THE FOUR WINDS by Kristin Hannah

I am not a Kristin Hannah fan, but I admit that I did like this book more than I liked The Nightingale.  Her writing style, or lack thereof, just did not get on my nerves as much here, possibly because the setting is so bleak; lush prose would just not be appropriate.  Elsa is a young Texas woman in the early 1920s whose parents treat her like garbage because she is twenty-five and unmarried.  Then she finds herself in the family way and is obligated to marry the child’s 18-year-old father, Rafe Martinelli.  Her pregnancy further alienates her from her own family, but the upside is that the Martinelli family welcomes her and her daughter wholeheartedly.  At first, this seems to be just another novel about a man who drinks all the money away.  Fast-forward a decade or so, and Rafe has not matured one iota, but the Great Depression has arrived, and the Texas panhandle is beset by devastating dust storms.  The bulk of the pages recount the trials and tribulations of Elsa and her children in California where migrants are shunned and mistreated as they try to build a new life under impossible circumstances.  My favorite scene is one in which Elsa attends a snooty PTA meeting; what she does and says just before exiting the building is priceless.  However, the vast majority of this novel is crushingly depressing, and the ending is melodramatic and tear-inducing.  Other reader-reviewers have complained that the novel is too political.  Really??  What is political about helping people rise up from squalor during difficult times?

LATE IN THE DAY by Tessa Hadley

This beautifully written novel moves along solemnly until it erupts, albeit somewhat quietly.  It’s the story of Christine and Alex, who are very close friends with Lydia and Zachary.  When the four of them first met years ago, Christine started dating Zachary, and Lydia had a crush on Alex, and then they exchanged partners, sort of, for better or worse.  In one particularly memorable scene, the four of them are on the brink of all having sex together when a child enters the room and cools their ardor.  Now Zachary has died, and the remaining three have to reassess their relationships with one another.  Zachary is really the glue that has kept them all together, and his art gallery was responsible for introducing Christine’s work.  Lydia, a seemingly shallow and vain woman, is completely unmoored by Zachary’s death, as her entire being has revolved around him; she does not know how to function alone.  Lydia does not come across as a likeable or sympathetic character, even in her grief, but Christine infuriatingly cuts her way too much slack, as they have been close friends since childhood.  Then the unthinkable happens.  Both couples have grown daughters whose roles in the novel are tangential and who somewhat reflect their mothers’ personalities.  Alex’s son from a previous marriage, on the other hand, is a famous musician, and I would have enjoyed a little more participation from him in this drama.  Ultimately, though, this book is about the trajectory of a marriage, as well as the evolution of a lifelong friendship, and how one event, a death in this case, can send it careening down a totally different path.

THE PAST by Tessa Hadley

Here we have another novel, like Sarah Blake’s The Guest Book, in which adult siblings convene in their dilapidated family home for three weeks to decide what to do with the house.  However, this book is richer in every way—characters, plot, and the beautifully described setting in the English countryside, where adults routinely lie down in the lush grass.  (Here in Florida we would be assailed by insects and reptiles.)  Parts 1 and 3 take place during this three-week span, bookending a section that takes place a generation earlier, in which the aforementioned siblings are children, or, in one case, not yet born.  In the present day sections, we have four siblings--Harriet and Alice, different as night and day, Roland, and Fran.  Roland has brought his 16-year-old daughter, Molly, and introduces his Argentine third wife, Pilar, to his sisters.  Alice inexplicably has her ex-boyfriend’s 20-year-old son, Kasim, in tow.  Fran’s kids, Arthur and Ivy, have prominent roles as well, but their father has conveniently forgotten about the trip and has booked appearances for his band.  The budding romance between Kasim and Molly is completely predictable but still charming, but 9-year-old Ivy is the impish surprise here, guarding secrets, particularly about an abandoned cottage in the woods, that really should be brought to light.  She is also somewhat of a little con artist where her younger brother is concerned and given to fits of anger-induced vandalism.  For me, Ivy, often dressed in a muddy petticoat, and frumpy Harriet, who bonds with the exotic Pilar, are the most vivid characters.  Harriet may be the oldest who would never forget her keys, as Alice does at the very beginning, but Alice, a failed actress who seems a bit superficial at times, is the one who ultimately has to do the heavy lifting in this story and also has the heaviest burden to bear.

MIRACLE CREEK by Angie Kim

The author is a former trial lawyer, and it shows.  This courtroom drama takes place one year after an arsonist killed a woman and a child in a hyperbaric oxygen therapy chamber (HBOT), owned and operated by the Yoo family.  Elizabeth, the mother of the dead child, is on trial for the crime, as circumstantial evidence points her way, and her son had previously been diagnosed as autistic, complicating Elizabeth’s life tremendously.  We soon learn that Elizabeth’s conviction is not a slam dunk, particularly since the Yoo family stands to collect over a million dollars in insurance reparation.  Not only are there multiple suspects, but all of the characters are lying about something, and the author takes us on a roller-coaster ride as we conjecture as to who did the deed.  The Yoo family, in particular, is engaged in a cover-up, as Pak, the father/husband, was not supervising the HBOT session at the time of the fire.  His wife Young was, but then where was Pak?  Young got distracted when a DVD player’s batteries went dead, and now she replays in her mind all of the things that went wrong that day, leading to the tragedy.  Mary, their teenage daughter, has secrets of her own that may or may not be related to the blast.  The pacing of this book is fantastic, and the characters are very distinctive, but their behavior renders all of them unlikable  to varying degrees.  The identity of the culprit is not revealed until close to the end of the book, and by that time, the collateral damage is heartbreaking.  The big question that hangs over the entire novel is whether or not any of the characters will come clean about their role in the tragedy.  And, if they do, will they suffer any consequences?

MIGRATIONS by Charlotte McConaghy

Franny Lynch suffers from compulsive wanderlust.  I don’t know if that’s a real affliction, but she can’t seem to stay in one place for long, abandoning loved ones without warning and without a thought of what impact her sudden absence might have on them.  An amateur ornithologist, Franny now wants to follow the migration of Arctic terns from Greenland to Antarctica via a fishing vessel.  The ensuing adventure, highly reminiscent of Moby Dick, is told alongside Franny’s past history.  This book, as well as being an adventure story, is also a love story and a warning on climate change.  Almost all animals, except insects, are extinct, so that a sighting of an owl or a school of fish is an event worthy of celebration.  The author’s imagined state of the planet is enough to render this book immensely sad, but her prose is so stunningly gorgeous that the result is a beautiful picture of the landscape, or rather the seascape mostly.  Franny herself is not a particularly endearing character (Why would someone concerned about the environment be smoking cigarettes?), but she is fearless, frequently diving naked into frigid waters, both literally and figuratively.  In fact, she dives into marriage to a man she barely knows and into the life of a deckhand with no experience whatsoever.  The boat’s captain allows her to join his crew, ostensibly since the terns will lead them to fishable waters.  Here again is another irony of the fact that Franny seems at times to be on the wrong side of her ecological principles, but I think these contradictions are intentional on the author’s part.  We are all part of the problem, making the solution that much more difficult to initiate.

THE TENTH MUSE by Catherine Chung

Like Hidden Figures, this novel focuses on how brilliant female mathematicians were marginalized, particularly in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s.  At an early age, Katherine is able to solve seemingly difficult problems with ease by recognizing patterns and using logic.  Even an early teacher—a woman—punishes Katherine for “showing off” her math skills.  Later on, Katherine discovers that her research and findings are constantly being usurped by men.  First, a fellow student co-opts Katherine’s school work, but the professor assumes, erroneously, that Katherine is the cheater.  Then she falls in love with her thesis adviser, and, although he gives her full credit in their publications, their colleagues all assume that he did all the work.  Finally, this same professor/lover finishes a mathematical proof that Katherine had been working on for ages and publishes it under her name.  He considers it a well-deserved gift, but she sees it as patronizing.  Plus, he has robbed her of the opportunity to do the work AND legitimately get the credit.  The math references in the book intrigued me, but I found the plot to be weak.  Katherine embarks on a quest to find her roots and encounters so many lies that I sometimes forgot what the true story was.  By sheer luck, she meets a cousin in Germany, and I found that coincidence to be a stretch, but this is a novel, after all.  The book also contains a riddle, and, although my solution was similar, the correct solution was much more elegant.

THE OTHER AMERICANS by Laila Lalami

A variety of first person narrators, including a dead man, tie this novel together in an intimate way.  These narrators are all very candid, but, particularly in one case, the author cleverly chooses that narrator’s words in order to mislead the reader.  The most prominent character is Nora, a musician who returns home to the Mohave Desert after her father dies in a hit-and-run that may or may not have been an accident.  Nora feels certain that her father, a successful business owner, was murdered, given that he was Moroccan and his donut shop was torched after 9/11.  Even after the alleged driver confesses, his intent remains murky, and proving vehicular homicide is problematic.  An undocumented man actually witnessed the accident but is fearful about coming forward and exposing his immigration status.  Nora’s family, however, remains the focal point, as surprising secrets about Nora’s father and sister surface but are not always shared with those who might benefit from such information.  The chinks in the armor of these two characters lend suspense to the storyline, as does at least one character with anger management issues.  I would have liked a chapter from Beatrice, a mysterious character that remains mysterious, and perhaps she remains in the shadows to retain that elusiveness.  Nora, puzzling over an unexpected inheritance from her father, strikes up a relationship with Jeremy, a cop who seems to be a bad fit for her but who ultimately helps her find her way through her grief.  This pair is the heart and soul of this novel, and I so wanted them to find a path to a future together. 

THE MOOR'S ACCOUNT by Laila Lalami

 Mustafa is a young black man in northern Africa in the 1500s who sells himself into slavery to save his family from starvation.  He soon finds himself in the New World on an ill-fated quest to find gold.  Although he is better equipped intellectually and physically to survive than the other men, he remains in the service of a white captain.  Their adventures are laced with hardships, including near starvation and disease, which decimate their numbers, and they find themselves relying on Indian villages to help them regain their strength, until the white men essentially become servants themselves.  Escape in this unknown and unforgiving land is a dicey prospect, but the remaining three white men, plus Mustafa, eventually become itinerant healers for the various Indian tribes in the Gulf Coast region.  At one point, Mustafa makes the poignant comment that he has finally heard the word “thank you” for the first time in his life.  He tells his story in order to correct the historical record that paints the Indians as murderers, thieves, rapists, and cannibals, when the white men are the ones most guilty of these crimes.  One of the greatest crimes, however, in Mustafa’s story, is that of deceit, as he comes to recognize that his contributions to their survival has not won him his freedom.  This is not the first novel about the atrocities that white men committed in conquering the New World, but I don’t know of any others narrated by a black man.  Unfortunately, I found this book tedious, and I had difficulty following the route that the men took through Florida and Mexico.  A map with the locations of the Indian settlements would have been extremely helpful, although perhaps that information is not known.

A TIME FOR MERCY by John Grisham

I count myself as a John Grisham fan, as I’ve read many of his books and really liked most of them.  The Street Lawyer is still my favorite, and I may reread it one of these days, but I rate this as one of his best.  Jake Brigance, from A Time to Kill and Sycamore Row, is back, reluctantly defending a prepubescent 16-year-old boy, Drew Gamble, for the murder of deputy Stuart Kofer in Clanton, MS.  Drew’s mother is Kofer’s frequently abused live-in girlfriend, and Drew and his sister have lived in fear of Kofer’s temper.  Kofer is something of a Dr, Jekyll and Mr, Hyde, in that his fellow officers like and respect him, but he is a violent drunk.  Saddled with Drew’s case, Jake is barely scraping by, financially speaking, and another indigent client is not making things any better.  He foolishly derails, pun intended, his lawsuit of a railroad company, which he had hoped would get him out of debt.  Jake’s money problems, however, have to take a backseat to preparation for Drew’s trial, and he has a few surprises in store for the prosecution.  For one thing, although being tried as an adult, Drew looks like he is about twelve.  The trial itself, of course, lives up to its buildup, providing a gripping finale.  However, the ending feels like a setup for a sequel, as there are some loose ends, although Grisham may feel that the Jake Brigance narrative has run its course.  His paralegal, Portia, could probably carry her own novel, despite the fact that Grisham’s protagonists are generally male.

THE BROKER by John Grisham

No courtroom drama or trial lawyers populate this 2005 novel from John Grisham.  Here Grisham dips his toe in the espionage genre, sort of.  Joel Backman finds himself suddenly pardoned, after six years securely behind bars, by an outgoing one-term President who doesn’t read his daily intelligence briefing.  Sound familiar?  It’s uncanny how so many authors have a knack for predicting the future.  Anyway, the CIA, who secured Backman’s pardon, hides him for a while in Italy until they are ready to release him to the wolves for slaughter.  The problem is that they have to keep an eye on him, because they want to find out who wants Backman dead.  Then the CIA will know who launched some very sophisticated surveillance satellites whose software Backman’s Pakistani contacts hacked.  Backman, true to his nickname, had brokered a deal with the Saudis for the software that takes control of the satellites, but pleaded guilty when his scheme was discovered, and all of his fellow schemers wound up dead. The storyline becomes a little tedious while Backman, in his witness protection of sorts, is studying Italian with a CIA-supplied tutor, eating scrumptious food, and exploring centuries-old cathedrals.  However, the frenetic finale more than makes up for this short pause in the action.  Obviously, Backman’s deeds brand him as an opportunist without a moral compass, but Grisham lures us into rooting for him nonetheless.  Maybe we are willing dupes because Backman’s handlers are so much more despicable.  Given Backman’s reputation and history, it’s hard to fathom why his son, whose own legal career Backman virtually destroyed, would willingly help him.  The son and the reader can only hope that Backman has realized the error of his ways and that he will somehow right the many wrongs that he has left in his wake.

OLIVE, AGAIN by Elizabeth Strout

The ever blunt and prickly Olive Kitteredge is back and in even better form this time around.  It is rare that I love a sequel more than the original, but that is certainly the case here.  Perhaps I was more prepared for the vignette style that Strout employs.  Olive is sometimes the main character and sometimes just appears as a cameo, but I also recognized beloved characters from The Burgess Boys and Amy and Isabelle in this novel.  What a treat!  Even better are the laugh-out-loud moments.  In the middle of some various serious dialog, such as one conversation about the sad and lonely lives of many nursing home residents, one of the characters will blurt out an outrageous and hilarious comment.  Several stories stand out as memorable, including one in which a teenage girl allows the man whose home she is cleaning to watch her fondle her own breasts, although such an act would at first seem reckless and perhaps even dangerous.  In another story, a woman confides in her beloved family lawyer about a marital indiscretion and grapples with whether or not to confess the affair to her husband.  In perhaps the most shocking story, a woman explains to her parents and sister that she earns money as a dominatrix.  Whoa.  Even more weird from my sheltered perspective is that her encounters do not include sex.  Ultimately, Olive is the hub to all of the spinning spokes of this novel.  She has met her match in Jack Kennison, a former Harvard professor, who just loves her “Oliveness.”  Here we have two souls with apparently little in common who find comfort in each other’s company late in life.  They do both, however, have uneasy relationships with their children.  Olive has never really liked her daughter-in-law but has to reevaluate her disapproval when she notices that the daughter-in-law treats Olive’s son in a similar condescending manner to the way in which Olive treated her son’s father.  The fact that her son may have chosen a wife whose personality resembles that of his mother is an eye-opener that may open the door to reconciliation between Olive and both her son and his wife.  Olive endures a brief stint in the hospital in which her son visits frequently and surreptitiously keeps track of her condition even more closely than she would ever have expected.

ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE by Elizabeth Strout

One could say that Elizabeth Strout makes ordinary people compelling, but, actually, this book is populated with characters who are anything but ordinary.  Lucy Barton, from Strout’s earlier work, My Name Is Lucy Barton, returns to her Midwestern hometown after having published a best-selling memoir.  When her siblings dredge up an incident from the past that paints their mother as an even worse monster than Lucy remembers, Lucy has a panic attack, cutting her visit short.  Her brother Pete, who lives in their poverty-stricken childhood home, has always harbored the opinion that their father started a fire that uprooted a family and killed their livestock.  Pete is such a tragic character, shouldering the guilt about his father and stressing out as he tries to make his house presentable for Lucy’s visit.  Other characters do not fare as well in the sympathy department, particularly Linda and her husband Jay.  Linda basically serves as her husband’s pimp, encouraging his voyeurism and sexual liaisons.  Yikes!  The aberrant actions of this pair backfire when his unwanted attention becomes predatory, and I found it impossible to be compassionate for them.  Aside from these two wackos, most of the other characters are people I would like to get to know.  Mary is especially appealing.  She lives in Italy with her decades-younger husband Paolo, when her beloved daughter Angelina finally comes to visit.  This reunion comes with some baring of souls, and I loved being a party to this mother-daughter conversation.  The writing here is just extraordinary in a very understated way, and I’m now accustomed to Strout’s usual format—individual stories that blend together to make a whole.  I see that her latest novel, Oh William!, is the third in this series, and I hope to read it before I forget these characters.

ABIDE WITH ME by Elizabeth Strout

I am a huge fan of Elizabeth Strout’s writing but not of this book, mostly because I found the main character so unappealing.  Tyler Caskey is a great orater and the pastor of a church in a small New England town.  A year after the death of his wife, he appears to his congregation to be functioning, but in reality he is floundering.  His younger daughter is living with his mother, and his older daughter, who is in pre-schoo,l would be better off there as well.  Tyler sends her to school with virtually no food, her hair a tangled mess, and wearing the same clothes as the day before.  When the child begins to act out at school, due to grief and confusion, Tyler becomes a parent in denial, just as he was formerly in denial about his wife’s health.  Admired for his magnificent sermons delivered without notes, he soon faces increasing backlash from his parishioners as his life tumbles out of control.  He is in over his head at home and unable to offer advice to his parishioners, causing him to question his calling from God.  Unlike Strout’s character Olive Kitteridge, who is blunt to the point of meanness, Tyler is a coward, and I found his failure as a father hypocritical and difficult to forgive.  The book does contain one conversation that I particularly enjoyed, in which a woman has been coerced into phoning Tyler about his daughter’s latest behavior unbecoming to a minister’s daughter.  The woman makes it clear that she did not want to make this call while at the same time getting her point across very effectively.  This is just one of several wake-up calls for Tyler that he chooses to ignore—until he recognizes that his job may be in jeopardy.

AMY AND ISABELLE by Elizabeth Strout

This is one of those books where I can’t quite put my finger on why I liked it so much.  The novel takes place during one summer in the lives of a single mother, Isabelle, and her teenage daughter, Amy, who becomes involved with her math teacher, Mr. Robertson.  Isabelle, however, is the more fascinating character.  Isabelle struggles not only with her somewhat distant relationship with Amy but also with her own personal loneliness that may stem just from shyness.  She works in an office with a group of other women, but she has slightly superior status as the boss’s personal secretary.  Isabelle gradually comes out of her shell, as she discovers the many tribulations of the women in the office, particularly Dottie, who claims to have seen a UFO in her yard after she undergoes a hysterectomy.  Isabelle has enough compassion to know better than to ridicule Dottie’s imagined sighting and finds herself inadvertently forming alliances.  Amy’s dalliance with her teacher is more than just an adolescent crush, and it becomes an unhealthy obsession, partly fueled by Mr. Robertson’s recognition and encouragement of Amy’s intellectual potential.  The more I came to know both Isabelle and Amy, the more I wanted to embrace them.  The writing just thoroughly and effectively evokes who these women are, and I devoured this book with relish.

TO BE A MAN by Nicole Krauss

I very rarely read a collection of short stories, but I read this one for book club, and I do really like Nicole Krauss.  I much prefer characters that mature over the course of a novel and a plot that I can sink my teeth into, but this collection has its merits.  Some stories here can stand on their own just fine, and others feel like the first chapter of a novel, and that may indeed be their purpose, as they seem to end with a cliffhanger.  One in particular ends with a man taking a baby up to a building’s roof.  My favorite is “The Husband,” the first part of which is an odd phone conversation between mother and daughter.  This story seemed not only the most compelling but also the most complete, although it did leave me puzzling over a few unanswered questions.  Some of the stories have a dreamlike quality, and a few seem to be missing a beginning.  In one case, the city is distributing gas masks to everyone in response to an undisclosed emergency, and I love how the author compares the look of these masks to an anteater.  The last story, whose title is also the title of the collection, concerns the perils of an open marriage.  The stories cover a wide variety of topics, although several have a connection to Israel, but not all characters are pro-Israel from a political standpoint.  Actually, neither politics nor religion factors heavily into these stories.  They are all very human stories, mostly about relationships being built, being solidified, or being torn asunder.

THE SHADOW KING by Maaza Mengiste

When Mussolini’s forces invade Ethiopia in the 1930s, they encounter a rebel army that is motivated but poorly equipped.  How the Ethiopians prevail is the stuff of myth, but this author proposes an explanation that is both believable and a little wacky at the same time.  However, up until the shadow king appears about halfway through, this novel is as dull as dirt.  I get that the author has to set the stage and introduce the characters, but pacing is an important aspect of any novel, and I expect many readers have abandoned this one before it really gets rolling.  Hirut is a servant in the household of Kidane and Aster, and her relationship with Aster is strained by Aster’s jealousy.  When the war begins, however, the two women become uneasy partners in persuading Kidane, who leads a band of civilian warriors, of their own military prowess, despite their gender. Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia does not do his reputation or his country any favors by running off to the English resort of Bath during the war.  His departure sounds remarkably similar to that of Afghanistan’s President Ghani, who slipped out of the country before the U.S.’s pullout and the Taliban’s takeover.  The cowardice of both of these so-called leaders is a reminder that power and leadership are two entirely different qualities.  On the opposing side of the conflict is Carlo Fucelli, whose team has built a POW prison near where Kidane’s army lurks, but Fucelli has other plans for his opponents that does not involve keeping them alive.  In his service is a Jewish-Italian photographer, Ettore, whose role is to document Fucelli’s malevolent deeds.  Ettore follows Fucelli’s orders, at the expense of his conscience, in an effort to save himself from the horrific fate that Jews in Italy are suffering, including, most likely, his family. 

SAY NOTHING by Patrick Radden Keefe

Before reading this book, I really knew very little about the decades-long violence in Northern Ireland.  I would characterize it as a long-running civil war between the majority Protestants who want to maintain British rule and the minority Catholics who want to de-couple from the Brits and reunify with the Republic of Ireland, whose population is mostly Catholic.  The bigotry against the Catholics that the author describes is astonishing and explains why the situation became so volatile, basically igniting another war fought over religious differences.  The author focuses primarily on two women—Jean McConville and Dolours Price.  Jean was a Protestant mother of ten whose deceased husband was Catholic.  The IRA abducted her in 1972, and she just disappeared.  Dolours Price and her sister, Marian, were IRA members who participated in the London car bombings in 1973.  These women’s stories are closely intertwined with that of Gerry Adams, an IRA member turned politician, who helped orchestrate a ceasefire in 1994 and a peace agreement in 1998.  The frustration of the IRA with the fact that so many people died for their cause without accomplishing anything dovetails with what’s happened in Afghanistan and previously in Vietnam, where all the bloodshed seems to have been all for naught.  The author sticks to a more or less sequential history here, which means that he has to juggle the lives of multiple characters simultaneously.  Since most of these names were unfamiliar to me, I had some difficulty keeping track of who was who, and my attention waned from time to time.  One character whose name I did know was Stephen Rea, who starred in the excellent movie The Crying Game, in which he played a conflicted IRA member.  I found it fascinating that he was married to Dolours Price, after she spent years in jail, and fathered two sons with her.  Two big questions remain pretty much unanswered:  Was Dolours Price remorseful, and why was Jean McConville abducted?  Then, of course, the overarching unanswered question about the conflict is, “What was the point?”

GIRL, WOMAN, OTHER by Bernardine Evaristo

This book is a series of vignettes, punctuation optional, each of which focuses on a single person.  Most of these persons are black women of varying ages, education levels, economic situations, and sexual persuasions.  One character declares as non-binary, or gender-free.  Their stories are interconnected in a variety of ways—blood relatives, friends, co-workers.  Some stories stand out more than others.  Dominique, for example, follows her super-control-freak lover Nzinga to the U.S. to live in a commune for women.  After three years of Dominique having lived essentially as Nzinga’s caged pet, some of the other women in the commune stage an intervention to allow Dominique to escape. In another story, Carole, an excellent student until she is gang-raped at thirteen, finally enlists the help of a teacher, Shirley, who has her own chapter in the book, to help extricate her from a state of despair.  Shirley later reaches a state of despair herself, unrelated to the fact that her mother lusts after Shirley’s husband.  Ouch.  LaTisha, who hosted the party during which Carole was raped, is an unmarried mother of three, by three different fathers, by the time she is 21.  These stories all have merit, and, even though I made some notes, I still had some difficulty keeping track of the characters’ interrelationships.  A diagram would be helpful, and I could probably create one if I were inspired to read this book again, but I’m not.  The book has no cohesive plot, but some of the individual stories have a sort of plot, and some characters’ stories are finished in another character’s chapter.

HAMNET by Maggie O'Farrell

This book falls short when compared with O’Farrell’s The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox and This Must Be the Place.  At least in this example, her historical fiction does not measure up to her superb creative fiction, and I think the same is true of Alice Hoffman and T.C. Boyle.  The first half of Hamnet is a grind—unbearably dreary—as it imagines the early attraction between William Shakespeare and Agnes (aka Anne) Hathaway.  Later, William seeks his fortune in London and becomes a successful playwright, while Agnes remains in Stratford with their three children.  Then we reach the inevitable tragedy—the death of their son Hamnet at eleven years old.  There is no cure for grief, the sentiment which overwhelmingly consumes this novel, nor was there a cure for bubonic plague, which may or may not have killed the real Hamnet, in the late sixteenth century.  This is basically Agnes’s story, and the author depicts her here, inexplicably, as having some supernatural gifts, taking me back to my earlier comparison to Alice Hoffman.  After Hamnet’s death, she is plagued (pun intended) by guilt that she was unable to foresee this outcome, just as she was unable to recognize that she was pregnant with twins before the birth of Hamnet and his sister, Judith.  Her eccentricity also seems a bit inauthentic—having a pet kestrel when she and William meet and delivering her first child alone in the woods.  I’m not buying that her unconventionality explains William’s interest in a woman eight years his senior, whom he marries when she is three months pregnant.  I am fascinated that in Elizabethan England eighteen-year-olds were minors, so that Agnes’s father had to approve the marriage.  I tend to think of our teenagers today as being less mature than they were centuries ago, and yet we consider them to be adults at 18.  I find it even more improbable that Mississippi is the only state in which the parties have to be at least 21 to marry without parental consent.

MY NAME IS WILL by Jess Winfield

I decided to immerse myself in fiction about Shakespeare after finishing Hamnet.  In this book we have two semi-parallel storylines.  One, of course, imagines Shakespeare as an eighteen-year-old Latin tutor who has to put the brakes on his freewheeling life when he finds himself facing a shotgun wedding.  His relationship with Anne Hathaway is much less romantic here than the one envisioned in Hamnet.  The second storyline takes place in the 1980s and follows the even more freewheeling life of California grad student William (Willie) Shakespeare Greenberg.  Willie plans to write his thesis on the effect of Shakepeare’s Catholicism on his work, but Willie’s progress is stalled by his extracurricular activities, as well as his lack of success in finding sufficient evidence of his premise.  Both Williams are on a mission to deliver a package that contains contraband, and both have run-ins with the law.  In Shakespeare’s time, Catholicism was basically deemed to be heresy, and Shakespeare manages to run afoul of a Protestant nobleman.  Willie, on the other hand, gets arrested in an altercation during a protest rally against the war on drugs, not for the marijuana and hallucinogenic mushrooms that he is transporting to persons unknown at a Renaissance fair.  This bawdy romp of a novel teeters on the edge of plausibility, and its clever wordplay does not quite compensate for its silliness.

THIS MUST BE THE PLACE by Maggie O'Farrell

Daniel Sullivan is a charismatic American linguist living with his eccentric wife and kids in Ireland.  Their home is so remote that twelve gates must be unlatched and relatched when driving the approach road.  He soon learns that an old girlfriend died shortly after he last saw her, and this discovery has a boatload of ramifications, putting Daniel in a tailspin.  His ensuing guilt is somewhat well-deserved, but the grief he suffers over a family member’s death is not.  Daniel can be loveable and dependable, but trying times turn him into a mess who makes selfish and foolish decisions with disastrous consequences.  He may not sound like a very appealing character, but he actually is, mostly.  I hesitate to reveal too much about the aforementioned eccentric wife, because her story is fascinating, and I don’t want to spoil it.  The timeline here is meandering, but each chapter heading indicates the year, thus minimizing confusion.  Details regarding events of the past seem to appear at just the right time, although there are a few events that could have used a bit more explanation.  In any case, I loved almost everything about this book—the plot, the characters, the clever dialog, and the narration.  Two of the most endearing characters are Daniel’s son and stepson, both of whom have afflictions that Daniel patiently and lovingly tries to ease.  When Daniel wallows in self-pity, though, he derails almost all of his relationships with both family and friends.  The “good” Daniel is the man we keep hoping will emerge and conquer his demons, as well as mend all the bonds he manages to sever so carelessly.

CLOUD CUCKOO LAND by Anthony Doerr

Five disparate storylines have at least one thread in common—their connection to an ancient Greek text.  Four of the storylines focus on resourceful adolescents, and all five narratives are so distinctive that keeping track of who’s who is not an issue.  Omeir and Anna are on opposite sides of the siege of Constantinople in the fifteenth century; Konstance is rocketing toward another planet in the future; and Seymour, on the autism spectrum, becomes extremely distressed by the destruction of wildlife habitats.  The fifth storyline follows the life of Zeno, a Korean war veteran, who is rehearsing a dramatic production of the aforementioned Greek story in the local library with five children.  Seymour’s and Zeno’s lives intersect early in the novel when Seymour enters the library with the goal of bombing the real estate office nextdoor.  All of the characters except Seymour have to dig deep within themselves in an effort to survive life-threatening situations alone.  For me, Konstance’s story stands out, because she has to call upon her intellect as well as her inner strength to battle isolation and uncertainty.  I find, though, that in most books in which there are several threads in progress that I gravitate to one in particular and tend to focus less on the other storylines that are competing for my attention.  However, here I would rate Omeir’s narrative a close second, as his suffering is the most heartbreaking as well as the most vivid.  I’m sure the author is promoting a theme in this book, and the best conclusion I’ve reached is that he is pitting the individuals who are striving for preservation of the environment and of knowledge against the hordes that seem bent on destruction.  Seymour is the character with a foot in each camp, viewing destruction as a means of preservation, but his vision of the outcome is flawed and unfortunately influenced by entities who do not necessarily share his objective.  Thanks to Simon and Schuster for the advance reading copy.

THE TESTAMENTS by Margaret Atwood

I have not watched any episodes of the TV series based on Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, but apparently in this book she makes an effort not to contradict the TV series.  This novel takes place around fifteen years later, and Gilead, the fascist misogynist country that occupies most of the U.S., is still thriving, but the three narrators of this novel may be able to widen some cracks in the regime.  Two teenagers, Agnes in Gilead and Daisy in Canada, both eventually discover that their parents who raised them are not their biological parents.  The third narrator, who is recording her thoughts surreptitiously, is the powerful Aunt Lydia, who has apparently become, or was always, disillusioned, with Gilead’s treatment of women.  I actually liked the format of this book, but I don’t think it’s one of Atwood’s best.  There is not enough suspense and perhaps even too much optimism about the fate of Gilead.  I also found the characters to be a little thin until near the end when Daisy, later known as Jade, shows more grit than I really expected of her.  Agnes, too, has a moment of gumption when confronted with the prospect of marrying a man old enough to be her grandfather.  Although Lydia knows both what came before Gilead, and how much she has lost, and what life there is like now, the two teenagers know only their own separate and wildly distinctive worlds.  Each finds herself in a situation in which she has to survive on the unfamiliar turf of the other’s environment, and I found their adaptations to be the most revealing in terms of who they are and what they are capable of.

HAG-SEED by Margaret Atwood

I love most of Margaret Atwood’s stuff, but this book is a little too offbeat for me.  Felix is a theatre festival director whose renderings of Shakespeare’s plays have become increasingly more outlandish.  He finds himself abruptly out of a job when his acolyte, Tony, who has been usurping his power a little at a time, boots him out, before Felix’s latest project, The Tempest, comes to fruition.  Felix then becomes a slightly deranged recluse in an out-of-the-way shack for a dozen years, imagining that his dead daughter lives with him.  Opportunity knocks with an offer to teach literacy at a medium security prison.  Felix accepts, with the caveat that he will teach Shakespeare and direct the inmates in a different play every year, and Felix’s kooky production style is well-suited for enactment by his incarcerated players.  Then another improbable opportunity arises when Tony and friends plan to abolish the prison literacy program, not knowing that Felix is at the helm.  They plan a visit to the prison, and Felix stages an immersive production of The Tempest during their visit in order to exact the revenge he has been wanting for years.  This is where things go a little haywire with regard to believability.  Granted, this novel parallels The Tempest, which is full of spells and spirits, but convincing inmates to drug visiting dignitaries is far-fetched, to say the least.  For me, a book this wacky is not in Atwood’s wheelhouse.

MADDADDAM by Margaret Atwood

I have to confess that I barely remember anything about the first two books in this series—Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood.  No matter.  Toby and Zeb and a few others are survivors of the plague brought on by Crake in his effort to wipe out humanity and replace our species with genetically engineered beings, the Children of Crake, or Crakers, who are completely innocent and devoid of malice.  They munch on kudzu and have no use for clothing, or what they perceive as a second skin.  We learn Zeb’s story, as he tells it to Toby, his lover and a sort of medicine woman. Toby is the central character here who finds herself the appointed storyteller for humoring the Crakers, who jump to unexpected conclusions.  Toby manufactures bigger and bigger whoppers, sometimes just to avoid having to explain something like the “f” word.  Zeb’s history is fodder for some of these stories, but they need no embellishment.  His escapades are the stuff of James Bond novels—wild, crazy, daring, and sometimes violent.  Oh, and he describes himself as a babe magnet.  What’s not to love?  And, for me, this is ultimately a love story, even though this book is the conclusion of a trilogy about rebooting civilization.  When Toby introduces the Crakers to reading and writing, we can see how she is jumpstarting their society to more advanced methods of keeping track of their own history, even though their perceptions of it are extremely skewed.

THE ROBBER BRIDE by Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood has created some diabolical characters, and Zenia in this novel is one of her best.  She appears in a restaurant where three of her friends—Roz, Charys, and Tony--are having lunch—five years after they have buried what was supposed to be a canister of her ashes.  The stories of the three bewildered friends follow this astonishing sighting, and we find that Zenia is a supreme manipulator and maneater.  Each friend in turn has befriended Zenia, comforted her, loaned her money, taken her in, nursed her back to emotional or physical health and then been blindsided when Zenia runs off with the woman’s lover or husband.  Zenia is basically toying with these men, as she summarily dumps them when their purpose has been served.  I never quite got a sense for Zenia’s motives, however.  Was she punishing the women for having something she did not?  Or was she just stealing these men to prove how weak the men were and how gullible their women were?  In some ways, this novel is a juicy romp, as each of Zenia’s moves and lies is more outlandish than the last, and I wanted to pull my hair out when all three women are duped by her tales of woe, allowing Zenia to upend their lives.  They all admire her, then feel sorry for her, and ultimately want revenge.  As I read this novel, I couldn’t help thinking how much fun it must have been to write such a blatantly evil character as Zenia and to cast three strong women as her unwitting victims who finally have a second chance to claim the upper hand.

THE RED LOTUS by Chris Bohjalian

I don’t think of Chris Bohjalian as a thriller writer, but he has concocted a doozy here; it has more in common with The Flight Attendant than it does with most of his other work.  Alexis, an ER physician, and Austin, her boyfriend of less than a year, are near the end of their bike tour vacation in Vietnam when Austin disappears.  Unsure of exactly how serious their relationship is, Alexis tries not to overreact.  She soon discovers that Austin has not been entirely truthful about why he wanted to come back to Vietnam after having just traveled there within the past year.  The two met when Alexis treated Austin for a gunshot wound.  He works in the same hospital in fund raising but may be involved in something more nefarious.  His explanation of how he was shot and how he got the scratches on his hands sound fishy, and we can fault Alexis for being naïve, but otherwise Austin hasn’t really given her cause to be suspicious.  The villain here, Douglas Webber, is evil in a completely unsubtle way, and Bohjalian doesn’t pull any punches when describing the horrors of napalm and Agent Orange that the Americans showered on the Vietnamese and their landscape.  And frankly, things become more gruesome as the plot thickens.  Besides the great writing and never-ending suspense, one thing I liked about this book is how the author never really pigeonholes Austin as a good guy or a villain.  Alexis, who has had some self-mutilation problems in the past, can’t help but doubt her own judgment when she gradually uncovers Austin’s secrets that do not reflect positively on his character.  I would be remiss to ignore the very uncomfortable and prophetic ending, which conjures up an image that I can’t unsee.

SKELETONS AT THE FEAST by Chris Bohjalian

Here’s yet another WWII novel, but this one is set near the end of the war.  Germans are fleeing the eastern part of the country in order to escape the Russian army, who are known to torture and murder civilians.  German families have a much better chance of staying alive by moving westward into the hands of the Americans and Brits.  The family whose story dominates this novel consists mainly of a mother, who adored Hitler, and her two children—18-year-old Anna and 10-year-old Theo.  They are also harboring Callum, a Scottish paratrooper and POW who has been working on the family’s farm, in the hopes that he will vouch for him when they reach the troops in the west.  More importantly, he is Anna’s secret lover.  This novel also follows the death march of Cecile, a young Frenchwoman, and the journey of Uri, a young Jewish man who jumps from a cattle car full of Jews bound for Auschwitz.  Uri is definitely the most colorful character, as he joins the family’s trek but conceals his true identity.  He has become a chameleon, confiscating whatever corpse’s uniform will afford him the best opportunity to survive.  This novel moves at a much brisker pace than the journey of its characters, and that’s a big plus, as the storyline never lingers too long over tragedies.  The author emphasizes that the German people were in denial not only about what was happening to the Jews but also about the danger posed by the Russians’ relentless and merciless advancement.  The parallel between their failure to recognize their own peril and Jews who pointlessly packed luggage before boarding a train to a concentration camp is striking.

WHAT COULD BE SAVED by Liese O'Halloran Schwarz

Philip Preston went missing in Thailand when he was eight years old.  Now, 40 years later, his sister Laura receives a convincing email that indicates Philip is alive and still in Thailand.  Against the advice of her boyfriend and her sister Bea, Laura jumps on a plane to Bangkok so that she can confirm Philip’s identity and retrieve him.  What’s so nifty about this semi-obscure novel is that it keeps the reader in suspense for a long time about what really happened to Philip.  I have to say that I was torn between wanting to hear Philip’s story and not wanting this book to end.  His story is just as grim as we may have imagined, but who is ultimately responsible for his disappearance is as disturbing as it is shocking.  In fact, we find out near the end that an unfortunate confluence of events led to Philip’s misfortune.  In many ways this book is a de rigueur family saga with the usual jaw-dropping secrets about cowardice and betrayal.  However, the author whips these elements into a delicious novel against an exotic backdrop.  During the family’s time as expats living in Thailand as the Vietnam War was winding down, Philip’s mother was not even aware that her husband was doing intelligence work for the U.S.  This is one of those books in which almost everything that happens is critical to the plot.  One incident in which Philip gets into a fight at his judo class left me a little puzzled as to what its significance was, but the author ties everything else up pretty neatly at the end.  I did have to reread one early scene at Philip’s father’s office, and I am still not entirely sure that I understand what happened there.  Sometimes we just have to draw our own conclusions and be OK with that.

THE WOMEN by T.C. Boyle

As in The Inner Circle, the narrator of this book is a fictional character—one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s apprentices who really did mostly grunt work around the Taliesin estate.  However, this piece of historical fiction is not so much about the great American architect as it is about his lover Mamah, whom he called his soul mate, and two of his wives—Miriam and Olgivanna.  Boyle, who lives in a Frank Lloyd Wright house, tells their stories in reverse order, and I liked this format.  In this way I got to know Olgivanna while Miriam was still in the picture, then Miriam while Wright was still mourning Mamah’s tragic death, and finally Mamah.  I think Boyle told Mamah’s story last, because hers is the most poignant, and her death is certainly a defining moment for Wright.  Wright’s first wife, Kitty, is in the background for all of these stories, but she is not really the villain.  That role falls to Miriam, a closet drug addict who made Frank and Olgivanna’s life a living hell.  She didn’t want to divorce him, but she didn’t want to live with him, either.  She excelled at creating drama and mayhem, mostly with a stroke of her pen.  Frank himself seemed to drift from one scandal to another, while dodging bankruptcy and establishing his well-founded reputation as a genius in his field.  This book is rather long but rarely drags, with Boyle at the helm.  However, I did not like the myriad footnotes constantly disrupting the flow.  I often missed the asterisk indicator but then read the footnote when I finished the page and had to skim the page again to find the passage that warranted the footnote.  I read a hardback copy, and I can’t imagine how the electronic version handled the footnotes.  Some of the best anecdotes are in the footnotes, though, including one where Wright declares himself the world’s greatest architect during a court proceeding.  Another footnote reminds us that one of Wright’s sons invented Lincoln Logs.  If you skip over the footnotes, you will be missing out on some good stuff.

THE INNER CIRCLE by T.C. Boyle

Boyle’s historical fiction is never as good as the stuff that emanates strictly from his imagination.  Plus, I always wonder how much is fiction and how much is true, but I’m way too lazy to do any significant research.  In this case, the narrator, John Milk, is entirely fictional.  After taking one of Professor Alfred Kinsey’s classes at Indiana University in the 1940s, Milk becomes Kinsey’s assistant in gathering and assembling data for what would later be known as the Kinsey Report, or, more accurately, Reports—two books about human sexual behavior.  Kinsey is certainly an enigma, coming off alternately as totally objective and non-judgmental regarding human sexual activity and at other times as totally heartless.  Milk’s wife has to remind her husband that Kinsey is not God, but Milk does not tolerate any criticism of Kinsey, even as Milk’s work life, and Kinsey’s laser-like focus on their research, threatens Milk’s marriage.  In any case, Kinsey was certainly a pioneer, and we are in his debt for helping to ease the taboo of homosexuality and masturbation, but his failure to condemn pedophilia, for example, at least in this narrative, is repulsive.  I would add that most of us still do not condone sex with farm animals or pets; that sort of activity still seems abusive to me.  Milk is the main character of this book, though, and although he wants to buy into Kinsey’s attitudes about marital infidelity and voyeurism, both fine in Kinsey’s view, Milk finds himself caught between Kinsey’s unconventional world and that of his home life.  Milk does not share with his wife the details of his job for two reasons:  for one thing, Kinsey demands complete secrecy, particularly as the first book’s publication nears, and furthermore, Milk knows that some of Kinsey’s activities would stretch Milk’s wife’s tolerance to the breaking point.

PATSY by Nicole Dennis-Benn

Patsy is a Jamaican woman who finally obtains a 6-month visa to go to the U.S.  Her main motivation is to reunite with her long-time friend and lover, Cicely, in New York.  There’s one catch, however.  Patsy has to leave her 6-year-old daughter, Tru, behind, with Tru’s father, who has a wife and family of his own.  Tru’s story is the heartbreaking one here.  Nothing but disappointment awaits her mother in the U.S., but it is nothing compared to Tru’s loss.  Patsy has never embraced motherhood, but now Tru keeps wondering when her mother will come back for her, as promised.  Patsy, of course, has no intention of ever returning to Jamaica, despite the drudgery and financial desperation she faces in the U.S., taking menial jobs and barely scraping by.  The upside is that Tru’s life with her policeman father is in many ways better than the one she shared with her mother.  Patsy grapples with guilt over her abandonment of Tru, but she never takes the steps necessary to assuage that guilt.  I get that Patsy aspires to life on her own terms, but her plans for resuming her relationship with Cicely are completely unrealistic, since she knows that Cicely is married, even if only for residency purposes.  For me, this story is unbearably sad, and not just for Tru and Patsy.  Cicely is trapped in a marriage to a successful but abusive husband, and her son is just as cowed as his mother.  She seems to have written to Patsy, begging her to come to New York, in an effort to bring some joy to her life.  It is unclear whether she has been fantasizing about a life for Patsy and herself, when she knows she doesn’t have the courage or the means to leave her husband, or if she has just been telling Patsy what she knows Patsy wants to hear.  Either way, her letters are the catalyst to an unfortunate series of events in which Tru is the one who suffers the most.  The central questions are these:  How long is Patsy going to carry a torch for Cicely, and is she going to make an effort to mend her relationship with her own daughter?

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

This is a book in search of a plot.  From its inauspicious beginning onward, I just wanted to get it over with.  The book’s format is that of a letter from the Vietnamese-American narrator to his illiterate mother, and that letter is rife with poetry, as the author is himself a poet.  However, I am a fan of fiction—not poetry.  Plus, I found nothing to endear me to the narrator other than the fact that he is abused by his mentally ill mother.  He discovers at an early age that he is gay and strikes up a relationship with Trevor, whose home life is just as awful as the narrator’s.  If ever there were a book with a central theme of identity, this is it, but actually I felt that Trevor and the narrator’s mother were both more compelling characters than the narrator.  Plus, the storyline, such as it is, is profoundly grim, with rare moments of beauty or joy, such as scaling a fence next to the freeway to pick wildflowers.  I mean, really, that’s about as joyful as it gets.  The most disturbing aspect of this novel is the story of Trevor’s opioid addiction that stemmed from a sprained ankle.  The narrator lambasts Purdue Pharma for destroying this boy’s life, and I’m with him on this point.  The upside is that, since the author voices his rage in a novel, I actually read it.  Not that I haven’t read or heard about the opioid crisis in the news, but the author here puts a face, albeit fictional, to the many innocent victims.  And I can’t even bear to mention what happens to the macaque in the misguided interest of male virility.  This book drives home the stark reality of how humanity can often be all too inhumane.

THE NIGHT TIGER by Yangsze Choo

One storyline in this novel concerns a 10-year-old orphan, Ren, who is looking for a severed finger.  The second storyline is about a young woman, Ji Lin, who possesses the finger.  Ren’s former employer, Dr. MacFarlane, is dying and has insisted that Ren retrieve the doctor’s missing finger so that it can be interred with him within 49 days of his death.  Thus begins this terrific novel that takes place in Malaya in the 1930s—before it became the independent nation of Malaysia.  Sinister forces are at work here, as the number of sudden deaths begins to mount.  The author keeps us guessing as to whether the culprit is a human or something called a weretiger, which is a person in a tiger’s body.  Ren and Ji Lin’s stories eventually intersect, and they discover that they both dream about Ren’s dead twin brother Yi.  Ji Lin has a sort of twin of her own—Shin, the stepbrother with whom she shares a birthday.  Ji Lin starts to realize that she is developing a romantic attraction toward Shin, which she is unsuccessful at stifling.  There’s no big surprise here that Shin has been carrying a torch for her as well.  The predictable love story perhaps prevents this book from being taken seriously by the literary community, but it drew me in anyway.  I was more put off by the many secrets and misunderstandings between Ji Lin and Shin, which seemed to be tired devices for keeping the pair apart.  Anyway, what’s not to love about a love story between step-siblings, with a healthy dose of intrigue and Chinese superstition thrown in?  Speculation about a sequel makes me hopeful.

THE MIDNIGHT LIBRARY by Matt Haig

Nora Seed is in her mid-thirties, and she is depressed.  Instead of seeking out a good therapist, she tries to kill herself.  In limbo between life and death, she lands in the Midnight Library, where she can review her “book of regrets” and try out some different paths through life that would have resulted from having made different choices.  The outcome of this book is painfully predictable, and the highlights are when Nora has to improvise her way through lives for which she is frightfully unprepared.  The prose is choppy, and it’s basically a fictional self-help book—too preachy, too moralizing, too heavy-handed with the life lessons, and too flippant with regard to attempted suicide.  Perhaps this book can inspire a reader to give pause to some minor self-reflection, like a Mitch Albom or Fredrik Backman book might, but it’s also just as poorly written and unappetizing as books by those guys.  Speaking of heavy-handed, Nora Seed’s real life is called her “root” life.  Root?  Seed?  Really?  It fails in the originality department, too.  In this book, Nora meets a man who experiments with thousands of different lives and calls it “sliding.”  Remember the Gwyneth Paltrow movie Sliding Doors, which explores two different fates?   I don’t mind reading a little fantasy now and then, or even some magical realism, but when Nora encounters several seemingly intelligent people who admit to believing in parallel universes, I just threw up my hands in exasperation.  Nora is obviously not the only character who needs a good therapist.  This book is way overrated.

KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON by David Grann

David Grann may not be my favorite non-fiction writer, but he does manage to unearth some little known but fascinating historical episodes, and he goes beyond just immersing himself in his subject matter.  He becomes an active participant.  Here he addresses a period in the 1920s when Osage tribe members in Oklahoma were being gunned down and poisoned by white men.  The Osage had shrewdly held on to the mineral rights for property that the U.S. government took from them, and oil leases made the Osage ridiculously wealthy.  In many cases, however, white men were appointed as “guardians” for Osage tribe members who were deemed incompetent for no particular reason.  Mollie Burkhart became reclusive in order to avoid the same fate as her mother and three sisters, all of whom perished during this time, including one sister who was shot in the back of the head.  Corruption was also rampant throughout law enforcement, until Hoover became the FBI director and hired former Texas Ranger Tom White to investigate the Osage murders.  White hired some trustworthy men to work undercover, as the Osage had lost all faith in achieving justice, especially through a U.S. government agency.  White does eventually get his man, but the author conducts a much later investigation of his own, based on archived documents and conversations with the grandchildren of other victims.  His discoveries are mind-blowing, bringing the number of murdered Osage tribe members well into the hundreds, with dozens of murderers going unpunished.  This book just reminded me that a portion of humanity will always be ruled by greed and will go to any lengths to attain the power and money they crave.  I applaud David Grann for bringing this sad piece of history to our attention, but sometimes this book dragged.  The photographs, however, were a welcome distraction.

THE NEED by Helen Phillips

The first fifty or so pages of this novel are tantalizing and gripping, but then the plot veers sharply into a weird universe.  The sci-fi angle, which is mildly intriguing, is juxtaposed with a story of an exhausted and indulgent mother of an infant and an unruly four-year-old, but the motherhood angle just wore me out.  Breastfeeding considerations occupy way too many pages, and the toddler is old enough for a healthy dose of behavioral consequences which the mother, Molly, is too pooped to dish out.  Molly also works as a paleobotanist and is excavating a pit near a Phillips 66 station that has been converted into a headquarters for her and her coworkers.  This pit has yielded some inexplicable finds, including a Bible in which all pronouns referencing God are female.  Religious zealots become incensed and obsessed with the Bible, and I would have preferred more focus on that artifact, along with the ramifications of its discovery, and less focus on toddler tantrums.  Molly is patient to a fault, both with her kids and with the other main character, about whom I don’t want to reveal too much.  I get it that managing two small children leaves no time for much of anything else, but the ad nauseam drudgery of Molly’s life as a parent pretty much nullifies the very promising opening of this novel.  The book is a little spooky throughout, in a mind-bending, Stephen King sort of way.  The plot loses its sense of urgency early on, but I have to say that I still wanted to know how the author was going to resolve its central conflict.  I actually liked the ending—but not nearly as much as the beginning.

THE GUEST LIST by Lucy Foley

I am willing to overlook some bad grammar (“on behalf of my new wife and I”) and a few sentences that seem to belong elsewhere when a book is an absorbing page-turner.  This novel moves at breakneck speed, despite having several narrators, all easily distinguishable, and a slightly wiggly timeline.  The action takes place on a remote island off the coast of Ireland, which is the location for a wedding between two beautiful people—physically beautiful, that is.  Jules has built a magazine from the ground up, and her husband-to-be, Will, is a reality show star.  Jules thought everything was going to be perfect until she received an anonymous note saying that Will is not who he seems and imploring her not to marry him.  Hannah, a wedding guest and one of the primary narrators, is married to Charlie, who is a long-time close friend of the bride.  As Charlie seems to be cozying up more and more to Jules, Hannah befriends Jules’s troubled younger sister Olivia and encourages her to open up about a past trauma. Painful histories notwithstanding, the characters are a pretty shallow bunch, and we know early on that one of them is murdered after the ceremony.  I had a pretty good idea who the victim was, and I was right, but I had no idea who the murderer was, as so many motives became apparent for so many characters.  There is plenty of suspense to go around, and little by little we learn of unexpected connections and secrets between the various wedding attendees.  The ending is tidy, but I did not find it completely satisfying.

THE COLD MILLIONS by Jess Walter

This book proves that I can’t necessarily judge an author by his previous work.  I was not a huge fan of Jess Walter’s Beautiful Ruins, but this novel is completely different in a completely positive way.  The primary characters are two brothers, Ryan (Rye) and Gregory (Gig) who ride the rails in the early 1900s to Spokane.  They survive on whatever work they can find at a time when corrupt employment agencies are flourishing.  The charismatic Gregory is the idealist, engaged in a fight for free speech at a union protest, and Ryan, only seventeen but the more practical of the two, idealizes Gregory and is willing to follow his older brother’s lead regardless of the consequences.  This book is a rough-and-tumble adventure, complete with violence, bribery, and historical figures that I had never heard of.  Ryan soon emerges as the principal character, attaching himself to the unlikely rabble-rouser Elizabeth Gurley Flynn while Gregory is either in jail or on the move.  Flynn, a teenager herself and pregnant, has an oratory gift and the drive to use it in the struggle to achieve justice for workers.  She’s not the only one who can turn a phrase, though.  My favorite chapter is the first one narrated by Del Dalveaux, whose job it is to slow down Flynn’s efforts.  He arrives in Spokane with these comments:

“I couldn’t believe how the syphilitic town had metastasized….The city was twice the size of the last time I’d hated being there.  A box of misery spilled over the whole river valley.”

The author proves himself to be quite the wordsmith here, creating an atmosphere that reeks of tramps and trains in stark contrast to a wealthy man who poses as his own chauffeur--as sort of a joke that falls flat and doesn’t fool anyone.  The epigraph for Part III is an appropriate Wallace Stegner quote, and this book is reminiscent of his novels about the growing pains of this country, particularly in the West.