DINNER AT THE HOMESICK RESTAURANT by Anne Tyler

Pearl Tull’s husband, Beck, abruptly leaves her with three children to raise on her own.  Cody, the oldest, is as mean as a snake, playing tricks on his kinder and gentler younger brother, Ezra, to get him into trouble or just for the fun of it.  Cody is obviously jealous of Ezra’s even-tempered likeability and is sort of a male version of the title character in Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride.  Jenny becomes a doctor but seems destined to repeat her mother’s habit of striking and verbally abusing her children.  There are some LOL nuggets in this book, including a hilarious letter proposing marriage to Jenny.  Her terse reply is also funny, but this book goes from funny to dark in a heartbeat.  Plus, Pearl’s mistreatment of her children and Cody’s mistreatment of Ezra just overshadowed everything else for me.  Ezra is a saintly sort of character, but I found it hard to respect him; he needs to grow a backbone.  I really liked the ending, but the rest of the book is definitely a downer.  One character, Ruth, whose story I don’t want to give away here, is particularly unfortunate, and another, Josiah, deserves better in life, although he is not nearly as pitiable as Ruth.

THE LIONS OF FIFTH AVENUE by Fiona Davis

Something about this novel makes me think of a Nancy Drew mystery, although Nancy Drew is a more competent sleuth than the two women who headline this novel.  In 1913, Laura’s husband, Jack, is the superintendent of the main library on Fifth Avenue in New York, and their family lives in an apartment within the library building.  All is well until two things happen:  some rare books go missing from the library, and Laura gets a scholarship to journalism school.  Laura goes on to become a famous essayist on women’s rights, but her family suffers from her negligence.  What?  Laura’s feminist activities lose their impact when one considers what she forfeited, and I object to the author blaming Laura’s pursuit of a career for what happens.  Some eighty years later, Laura’s granddaughter, Sadie, is in charge of a collection of rare items, when, again, rare items start to disappear.  Sadie becomes an amateur detective, alongside a legitimate detective hired by the library, but manages mostly to implicate herself, due to several bonehead moves that are obviously going to come back to bite her.  Sadie decides to investigate the thefts from eighty years ago as well, thinking they may be connected somehow.  Huh?  Despite the implausibility of both of these crimes, I did find myself anxious to know whodunit and how, but the identities of the perpetrators are so ridiculous that I could only sigh with relief when I finished this novel.

GIRL IN ICE by Erica Ferencik

Val’s twin brother Andy has just died of an apparent suicide doing research on a remote island above the Arctic Circle.  Now Wyatt, Andy’s friend and colleague, has invited Val to bring her linguistic skills to that same island.  Apparently, Wyatt has thawed a young native girl from a crevasse near their research station, but she is speaking an undecipherable language.  Val, whose mental health is already teetering on the edge, decides to accept Wyatt’s offer, but her main objective is to find out what really happened to Andy.  I would classify this novel as an adventure/thriller, in the same vein as The River at Night, but I thought this book was a major improvement, primarily because Val, despite her vulnerabilities, is admirable, likable, and believable, even if the plot seems a bit farfetched.  Although not a mother herself, Val becomes a mother figure to the unfrozen girl, whose name turns out to be Sigrid.  Val is caring and protective of Sigrid, especially since Wyatt may or may not be trustworthy.  I found this book to be well-written and extremely suspenseful, although its first person narrative indicates that Val will survive.  For me, that helpful hint is not a bad thing.  I questioned more what was going to happen to Sigrid, as Wyatt’s motives become increasingly more suspicious and Val’s ability to shield Sigrid from Wyatt’s experiments appears to be insufficient.  Even here in Florida I feel shivery after reading this book—partly from the action and partly from the constant reference to the frigid weather.  Isolation is scary enough, when the few people around Val are nefarious characters, but the subzero temperatures add an additional fright factor.  Thanks to Simon and Schuster for the advance reading copy.

THE RIVER AT NIGHT by Erica Ferencik

Four women embark on their annual adventure/vacation—whitewater rafting in Maine.  Pia has cooked up this idea and then convinced the other three to go along, as she always does.  Wini, the narrator, is the most skeptical, particularly since their guide is a 20-year-old who, along with his father, is just getting started in the business.  This whole scenario, of course, is a recipe for disaster, but we don’t know if the women’s antagonists will be the forces of Mother Nature or Deliverance-style humans living off the grid.  This novel has strong similarities to Peter Heller’s The River, but in this case the characters are smart women who make some exceedingly unwise decisions.  Disagreements among the women as to the best course of action after each catastrophe (yes, there is more than one) always seem to be resolved by choosing the least reasonable alternative and with Pia continuing to take the lead, despite the fact that she got them into this mess in the first place.  In other words, the plot is gripping, though somewhat frustrating, and the pace is faster than a speeding bullet, with vivid accounts of the women, particularly Wini, fighting for survival, often underwater.  The author doesn’t pull any punches here and delivers a few right to the reader’s gut.  There are times when this novel is not entirely believable, such as when Wini’s knowledge of sign language becomes a life saver, but overall it is very visceral and convincing.

THE CANDY HOUSE by Jennifer Egan

Once again Jennifer Egan takes us on a wild ride through the lives of multiple connected characters.  We start with Bix, the head of a facebook-like company that takes sharing memories to a whole new level.  In this futuristic take on social media, people can upload their consciousness from their brains to the internet.  Like the candy house in Hansel and Gretel, this technology is not as tasty as it appears to be.  Another company allows users, known as eluders, to transfer their online identity to a proxy.  This cyber stuff is really secondary, though, to the lives of the characters, intertwined with family, friendships, and work relationships.  This novel consists of separate narratives that resemble short stories, similar to the format of Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge and Olive, Again.  The downside to this approach is that there is no cohesive plot that I could identify, and some narratives seem unfinished.  For instance, in one chapter, Chris Salazar finds himself stuck with a stranger’s suitcase, but unless I missed something, we never find out if the suitcase is reclaimed or what is in the suitcase.  One whole chapter consists entirely of pieces of correspondence (emails, tweets?), some of which are hilarious.  Another chapter contains a lengthy and, at times, snooze-worthy, list of behavioral rules for spies and at the same time recounts the experiences of a “citizen agent.”  I don’t remember A Visit From the Good Squad at all, but many of the characters from that book reappear here with different stories to tell.  Authenticity seems to be a primary theme, and one character screams periodically in public just to elicit an authentic reaction, which is rarely positive.  All in all, this novel is quite clever and creative but not exactly riveting.  Thank you to Book Club Favorites at Simon & Schuster for the free copy for review.

A WOMAN IS NO MAN by Etaf Rum

This troubling novel revolves around Isra, a Palestinian woman who comes to live in Brooklyn as the wife of a Palestinian man whom she barely knows, and her daughter Deya.  A third woman, Isra’s mother-in-law, Fareeda, is a powerful factor in both women’s lives.  The gist of the story is that Arab-American women live in almost complete subjugation to their husbands.  They do not go out alone, they do not speak English, they are discouraged from pursuing education, and they have no job skills that would help liberate them from unspeakable oppression.  When Isra’s husband starts to beat her into submission, although actually she is already pretty submissive, for the crime of having produced four daughters but no sons, her story becomes almost unbearable.  Even more depressing is the fact that other women, including her mother-in-law, turn a blind eye to the abuse, and Isra’s mother is complicit in perpetuating the plight of her own daughter by having forced her into an early and ultimately dangerous marriage.  The gloomy prospects for these women makes for a predictable, frustrating, and repetitive read.  Also, this novel contains a few grammatical errors that a decent editor should have caught.  I can understand such errors in the dialog, although most of the dialog in this case is in Arabic, in theory, and translated for our benefit, but they are especially annoying in the prose narrative.  All that aside, life for these women is not that different from those living under Taliban rule in Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns.  I am disheartened to know that many Palestinian-American women, despite living in the U.S., will not escape their repressive and abusive culture.