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.