LET US DESCEND by Jesmyn Ward

If slaves were such valuable property and so vital to their owners as farmworkers, why did their owners starve them?  Wouldn’t nutrition make them stronger and more efficient?  More puzzling is a slave trader who drags slaves for weeks and miles to market.  Wouldn’t they bring a higher price if they looked strong and well-fed?  Slave owners treated their livestock better.  Annis is a young slave whose mother is sold and whose owner is her biological father.  Hers is a hopeless and dreadful life, as she endures every nature of hardship.  A spirit, who may be benevolent or may have her own agenda, visits Annis from time to time, and I am not generally a fan of magical realism.  With or without the help of this spirit, Annis struggles to survive, although at times I think she just wants to die, and who can blame her, when living is sheer agony.   She has memories of a better life and envisions a life of freedom that does not involve constant fear of capture by the brutal slave patrols; constant anxiety for a runaway is not really freedom. This country was not the land of the free for slaves.  On the contrary, it was a hellacious place to endure.

THIS OTHER EDEN by Paul Harding

This fictional account of the real displacement of the people living on an island off the coast of Maine could have gotten bogged down in sentimentality.  Instead, it is a clear-eyed view of a very small mostly Black population who live in isolation, and we know from the beginning that all of the residents will eventually be evicted and resettled elsewhere or institutionalized.  The novel opens with a gripping account of a flood, and generations later a murder occurs, and this latter time period is when the rest of the action takes place, although the word “action” may not be appropriate, since the pace is pretty slow.  A white man, Matthew Diamond, starts a school there, and despite his disdain for Black people in general, he finds that several of his students are very bright.  One girl becomes a Latin scholar, and another soon exceeds the teacher’s mathematical ability.  A teenage boy, Ethan, a mixed race artist who can pass for white, has exceptional talent and goes to the mainland so that he can attend art school.  One section of the book is devoted to his experiences away from the island, and except for the auspicious beginning of the novel, this section was the most engrossing.  One of the men involved in removing the island residents describes the situation to his wife in very stark and unsavory terms, giving us some idea of why this displacement was allowed to happen.  However, his observations ignore the fact that these people are a loving family to one another and not just poor and dirty nameless beings.  The intermarrying and incest may have ultimately doomed this tiny population anyway, but booting them out of their homes was cruel and unnecessary.

NIGHT WHEREVER WE GO by Tracey Rose Peyton

Six women slaves of varying backgrounds live on a Texas farm that is struggling to make a profit.  Next to the land itself, these women are the most valuable proper that the Lucys own.  Lucy is not their actual surname, but it is the one assigned by the slave women because they associate their devilish owners with Lucifer.  Lashes may be the most frequent punishment, but that does not compare to the anguish they experience over separation from their loved ones.  One woman is in love with a slave on a neighboring plantation, and one hopes to visit her children on a steamboat trip with Mrs. Lucy.  One has a teenage son, also owned by the Lucys, but the other women expect never to see their families again. In order to expand their workforce, the Lucys bring in a slave whose only job is to impregnate the women, but they go to some lengths to thwart this plan.  The problem with this book is that it doesn’t really seem to go anywhere until we get to the very rushed and not entirely clear ending.  I felt so puzzled, let down, and frustrated that I regretted having ever started reading this book.  Inside the dust jacket the blurb has this headline:  “A gripping, radically intimate debut novel about a group of enslaved women staging a covert rebellion against their owners.”  This description is entirely misleading, as it implies more action than actually takes place.

THE WORLD AND ALL THAT IT HOLDS by Aleksandar Hemon

Rafael Pinto steps outside his Jewish family’s pharmacy in Sarajevo and witnesses the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.  Thus begins WWI, and what would seem to be an auspicious beginning for this book.  Pinto lands on the front lines, along with the handsome Osman, and the two become devoted lovers.  The storyline is a series of Pinto’s adventures, including imprisonment, near starvation, a six-year trek across the desert, a sandstorm, and almost wasting away in opium dens.  Pinto becomes the protector of a child named Rahela, who may be Osman’s biological daughter, and whose responsibility is the only thing standing between Pinto and the fulfillment of his death wish.  The storyline here should be exciting, but I found that the writing style does not supply sufficient verve.  A British spy appears in the narrative from time to time to spice things up, but moments that grabbed my attention were just too infrequent.  Also, the author includes many untranslated sentences and songs in Bosnian or German or Spanjol, which is a version of Spanish.  Frankly, I didn’t mind getting to leapfrog these sections, as skipping these foreign phrases propelled me to the finish a little faster.

THE LAZARUS PROJECT by Aleksandar Hemon

Vladimir Brik, a Bosnian native living in the U.S. with his neurosurgeon wife, has decided to write a book about Lazarus Averbuch, a young Jewish man who was killed under suspicious circumstances a century earlier.  Brik uses grant money to research Averbuch’s history in the Balkans, accompanied by an acquaintance from Brik’s Sarajevo days, Rora, a photographer.  The timeline here is fluid, to say the least, as the storyline oscillates between Averbuch’s story and Brik’s travels, which sometimes involve border crossings in cars with reckless drivers who frown on seatbelts.  At times, I got bogged down in the unfamiliar history of the breakup of Yugoslavia, and my attention span waned.  Hemon, however, is quite the wordsmith, especially given that English is not his first language.  For example, here are a couple of my favorite passages.  On page 229, we have the sentence, “Her hair seemed to be ponytailed to the point of pain.”  I love this visual and always admire an author who can convert a noun to a verb with such a vivid result.  Then on page 263, Hemon writes, “The bathroom walls were daubed over with various venereal diseases; the lines between the tiles brimmed with unspeakable ecosystems.”  The image may be yucky, but the metaphors are marvelous.

MOTHERS AND SONS by Adam Haslett

Peter Fischer is a lonely gay immigration lawyer who specializes in asylum cases, many of which involve persecution for sexual orientation.  Until now, Peter has avoided cases involving gay immigrants, possibly because they force him to dredge up his own past.  His relationship with his lesbian mother, a former priest who now co-owns a women’s retreat in Vermont, is strained.  Theirs is just one of several mother/son relationships that support the book title.  We also have Vasel, Peter’s first gay client, whose mother helped get him out of Albania but whom Vasel cannot ask for a letter confirming his homosexuality.  Another client is Sandra, whose son Felipe is terrified that she will be deported back to Honduras and leave him alone in the U.S.  Last but not least is Peter’s sister, Liz, whose 4-year-old son, Charlie, whom she adores, is still not completely potty-trained.  Despite the peaceful tone of this book, its subject matter is anything but peaceful.  I would say that it is an uncomfortable, squirm-inducing read with several violent backstories.  I also found it baffling at times.  How can a traumatized teenager whose mother is a priest not receive any sort of counseling?

Y/N by Esther Yi

Sometimes I read a book, and I think, “Really?”  This is one of those books.  This is not the worst book I’ve ever read, but it’s way down there.  I don’t even know how to classify this book, because it’s so nonsensical.  Borderline fantasy, maybe.  The unnamed first-person narrator is a twenty-something woman living in Berlin. She becomes obsessed with Moon (“mooning” over him), a member of a Korean boy band called the pack of boys.  She writes a fictional story about him, using the placeholder Y/N, so that the reader can insert “Your Name” for the person in a relationship with Moon. When Moon decides to step back from the band in real life, the narrator travels to Seoul on a quest to find him.  She eventually tracks him to a convalescent home called the Sanctuary where she sees a boy who looks like Moon.  Here’s her thought process, from page 154:

“In fact, his resemblance possibly proved he wasn’t Moon.  Similarity precluded equivalence:  If the boy were Moon, I’d never say he looked like Moon, just like I’d never say that I looked like myself.”

This odd deductive logic is my favorite passage in the book, but it’s a good example of how weird the whole thing is.  On the plus side, the cover art is stunning, but you know what they say:  You can’t judge a book by . . . .