THE GREAT RECLAMATION by Rachel Heng

Is modernization a good thing or a bad thing?  It is certainly disruptive to the ecosystem and a way of life that depends on that ecosystem.  On page 355, the main character, Ah Boon, suggests “… perhaps there was a way for progress and past to coexist.”  Then again, maybe not.  He witnesses—and participates in--the evolution of Singapore, starting with the WWII occupation by the Japanese, and continuing until 1963, when Singapore is on the brink of becoming a burgeoning first-world entity.  At the beginning Ah Boon is a seven-year-old boy in a fishing village, but he is not a hardy youngster like his older brother.  His uncle, who becomes the family patriarch, wants Ah Boon to follow in his father’s footsteps as a fisherman.  The girl whom Ah Boon has grown up with and whom he loves dearly wants him to join the fight for Communism.  Ah Boon soon embarks on a totally different path when a new community center is built nearby.  I liked the historical aspect of this novel and the fact that the changes that Singapore endured are seen through Ah Boon’s eyes.   I also admired the author’s ability to remain neutral and not take sides in the clash between traditional ways and infrastructure improvements.  However, I needed something to hold my attention, and that something was lacking.

THE MIGHTY RED by Louise Erdrich

Kismet Poe is graduating from high school and has two boyfriends.  One of them, Gary, is a popular athlete with a tendency toward recklessness, but he presents Kismet with an engagement ring, and she is too shocked to say no.  Her other boyfriend, Hugo, is planning to find a job in the oil fields so that he can earn enough money to win Kismet’s affection, whether she is married to Gary or not.  As for Kismet, she seems smart and industrious but allows Gary to coax her into a marriage she doesn’t really want.  Why she cannot extricate herself from this plan is somewhat of a mystery.  Her mother, Crystal, is devastated that Kismet is abandoning her college plans to marry Gary, while Gary’s mother is ecstatically planning a lavish wedding.  After Kismet reluctantly and hilariously says her wedding vows, she becomes something of a Cinderella figure, but Gary is no prince.  We, and Kismet, finally become privy to the details of an event that puts Gary in an even worse light, if that is even possible.  Since this book takes place in an agricultural community, Erdrich manages to weave in her concerns about the ecological impact of sugar beet farming, but she also sprinkles in more humor than I recall from her other novels.  In fact, this is my favorite book of hers since The Master Butchers Singing Club.  Crystal and Kismet are the delightful anchors here, and the storyline makes for an entertaining read.  Even Gary, with all his flaws, is more pathetic than despicable.

SAM by Allegra Goodman

The first half of this book made me anxious, but I stuck with it, and I’m glad I did.  The title character is a petulant child, and she is the chief anxiety producer.  Her single mother, Courtney, is a saint—working two jobs to make sure that her two children have better opportunities than she had.  Sam’s ability to climb door frames inspires her ne’er-do-well father to take her to a climbing gym, and thus begins Sam’s love/hate relationship with climbing.  The narrative recounts Sam’s life until she is about nineteen or so, making this a true coming-of-age novel.  As difficult as she is as a child, she is worse as a teenager, making some very wrong-headed decisions.  The second half of the book becomes much more palatable, as she falls in with a group of twenty-something-year-old rock climbers.  She may not be their peer age-wise, but she is the best climber, and she seems to be making progress toward figuring out what she wants in life.  Lapses in judgment still plague her, though, as does regret regarding her relationship with her father.  The fact that her mother maintains her sanity through all of Sam’s screw-ups is what gave me hope that Sam would find her way to adulthood with her own sanity intact.  Failures can be learning experiences, and Sam has plenty of those on which to build.  Climbing is almost too obvious a metaphor here.  When Sam falls, she dusts herself off and launches herself right back up the boulder.

THE CHALK ARTIST by Allegra Goodman

At its heart, this book is a love story, and it is almost as addictive as the immersive video games described in it.  You can somewhat predict what happens when a very talented artistic young man named Collin---meets the daughter—Nina—of a mogul who owns a video game empire called Arkadia.  This book predates Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by years, and I liked this one much better, although I have to say that the gaming sections were not my favorites.  A side plot involves two sibling students at the high school where Nina teaches English lit.  One of those student’s schoolwork is suffering, since he sometimes games all night, aided and abetted by a female Arkadia employee—Daphne.  She has a dark allure that even Collin falls victim to, jeopardizing his relationship with Nina.  I felt that Arkadia was the villain here, somewhat personified by Daphne, replacing real life with a soul-grabbing fantasy world and preying on teenagers.  However, novels can be immersive as well, and one could argue that some of us are addicted to books, so who am I to judge gamers for their obsession or, for that matter, gaming companies for giving them what they want?  Then again, I don’t know any compulsive readers whose personal lives suffer because of books, do I?

THE OTHER SIDE OF THE ISLAND by Allegra Goodman

I did not realize until after I had finished this book that it was intended for a young audience.  No matter.  Also, it’s even more relevant now than it was when it came out seventeen years ago.  Climate change is an increasingly bigger problem, and kudos to Allegra Goodman for writing about it in language accessible to all.  Honor is a 10-year-old girl in a dystopian society, and her parents are not conforming to the will of Earth Mother, a corporate entity that makes the rules.  The school system is molding the students into Stepford children, who are punished for any infraction that defies or questions the government’s restrictions.  Everyone knows that non-compliant parents will be “disappeared,” and their children will become orphans who have to board at the school.  Honor is terrified that her parents will meet this fate if they don’t start behaving in the manner expected of them.  This reversal of who is rebelling—the parent rather than the child—begs the question of whether or not safety is in obedience or in refusing to be subject to the constraints of a repressive society.

OUR SHARE OF NIGHT by Mariana Enriquez

When I think of horror stories, I think of Stephen King, but this book is not on a par with his stuff at all.  In fact, it is Dull with a capital D and totally lacks suspense.  Maybe some of its punch was lost in translation, but I doubt it.  The first part of the book is about Juan Peterson, whose parents sold him as a child to the Order—a privileged group of sorcerers.  Juan is a medium who can summon the Darkness—a supernatural presence which supposedly has the power to grant immortality.  The Darkness, however, gets hungry, and the members of the Order are happy to supply the Darkness with human sacrifices.  Yep.  Also, anyone who ventures too close to the Darkness is likely to lose a limb.  Summoning the Darkness takes its toll on Juan’s fragile physical health, and the Order wants his son Gaspar to take over his duties.  Juan does everything in his power to protect Gaspar from becoming the Order’s puppet, and sometimes his protection techniques are violently abusive, causing Gaspar to be quite conflicted about his relationship with his father.  The dynamic between Gaspar and Juan was, for me, what gave the novel some heart, but otherwise it’s just a long and unpleasant slog through cemeteries, mass graves, and houses that are bigger on the inside than on the outside.

BLACKOUTS by Justin Torres

This is my first exposure to erasure poetry, which I had never even heard of until now.  Chunks of an existing text—in this case, a real study of homosexuals from the 1930s called Sex Variants—are blacked out, so that the visible text forms something new.  Photos abound in this book, including those of the erasure poetry, which were definitely above my pay grade.  Suffice it to say that the non-traditional format of this book rendered it too cerebral for me.  Basically, an unnamed gay narrator is trading stories with an elderly gay man named Juan, who is dying.  These two men met in a mental institution, and now they are swapping stories, sometimes describing events as if describing a movie—a clever way to set the scene more vividly.  The book is a mixture of fact and fiction and may be semi-autobiographical, but one of my chief beefs is that I found it difficult to decipher who was talking—Juan or the narrator, whom Juan calls “nene.”  There are pages and pages of dialog with no identification as to who is saying what, except that occasionally the speaker addresses Juan or nene, so that we know that the other character is speaking.  There is some fascinating history here, particularly with regard to homosexuality as a mental health condition, but if this book was a test, I failed.