial situation that move Malcolm forward through each quietly claustrophobic day of the storm, but it is the question of his marriage and longing for Jess that is the novel's central question and its beating heart.
Mary Beth Keane has written a deeply contemplative novel that is also wonderfully entertaining. Highly Recommended! ...more
A few years ago I read Jeff Goodell's harrowing The Water Will Come in which he writes, "Sea-level rise is one of the central facts of our time, as reA few years ago I read Jeff Goodell's harrowing The Water Will Come in which he writes, "Sea-level rise is one of the central facts of our time, as real as gravity. It will reshape our world in ways most of us can only dimly imagine."
Lily Brooks-Dalton read this book, too—she references it in her author's notes. And clearly she's not "most of us", for The Light Pirate is her vividly imagined tale of the not-too distant future where the waters have risen in Florida and do not recede.
The story opens with a devastating hurricane and the birth of a child. Ten years later that child, Wanda, named after the hurricane that accompanied her arrival, lives with her father and older brother. The men, both lineman for the town's utility district, toil to keep the power on in an area constantly under siege by ferocious storms. The work keeps them mostly numb to the terrible tragedies that marked the miracle of little Wanda's birth ten years before.
The town, Rudder, is slowly emptying out as the ocean creeps steadily in. The government is evacuating the area and Wanda's little family struggles with the decision to stay or go. One final disaster forces the decision. Wanda stays, under the care and protection of a neighbor, Phyllis, who has been preparing for the worst for years. She welcomes Wanda into her self-sufficient homestead and trains her to fend for herself.
As in her haunting and beautiful debut, Good Morning, Midnight, Brooks-Dalton infuses the narrative with heavy tension that forebodes disaster, like the sudden oppressive stillness and otherworldly glow that descends moments before a storm unleashes. She also excels at creating an intense loneliness in her characters and her settings that is somehow both peaceful and keening; the question, what would I do? repeats in a quiet voice as you read.
There is also a supernatural element that may or may not work for you, depending on your willingness to suspend disbelief. I loved it. The mystery allowed the story to move past a hopeless near-future into what may come next, for there will be a next. It may not include homes with four walls, roads, skyscrapers or farms. It may not have television or theme parks, cows or cars, but the world will adapt. The question is, will we?
As relentlessly bleak as the book may seem, it is not without hope and it is steeped in love. Highly recommended....more
This book's brilliance lies in its ability to unsettle the reader: It is fiction? Is it memoir? Why do we care? What is inherent in our nature that weThis book's brilliance lies in its ability to unsettle the reader: It is fiction? Is it memoir? Why do we care? What is inherent in our nature that we need to categorize an exterior thing in order to understand our interior reaction to it? And in this very way, Elizabeth McCracken challenges the reader to examine her expectations of what makes a story.
This is a book about grief and yet it is playful and wry. McCracken's protagonist, a woman who travels alone to London to trace the steps of one of the last happy times with her recently-deceased mother, is, like the author, a writer. She adroitly catalogues details as she travels through the city, giving this a Mrs. Dalloway energy of consciousness, rather than an unfolding of a plot.
I know much of why I adored and connected to the slim, punchy, resonant read is the narrator's musings on writing, a meta-meditation on storytelling. But the novel transcends an insider's tale of her craft and muses on the universality of a child's relationship to her mother and the tumult of emotions that follow when the physical mother is gone but the emotional bond remains.
Much has been made of this blow-by-blow retelling of Dickens’s David Copperfield (ahem!), but there’s no need to have read the classic denouncement ofMuch has been made of this blow-by-blow retelling of Dickens’s David Copperfield (ahem!), but there’s no need to have read the classic denouncement of the ills of the industrial age to appreciate Demon Copperhead. Barbara Kingsolver holds her own here, setting her misery tale in opioid-ravaged Appalachia of the 1990s-2000s.
I’ve been reading Kingsolver’s novels and essays for over thirty years and I’ve had my ups and downs with her work. There are novels that I’ve treasured and which helped shape me as a writer (The Beans Trees, Prodigal Summer). There are novels I’ve barely been able to finish (The Lacuna, Flight Behavior). Truth is, it’s been a very long while that anything by Kingsolver made me excited to read Demon Copperhead. But this novel is an achievement and once again I land in awe of her ferocious talent.
Character is king here. Kingsolver leans heavily into the Dickensian license to create an epic tragedy with an unforgettable cast. Protagonist Damon "Demon" Copperhead is as irresistible and sympathetic a character as you would imagine a Copperfield-inspired young soul to be. His voice, from tragic childhood to abusive fostering to descent into drug addiction hell, is singular and unflinching. He lifts this long and grim tale out of the mud of poverty, abuse and nihilism with his grit, self-effacing wit and inherent sweetness born of an inquiring mind.
Where I shift uncomfortably is how very entertaining this novel is (except that it is just too long, to the point where I was certain pages were added each night as I slept, so I was forever on page 247). Dickens wrote allegorically, with a strong bent toward the satirical to deliver a message. Kingsolver is a most literal writer and I fear that Demon Copperhead evokes a reader’s horror and pity. That ‘can’t look away from the car wreck’ feeling becomes a sense of relief that it isn’t us as we drive slowly past. And then, when those same folks have a different political or cultural viewpoints, we label them idiots, --phobes, --ists. Kingsolver touches on this cultural bigotry against Appalachians, but then makes the enlightened few characters those who are either not originally from the region or who left to get educated elsewhere and return to save the community with their progressive values.
She also tosses in Demon’s ethnic heritage as a Melungeon but does not offer any notion why, other than to give Demon his unique physical attributes. It feels gratuitous, exploitative, and does nothing to advance the plot.
I quibble, but I still offer a high rating because of the propulsive story and Demon’s rich and wonderful voice. The opioid epidemic slammed down on Appalachia with a targeted tsunami of vicious addiction. Demon Copperhead tells the tale of one tiny community that suffered a massive blow. I hope other contemporary writers tell stories about the heritage and resilience of this beautiful, culturally-rich region that all Americans should treasure. Barbara Kingsolver could!...more
The Wilf family— physician father, his beautiful wife and two ideal kids — live in a quiet, leafy commuter suburb of New York City. A tragedy opens thThe Wilf family— physician father, his beautiful wife and two ideal kids — live in a quiet, leafy commuter suburb of New York City. A tragedy opens the book, shattering their idyll even as the family works to forget it ever happened. The kids, Sarah and Theo, grow into adults whose lives seem shiny from the outside. Sarah becomes a powerful Hollywood screenwriter and Theo a celebrated chef. But inside lurks a rotting core of shame and bewilderment. Back in New York, Dr. Wilf is packing up their beloved house, preparing to move to a retirement community where his wife is already residing in the memory care unit. Next door live the Shenkmans, neighbors for a decade who the Wilfs hardly know, except for a chance event nine years before: Dr. Wilf delivered Waldo Shenkman in the kitchen, saving his life in an emergency delivery as the ambulance sirens could be heard screaming into the neighborhood. The baby boy grows into a child with special gifts, but his curious intelligence frustrates his conventional dad. Waldo's search for meaning leads him literally into the night and back into Dr. Wilf's life in a full circle of love and tragedy that brings an estranged family back together again.
Signal Fires eschews chronological storytelling, instead dropping the reader into decades past and present: 1970, 1999, 2014, 1985, 2010, 2020. We see these families' futures before we understand their pasts, and then once we know them, we live in their present, omniscient and anticipatory. Shapiro balances plot and story as a teacher of craft should: one is there to move the other along at an unhurried but unflagging pace.
This is Dani Shapiro's first novel in a dozen years and it's well worth the wait. Like her memoirs, it is a story of families and secrets, rendered in beautiful, clear-eyed prose. Her style is intimate — the characters feel like friends and family, their stories told at the kitchen table with hands wrapped around a hot cup of tea or in a quiet corner of your favorite restaurant over a glass of wine. It is a compassionate and lovely meditation on chance and choice. Highly recommended....more
I admire the crap out of Taylor Jenkins Reid. Her stories have so much energy, her characters constantly in motion, ambitioning through their lives atI admire the crap out of Taylor Jenkins Reid. Her stories have so much energy, her characters constantly in motion, ambitioning through their lives at full-tilt. It's what makes her novels compulsively readable, why she has legions of fans. Her work is delightfully entertaining. And so it goes with the cringely titled Carrie Soto is Back.
The plot here is simple: Carrie Soto retired in 1989 as the GOAT of women's tennis, with a record of the most career Grand Slam titles. Five years later, at age thirty-seven, she's back on the court to defend her title from a new champion, power player Nicki Chan. Whether or not she succeeds, and at what cost to her mental and physical health, is the central mystery.
Her coach is her darling father, Javier, once a tennis pro himself before he left his Argentine homeland for Los Angeles. Carrie was a ruthless competitor, earning the nickname Battle Axe, if only because the press couldn't just call her Bitch. She made no friends on the circuit and eschewed romance for short-lived affairs with her male counterparts on tour.
Most of the story takes place on the court as Carrie trains relentlessly for her comeback, and then begins competing. The matches are breath-stealing; I had to force myself not to let my eyes jump ahead to the end of the page to learn the outcome before I'd read each player's moves. TJR fully inhabits the tennis pro's psyche and body. The reader lives each decision and swing, agonizing over the volleys as the competitors battle every point.
Introspection comes in the interplay between characters. TJR uses the moments of coaching to reveal a father-daughter relationship, co-training between Carrie and another veteran player, Bowe Huntley, to advance a romance, fierce competition between rivals to show Carrie's deep emotional conflicts and her self-inflicted loneliness.
You do not have to be a tennis fan or know anything about the sport to be enthralled by the suspense and enchanted by these characters, even the oft-maddening Carrie. Taylor Jenkins Reid serves up an ace of a read!...more
My anger is not so much directed toward the accusations as it is toward the lack of self-regard these women have—the lack of their own confidence.
My anger is not so much directed toward the accusations as it is toward the lack of self-regard these women have—the lack of their own confidence. I wish they could see themselves not as little leaves swirled around by the wind of a world that does not belong to them, but as powerful, sexual women interest in engaging in a little bit of danger, a little bit of taboo, a little but of fun. With the general, highly objectionable move toward morality in a populist insistence of morality in art, I find this post hoc prudery offensive, as a fellow female.
So opines the unnamed protagonist of Julia May Jonas's searing, astonishing debut, Vladimir. This quote sums up some essential conflicts in a post-#MeToo society: what and who determines agency over one's body and sexuality? What is power? Should art reflect or protect? Of course, in an increasingly narcissistic culture that valorizes suffering, the answers are slippery, muddled with context and culture. But Jonas takes it all on, in a darkly ironic tale of betrayal, lust, and literature.
The novel is narrated by the wife of the chair of an English department at a small, unnamed upstate New York liberal arts college. She is also a tenured professor in the same department, beloved as a teacher of women's literature, but she privately bemoans her own middling success as an author: two nearly-forgotten novels published a generation earlier.
Her husband is on paid leave from his post in the English department, awaiting a hearing that will determine the fate of his academic career. He has been accused by seven former students of inappropriate sexual conduct—affairs that happened prior to the college's rule forbidding sexual relationships between students and faculty. The affairs were consensual (as much as can be between luscious coeds in their early twenties and a lusty older professor, ewww), and in their open marriage, vaguely acknowledged by his wife. In fact, students across campus eventually call for her dismissal, citing her betrayal of the female by "enabling" her husband's affairs.
But this looming threat is merely a backdrop to the story, which centers on our complicated, maddening, endearing narrator, her obsessive desire for the newly-arrived English professor Vladimir Vladinski, and her fascination with his fragile wife, Cynthia. Both Vlad, a second-generation Russian, and Cynthia, an ethereally beautiful woman of Chinese heritage, are preternaturally gifted writers, a fact that both energizes and grates at the post-menopausal narrator.
The novel is rich with literary allusions, from Stephen King to Nabokov, hearkening themes of claustrophobic obsession, unreliable narrators, gothic melodrama from Misery and Lolita to Rebecca and Dante's Inferno. The insular, entitled world of academe is flayed open and Jonas pulls no punches: students and professors alike are roasted as snowflakes, coddled in this Ivory Tower.
Things take a turn for the weird and outrageous, scenes that will cause the reader to erupt in nervous, overly self-conscious giggles, before resolving in tragedy and then in gentleness. It's the wonderfully disconcerting mix of madness and rationality, of silliness and substance, that make me adore this novel. Bold, thorny, caustic and wry, Vladimir left a deep impression and I'm deeply impressed by this exceptional writer....more
Loading...
