SEVERANCE by Ling Ma

Candace Chen is one of the few New York survivors—so far—of a deadly pandemic caused by a fungus.  This novel has a before-and-after timeline.  In the present, Candace is traveling cross-country with a handful of other young adults, with their fanatically religious leader Bob.  In the pre-pandemic world, Candace is a project manager for Bible production—a job that she does not really like but that she is exceptionally good at.  As her officemates begin to disappear, either abandoning the city where the infrastructure is starting to crumble or succumbing to the Shen Fever, Candace carries on, even after she no longer has any work to do.  Candace is a loner, declining her boyfriend’s invitation to move out west with him, and her aloneness becomes even more striking when the city becomes a ghost town.  In fact, Candace resurrects her photo blog, NY Ghost, and sees a kind of beauty in deserted subway stations and horse carriages with no drivers.  The title of this book seems appropriate in a number of ways.  Candace observes at one point that nostalgia seems to make a person susceptible to the fever.  In that case, she should be fine.  She doesn’t seem to be nostalgic for how things used to be, nor does she have other personal entanglements.  Candace was born in China, as were her now-deceased parents, but she has no family connections there to speak of.  Her severance may be her emotional salvation.

TRANSCRIPTION by Kate Atkinson

A Kate Atkinson spy novel?  What’s not to love?  Plucky eighteen-year-old Juliet Armstrong interviews for a job in 1940 as a typist for MI5.  Her interviewer asks her which she would choose if a gun were held to her head—Communism or Fascism.  She cleverly dodges the question by choosing the gun and tells capricious lies during the course of the interview.  Atkinson has always been a master of witty and often sarcastic dialog, and this book shows off the author’s talent in that regard, as well as reminding us how well she can spin a good yarn.  Juliet’s job description vaults from transcribing taped conversations among English Nazi sympathizers to taking on a new identity as, well, a Nazi sympathizer.  Her audacity suffers a setback when she discovers that undercover work is not all fun and games but more a matter of life and death.  A decade later we find Juliet working as a producer for the BBC, but her MI5 work has not totally ended.  Apparently, once a spy, always a spy, although she seems anxious to put the war years behind her.  She runs into a man whom she worked with during the war, and he pretends not to recognize her.  Pair that with a threatening note, and we have suspense that totally reeled me in.  The whole clandestine aspect of this novel—changing watchwords and leaving newspapers on benches for other operatives to retrieve, for example—makes it ever so addictive and thoroughly entertaining.  And the ending will make your head spin.  It demands a reread.

BIG SKY by Kate Atkinson

I am a huge fan of the Jackson Brodie novels, and, although I enjoyed this one, I did not think it was as good as the previous two.  There’s just not enough Brodie and witty banter for my tastes.  Also, Reggie, a character from a previous novel, reappears, but I can’t remember that far back.  Louise, the character that I do remember does not appear until near the end, and her scene is more of a cameo.  Also, Brodie doesn’t get involved in the main crime of this book—sex trafficking—until about 100 pages in.  Still, there are several multi-faceted characters, my favorite of which is Crystal, aka Christine, Holroyd.  Her past is a bit of a mystery in and of itself, but she has obviously catapulted herself from an unpleasant childhood into an affluent life, including a house with a swimming pool in the basement.  The main focus of her life is her young daughter Candy, but she is also a surprisingly good stepmother to Harry, a nerdy teenager who has two offbeat part-time jobs.  One of his jobs is in a rundown carnival-type arcade, and the other is in a theatre that features aging drag queens and bad comedy.   There is so much going on in this novel that it’s hard to nail down the main storyline.  A woman is murdered with a golf club, and I have to say that this event is particularly tangential, and, after the culprit was identified, I was puzzled as to what was the point of her death as far as the book’s plot was concerned.  I think Atkinson may have thrown a few too many ingredients into this pot.

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE MUSEUM by Kate Atkinson

I love Kate Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie novels, but her other stuff, not so much.  This novel is narrated by Ruby Lennox and charts her life from conception, no less.  It also covers the lives of her mother, her grandmother, and her great-grandmother, causing me much confusion as to which generation I was reading about.  In all honesty, I could never keep track of these various women’s siblings, except for those of Ruby herself.  Ruby is the youngest of three girls whose mother, Bunty, is not of the warm and fuzzy variety.  The previous generations of women have both brothers and sisters, some beloved, some not, some killed in action.  Ruby’s story is mostly an unhappy one, where one of the happier weeks of her life is one spent with her sisters at the shore with their father’s lover, of all people, as babysitter.  This book has some funny moments but mostly not.  In fact, it supports the argument that dysfunctional families beget dysfunctional families.  Arguably the saddest event in the novel involves animals, following the death of a family member, but Ruby is indeed a tragic character.  Although not physically abused, except perhaps by her vicious sister Gillian, she suffers emotional abuse that becomes even more evident in the last 50 pages of the book, which are by far the most enlightening, the most heartbreaking, and at the same time the most uplifting.  A startling revelation in this section delivers a blast of righteous indignation that stirred me to pop up out of my chair, almost.  It certainly explains Bunty’s lack of affection for Ruby, but it does not exonerate her for being such an emotionally distant mother.

AMERICAN DIRT by Jeanine Cummins

I have mixed feelings about this novel and not just about its authenticity.  I certainly have no legitimate knowledge of the Mexican-American experience.  This book opens with a massacre which Lydia and her 8-year-old son Luca manage to escape by hiding in the shower.  The remainder of the novel recounts their harrowing journey, partly by freight train, from their home in Acapulco to el norte—the U.S.  At face value, this is an adventure story, grounded by Lydia’s fierce vow to herself to protect her son, at all costs.  Along the way, she trusts people that she should not and is wary of people whose only motive is to help her; she definitely walks a tightrope between paranoia and a firm belief in the innate goodness of people that gradually erodes as she occasionally comes face to face with a stunning betrayal.  The biggest betrayal is from the beginning when an erudite man named Javier becomes her friend and then murders her family.  Javier is as unrealistic an example of a druglord as Lydia is of a migrant.  She is not fleeing poverty; rather she is fleeing Javier’s watchful eye and his possible desire to finish off Luca and Lydia, despite the fact that he is in love with her.  She is plagued by guilt, and that sentiment to me is perhaps the most inauthentic aspect of the novel.  She does not kill her family; the cartel does.  She also did not write the newspaper piece that caused Javier to lash out in revenge; her husband did, and he paid the ultimate price.  She had no way of knowing the domino effect that the article would ultimately have. I could perhaps relate to her emotions better if survivor’s guilt were in play here, but that’s really not the case.  And I get that the author wanted to shed some light on the migrant’s plight, but Lydia is not at all typical.  She is well-educated, and her son speaks perfect English.  He also has a photographic memory when it comes to geography.  Really?  Does such a thing exist?

AN ELEGANT WOMAN by Martha McPhee

I would expect a certain amount of confusion when reading a book about four generations of women, and there is that.  The narrator is fourth-generation Isadora, but her grandmother and great-grandmother dominate the novel, and rightfully so.  The first generation woman is Glenna, who leaves her husband in bed with his mistress in Ohio and takes their two daughters westward by train.  Glenna plans to make a living as an itinerant teacher, despite her lack of credentials and the disadvantage of having two small children in tow.  The elder daughter is Thelma, known as Tommy, who becomes a mother to her sister Katherine during Glenna’s lengthy absences.  Tommy has to sacrifice her own educational aspirations in order to run the household so that Katherine can graduate.  As adults, their lives diverge in a surprising way, with Tommy going east and Katherine going west.  Katherine decides to be known as Pat, since her middle name is Patricia, which she deems more suitable for her plan to become an actress. Tommy changes her name also and basically takes on a whole new identity, in an effort to become the person she wants to be.  Tommy then tries to ensure that her daughter Winter’s childhood is the complete opposite of her own.  In any case, Tommy’s life is the main focus of the novel and the glue which holds it all together, and for me, Tommy is the title character, although I guess one could argue that all four generations of women are elegant in their own way.  Male characters receive fairly cursory treatment here, except for Slim, Pat’s son, who can’t help but wonder how his life would have unfolded had his mother followed the path that Tommy forged.  This book is reminiscent of Wallace Stegner’s masterpiece, Angle of Repose, but does not quite rise to that standard.