NIGHT BOAT TO TANGIER by Kevin Barry

Two washed-up Irish drug smugglers, Maurice and Charlie, are hanging out in a Spanish port’s seedy ferry terminal, hoping to catch up with Maurice’s long lost daughter, Dilly.  The book ends in the same place that it begins, but the pages in between tell us the long history between these two men, which has not always been amicable.  In fact, despite their having been partners in crime, their lives intersect unexpectedly a couple of times and accordion back and forth between betrayal and reconnection, depression and jubilation, and lucidity and hallucination.  This is definitely noir fiction, which I would normally love, but the structure, for me, is off-putting.  Without quotation marks, the dialog is hard to distinguish from descriptive prose, and I found it difficult at times to identify the speaker.  There is also a fair amount of what appears to be Irish slang, although even my kindle could not define every word.  On the plus side, I think the author does an exceptional job of creating a dark, desolate, and threatening mood, despite the fact that I could not always follow the action.  This is a challenging book to read and not one I can recommend, but it is relatively short and set in a darkly exotic part of the world.  Prior to reading this novel, it had never occurred to me that on a clear night one might be able to see Africa from Spain.  If only this book were just as easy to decipher.

THE BOOK OF LOST NAMES by Kristin Harmel

Eva and her mother are called to a neighbor’s flat in Paris to watch her children while the neighbor has to deal with a family emergency.  The real emergency, though, is that Jews are being rounded up in the city, and the authorities whisk away Eva’s father to a detention camp.  Eva then uses her artistic skills to forge identity papers that will allow her and her mother to travel to a fictional town in France that is known to harbor Jewish refugees.  As if the Nazis were not a big enough threat, Eva’s mother resists every move Eva makes on their behalf.  She is in denial about the danger and believes that the arrest of her husband is just a mistake.  Eva’s talent for forging documents makes her a valuable asset to the Resistance, especially in helping to smuggle children into Switzerland, but Eva’s mother continues to be a thorn in her side.  This novel is not great literature, but I mostly enjoyed it anyway.  It’s a love story and an adventure story with a villain whose identity the author does a poor job of concealing, although perhaps that was her intention.  The ending is quite predictable as well, but this is the kind of book where I raced to the end without much consideration for the quality of the writing or lack thereof.  Despite the two timelines—the 1940s and 2005—the plot is a cinch to follow.  There is a section describing a code based on the Fibonacci sequence, which I am very familiar with from a math standpoint, but I had to reread this section several times to get a sense for how it was being applied.  Understanding how this code works is not crucial to the plot, however.  What is crucial to understand is that the code is used to document children’s real names, along with their false identities, since many of them may be too young to remember their true identities if they survive the war.

THE TOPEKA SCHOOL by Ben Lerner

I like a challenging novel, but this book was just too cerebral for me—literally, since two of the three main characters are psychotherapists.  The third character is their son Adam, a high school senior who excels at various types of debate that I have never heard of.  These three characters rotate as narrators, along with Darren, a troubled, learning-disabled teen who is occasionally included in various teenage outings but then derided and/or abandoned, so that his violent response is not exactly unexpected.  He himself seems unable to distinguish between what he has thought about doing and what he has actually done.  Adam also has some trippy imaginings, not to mention migraines, which may or may not stem from a concussion he suffered when he was eight years old.  One particularly intriguing section involves an argument between Adam’s parents as to whether his mother should give in to Adam’s request for one of her tranquilizers before the national championship debate.  Adam’s father’s vehement objection to the possibility of his wife drugging their son is particularly ironic, since we already know that Adam’s father had a bad LSD trip while visiting a museum.  Another compelling event is when Adam becomes unglued after finding out that his girlfriend, living in Europe—country unspecified—has moved in with another guy.  This storyline ends abruptly, leaving me to wonder about its resolution, which is partially revealed at the end.  In fact, throughout this book, I kept wondering if I had missed some important tidbit, and I probably did, as this book has no coherent plot as such.  Just as I would become engrossed in one particularl scene, it would end, and another would begin.  Bottom line:  This book held my attention, but it was ultimately very exasperating.

MISS BENSON'S BEETLE by Rachel Joyce

Nothing about this novel is remotely realistic.  Two women, Margery Benson and her assistant, Enid Pretty, set out from England to New Caledonia in the early 1950s in search of a golden beetle, with one passport between the two of them.  See what I mean?  The quest for the beetle is actually Margery’s “vocation;” Enid’s is to bear a child.  These two women are as diametrically opposite as they can possibly be, but they have both had rather tragic lives.  Enid’s history unfolds as the novel progresses, but she is spunky and resourceful.  Margery’s father shot himself after getting word that her brothers had been killed in WWII.  Margery and Enid, despite their vast personality and physical differences, grow to rely on one another, both physically and emotionally.  When Margery becomes despondent, Enid rekindles her motivation, and when Enid becomes incapacitated, Margery rises to the occasion.  Besides the overly whimsical nature of this book, Enid has a dream that foreshadows the ending, and I found that hint to be completely unnecessary.  I felt as though the author was trying to soften the blow, but instead I felt that the ending was a foregone conclusion that slowed down my reading pace significantly; I developed sort of a “why bother” attitude.  I plodded on to the conclusion, but I wasn’t really emotionally vested in the story anymore.  On the plus side, this is a madcap buddy story, and both of the women are completely lovable.  Their foil is a man suffering from apparent PTSD whom Margery rejected as her assistant for the expedition. He surreptitiously and maniacally follows the two women across the globe.  We know that their paths will eventually cross, and his interruption of their adventure will have major consequences.

THE EMPEROR OF SHOES by Spencer Wise

Alex Cohen is a 26-year-old American, primed to take over his father’s shoe factory in China.  He falls in love with Ivy, a seamstress in the factory, who is working to unionize the plant.  The conditions there are horrific, and Alex, thanks to Ivy’s prodding, is beginning to notice.  He finds himself pulled in several directions.  The union organizers want his help in allowing a strike; the mayor wants him to rat out the union organizers; his friend Bernie wants Alex to join him in creating a new brand of shoe, using Alex’s factory; and Alex’s father stubbornly wants to retain the status quo, including kickbacks to corrupt officials. When a despondent worker commits suicide, Alex starts to lean in the direction of change, knowing that sparring with his father is going to require him to summon courage that he has never displayed in the past.  Despite the weighty subject matter, the author keeps the tone light, especially in the dialog between Alex, who has a knack for design, and his father, who refuses to initiate change but may, in fact, embrace it if it helps his bottom line.  One particularly funny scene plays out near the beginning when Alex replaces their usual 60-year-old size 6 foot model with the beautiful Ivy.  This book made me wonder which of my shoes were manufactured in China, and my guess is that all of them were, or at least, in Asia.  The Cohens are not directly involved in the production of leather, but that work is even more disturbing, if that’s possible.  Synthetic shoes are looking better and better, but the factories probably still reek of glue and dye.