THE LYING LIFE OF ADULTS by Elena Ferrante

In a moment of pique, Giovanna's father says that Giovanna's face has become like that of his estranged sister, Vittoria.  Having never met the much maligned Vittoria, Giovanna becomes curious and ultimately meets her aunt, who is weirdly attached to the wife and children of her dead lover.  Vittoria asserts that there are two sides to the argument that caused animosity between her and her brother, but Vittoria is certainly a force to be reckoned with, and may be a catalyst to upsetting Giovanna’s family harmony.  This book is a tale of undulating loyalties, as Giovanna discards and then reclaims friends with typical teenaged vacillation.  One symbol of these ever-changing liaisons is a bracelet whose history is complicated and whose ownership changes so frequently that it becomes a character in its own right, like a traveling garden gnome.  The most intriguing relationship in the novel is the three-way relationship between Giovanna, her friend Giuliana, and Giuliana’s erudite and charismatic fiancé, Roberto.  Giuliana may be beautiful, but she is no match intellectually for Roberto’s educated friends, whereas the much younger Giovanna is enthralled by their cerebral discussions.  I was reluctant to read this book because I really did not care for Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend.  However, for me, this is a much better read.  Giovanna sheds one identity after another in an effort to find her true self, transitioning from acquiescent daughter to a rebellious one who dresses only in black and neglects her studies.  She eventually outgrows this phase, thanks largely to her admiration for Roberto, but she is only sixteen when the book ends, and I’m sure she has personal transformations still on the horizon.

PIRANESI by Susanna Clarke

Piranesi is a sweet and innocent young man who inhabits a world of fifteen people, thirteen of whom are dead.  The only other living person he has ever seen is an older man whom he calls simply The Other and with whom he meets for an hour twice a week.  During his waking hours, Piranesi wanders the many—perhaps infinite—vestibules and staircases of the huge structure that constitute his entire world, which The Other calls the Labyrinth.  Piranesi communes with birds, does not appear to have any concept of loneliness, and survives by burning dried seaweed and eating fish that float in with the massive tides that periodically, and quite violently, flood the lower floors.  The Other, however, obviously has other resources for food and clothing not available to Piranesi, who is so naïve that he doesn’t even question the source of The Other’s bounty.  When another living human appears in the Labyrinth, Piranesi begins to reevaluate everything that he believes to be true.  This disruption is particularly striking because the author has done such a remarkable job of creating a calm and serene atmosphere up to this point; Piranesi’s contentment feels perfectly natural.  When cracks begin to form in his perception of reality, the novel really picks up speed.  I don’t read many fantasy novels and even fewer that I actually like.  This is a notable exception.

THE KING AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD by Arthur Phillips

Dr. Mahmoud Ezzedine arrives at Elizabeth I’s court as part of a Turkish diplomatic retinue in the late 1500s.  He springs into action when a baron has an epileptic seizure in the presence of the queen.  When the Turkish dignitaries return to Constantinople, Dr. Ezzedine is left behind as a gift to the queen, because one of the high-ranking Turks covets the good doctor’s wife.  Ezzedine is then regifted to the epileptic baron, converts from a Muslim to a Protestant, at least in theory, and changes his name to Matthew Thatcher.  (Another character changes names as well in order to keep his identity a secret, causing some minor confusion for this reader.)  Ultimately, though, Thatcher becomes a spy in a covert plot to determine whether or not King James VI of Scotland has truly converted from Catholicism. If he is now a Protestant and not just masquerading as one, he can succeed Elizabeth as King of England.  Thatcher arrives in Edinburgh with the assignment of learning what is in the king’s heart but succeeds only in becoming the king’s chess opponent—the perfect occupation for Thatcher, since he is a pawn himself.  The plan that he ultimately has to execute is diabolical with potentially dire consequences, but the doctor has been promised that if it succeeds, he can return to Constantinople, where his wife and young son may or may not be still awaiting his return after a decade.  I love how this novel inserts a bit of intrigue into what is historically a foregone conclusion with a jaw-dropping twist.  However, the less-than-breakneck pace of the novel draws attention to Ezzedine/Thatcher’s infinite patience but challenges the patience of the reader.

PRAGUE by Arthur Phillips

In 1990 Budapest—not Prague—a group of half a dozen twenty-somethings congregate at bars and jazz clubs.  All are expats, trying to make their mark.  John, a journalist for a local English-language newspaper, is the main character and has followed his brother, Scott, to Budapest, much to Scott’s dismay.  John has a thing for Emily, a girl Friday at the American embassy.  Mark is writing his dissertation on nostalgia and spends an entire day riding the mountainside cable car just to savor the view.  (He then imagines that he appears in a corner of all the tourist photos taken on the funicular that day.)  Charles, who interested me the most, evaluates local businesses for a private equity firm and decides to invest personally in a small publishing business after his firm passes on it.  (The almost 200-year history of this family-owned business gobbles up a pretty long chunk of the novel and serves as a device for the author to share some Hungarian history as well.)   In one of my favorite scenes, Charles is meeting with one of the press’s staffers, who extols the virtues of the small publishing company’s owner, while Charles contemplates pickup lines for later in the evening.  The interleaving of these two trains of thought is clever and hilarious, and I would have appreciated more moments like this.  The pace of the book is not supersonic and left me with a few dangling unanswered questions, although perhaps I just wasn’t astute enough to figure out what happened to a couple of characters who exited Hungary.

SMALL THINGS LIKE THESE by Claire Keegan

Why are so many atrocities committed in the name of religion?  I was not familiar with the Irish Magdalene Laundries until I read this book, and I still can’t believe they existed until the 1990s.  In this spare but heartrending novel, Bill Furlong, an Irish businessman, sees the Laundries’ child abuse up-close-and-personal when he discovers a girl freezing in the local convent’s coal shed.  Shocked and dismayed and uncertain how to respond, he goes on about his work, tortured by what he has witnessed.  He learns that his fellow villagers, including his wife, insist on turning a blind eye, afraid to rock the boat or wage a battle against the Catholic Church or even acknowledge the cruelty that is taking place right under their noses.  Many of the young girls who are basically slaves at the convent have been placed there because they became pregnant out of wedlock.  Furlong is especially sensitive to their plight, as his mother was an unwed mother herself but escaped a similar fate due to the kindness of her employer.  The main question, then, is will he assuage his conscience, or will he stick with the status quo.  This book brought to mind Paulette Jiles’ News of the World, which I loved, but this book is more chilling, because these institutions actually existed, as did the apathy that allowed them to endure for centuries.

THE OLD DRIFT by Namwali Serpell

This sprawling, multi-generational novel takes place in Zambia, beginning with its colonial beginning as Northern Rhodesia.  The family tree shown at the beginning of the novel is invaluable, as keeping up with who’s who is a formidable undertaking.  The three prominent matriarchs are Sibilla, Matha, and Agnes.  A healthy dose of magical realism accompanies the weird afflictions of Matha and Sibilla.  Sibilla has fast-growing hair over most of her body.  (I couldn’t erase the mental image of Cousin Itt from my mind.)  And Matha cries nonstop.  (Wouldn’t she have a dehydration issue?)  Agnes’s affliction is more mainstream in that she goes blind just as her tennis career in the UK is about to take off.  She lands in Zambia after falling in love with a man before discovering that he is black.  The timeline of the novel extends into the AIDS crisis and beyond—into a future in which the government implants a “bead” in the palm of everyone’s hand so that it functions similarly to a smartphone.  This invention may not be that farfetched, but the whimsical nature of many of the plot points seems to conflict with the seriousness of other events.  The focus on the horrific AIDS epidemic eerily foreshadows the Covid pandemic, especially since AIDS is referred to in the novel as simply “The Virus.”  There is a lot to unpack in this novel, as evidenced by its length, and that coupled with the convoluted relationships of the characters make this book more of a challenge than I had bargained for.

NAAMAH by Sarah Blake

Naamah is Noah’s wife, as in Noah of the Old Testament.  This is not a biography by any stretch.  Magical realism abounds, but then the premise of having two of every animal species on a boat is not exactly fathomable, either.  The supernatural elements, the lengthy dream sequences, and the appearance of God in the form of a bird all lend a biblical quality to the narrative but not in a good way.  The language on the other hand, is quite modern, and I questioned the multiple references to planets, including planet Earth.  I doubt the likelihood that people during Noah’s time thought of the Earth as a planet.  Given that I am not a biblical scholar, I don’t know how much of this story is in the Bible, but my sense is that the Bible’s focus is on Noah, not his wife, and that shift of focus is exactly the point of this novel.  Naamah sees God as cruel and unjust, especially with regard to the destruction of the rest of humanity.  She particularly laments the fate of children, as well as that of her female lover, and mingles with the dead children, who inhabit the bottom of the floodwaters in a sort of afterlife.  (An angel gives Naamah the ability to stay underwater for long periods of time.)  This book is probably full of symbolism, but I was at a loss to interpret any of it, nor did I understand the reason for some of the strange happenings, such as Naamah’s losing the ability to see the animals.  My biggest takeaway is that Naamah views herself as the mother of all humanity going forward, and that is a weighty assignment.

THE LOST BOOK OF ADANA MOREAU by Michael Zapata

Adana Moreau, wife of a pirate and mother to Maxwell, writes a sci-fi novel called The Lost City.  She pens a sequel but destroys the manuscript shortly before her death in New Orleans around the time of the stock market crash of 1929.  A copy of the sequel resurfaces decades later, and we must wonder how it survived.  Thus we have two timelines:  one that follows Maxwell’s adventures after his father leaves home to find work and one that follows the discovery of the sequel in the early 2000s.  Parallel universes and theoretical physics play a small role in this novel, but these subjects are not the reason that the book is confusing.  One reason is that there are two characters named Saul; one is Benjamin’s father, and one is Benjamin’s grandson; Benjamin himself is the one who has the copy of the sequel.  After his death, his grandson Saul discovers the manuscript among his grandfather’s effects.  Saul and his disaster-seeking journalist friend, Javier, embark on a quest to deliver the manuscript to Maxwell and find themselves in New Orleans amidst the devastation of Katrina. Another reason that this book is hard to follow is that several characters tell first-person stories, and I had to be sure not to lose track of who was narrating and which timeline the story belonged to.  Also, occasionally a character reappears after having been introduced many pages ago, and then I found myself flipping backwards to reacquaint myself with them.  In other words, this novel presents a reading challenge but does not deliver a sufficient reward.

CODE NAME HÉLÈNE by Ariel Lawhon

Among the plethora of recent novels about women working in counterintelligence during wartime (The Lost Girls of Paris, The Book of Lost Names), this one stands out and ranks right up there with Transcription.  Plus this book is about real-life heroine Nancy Wake and proves that historical fiction does not have to be poorly written or trite.  I find that some popular historical fiction authors are good researchers but not necessarily good storytellers.  This novel, however, is gripping and has a juicy love story to boot.  The book follows two timelines that are only a few years apart, and they converge in a very nifty fashion at the end of the novel, with the earlier timeline giving us a broader perspective on characters that we know in the later timeline.  My only beef with this novel is that a wholly fictional character, Marceline, is somewhat overdone as a villain, and I think the author should have stuck to the facts at the end, instead of making Marceline so vicious.  The story opens with a hungover Nancy preparing to parachute into the French countryside to coordinate the retrieval of airlifted weapons and supplies to the Resistance during WWII.  In the earlier timeline she meets Henri Fiocca, the love of her life, and we also follow her progression from journalist to a woman of great strength and courage who risks everything to defeat the Nazis.  The unspeakable acts of cruelty that Nancy witnesses are almost too vivid, but her various hair-raising experiences and narrow escapes make for an edge-of-your-seat read.  I recommend that you not spoil the story by reading about Nancy Wake beforehand.

A BURNING by Megha Majumdar

This novel revolves around three characters, whose pivot point is Jivan.  She quit school, where PT Sir was her physical education teacher, after passing her 10^th grade exams.  Jivan now works in retail and gives English lessons to Lovely, an aspiring transgender actress.  Then she posts an inflammatory comment on social media that puts her in the crosshairs of the police, who are looking for a train bomber who killed 100 people.  Although Jivan was not involved in the bombing, she is soon behind bars with a court-appointed lawyer trying her case, which hinges somewhat on the testimonies of Lovely and PT Sir.  The latter is still puzzled as to why Jivan quit school and by sheer happenstance has found himself working for a political party who hopes to gain power in the upcoming election.  His job, unfortunately for Jivan, is to testify against accused criminals.  Lovely’s passion on the witness stand catapults her career into overdrive.  Thus, Lovely and PT Sir find their lives suddenly thrust in an upward trajectory that was previously unimaginable, whereas Jivan’s life is in a dangerously downward spiral.  Jivan makes some unfortunate judgment errors, particularly with regard to whom she can trust, but Lovely and PT Sir are the more complex characters and the ones whose stories held my attention.  They both face decisions about whether or not to ignore their consciences in order to better their own existences and to gain some modicum of power.  This book takes place in India, but the level of corruption and governmental retaliation is not entirely unfamiliar, even in the U.S.  Bigotry against Muslims is another prominent theme, and one particular act of violence on the part of mob vigilantes against an innocent man is actually just as horrific as the train bombing.

THE HOUSE IS ON FIRE by Rachel Beanland

Historical fiction can be educational, as is this novel about the Richmond Theatre fire of 1811.  I had never heard of this disaster, which Patrick Henry’s daughter, Sally, survived.  She, along with three other characters, headline the chapters and present their various perspectives on the events of that tragic night.  She was a patron the night of the fire, and in this telling, she jumped from a third floor window and survived.  Gilbert is a slave who caught a dozen white women who plunged into his arms from a second story window.  Cecily is Gilbert’s niece who sees the event and the city’s inability to identify the dead as an opportunity to flee to freedom.  Jack is a young stagehand whose actions contributed to the accident that caused the fire.  The book reads like a thriller as we follow Cecily’s escape plans and Jack’s efforts to quiet his conscience when his fellow theatre workers concoct a story of a slave revolt as a cover-up for their own mistakes in causing the fire.  However, the characters are fairly one-dimensional, especially the villains, including the blacksmith who owns Gilbert, and Cecily’s owner’s son, a brute who frequently rapes her.  However, the slave owners are not the only cruel characters.  Sally experiences a rude awakening when she discovers that many of the men in the theatre survived the fire by basically trampling the women.  So much for chivalry.  Thank you to Book Club Favorites at Simon & Schuster for the free copy for review.

APPLES NEVER FALL by Liane Moriarty

Joy Delaney has gone missing, but her four adult children and her husband take their sweet time about reporting her disappearance to the authorities.  She left them all a cryptic text message, but then the housekeeper finds Joy’s phone under the bed in the Delaney house.  Joy’ husband, Stan, with whom she ran a successful tennis academy, seems the most likely suspect, especially since he is enigmatically unconcerned.  Even more curious is the former presence of Savannah, an injured waif who showed up on the Delaneys’ doorstep several months ago and proceeded to insert herself into the household.  The fact that two seemingly intelligent adults would allow a complete stranger to move in and take over the cooking and housekeeping is incomprehensible, but then many aspects of this book are absurd.  What’s not absurd is the number of family secrets that trickle out one by one, adding intrigue to the mystery of Joy’s whereabouts, as well as dispelling the myth of the Delaneys’ perfect marriage.  Three of the four children have their own share of secrets, including, in some cases, the fact that their marriages/relationships have recently gone bust.  The plot sizzles at times, but this book falls more squarely into the cozy mystery category than the thriller genre.  The writing style is too simplistic, and the characters are too even keel to rev up our heartrates and inspire us to become truly worried about Joy.  Everyone, including the reader, seems to feel that Joy will turn up sooner or later.  Also, the author is not the least bit subtle about sharing odd tidbits that turn out to be incremental to the plot, such as the ugly rug, the dog that eats paper, the cat that steals laundry, and, of course, the hotshot tennis prospect that got away.

AFTERLIFE by Julia Alvarez

Antonia is still mourning the death of her beloved husband, Sam, after almost a year and finds herself at loose ends, until suddenly she has too much on her plate.  Her oldest sister, Izzy, has vanished en route to Antonia’s 66^th birthday party, and the girlfriend of her neighbor’s undocumented employee, Mario, needs a place to stay.  Unbeknownst to Antonia and Mario until her arrival, Estela, the undocumented teenaged girlfriend, is pregnant with another man’s child, and now Mario wants nothing to do with her.  Antonia finds herself torn between two crises while trying to stay true to her mantra of taking care of herself first.  Her reluctance to help Estela brings with it a heavy dose of guilt, since she knows that Sam would have helped Estela in every way possible.  Plus, Antonia is a Dominican immigrant herself.  As for the Izzy crisis, Antonia has three sisters working on that situation, all convinced that Izzy is mentally unstable, and Antonia questions whether her participation is even necessary.  She boomerangs between the Izzy problem and the Estela problem, both geographically and emotionally, and this tug-of-war between the two emergencies is the driving force in the novel.  The author vividly and eloquently paints Antonia as a truly relatable character who deftly juggles both crises while battling uncertainty about how much commitment she wants to make to either one.  Her sisters are tugging on her to help resolve the Izzy situation, and Sam, or at least the memory of Sam, is tugging on her to help Estela.  I have to admit that I felt that Estela was more in need of assistance than the sisters, but family pressures are difficult to deny, particularly when one family member has become a threat to herself.

THE PLOT by Jean Hanff Korelitz

Jake Bonner is a writer whose first novel was reasonably successful but whose subsequent efforts have been mediocre at best.  After a student named Evan Parker, who happens to be a decent writer, recounts to Jake the dynamite plot of a novel he plans to write, Jake expects to see that novel in print within a few years.  However, for some reason it has never come to fruition, and Jake discovers that Evan died shortly after completing Jake’s workshop.  Jake struggles to rationalize why he ultimately expands his student’s plot into a novel of his own:  it’s a story that is too good to go to waste.  The ensuing recognition of Jake’s novel comes with not only a fair amount of guilt but also a new girlfriend and some creepy missives from someone who apparently knows that his book’s storyline is not original.  One could argue that it’s always a bad idea to do something that will cause you to be constantly looking over your shoulder to see if someone is coming after you.  Jake’s dilemma, as he dodges questions about how he got the idea for his novel’s plot and pretends to be unfazed by the ever more threatening notes from someone calling themselves TalentedTom—clearly a reference to Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley about a man who covets the life of another man and ultimately takes it over.  Jake may be enjoying the accolades that rightfully should have belonged to Evan Parker, but there is more to the Ripley theme than just stealing the plot of another man’s novel.  Chapters of Jake’s blockbuster novel are interspersed throughout this book, so that we really have two novels here that converge.  The story of Jake’s inner turmoil and quest to uncover the identity of his nemesis is undeniably a page-turner—even more so than the stolen plot of his best-selling thriller.

HARLEM SHUFFLE by Colson Whitehead

Ray Carney is mostly an honest entrepreneur who owns a home furnishing store in Harlem in the early 1970s.  However, he does occasionally deal in stolen merchandise but only on a small scale, at least according to him.  However, his beloved cousin Freddie is a small-time crook and constant liability who sometimes involves Carney in his capers, with or without Carney’s consent.  Over the course of this novel, Freddie becomes involved in a burglary of a hotel’s safe deposit boxes, aligns himself with a drug dealer, and double-crosses a mobster.  Carney finds it tough to maintain his respectability as a businessman when he gets embroiled in Freddie’s various escapades, especially when the cops interrupt a meeting he has with a rep for a high-end furniture manufacturer.  Carney also engineers a caper of his own in order to get revenge against a banker who failed to deliver on a $500 bribe.  Although the writing is terrific, the pace of this novel is snail-like, despite the action-packed plot, not all of which I totally grasped.  The scene in the book that I can’t stop reading, because it is just too funny and vivid, takes place in a laundromat.  I won’t quote all the witticisms on pages 225-226, but these two sentences elicited a huge guffaw from me:

“The manager of the laundromat was a scrawny man in a saggy undershirt painted with sweat stains.  Launderer, heal thyself.”

I also learned about dorveille, or “dorvay” as Carney likes to spell it, which is a period of wakefulness between two half-cycles of sleep.  Apparently, centuries ago, people slept in two shorter shifts rather than in one continuous 8-hour stretch.  Makes sense to me, except for the going to bed at dusk, although during Daylight Saving Time that might work out OK.

BLACK LEOPARD, RED WOLF by Marlon James

Yikes, reading this book was a chore.  This book is The Lord of the Rings on steroids, or maybe testosterone, complete with a wicked enchanted forest, but not nearly as engrossing or entertaining.  Tracker plays the Strider role here but without the charisma, and the quest is the search for a mysterious boy.  Violence abounds, along with shape-shifting characters, including the Leopard in the title who transforms himself into a man and back again.  Characters morph into other characters, and their behavior and personalities fluctuate as well; they are sometimes good guys and sometimes bad.  And don’t even get me started on the women, who are all witches, sorceresses, or otherwise despicable creatures, such as hyenas.  There is quite a bit of perfunctory sex, sometimes consensual, sometimes not, but almost all of it takes place between male characters.  In fact, the only really likeable character is Sadogo, a big-hearted oaf with a murderous past.  The mingi are cursed children—albinos, conjoined twins, a boy with no limbs—whom Tracker tries to save from all the evil entities, and they are pretty cool as well.  However, all the misogyny aside, the choppy sentences, constant savagery, pronouns with ambiguous antecedents, the zigzagging timeline, and a vast cast of characters whose names vary and whose allegiances are fluid, make this novel very difficult to follow and even more difficult to enjoy.  I am totally mystified as to why this book has garnered so much praise.

HOW MUCH OF THESE HILLS IS GOLD by C Pam Zhang

The first part of this book reminded me so much of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying.  Two orphaned children in the western U.S. are transporting their father’s rapidly decomposing body to an as yet undetermined burial place, as appendages drop off along the way.  They are abandoning their hardscrabble life in a mining community in the late 1800s for an uncertain future after Lucy fails to keep secret the family’s stash of gold bullion.  Lucy is twelve, and her sister Sam is nine, but partly due to their father’s urging after losing a newborn son, Sam(antha) passes as a boy.  Eventually, Lucy eschews life on the road, and their paths diverge, at least for a while, as both are looking for a place to call home.  The defining characteristic of these two kids is that they are Chinese-Americans, born in this country but forever treated differently because they look different.  Their quest for a sense of belonging is virtually unattainable, and their suffering, especially Lucy’s, has been augmented by physical abuse at the hands of their father after the loss of their mother.  We also learn the history of Lucy and Sam’s parents, and it is not pretty.  In fact, their story is so horrific, due to a catastrophe of their own making, that it’s a wonder they maintain any semblance of sanity afterward.  Although the pace of this novel definitely accelerates at about the halfway point, it still did not move me.  Plus, several stones in the plot are left unturned, such as whether Lucy finds out about her parents’ past, and we are left wondering about what happened to the kids’ mother.  I needed more closure on these two points, and the ending raises even more unanswered questions, so that the book feels unfinished. 

STILL LIFE by Sarah Winman

Love comes in many forms, as does family.  In this case, we have a family of unrelated people, mostly—mostly people and mostly unrelated.  A London bar serves as the gestation point for most of this family, but a move to Florence, Italy, for some of the characters causes the scope of this family to expand.  Ulysses Temper (and, yes, there is a minor character named Penelope) is the main character who moves to Italy with his ex-wife’s daughter, Alys.  Ulysses and Alys, also known as “kid,” are not related by blood, but his parental instincts are much stronger than those of Alys’s mother, Peg.  Peg is the character who disappointed me the most.  She is supposed to be beautiful and adored by all, but she does not generate any charisma on the page.  What’s to love about a mother who sends her seven-year-old daughter off to live in Italy, even if their relationship is problematic?  Peg eventually marries the abusive Ted, but her victimhood does not make her more appealing.  However, all of the other characters are very warm and fuzzy, including Claude, a parrot who manages to make an astute comment on many situations, and Cress, a lonely soul who finds romance late in life.  Granted, Claude’s remarks, along with Cress’s prognostications and a number of unlikely coincidences, cause the novel to dip into the realm of magical realism from time to time.  No matter.  This novel is largely an ode to Florence and to close friendships that transcend age and geographical proximity.  The lack of serious conflict among the cast of characters also verges on the improbable, but their bond is an illustration of what can be, if not necessarily what is.

INTERIOR CHINATOWN by Charles Yu

The format of this book—a TV script—was very off-putting for me.  Plus, the author blurs the line between real life and Hollywood make-believe to the point that I was very confused.  Despite all that, he drives home the image of the Asian American stereotype, both in real life and in movies/TV shows, and the bigotry that stems from that stereotype.  Willis Wu apparently makes a living playing the role of “generic Asian man” in a cop TV series, but that label applies to his real life as well.   Several compelling truths emerge from his story.  For one thing, his great aspiration is to elevate himself to “Kung Fu Guy” in the show, and his father was in a fact a kung fu master in his day.  The fact that Willis still lives in poverty is a testament to the reality of how little he earns from these bit parts, especially since his character is always destined to die, and then he has to “stay dead” for six weeks before he can play another “generic Asian man.”   Another character in the novel is Older Brother, and I could not determine if this were some mythical successful Asian American actor or a real person in Willis’s life.  Older Brother reappears late in the novel as a lawyer who abandoned acting altogether, although Willis sees him as having achieved the ultimate pinnacle of success as “Kung Fu Guy.”  The heart of the matter is that Willis is propagating his own stereotype, even though he has to look in the mirror to remind himself that he does not look like other Americans, Black or white.

HAPPY & YOU KNOW IT by Laura Hankin

Who even knew there was such a thing as a playgroup musician?  Claire is one, having been dumped by her band that is now hugely popular without her.  She may be struggling to make ends meet, but she is performing kids’ songs for wealthy moms and their children.  These women may seem to have it all together, but they have marital struggles as well as financial struggles of their own, and their secrets spill out one by one.  Claire becomes privy to these secrets and wrestles with her conscience about what to do about them.  One particular eye opener has ramifications beyond this one cozy playgroup, and these women’s response is not exactly humanitarian.  Claire becomes more and more involved with these women, who include her in various other activities, but at times she seems to be the only one with a conscience.  Still, this book has a very frivolous vibe, and, although the playgroup has at least half a dozen women, the author really only explores the personal lives of three of them.  Whitney is the beautiful host with an apathetic husband and a burgeoning social media presence.  Gwen comes from old money and owns a stunning brownstone, but her charming and handsome husband is a philanderer.  Finally, we have Amara, the only black woman in the group and in many ways the most enigmatic.  She befriends Claire and has communication issues with her husband, hiding the expense of boutique vitamins and quitting her job to become a full-time mom without discussing this intention with him.  All the moms are shallow and self-centered at times, but the author endows them all with love for their families.  They also seem to be unrealistically and inconsistently compassionate at times, so that their characters’ true personalities are a little out of focus.

SISTERS by Daisy Johnson

Two sisters, July and September, are close in age but complete opposites in personality; they operate almost like conjoined twins with September clearly in charge.  They flee Oxford with their mother, Sheela, for reasons to be explained later, to their father’s nearly derelict family vacation home.  Gradually we learn the backstory of this family.  July is basically her older sister’s devoted acolyte, playing games in which September requires that July perform acts of vandalism, among other naughty deeds, and September’s demands are the direct cause of July’s self-inflicted wounds.  September may be a cruel tyrant, but she also serves as July’s protector when July becomes a target for bullies and pranksters at school.  Where is their mother in all this?  Sheela basically checks out and leaves the girls to their own devices.  Ironically, despite her lapse in parenting, Sheela writes and illustrates children’s books in which her daughters are the main characters.  She seems aware of their unhealthy relationship but not to the degree that she is willing to do anything about it.  This book has an eerie, spooky feel to it, and the twist, which is extremely obvious, is a long time coming.  I spotted it a mile away, because the author dangles too many clues, and the creepy mood is one of them, along with July’s dreamlike narration in which the facts are a little fuzzy.  The author also foretells the conclusion in an earlier conversation between the two girls.  Even so, I felt that the ending could be interpreted in two ways, particularly given the events at a drunken beach party, but the foreshadowing caused me to lean in one particular direction.

GILDED MOUNTAIN by Kate Manning

Sylvie Pelletier is a 17-year-old in 1907, living in a Colorado mining community where the workers, including her father, desperately need to unionize.  The work is dangerous, and the pay is miniscule, when the Company actually deigns to pay the workers at all.  Sylvie catches a break when she lands a job in town with the local newspaper, owned by K.T. Redmond, who has no qualms about telling the truth.  Because she speaks French, Sylvie then lands a summer job at the home of the mine’s owner, Duke Padgett, and gets a first-hand glimpse of how the other half lives.  K.T.’s advice?  Take notes.  Even as she develops a crush on Jasper, the Padgett heir, Sylvie becomes a valuable information source for K.T.  The content of this novel is largely serious, focusing on the deplorable conditions at the mine, but sometimes the author provides some much-appreciated comic relief, particularly in the witty banter between Sylvie and union organizer, George Lonahan.  On page 367, George makes this cheeky comment about the mining company president, whose name the miners jokingly mispronounce among themselves as “Bowels:”

“’Today Bowles made the union an offer of air and threw in daylight as a bonus.’”

Sylvie enjoys some wordplay of her own, inventing the word “underdonkey” and adding her own unspoken comment in a conversation with George on page 359:

“’Hackles!’  He slapped his thigh. ‘You’re a stitch, Sylvie Pelletier.’

I was a stitch.  A dropped stitch, which results in a great unraveling.”

Speaking of stitches, Sylvie can’t help laughing at George’s jokes, and neither could I.  At times this novel feels like a Cinderella story, and I could have done without the hints of future tragedies on the horizon.  Sometimes I think authors, including this one, convey a sense of foreboding as a way to soften the blow when the hammer eventually falls.  I would prefer to be surprised, especially by bad news.  Sylvie herself, however, is what makes this novel special.  She occasionally falters in the common sense department, especially when it comes to matters of the heart, but her commitment to justice, particularly for the underdonkey, never wavers.  Thank you to Book Club Favorites at Simon & Schuster for the free copy for review.

OH WILLIAM! by Elizabeth Strout

Lucy Barton narrates this engaging novel in a conversational tone as she negotiates her grief over the death of her beloved husband, David, while at the same time dealing with her ex-husband, William, who is in an emotional crisis.  William is blindsided when his wife leaves him abruptly, shortly after giving him a DNA kit that reveals information about his mother’s history, which stuns him even more.  He coaxes Lucy into accompanying him on a trip to Maine to investigate his roots, and she obliges, despite the fact that the trip’s purpose is somewhat nebulous. She becomes his sounding board for his various grievances and his intermediary for an awkward meeting with a long-lost relative whose existence proves that William’s mother, Catherine, was no saint. Lucy and William both adored Catherine, but as her past unfolds during the trip, I was puzzled as to why.  I devoured this novel and love Strout’s writing, but William and his mother do not come off as lovable at all.  I can only surmise that Lucy’s own escape from unfathomable poverty caused her to be overly deferential to William and especially to his mother, who regularly introduced Lucy to friends as someone who had “come from nothing.”  This condescension did not really bother Lucy, although I found it abhorrent, until she uncovers the secret of Catherine’s own upbringing.   As for William, he accuses Lucy of being self-absorbed, but he is far worse in that department and extremely needy, without being the least bit sympathetic to Lucy’s grief.  When one of Lucy and William’s grown daughters asks Lucy if she and William are getting back together, I could only think, “Please, no!”

WRITERS & LOVERS by Lily King

Casey is a 31-year-old aspiring writer with crushing student loan debts that she acquired after blowing off a golf scholarship.  Barely keeping the creditors at bay, she waits tables at a posh Boston restaurant, where she meets Oscar, a charming, established author who is a dozen or so years her senior.  Oscar, whose wife died of cancer, is now the single parent of two ridiculously delightful boys.  Casey is grieving as well, as the death of her mother a year ago under weird circumstances seems to have fueled Casey’s panic attacks.  Meanwhile, Casey is also stringing Silas along.  He is an aspiring writer himself and falls more in her age bracket and peer group.  While she has an embarrassment of riches in the romance department, her already precarious financial situation takes a nosedive; she loses her job, learns that the space she rents is about to be sold, and discovers a possible cancerous lump.  This confluence of bad news would drive anyone to panic attacks, and writing is the balm that soothes her.  Plus, she eventually has to choose between the two men in her life.  She and Oscar’s lively and witty banter, not to mention his adorable sons, made me root for him, but she lusts after Silas in a completely different way, and he seems almost as broken as she is.  Bottom line:  I loved everything about this novel—the characters, the writing, and the storyline, which starts to fizzle near the end but then bursts into flower.  I did not expect that this book could top Euphoria, but this book has more heart and a more endearing cast.

THE PLEASING HOUR by Lily King

Nineteen-year-old Rosie, an American, has been hired as an au pair by a French couple, Marc and Nicole.  We learn early in the novel that she has given her infant daughter to her sister, but the details do not surface until much later.  We also know that her tenure with Marc and Nicole is relatively short-lived, as the timeline bounces between Rosie’s time with them and her later role as caretaker of Lucie, an elderly woman who knew Nicole as a child.  The two mysteries—that of Rosie’s baby and that of her departure from Marc and Nicole’s household—unfold in a dreamy manner, as we learn not just of Rosie’s background but of Nicole’s as well.  Both women’s histories are a little sketchy, however, and their complex personalities are most vivid during the pages in which they live together but never wholly warm up to one another.  Marc is also a very central character, although we learn almost nothing about his past.  That omission is obviously intentional, as we are left to draw our own conclusions about his real character.  Is he a man of integrity and substance, or is he not what he seems?  Rosie’s mistakes in life are plain to see, as both of the novel’s mysteries revolve around unfortunate decisions on her part.  Marc, however, is an enigma, as is the title.

PEOPLE PERSON by Candice Carty-Williams

If there’s one thing I like less in a book than bad writing, it’s a silly plot.  This book reminds me of Fredrik Backman’s Anxious People, and maybe it’s no coincidence that both have the word “people” in the title.  Here we have five half-siblings (same father, four different mothers) trying to dispose of a body that wasn’t really dead.  After this wacky incident, the story improves somewhat but not enough.  Dimple (a ridiculous name in a ridiculous plot) is the half-sibling whose ex-boyfriend Kyron slips and cracks his head open after he tries to strangle Dimple.  She scratches his face in an effort to slip out of his grasp and fears that those scratches will mark her as a murderer.  She then enlists the assistance of her four half-siblings, whom she has met only once, and they all reach the unlikely agreement that they should wrap Kyron in a tarp and bury him at a construction site.  After Kyron comes back to life, he attempts to blackmail Dimple, not knowing that she had four accomplices.  I get that this is supposed to be a feel-good story about family members coming together, but I would have liked a less ludicrous crisis as a catalyst to their bonding.  Plus, Dimple’s role as a social media influencer just makes her that much more of a caricature rather than a robust character.  Thank you to Book Club Favorites at Simon & Schuster for the free copy for review.

A SLOW FIRE BURNING by Paula Hawkins

Someone has slashed Daniel Sutherland’s throat.  Miriam, who lives in the houseboat next to his, discovers the body.  As it turns out, Daniel was not a nice guy, and several people may have wished him dead.  The police suspect Laura, as she was seen, covered in blood, leaving Daniel’s place the morning of his murder.  However, Daniel’s family members raise our suspicions as well.  His Aunt Carla and her ex-husband, Theo, lost their 3-year-old son fifteen years ago while Carla’s alcoholic sister, Angela, was babysitting.  The toddler fell to his death from Angela’s balcony while Daniel was still a child, and forgiveness has been hard to come by.  Angela preceded Daniel in death by just a few weeks, presumably as a result of a fall, so that we can eliminate her as a suspect.  Miriam’s best friend Lorraine was brutally murdered when the two girls were abducted as teenagers, and Laura has issues with anger management, due to a brain injury she suffered as a child.  In the middle of all these deaths and traumatic injuries is Irene, who befriends Laura, and Laura can definitely use a friend.  I liked this novel so much better than The Girl on the Train.  The plot is easy to follow, and most of the characters who are not dead have some redeeming qualities.  All of the women, except poor Angela, are pretty feisty.  Laura’s occasional violent outbursts mostly seem warranted as self-defense, while Miriam lives with survivor’s guilt, wondering if she should have made an effort to save Lorraine.  Irene almost goes too far in trying to solve the various mysteries at hand on her own.  Confrontation with possible murderers is never a good idea, but Irene uses her reputation as a silly old woman to good effect.

A TOWN CALLED SOLACE by Mary Lawson

Three main characters inhabit this novel—Clara, Liam, and Elizabeth, each of whom headlines the chapters.  Clara is eight years old, and her 16-year-old sister Rose has disappeared after one of many arguments with her mother.  Clara spends her time in a vigil by the window, awaiting Rose’s return, and taking care of her nextdoor neighbor’s cat, Moses.  That neighbor, Elizabeth, is now deceased, and Liam Kane, her heir, has moved into Elizabeth’s house.  His presence is puzzling to Clara, since her parents have chosen not to burden her with the news of Elizabeth’s death.  This novel makes a good case for not sheltering children from this kind of news, because not only does their secrecy erode Clara’s trust in her parents, but she initially mistakes Liam for a burglar.  Liam is not, in fact, Elizabeth’s son, but Elizabeth became very attached to him after her five miscarriages when he desperately needed parental love.  He was a neighbor’s son whose mother focused all of her energy on two sets of twin girls and found Liam to be an annoying and difficult burden.  Elizabeth was more than happy to take up the slack and look after Liam as frequently as his mother would allow.  A catastrophic mistake on Elizabeth’s part ended her relationship with Liam and his family, but she resumes contact with him after he is an adult.  He is now going through a divorce, has quit his accounting job, and has moved into Elizabeth’s house.  This novel bears some resemblance to Anne Tyler’s books in that it takes place in a small town with no real villains.  However, I found this book to be much more engaging, particularly with the intrigue and anguish surrounding the missing Rose.  My favorite character, however, is not one of the main three but rather Moses, the elusive cat.  I particularly love this sentence in the book, from page 188:

“She [Clara] fed Moses and then sat on the floor and watched him turn himself into triangles and squares and circles inside boxes until Mr. Kane stuck the key in the lock, whereupon Moses turned himself into a cat again and skedaddled.”

A CHILDREN'S BIBLE by Lydia Millet

A group of families are vacationing together in a very large waterfront house.  The kids, completely unsupervised except by one another, are the main characters, with the heavy-drinking parents in the background.  In fact, the parents are basically a collective entity, and the kids are playing a guessing game as to who belongs to whom; no one really wants to claim their own parents.  This book initially called Lord of the Flies to mind, but the kids are a little older, much more compatible, and basically seem better off without the adults’ interference.  When a huge storm befalls them, flooding the property and knocking out power, the kids have the good sense to head for a farm, where they have an ample supply of just about everything.  Then a pregnant mother shows up, followed by a band of violent outlaws, and things start to deteriorate rapidly.  Up until this point, the novel has been pretty lighthearted, but the arrival of the villains isn’t the only bad news.  The survival of the planet is at stake here.  The teenaged narrator, Evie, finds that her 9-year-old brother, Jack, has acquired a child’s version of the Bible and has captured an assortment of wild animals, like Noah but without the pairings, in an effort to save them from destruction.  This book may be an allegory of sorts, but Jack is astute enough to see the Bible as one as well.  He equates God with nature and Jesus with science, and his reasoning for doing so is very clever.  There are lots of other Bible story parallels, but the backbone of the novel is not an allegory.  The kids blame their parents’ generation for not being good custodians of our planet and rightfully so.  This novel can be seen as a call to action.  Ignoring the problem will not make it go away.

WHAT ARE YOU GOING THROUGH by Sigrid Nunez

Like her novel The Friend, this Sigrid Nunez novel addresses the death of, yes, a friend.  This time the death is planned but has not happened yet.  The narrator agrees to stay with her terminally-ill friend in the final days before the friend takes a euthanasia pill.  This book takes not only a very thoughtful look at the death of a person, but one character, who turns out to be the narrator’s “ex,” crusades to warn that the death of our planet is not only imminent but unavoidable—so much so that he laments the upcoming birth of his third grandchild.  Despite this maudlin subject matter, the narrator regales us with such funny reflections and remembrances that we forget to be sad.  There are so many great stories scattered throughout this novel, including one ostensibly about the cat on the cover and one about an elderly woman who tries to reform the scammers who constantly call her.  Although the narrator’s ex paints a gloom-and-doom portrait of humanity as being too stupid to save their own planet, the narrator reminds us that empathy and compassion still exist and that being there for someone can be fulfilling yet all-consuming.  Ultimately, the narrator’s anxiety moves away from the loss of her friend and on to the aftermath, in which she is expected to lie about her complicity in her friend’s euthanasia plan.  At one point the narrator notes that even a sad movie can be uplifting if the story is told in a beautiful way.  That same observation applies to this novel. 

LEAVE THE WORLD BEHIND by Rumaan Alam

This novel begins with a seemingly innocuous family vacation in a remote Airbnb but soon becomes one terrifying incident after another.  Clay and Amanda are parents to two teenagers, Rose and Archie, and I don’t want to give too much away about their nightmare of a vacation.  Suffice it to say that each scary moment turns into a frantic frenzy on the part of Clay and Amanda, often with the two of them having to come to an uncomfortable consensus about what to do.  Safety is tantamount to all their decision-making, but also pinning down the best course of action to avoid jeopardizing their family is a constant conundrum.  Compassion has a small role here, too, but self-preservation trumps it, as a lack of information fuels anxiety and outright fear.  Sanity starts to wear thin as it becomes increasingly obvious that the world is not OK, thanks to some unusual wildlife appearances.  This book keeps you guessing and ends way too soon.

THAT KIND OF MOTHER by Rumaan Alam

This is not at all the book I expected from an Indian-American man.  Nor would I have expected to enjoy a book that celebrates motherhood, integrity, and doing the right thing.  That is not to say that the main character, Rebecca, is not flawed, because, while she may be a good mother, she is not a particularly good sister/wife/friend.  She is, to say the least, completely absorbed in the poetry she strives to write and the duties that befall her when her beloved Black nanny dies in childbirth.  No shrinking violet, Rebecca can be so wrong about some things when she steadfastly believes that she is right.  One might also say that she is impulsive when she decides to take in an infant Black boy—her nanny’s orphaned child--to raise alongside her white toddler son without consulting her husband.  Then she is particularly naïve about how to raise a Black child and bristles at the stern advice she receives from the Black couple—the boy’s older sister and her husband--who declined to raise him themselves.  The only big mystery is who fathered the nanny’s child, but that question is resolved without fanfare, although, honestly, I was hoping for something scandalous.  What this novel lacks in suspense it makes up for in beautiful writing and one superbly drawn character.  The other characters—husband, nanny, nanny’s grown daughter—are depicted adequately enough that we get a sense of who they are, but, more importantly, who they are to Rebecca and vice versa.

THE LINCOLN HIGHWAY by Amor Towles

Now that 18-year-old Emmett is out of jail, he and his 8-year-old brother, Billy, plan to travel west to start a new life.  However, their plans are quickly defenestrated by Duchess and Woolly, who have escaped from jail as stowaways in the trunk of the warden’s car.  Duchess, who earned that nickname as a child, means well, sort of, but he creates way more problems than he solves, mostly at Emmett’s expense.  In fact, each time Emmett veers off to perform an errand or solve a sticky situation, we know that yet another calamity is on the horizon.  I kept thinking that he would eventually not allow Duchess to hoodwink him, but Emmett’s missteps continue, leaving Billy in the lurch, even when the trap seems obvious.  Billy may seem to be a vulnerable liability at times, but he remembers every piece of advice verbatim, applying these tidbits often with effective, and sometimes humorous, results.  And Duchess is not the only problem.  Billy occasionally finds himself having to rely on the kindness of strangers, but he finds it hard to distinguish which strangers are really kind, and which have darker motives.  Pastor John, who justifies his misdeeds as God’s will, is a threat.  Ulysses, on the other hand, is the foil to Pastor John and has been wandering for years, just like the mythical Greek Ulysses, whose story Billy shares with him.  Ulysses is then inspired to embark on a quest of his own, accompanied by another of Billy’s heroes.  In some ways this is a buddy novel in which Duchess is the instigator of mischief and Emmett is the easy mark, repeatedly caught unawares.  I noticed that the chapters are numbered backwards from 10, like a countdown.  A blast-off to what?  A new journey?

DEACON KING KONG by James McBride

I love the nicknames in this book, especially the men’s, and they make it easy to keep up with who’s who.  (Most of the women are Sister Somebody, and I could not keep them straight at all.)  Sportcoat. living in the projects in Brooklyn and still talking to the ghost of his wife who died a year ago, is a good-hearted drunk.  He makes a living doing odd jobs and has a marvelous green thumb.   However, when he shoots off the ear of the 19-year-old Deems, drug dealer and former star pitcher for the neighborhood baseball team, Sportcoat finds himself in the crosshairs of both the police and the drug kingpin.  Fortunately, he leads a somewhat charmed life, in denial about having shot Deems and about needing to lie low, and one particular pursuer keeps running into mayhem.  The author presents lots of opportunities for romance and redemption in this novel and does not disappoint, although several loose ends are never tied up.  One of the prevailing themes here is a sense of honor that governs even the lives of people like the Elephant, who deals in stolen goods.  Romance springs up in unlikely places, and, in the redemption department, Sportcoat believes that Deems’s salvation lies in his return to baseball.  Of course, Sportcoat has his own problems, not the least of which is his drinking problem.  The characters, plot, and writing style of this novel are all terrific, but occasionally the pace slows to a crawl.

SONG YET SUNG by James McBride

This book is so not your typical slavery novel; it’s much more nuanced, leaving the brutal beatings and separation of families to other writers.  In fact, it’s mostly an adventure story, where the villains are not the punishing landowners but are instead the folks who tracked down escapees and stole slaves so that they could sell them elsewhere.  The most despicable of these slave traders is Patty Cannon, who makes the mistake of imprisoning Liz Spocott, who has mystical powers and becomes known as the Dreamer.  She escapes from Patty’s imprisonment and frees a dozen or so other slaves in the process.  The action all takes place in Eastern Maryland, where oyster beds provide a living for most of the denizens, but Kathleen Sullivan has a farm and three slaves—a man named Amber, his sister, and her 17-year-old son.  All sorts of shenanigans ensue, including the kidnapping of a white child and encounters with the Woolman, a Black man who viewers describe as a ghost or the devil, because of his unkempt appearance and swiftness of movement.  The most ambivalent character is Denwood Long, who has come out of retirement to trace down the Dreamer.  He wants the money that her master will pay, but Denwood also recognizes the injustice of slavery, so that sometimes his humanity interferes with his job.  The only time that this book drags is when the author gets bogged down (pun intended) in a description of the swampy landscape.  Otherwise, the novel moves along at a good clip, with excellent character development, particularly of Amber, who is torn between helping his nephew escape to Pennsylvania, less than 90 miles away and staying on the farm to help Kathleen stay solvent.  Having no wife and children of his own, Amber has become attached to Kathleen’s eight-year-old son, whose father disappeared in a squall.  I particularly liked Kathleen, a strong, no-nonsense woman, who is also conflicted.  She could sell Amber in order to pay off her debts, but in addition to losing his help on the farm, she will not be able to guarantee that his subsequent owner will be as fair-minded as she is.

THE LAST THING HE TOLD ME by Laura Dave

The best thing I can say about this book is that it was a fast read, because it certainly did not live up to the hype surrounding it.  Given its popularity, my expectations were high, but any thriller by Dennis Lehane or Erica Ferencik is a better read.  The author does a good job of building suspense but then drops the ball and moves on to another teaser.  Hannah is a woman in her forties, married for just over a year to Owen, whose 16-year-old daughter, Bailey, lives with them.  Almost immediately, we find that Owen has disappeared in the midst of financial fraud at his company, and a cryptic note from him asks Hannah to protect Bailey.  Enter a U.S. marshal and a couple of FBI agents, but Hannah soon discovers that her husband’s company’s criminal activities are the least of her worries.  She and Bailey jet off to Austin, TX, to jog Bailey’s memory regarding events from her early childhood.  The result is a pot that should not have been stirred, although Bailey’s thawing frostiness toward her stepmother provides a tiny grain of redemption for a character that is otherwise unpleasant, to say the least.  Nothing about the plot is remotely believable, including the ending, but this is fiction, of course.  Would a professor really frame an exam from the “worst student ever” and then not remember his name?  Just as we think we are getting somewhere in solving the mystery of Owen’s life, we reach a roadblock.  Then a previous roadblock is removed, and Hannah’s amateur sleuthing takes another step forward.  What she discovers is not a particularly complicated story, and the resolution is awkward.

THE END OF LONELINESS by Benedict Wells

Jules Moreau, the melancholy narrator of this German novel, is a happy, boisterous 11-year-old until his parents perish in a car accident.  He and his older siblings, Liz and Marty, are shipped off to a public boarding school where they rarely see one another.  The three were already quite different personalities, but their trajectories diverge even further after the tragedy.  Jules becomes fast friends with Alva, who attends the same school but does not board there.  As teenagers, their relationship ends abruptly, but Jules still carries a torch for her and wonders what might have been.  He feels that he has lost his way in life until he resumes contact with Alva and discovers that she has married one of their favorite authors.  As the first-person narrator, Jules is very introspective, and this novel is as much about what he feels and thinks as it is about what happens.  For example, a bullying incident at school becomes a somewhat pivotal event, largely because of how his brother fails to react.  Marty’s friend Toni, however, comes to Jules’s rescue and is perhaps the second loneliest character in the book.  Toni pines for Liz, who strings him along between boyfriends.  Memories also play a large role in this novel, not only because the three Moreaus lost their parents at a young age, but also because Jules feels that Alva was the one true friend his father had advised him to seek.  What struck me most about this novel was how the author reminds us that making memories is not something that we plan.  The best ones are of events that occur unexpectedly.

YOU MADE A FOOL OF DEATH WITH YOUR BEAUTY by Akwaeke Emezi

Feyi is still reeling from the death of her husband five years ago in a car accident.  She has since found it difficult to open herself up to another serious relationship, but she does hook up with a guy at a party.  Limiting her ongoing involvement with him to sex only, she then meets one of his friends, Nasir, who might have more long-term potential.  She insists they take things slowly, but then he offers her a chance to visit his father’s estate on a Caribbean island that also includes a chance to show her paintings at a significant art show.  All of this seems like a dream come true, but when she meets Nasir’s celebrity chef father, Alim, she is instantly smitten.  This book is such a departure from Freshwater and The Death of Vivek Oji.  It’s a moving and powerful love story, and I just devoured every word with relish.  The author keeps us on edge with barely restrained passion that is bursting at the seams.  Even though neither party is married, this romance is complicated by a sticky family situation.  On the one hand, this book feels like a guilty pleasure, although I don’t know why I should feel guilty about reading something so delicious, and I’m not just talking about all the scrumptious food that Alim dishes up. And just because the male lead is filthy rich doesn’t mean that the story can’t be about other types of struggles.  Grief is the hardship that plagues both Feyi and Alim, and I think that’s enough.  Grief also binds them together, but every good book needs some sort of conflict, and in this case it is the forbidden nature of their relationship.  Thanks to Simon and Schuster for the advance reading copy.