ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN by Mark Twain

The Southern dialect dialog keeps this picaresque classic from being a fast read, and I think now it might work better as an audiobook.  Still, I plodded my way through and enjoyed the irony, humor, and adventure that his book offers.  Why on earth did we read this as kids, aside from the fact that the title character is a 14-year-old boy?  Jim, a runaway slave, has in his head a gazillion superstitions, and Huck seems to run afoul of all of them, courting bad luck at every turn and never knowing when the bad luck has ended.  The escapades of Huck, Tom, Jim, and two despicable con men are often silly, but sometimes the results are dire.  This novel has quite a bit of violence, including a murder in cold blood and a family feud that practically wipes out both sides, with neither family really sure about the origin of their disagreement.  After a particularly deadly encounter, the families attend a church service in which the sermon’s message is brotherly love!  Their animosity, juxtaposed with their fundamentalist religion, would seem ridiculously hypocritical if it didn’t hit so close to home for so many disputes today and throughout history.  On the lighter side, Hamlet’s soliloquy is hilariously misquoted and interleaved with passages from Macbeth and possibly other works, for all I know.  Ultimately, though, this is a story of the bond that develops between Huck and Jim.  Huck’s sense of right and wrong is constantly challenged, due to his misguided conviction that the right thing to do is to return Jim to his owner.  However, his loyalty to Jim and his doubt that he is destined for heaven anyway cause him to act on Jim’s behalf time and again.  These two naïve souls have each other’s back, protecting one another both physically and emotionally.

THE GUEST BOOK by Sarah Blake

One thing that annoyed me about this novel was the author’s overuse of the word “ranged” or “ranging.”  She uses “range” as a verb twenty times, and not in the way I would use it, such as in “a number ranging from one to a hundred.”  Perhaps this word usage is common to people who come from old money, and that’s why it seemed so odd to me.  This novel is indeed about old money, as in buying an island off the coast of Maine during the Great Depression.  Three generations of the Milton family have enjoyed summers on this island, with varying levels of attachment to it.  Evie is the modern-day character who wants to hold on to the island, not matter what the cost, but not all of her cousins agree.  As in many fictional family sagas, secrets abound, and even after I finished the novel I was unsure what Evie knew about her family’s past and what she didn’t.  For example, her grandmother Kitty’s firstborn son plunges through the window from the 14^th floor of their apartment early in the book, but I was never sure whether subsequent generations knew about this accident.  They were, however, certainly aware that Kitty’s second son, Moss, died in his 20s in 1959, and the circumstances of his death are not revealed until the end of the novel.  Besides the fact that I could not relate to these people and their problems at all, I felt that the author was particularly hard on the characters of her own gender.  The women are mostly buttoned up and resistant to change, overly concerned with wallpaper and upholstery fabric, whereas the men are more open-minded, despite some unsavory business alliances.  At almost 500 pages, this novel spends way too much time describing the contents of the island house, and I just wanted to get on with the story.  Things do pick up in the last 100 pages, but not enough for me to declare that reading the first 400 pages was time well spent.

RED CLOCKS by Leni Zumas

Teenage girls who seek abortions are imprisoned, and abortionists face the death penalty.  This novel gives us a glimpse into the lives of four women in the not so distant future after Roe v. Wade has been overturned.  The characters are the wife (Susan), the biographer (Ro), the daughter (Mattie—no relation to Susan), and the mender (Gin).  A law school dropout, Susan loves her two small children but hates her life to the point that she contemplates driving off a cliff.  She would like a divorce, partly so that her husband can take the kids on weekends, but she does not want to initiate it.  Ro, on the other hand, envies Susan’s life and, at 42, is trying to have a child via artificial insemination.  She would settle for adoption, but as a single parent, her chances are slim, and soon such adoptions will be illegal.  Mattie is 16, herself adopted, and pregnant, and would like to have the fetus ripped from her body by any means possible.  Gin is a purveyor of herbal remedies and is Mattie’s biological mother, although Mattie is unaware of their relationship.  These women each command their own chapters, which are interleaved with the journal entries of a female arctic explorer—the subject of the biography that Ro is writing.  I did not grasp the significance of these interruptions, which I felt disturbed the continuity of the book.  Other than that, I loved it, especially the contrast between Ro’s and Susan’s lives.  Both are on the brink of total despair and want what the other has.  What I found so scary about this novel is how these women’s lives seemed pretty familiar, except for Gin’s, since she lives in a cabin in the woods.  Then the stark reality of how much these strict parenthood laws have cost them becomes apparent and extremely frightening.

THE WATER DANCER by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Hiram Walker is a young slave on a Virginia tobacco plantation in the mid-1800s.  His white father owns the plantation and positions Hiram to be the manservant of Hiram’s white half-brother Maynard.  While being groomed for this job, Hiram learns to read and to take advantage of and exhibit his photographic memory.  Hiram has another talent, known as “conduction” in the novel, which allows him to teleport himself from one place to another.  I have to say that this magical realism aspect of the novel does not really add any particular value.  It seems very Harry Potter-like for what is undoubtedly a very serious novel.  It takes some time for Hiram to fully corral this ability, and, in the meantime, he has a number of adventures, both pleasant and terrifying.  The problem with this book is that, despite all of Hiram’s ups and downs, it drags.  This author has a reputation for non-fiction and perhaps needs to hone his ability to engage the reader with suspense and concern for the fate of the characters.  I did care what happened to Hiram, but I was not inspired to pick up the book and find out.  I trudged through it, delighted by the Harriet Tubman cameo, and worried for Hiram’s safety from start to finish.  However, we know from his first-person narrative that Hiram survives into old age, and I found that knowledge comforting but not exactly conducive to a nail-biting experience.  Still, there’s a lot of good stuff here, including a love story, a massive betrayal, and a heartwarming reunification.  Then there’s the ugly truth of slavery that we get to witness through the eyes of a young man who gains and shares a wide-angle perspective.

HOUSE ON ENDLESS WATERS by Emuna Elon

Yoel Blum is a well-known Israeli writer who returns to Amsterdam, the city of his birth, to research a novel about his past.  We know that his mother Sonia escaped the Holocaust with her daughter Nettie, and Yoel, who has discovered that Sonia apparently left another child behind.  Some reviewers have called this a family mystery, but the mystery is not so much about what happened, as that seemed obvious to me, but how it happens.  Yoel has prodded his sister for details after his mother’s death, and her explanation fuels Yoel’s imagination in the writing of his novel, although we readers are enlightened only by the text of Yoel’s novel as it progresses.  He rents a small hotel room in the neighborhood where Sonia lived so that he can immerse himself both physically and emotionally in her story.  This book, then, is actually two stories—Sonia’s and Yoel’s—with almost seamless switching between the two.  Sonia’s life deteriorates little by little into a harrowing existence as she endeavors to save her family from a demise that she can hardly believe is coming.   A revelation at the end explains why Yoel’s mother was so secretive about the past, but that was not particularly surprising, either.  What makes this book special is how personal the story feels.  Sonia’s heartbreak as she wrestles with impossible decisions is palpable and so gut-wrenching that I was immensely glad to know from the beginning that she survives.  This book is a true reminder that the experiences of Sonia’s family, grappling with life and death choices regarding the welfare of themselves and their children, were not unique.  I cannot begin to imagine what their lives were like, but this book provides a small window into that horror.