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.