EDUCATED by Tara Westover

I was reluctant to read this book, because I had heard so much about it.  In some ways, this memoir resembles Angela’s Ashes, All Over But the Shoutin’, The Liars’ Club, and The Glass Castle.  These are all very different books, but they all tell the story of the author’s remarkable journey from an appalling upbringing to success as an adult.  In Educated, however, the author particularly recounts her tortured ambivalence toward her family, which is governed by her father—a fundamentalist Mormon who eschews doctors and anticipates the end of the world at any moment.  The most shocking part of the story is the physical abuse that the author suffers at the hands of an older brother.  Plus, her father and another brother are severely burned in separate workplace accidents, and neither is treated by a medical professional.  The family deals in scrap metal, and there are numerous on-the-job calamities involving machinery and just plain negligence, in addition to two horrific car accidents.  Actually, many events in this book are shocking, and the author continues to put herself in harm’s way, in some cases because she has no other recourse, and in other cases, because she does not want to estrange herself from her family.  If there is a flaw here, it is that she fails to make me understand why she has such a hard time making a clean break.  She does not paint her parents as sympathetic characters—ever.  Her mother lies to her, and her father puts everything in God’s hands, denying personal accountability for any of the catastrophes, most of which are his fault.  I get that for the first seventeen years of her life she has no outside experiences with which to compare the strict framework that she has endured.  However, once she begins to become “educated” and to realize how much she has missed out on, I expected her to let go of her previous life without remorse. Bottom line, though, hers is a remarkable story, and she tells it beautifully.

THE SILENT PATIENT by Alex Michaelides

Alicia Berenson is in a psychiatric institution after being convicted of killing her husband Gabriel.  Theo, the narrator, is a psychotherapist who obtains employment at the institution where Alicia is housed, so that he will have the opportunity to draw her out of her silence; she has not spoken since the murder six years ago.   Alicia’s diary entries are interspersed among the chapters narrated by Theo, in order to give the reader some of her background, since she is non-verbal.  Theo begins investigating the murder himself by talking to Alicia’s friends and assorted unsavory relatives.  On the home front, Theo discovers that his wife is having an affair.  Since character development in this novel is virtually non-existent, I had to wonder what was the point of this subplot.  Several people had warned me that the book had a twist at the end, and gradually I began to put two and two together.  I’m not saying that I figured it out exactly, but I guessed enough to make that twist pretty anti-climactic.  Psychological thrillers have become so popular that I think we are giving some of them more credit than they deserve.  This one in particular was definitely a disappointment.  Plus, the people who work at Alicia’s mental institution seem to be more wacko than the patients.  At best, they are unprofessional and incompetent.   The most annoying aspect of the novel, though, is that Alicia refuses to speak.  The author tries to draw an analogy to a Greek tragedy, but this comparison is a huge stretch.  I felt that Alicia’s silence was really just a ploy on the author’s part to allow the other pieces of the novel to fit together, and he wasn’t totally successful in that endeavor.  On the plus side, this book held my attention and was a fast read.  Best of all, it made me appreciate a really good thriller, which it is not.

INSTRUCTIONS FOR A HEATWAVE by Maggie O'Farrell

The Riordan family members all have secrets, and they are all blockbusters.  It’s 1976 London, and Robert Riordan has disappeared, setting in motion the assembly of his grown children--Monica, Michael Francis, and Aoife (“Ee-fah”).   Their mother Gretta seems reluctant to acknowledge Robert’s absence, and her children have personal issues of their own.  Monica is terrified of the reaction of her stepchildren when she has to have their beloved cat euthanized.  Michael Francis sees his marriage disintegrating as his wife spends more and more time away from home.  Aoife, the most compelling of the siblings, is a bartender in the States and moonlights as a photographer’s assistant, despite a crippling but hidden disability.  She and Monica have not spoken to one another in three years.  Everyone’s embarrassing secrets are revealed, one by one, and they are all somewhat shocking, particularly to the other family members, with the possible exception of a marital infidelity.  I had trouble warming up to these characters, all of whom have, to some degree, created their own messes.  However, despite their flaws and mistakes, I kept reading in the hope that they would all somehow make peace with one another.  This is ultimately a novel about relationships and the realization that the truth will indeed set us free.

WOMEN TALKING by Miriam Toews

If you like dialog, this is the book for you, as the title is completely appropriate.  The women in question are members of a Mennonite community in Bolivia, and their story stems from a real event.  While they were sleeping, a group of men from the community—husbands, brothers, and sons of the women, in many cases—drugged and raped the women.  I use the term “women” loosely here, as the victims include children as young as three years old.  For a three-year-old to have an STD transmitted during a rape, possibly by a relative, is unfathomable, and, in this case, the only antibiotics available are those used on livestock.  The novel takes place over a couple of days in a hayloft, where the women meet to decide what is the best course of action.  The women believe August Epp, the narrator and local schoolteacher, to be harmless.  Therefore, they have recruited him to take minutes of their meetings, as none of the women can read or write.  They have narrowed their prospects down to three options:  leave, stay and fight, or do nothing.  Another option surfaces later, and that is for the men to leave.  Currently the perpetrators are in jail in town, and the rest of the men in the community are also absent, working on raising bail for the incarcerated men.  We soon learn that these are strong, opinionated women, but their religion has basically rendered them powerless.  This book reminded me of A Thousand Splendid Suns, where again we have a male-dominated, religion-infused society in which women have little hope of escaping their oppression.

ALL MY PUNY SORROWS by Miriam Toews

To say that this novel is sad is a gross over-simplification.  In fact, the last few chapters are downright joyous with quips that made me laugh out loud.  Up to that point, though, the book is a semi-autobiographical novel about family in which the father commits suicide by stepping in front of a train, and his daughter Elf, short for Elfrieda, a brilliant concert pianist, also wants to die.  The other daughter, Yoli, in her forties, narrates, and desperately wants to keep Elf alive, until she finally hatches a plan to get Elf to Switzerland for a legal suicide.  How Yoli manages to remain remotely sane is the question I kept asking, and the fact that she does makes her heroic.  She is the divorced mother of two, living in Toronto, but she spends much of the novel in the psych ward of a hospital in Winnipeg, visiting her sister, near the small Mennonite community in which she grew up.  I kept wondering how or if Elf’s healthcare might have been handled differently in the U.S.—not necessarily better, but possibly differently.  For Elf, it seemed that perhaps music was both her salvation and her albatross, but everyone in the novel sees it as what has kept her going up to this point.  Honestly, I’ve never been really close to someone who ultimately committed suicide, so that I’m speaking from a complete lack of experience.  Near the end, Yoli has an argument with a friend as to whether suicide is an act of courage or of vanity.  I’m certainly not qualified to answer that question, but it’s clear in this case that it is an act of desperation.

THE KEEPER OF LOST CAUSES by Jussi Adler-Olsen

Carl Morck is a curmudgeonly Copenhagen police detective mourning the death of one colleague and critical injury of another in an ambush.  Now he has been relegated to the basement to tackle cold cases, along with a new eager assistant, Assad, who also serves as his department’s janitor.  Carl and Assad are the only employees in the newly formed Department Q, and Assad has unexpected skills from an undisclosed prior life.  Carl is obviously suffering from PTSD and drags his feet for a while but eventually begins investigating the disappearance of Merete Lynggaard, a beautiful liberal politician who eschewed social interaction in order to care for her disabled brother.  She has been missing for five years, and her brother has been institutionalized.  Gradually Carl and Assad begin to unravel the mystery of her disappearance, while Merete struggles to maintain her sanity in isolation in an impenetrable room.  We follow her imprisonment in detail and try to solve the puzzle, as she does, of what she has done to deserve such torture, including having to pull her own abscessed tooth.  Her plight motivates us as readers to hope that Carl and Assad will hurry up and rescue her, while they are not even aware that she is alive.  This novel is a treat in every way with twists, suspense, and a smidge of humor to keep you reading and wishing for more at the end.  In fact, for once I succumbed to the temptation to read the sneak peek for the next book in the series.  I have to say that Assad basically steals the show here, and I look forward to learning more about his background in the sequels.