MOONLIGHT AND THE PEARLER'S DAUGHTER by Lizzie Pook

It’s the late 1800s, and Eliza Brightwell’s father has gone missing off the coast of Australia after a routine two-month pearl-diving expedition.  Her brother Thomas was on the boat at the same time as their father but is obviously not being totally forthcoming about what happened.  Eliza, with the help of her father’s diaries and a young man named Axel, embarks on her own search for the truth.  I found the plot to be compelling, as Eliza tracks down clues and finds herself in some unsavory venues.  She is the consummate female protagonist for an adventure novel—smart, headstrong, and tenacious.  Unfortunately, however, the characters are all drawn rather thinly and struck me as singularly one-dimensional.  Perhaps because of Eliza’s age (twenty) or perhaps because the prose is unexceptional, the book seemed perhaps to have been intended for a young adult audience.  There is also a side plot concerning an indigenous man who has been arrested for Eliza’s father’s murder, even though there may not actually have been a death, much less a murder.  When the accused murderer escapes into the wilderness, Parker, the local constable, takes off after him and proves himself to be almost as despicable as Eliza’s brother.  Again, these characters need a little more nuance; the bad guys are too easily distinguishable from the good guys.  Thanks to Simon and Schuster for the advance reading copy.

THE GLASS HOTEL by Emily St. John Mandel

The lives of the main characters in this book swirl around a remote hotel near Vancouver.  This hotel is the hub in which their lives briefly intersect, and then they scatter--mostly.  Vincent, a confusing name for a woman, and Paul are half-siblings, and Paul has landed at the hotel as an escape from a death for which he was an unwitting catalyst.  Vincent, the bartender, catches the eye of wealthy Jonathan and becomes his arm-candy but never officially his wife.  This oversight may be a good thing, as Vincent is running a huge Ponzi scheme, à la Bernie Madoff.  Leon becomes one of Jonathan’s unfortunate investors and eventually investigates Vincent’s disappearance, which the opening of the book mentions somewhat nebulously.  I enjoyed this book immensely, although corruption and lack of conscience are the main themes, and I would have liked some of the characters to have shown at least a hint of a moral compass.  Also, the chapters surrounding the crumbling of Jonathan’s pyramid are written in first-person plural, presumably by one or more members of his spineless and greedy staff, and struck me as either a knockoff or an homage to Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came to the End about a corporate layoff.  Despite this quirk, their various reactions to the authorities’ discovery of their fraud are priceless.  They all knew they were committing a crime and fleecing their clients but basically did nothing to prepare for the inevitable collapse.  I couldn’t decide if they were in complete denial or were just deer in the headlights.  Simone, the receptionist, is completely in the dark until she has to buy four shredders.  Jonathan’s daughter tells Simone that she will escape the scandal with a good cocktail party story, and I love how that prediction comes to fruition.

THE NIGHT WATCHMAN by Louise Erdrich

Inspired by her grandfather’s fight to save his Chippewa tribe from forced assimilation, Louise Erdrich brings us another of her signature novels about hope and humanity.  This time she pairs those themes with Thomas’s diligence in carrying the standard for his people’s rights all the way to Washington.  He is the title character, struggling to stay awake at this job while planning a political battle.  However, his efforts are somewhat of a backdrop to the completely fictional story of his 20-year-old niece, Patrice, who excels at her factory job but aspires to more.  For the time being, she is providing financial support to her family and anxiously awaiting the return of her sister Vera from Minneapolis, who has vanished.  Following up on a tip as to Vera’s whereabouts, she travels to the Twin Cities and lands a strange temporary job whose dangers soon become apparent.  Patrice is no fool, however, and has the good sense to skedaddle back to the reservation with Vera’s infant child in tow, along with Patrice’s childhood friend and current suitor, Wood Mountain.  His story is not nearly as dark, as he and his opponent both feign injuries prior to their boxing bout to raise money for the Washington trip.  Patrice and Thomas are the main draw, however--both strong and admirable characters without malice, as are most of the other members of their tribe.  There are a few bad eggs, though, including Patrice’s alcoholic father and a group of boys who once abducted Patrice.  To escape, she had to swim for her life and hitch a ride to shore in her uncle’s boat.  Leave it to Erdrich to find the humor in this situation and in the unusual consequence that mysteriously befalls one of the abductors.

LOVE MEDICINE by Louise Erdrich

Again, we have a book in need of a family tree diagram.  This novel covers multiple generations of multiple families on a Chippewa reservation in North Dakota but is focused on the Lamartines, the Kashpaws, and the Nanapushes.  I could not keep the relationships straight at all.  Lulu has a bunch of kids by several different fathers; June marries her first cousin but frequently strays; and Marie, raises several children whose parents could not or would not raise their own children, in addition to her own children.  Marie had intended to join a convent, but a witch of a nun changed her mind about that vocation.  The men are mostly not good people—philanderers, criminals, alcoholics, etc.  Nector Kashpaw, the novel’s main patriarch, had intended to marry Lulu and then falls for Marie but perennially carries a torch for Lulu while married to Marie.  The relationship that develops between these two women after Nector’s death is my favorite storyline in this book, even though it is never really a focal point.  Most of the individual stories in this book can stand alone without the reader having to get too bogged down in family trees, but the stories intertwine and wrap around each other so intricately that some sense of how the characters all fit together is necessary.  Start diagramming as soon as you start reading and expect your tree to get messy.

A PLACE FOR US by Fatima Farheen Mirza

The wildly scattered timeline in this novel finally settles down in the second half, resuming the opening scene of Hadia’s wedding.  Her long-lost brother, Amar, is in attendance, as is his former girlfriend, Amira.  Their relationship is at the core of this novel, along with Amar’s relationship with his parents and sisters.  He has always struggled to keep up with his sisters academically and behaviorally, setting low expectations for himself that are substantiated by the other members of his family.  Their benevolent condescension ends abruptly when his substance abuse problems become obvious.  Unfortunately, however, Amar’s downhill slide is inadvertently brought on by his mother, when she takes action against the one aspect of Amar’s life that might save him.  Throughout the novel, good intentions have disastrous results.  Muslim culture is also at play here, dictating how interaction between boys and girls is discouraged.  The last half of the book, largely narrated by Amar’s father, is very moving, but unfortunately the first half failed to convince me of Amar’s kindness and charm.  He comes across as a self-loathing boy and young man who does not have the tools or support to dig out of a deep, dark hole.

TRANSCENDENT KINGDOM by Yaa Gyasi

Gifty, the first-person narrator, was born in the U.S. after her parents and older brother, Nana, moved to Huntsville, Alabama.  Gifty’s mother battles depression, and her brother becomes addicted to opioids after an ankle injury.  His promising future as a basketball star never materializes, as his recidivism drives Gifty to wish for his death, which finally comes after his umpteenth relapse.  The introverted Gifty studies neuroscience at Harvard and then does post-doc work at Stanford.  For me, her research on reward-restraint behavior in mice is fascinating, especially given that her mission is to find a cure for drug addiction, years after her brother has died of an overdose.  Some mice become addicted to Ensure, even after she applies an electric shock randomly when they press the lever to release the Ensure. Ensure would seem to be a relatively harmless addiction, but this book underscores how over-consumption of almost anything is unhealthy if the consequences are sufficiently dangerous.  A happy story this is not; it is an addiction story wrapped in an immigration story, with lots of other themes, including guilt, blame, hypocrisy, and loss of faith.  The author has a fluid writing style that helps ease the pain, and we read on with the hope that Gifty, who has already overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles, will be able to soar in her personal—and scientific—endeavors.