NO ONE IS TALKING ABOUT THIS by Patricia Lockwood

This book might be perfect for readers with a short attention span, but the format turned me off.  The first half of the book is a series of social media witticisms, and, if that’s what I wanted to read, then I would read witticisms on social media.  Granted, the author’s witticisms are way funnier and thought-provoking than those I might find on the internet, but this book was just not cohesive enough for me.  The first-person unnamed narrator is a woman who posts pointed ruminations on “the portal” and travels the world for speaking engagements.  The subject of these speeches was a mystery to me, but I assumed that she was sharing with her audience more comic observations about social media and that people were willing to pay to hear this stuff.  The second half of the book deals with a real-life tragedy that starkly contrasts with the first half’s twitter posts, if that’s what they are.  I foolishly hoped that the format of the novel would become more traditional in the second half, but no such luck, and I felt like the format diluted the content.  I recognize that the author has an important message to deliver about what really matters versus the barrage of trivialities that we consume on the internet.  I just wish that she had stated her case without making me read it as a series of twitter-like snippets.

WHEN WE CEASE TO UNDERSTAND THE WORLD by Benjamin Labatut

This book makes me wish I had studied Physics.  If you’re a science nerd, don’t miss this blend of fact and fiction, but even if you’re not a science nerd, this book is spellbinding.  The only downside is that I will never remember which scientist made which discovery, particularly in the area of quantum mechanics, in which subatomic entities behave both as particles and as waves.  Einstein, Oppenheimer, and Niels Bohr are bit players here, while Schrodinger (of Schrodinger’s cat fame), Heisenberg, de Broglie, Schwarzschild, Mochizuki, and Grothendieck steal the limelight here.  Unfortunately, the only part of this book that I am likely to remember is the beginning when the author recounts the various drug addictions of Hitler, Goring, and other Nazi bigwigs.  He goes on to talk about cyanide and its original development as a pigment for paint.  Apple seeds contain cyanide (who knew?), and half a cup of them contains enough cyanide to kill a human.  This book is not exactly dripping with little-known facts like that, but fascinating stuff abounds.  One would assume that brilliant scientists would collaborate, but apparently they were just as likely to feud, each convinced that his (no women here) theory offered the truth about the behavior of matter.

BRIGHT YOUNG WOMEN by Jessica Knoll

The author here is on a mission to prove that Ted Bundy and other serial killers are not genius masterminds.  In this novel, the Ted Bundy character is known simply as The Defendant, and we learn fairly early in the novel that he murdered two sorority sisters near the end of a killing spree that stretched from Washington State to Florida.  The focus here is on the victims and the two first-person narrators—Pamela and Ruth.  To further complicate matters a bit, Pamela narrates in two different timelines—the immediate aftermath of the murders of two of her FSU sorority sisters and several decades later.  Ruth is a victim whose body is never found.  Pamela also witnesses the escape of the murderer as he exits her sorority house, making her one of the few people who can identify him.  The writing here is good, and the plot is very suspenseful but confusing at times, and not just because of the dual narrators and three timelines.  A journalist named Carl apparently sees himself as the next Truman Capote, but I was unable to follow exactly how he fit into the picture.  Although I realize that the author does not want to give The Defendant too much airtime, I couldn’t follow his various arrests, extraditions, and prison escapes, and my morbid curiosity led me to wonder exactly how he slipped through so many fingers.  Finally, there’s Ruth’s friend and mentor, Tina, who has made it her personal mission to make sure that The Defendant is brought to justice, but various law enforcement officials warn Pamela that Tina is dangerous.  I was never sure if the author’s intent here was to introduce a red herring or simply to highlight the poor judgment and incompetence that allowed so many women to lose their lives even after The Defendant had been taken into custody—multiple times.

THE MARRIAGE PORTRAIT by Maggie O'Farrell

Historical fiction is not really my thing, and since I know that Maggie O’Farrell has a very fertile imagination, I would prefer that she stay away from semi-true stories.  I liked this much better than Hamnet, however, as this novel is very creepy--in a good way.  In this version of her life in the sixteenth century, Lucrezia de’Medici is married off to Alfonso, Duke of Ferrara, when she is only fifteen.  The ultimate insult that she receives from the Duke and his sister is that she is a mere child, but, ironically, her foremost duty is to bear a child, preferably male.  What makes this spooky, though, is that Lucrezia suspects that her husband will murder her in short order if she does not produce an heir, although rumor has it that the Duke is infertile.  I liked the suspense of this novel and especially its sinister Gothic mood, although the ending appeared to be a foregone conclusion.  O’Farrell kept me guessing as to whether she was going to be true to history or deviate. The Duke is handsome, and, at times, charming, but he has a dark side, particularly when it comes to challenges to his authority. Lucrezia is your typical spunky heroine who unwittingly incurs the dastardly Duke’s wrath at times and deserves a better fate.

THE OTHER VALLEY by Scott Alexander Howard

I love time-travel novels with their tricky handling of interference with the past.  In this one, the author has conjured up a unique world--a series of identical valleys with a twenty-year time difference between each one.  The valley to the west is twenty years in the past, and the valley to the east is twenty years in the future.  The boundaries are manned by a gendarmerie who ensure that no one crosses into an adjacent valley without an assigned escort and permission from the Conseil of both the visitor’s home valley and destination valley.  Denied petitions require vigilance, as those petitioners may attempt to cross anyway.  We meet Odile, the first-person narrator, when she is sixteen years old.  She becomes friends with Edme, a violin prodigy, and then recognizes his parents visiting from the future, despite the black masks that are meant to disguise them.  This visit can only mean that Edme’s parents want another glimpse of him while he is still alive and that Edme’s death is imminent.  The tacit rule against sharing that information with his family in the present sets the course for Odile’s future, as she is riddled with guilt and keeps tripping up in her efforts to improve her lot in life.  There is not a lot of border crossing in this novel, but the concept certainly dominates the plot.  The author manages what time travel does take place with an eye for the intricacies and pitfalls that accompany such scenarios as people running into their past or future selves.  Thank you to Book Club Favorites at Simon & Schuster for the free copy for review.

THE SENTENCE by Louise Erdrich

Tookie, a Native American woman living in Minneapolis, is arrested for stealing a corpse.  Plus, said corpse had crack cocaine hidden in his armpits.  After ten years in prison reading voraciously, Tookie lands a job at an independent bookstore and marries her arresting officer, Pollux.  Then her most annoying customer, Flora, who wishes that she herself were Native American, dies.  All is well, but things have to start going awry or we don’t have a story worth telling.  Flora’s ghost haunts the bookstore, George Floyd is murdered, and Covid-19 causes life as we know it to grind to a halt.  Then there’s the double meaning of the title.  First, Tookie has to endure a prison sentence, and Flora seems to be serving a sentence of being trapped between the land of the living and the afterlife.  On the other hand, this book is largely about books, and Tookie believes that a particular sentence in a book killed Flora when she read it.  As with all Erdrich novels, this one serves up a heavy dose of fascinating Native American beliefs and traditions, including how to evict a ghost.  Erdrich also inhabits her own book here, as the writer who owns the bookstore.  I love how she describes herself and hope that her real-life bookstore is as welcoming and full of warmth as the one in this novel.  What ghost would not want to reside there?

FOUR SOULS by Louise Erdrich

Louise Erdrich’s older books, such as this one, read like folklore that has been passed down through the Ojibwe tribe for generations, rather than a novel that has sprouted from her imagination.  For me, these books are challenging in that the pace is on a par with molasses.  Here we have multiple narrators and two semi-related storylines.  Fleur Pillager signs on as the laundress for the wealthy man who acquired her land by paying the back taxes and then stripped it of all the trees.  Fleur becomes his wife, bears him a son, and then plots how to regain her property.  She is the adopted daughter of Nanapush, whose unfounded jealousy drives him to some shenanigans, which spectacularly backfire, against the man he suspects of trying to steal his wife.  Side stories abound, and although it is culturally enlightening, this is just not the kind of book that I can sink my teeth into.

THE BINGO PALACE by Louise Erdrich

Lipsha is a young Chippewa man who falls in love with his uncle’s girlfriend, Shawnee Ray.  She has a good head on her shoulders, and why she would put up with either of these men is mystifying.  Lipsha’s life is a mess until he obtains through some magical means a stack of bingo cards that never lose.  However, Lipsha’s sudden financial windfall does not seem to portend a better life for him or success in the romance department.  Shawnee Ray seems to prefer Lipsha to his uncle, who is also Lipsha’s boss, but that’s a pretty low bar.  Almost all of the action in this novel happens near the end.  Until then, Lipsha is on a mission to win Shawnee Ray’s heart through love medicine potions or starvation-induced visions or whatever.  The fact that he and his uncle maintain a cordial relationship despite their rivalry is the source of some humor in the novel, but the narrative drags at times.  Plus, keeping up with the other characters and their familial relationships is somewhat of a challenge.  I get that the author wants to give us an authentic glimpse of reservation life, as well as the spirit world, but the side stories just confused me and detracted from the main plot.  I stayed with it because I so wanted to see Lipsha get his act together, with or without Shawnee Ray.

THE SUN COLLECTIVE by Charles Baxter

After reading The Feast of Love, I thought I would love every Charles Baxter book, but sadly that was not the case.  Baxter’s prose itself is entertaining, but the storyline and characters did not grab me.  The title refers to an activist group whose manifesto preaches both love and anarchy.  Harry Brettigan is a retired structural engineer who picks up a copy of the manifesto during his regular walk through the mall with his group of friends called the Thundering Herd.  He refers to homeless people as Victims of Capitalism, and they seem to be the main recipients of the Sun Collective’s beneficence.  Harry’s wife, Alma, is actually more sympathetic to the group than her husband, particularly after she suffers an episode that may be a mini-stroke.  Two younger characters, Christina and Ludlow, are affiliated with the Sun Collective and add some spice to the storyline, particularly when Christina is on the Blue Telephone, a hallucinogenic drug.  Christina’s role becomes more pivotal as the novel progresses and we learn more about the whereabouts of the Brettigans’ son, Tim.  The problem for me is that all the characters, including the Trump-like president, seemed more like caricatures than real people.  The wordplay is the book’s salvation, but it’s just not enough.  The leader of the Sun Collective is named Wye, frequently misunderstood as “why,” and that’s the question I kept asking myself as I read this book and tried to decipher what the author’s, or the Sun Collective’s, message was.

THE SOUL THIEF by Charles Baxter

My biggest problem with this book is that I did not totally understand what happened.  Nathaniel Mason is a grad student in Buffalo in the 1970s.  At a party he meets Jerome Coolberg, who weirdly seems to want to hijack Nathaniel’s entire identity, including his family history and his possessions.  Whether or not Nathaniel’s soul is worth stealing is debatable, since he doesn’t seem to be committed to much of anything except his beloved lesbian friend, Jamie.  Things veer into treacherous territory during a nighttime Niagara Falls outing, but Nathaniel maintains his unflappable acceptance of everything, even serving coffee to a burglar, until one of Coolberg’s more grim predictions comes true.  A revelation near the end renders the plot of this book even more inscrutable, with several unanswered questions remaining.  On the plus side, I love Baxter’s writing.  Decades after Nathaniel’s grad school days, he travels to Los Angeles to meet Coolberg again.  The author’s descriptions of “the ritualistic hostility of LAX” and the “emblems of four-star neglect” in a Sunset Boulevard hotel are priceless.

THE FEAST OF LOVE by Charles Baxter

This is my first Charles Baxter novel, but it most certainly will not be my last.  In fact, I wish all novels could be as good as this one, as I completely fell in love with the writing style.  Every sentence is a splendidly written gem, and the characters are splendid as well.  I think there are about ten main characters, and they connect with one another in a closely woven narrative that is not exactly a plot.  It’s more along the lines of the movie Love Actually.  It starts out as Bradley’s story, but then it branches out to include the stories of other people in his life, including his two ex-wives, their lovers, his neighbors, and two young people who work in his mall coffee shop.  All of the characters are completely unique and easy to distinguish from one another.  Part of the fun of this novel is figuring out who is narrating each chapter, but their identity becomes obvious pretty quickly from context.  I think that I could read this novel many times, just for the sheer joy that the language delivers.  Bradley may be the fulcrum of the novel, but his satellite characters are more colorful.  For such a nice guy, he seems to be somewhat clueless and insensitive.  For example, he takes his first wife to visit the animal shelter, in spite of the fact that she is extremely afraid of dogs.  In that same vein, he takes his second wife to a remote B&B for their honeymoon, completely ignoring her phobia of open spaces.  These adventures seem a little torturous on the surface, but Bradley thinks he will somehow cure both wives of their fears, and, honestly, these uncomfortable situations make for some great reading.  Humor abounds here, but the author does not shy away from human tragedy and addresses it with a clear-eyed directness while also offering hope that the grief will one day morph into a new beginning.

BIRNAM WOOD by Eleanor Catton

The title is a MacBeth reference, but here it’s a New Zealand environmental activist group that surreptitiously plants vegetables on unoccupied lands they don’t own.  Mira founded the group, and now she has accepted a large donation from American billionaire Robert Lemoine.  Is this a pact with the devil?  Time will tell, but Lemoine certainly is not known for his ecological awareness.  Under the guise of building a doomsday bunker, Lemoine is conducting an illegal mining operation.  Tony, a former Birnam Wood member and aspiring journalist, becomes curious about Lemoine’s activities and finds himself being pursued by Lemoine’s heat-seeking drones.  Lemoine is the perfect villain—charismatic but ruthless, unscrupulous, self-serving, and opportunistic.  I don’t love the fact that Mira and her roommate Shelley are more than a little starstruck by Lemoine, whereas it takes a man (Tony) to see through his façade.  That quibble aside, this novel is full of suspense and adventure and therefore right up my alley.  Plus, it mentions that fewer than a million days have passed since the birth of Jesus.  I love fascinating tidbits like this, as well as the suggestion that we replace “I’m sorry” with “Thank you.”  For example, instead of saying to my tennis partner, “I’m sorry I muffed that shot,” I could say, “Thank you for not yelling at me for muffing that shot.”  What a concept.

MY YEAR ABROAD by Chang-rae Lee

This is my least favorite Chang-rae Lee book.  As expected, the writing is stellar, but the plot is just too bizarre.  Tiller is a 20-year-old, living with thirty-something Val and her eight-year-old son Victor, Jr.—Veej for short.  Tiller is supposed to be doing a year abroad for college, but he has settled into some version of domestic bliss after a wild and crazy junket that is also not college-sanctioned but certainly educational in its own way.  He travels with Pong, a fifty-something entrepreneur, whom Tiller meets at a golf event.   Then Tiller becomes Pong’s assistant of sorts, ostensibly tasked with helping Pong market an elixir to a young audience.  The narration alternates between the Val/Veej story and the Pong story, both of which are kooky.  Veej becomes quite the chef, and strangers start showing up from all over town to sample his wares, despite the fact that he and Val are under witness protection.  The Pong story, though, is what takes the cake in the weirdness department, as Tiller is part of an entourage that jets all over the Pacific Rim and finally lands in a luxurious lodge in China.  Tiller shows a talent for karaoke, but other than that, it’s not clear what his real role is, other than serving as a boy-toy for the daughter of the lodge’s owner.  Things turn very dark, but, fortunately, we know that Tiller will land on his feet, in the company of Val and Veej, who have dark moments of their own.  This novel is very long, and the plot is a whirlwind going nowhere until about three-quarters of the way through.  Pong’s backstory takes place during Mao’s Cultural Revolution in China, and I felt as though he ultimately subjects Tiller to a similar experience.

ALOFT by Chang-rae Lee

Sixty-year-old Jerry Battle works part-time at a travel agency, now that his son Jack is at the helm of the family landscaping company.  However, Jack’s “lofty” attempts to change the company’s direction now have the company teetering toward bankruptcy.  Jerry spends as much time as he can, weather permitting, in his Cessna plane, drifting above Long Island and all the problems down below.  In fact, Jerry is much maligned by both his family and Rita, his former girlfriend of twenty years, for being emotionally distant, even after the tragic death of his mentally ill wife, Daisy.  Jerry’s life just keeps getting more complicated by family issues, as his daughter, Theresa, has made a difficult and possibly unwise decision, and Jerry’s aging father is creating crises of his own.   What Jerry really wants is to persuade Rita to come back to him, but she is now involved with a very successful and wealthy lawyer.  One particularly entertaining scene in the novel is a tennis match between Jerry and Rita’s lover on which an outlandish bet is made.  Another terrific section is at the beginning when Jerry is buying the plane from a guy who had a stroke while piloting it at 9500 feet.  This beautifully written book obviously has lots of family drama, plus plenty of soul-searching as Jerry tries to navigate through the turbulence and steer his life’s sudden bumps toward a smooth landing.

NATIVE SPEAKER by Chang-rae Lee

Henry Park is a Korean-American with an unusual job:  he is expected to cozy up to a particular person in order to get dirt on them.  After his assignment to a psychiatrist turns into a fiasco, he is offered redemption by having to join the volunteer staff of a rising political star named John Kwang, who is also Korean-American.  Park’s problem, if you want to call it that, is that he identifies too closely with his assigned mark, and empathy is not conducive to his getting the goods on anyone.  John Kwang in particular is respected and charismatic and offers hope to the New York Korean community that he will break down ethnic barriers.  The novel follows Henry’s gradual rise through the ranks of Kwang’s minions as well as the possible reconciliation between Henry and his wife, Lelia.  Their marriage has been ripped apart perhaps due to her ethical concerns about Henry’s job and by the accidental death of their young son. I’m not sure what the plot gains from this family tragedy, but, ironically, Lelia is a speech therapist who often works with children from non-English-speaking families.  These children sometimes feel like surrogates for her lost son, and Kwang is something of a stand-in for Henry’s deceased father.  Henry may be the protagonist here, but Kwang is the more intriguing character whose true self emerges, little by little, over the course of the novel.  The author keeps the tone of the novel on an even keel throughout, somehow amplifying, rather than diminishing, the shock value of some revelations.

WHAT COMES AFTER by JoAnne Tompkins

Daniel and Jonah are two key characters in this novel, but they are both dead from the beginning.  Daniel was a handsome, popular, athletic teenager who disappeared.  His body was found days later after his awkward semi-friend, Jonah, killed himself and confessed to Daniel’s murder.  Isaac, Daniel’s divorced, schoolteacher father, is a devout Quaker who was emotionally unavailable to his son.  Lorrie, Jonah’s widowed mother, lives next door and struggles to support herself and her daughter.  The catalyst to a possible truce between Isaac and Lorrie is Evangeline, a pregnant, homeless sixteen-year-old.  Isaac is stubborn and judgmental in his assessments of people, despite evidence that he is completely wrong.  He particularly has a blind spot with regard to his son, who was no saint by any stretch of the imagination.  In fact, Isaac refuses to see the flaws in the novel’s most flawed characters but freezes out those who could use some compassion, with the exception of Evangeline, whom he takes under his protective wing.  As you might expect, grief is a dominant force in this novel, but the prospect of a new life when the spunky Evangeline gives birth provides a source of hope.  Her circumstances have made her rough around the edges but have also forced her to figure out how to survive.  She is the central figure around which everything in the novel revolves, and the ultimate question is whether or not she was a source of strife between the two dead boys.

THE FINAL REVIVAL OF OPAL & NEV by Dawnie Walton

I did not like the format of this book, which is a series of interviews conducted by Sunny Shelton, the editor-in-chief of a music-oriented publication.  I sometimes lost track of who was speaking and had to flip back, and the timeline was meandering.  Sunny’s comments had a different font, making them easy to distinguish, but I did not like the hopping around from one speaker to another.  Enough about that.  The storyline, if you want to call it that, involves a rock duo—a red-haired Englishman (Nev) and a Black woman from Detroit (Opal).  An Altamont-style disaster is the focal point of the whole novel and plays a role in the undulating relationship between the two main characters.  Both are guilty of lapses in judgment on that fateful day, but it’s hard to fault either one of them, since they couldn’t know what the tragic result would be.  Opal is definitely the character who gets the most air time and has the better moral compass, but her colorful fashionista friend Virgil was my favorite, and I would have liked to have heard more from him.  Nev, on the other hand, gets credit for snatching Opal out of oblivion and into the limelight, but after that, he’s not much more than an ambitious songwriter and guitar player.  As the daughter of Opal and Nev’s former drummer, Sunny’s personal connection is both a boon and a detriment to getting their story right.  When she receives a piece of information that may or may not be true, her plans for a book about Opal and Nev start to unravel, as does her relationship with them.

THE MAGICIAN by Colm Toibin

I was reluctant to read this novel, because, for me, Toibin’s biographical novel about Henry James, The Master, was a dud.  However, the German author Thomas Mann proves to be a much more book-worthy subject.  Like Henry James, he is a closeted homosexual, but he marries Katia and fathers six children with her.  Plus, his life is in an almost constant state of upheaval, due to WWI, WWII, McCarthyism, and the political activism of some of his family members.  The success of his novels propel him to an affluent life but with the aforementioned serious bumps along the way, plus the drug addiction of one of his children and the suicides of two of his siblings.  After having moved to the U.S., he and Katia find themselves inconveniently in Sweden when Hitler goes to war, leading them to a harrowing and desperate escape from Europe.  I did find it a bit challenging to keep track of his siblings, his children, their spouses and lovers, and his many acquaintances, including composers and other writers.  Plus, there are three Klauses(!), but the vast cast of characters did not detract from my enjoyment of the novel.  I do have a copy of Mann’s The Magic Mountain, whose length is somewhat intimidating, but I’m more inspired to tackle it now.

DEATH IN VENICE by Thomas Mann

Gustave von Aschenbach is an aging German writer who suddenly decides to vacation in Venice.  While there, he becomes obsessed with a beautiful Polish boy named Tadzio.  Aschenbach never communicates directly with the boy, but his attraction to the boy leads him to stalk him.  Apparently this story is a somewhat autobiographical, although what really happened probably is not quite as disturbing.  This is my first Thomas Mann novel, and I chose it because it has fewer than a hundred pages.  As translations go, I think it captures the mood of Venice and Aschenbach’s tormented infatuation quite well, but I’m not wild about the subject matter—the musings of a frustrated pedophile. 

I HAVE SOME QUESTIONS FOR YOU by Rebecca Makkai

We know from Rebecca Makkai’s The Great Believers that she can write vivid characters, but this book is more plot-driven.  It’s basically a murder mystery that takes place twenty years after the actual murder.  Seventeen-year-old Thalia died in her prep school’s swimming pool in what was initially considered an accident.  By the time the authorities realized that she was murdered, the crime scene had been completely contaminated.  Now, our narrator, Bodie Kane, Thalia’s former roommate, is teaching a podcast seminar at Granby, the prep school she and Thalia attended, and one of Bodie’s students wants to investigate Thalia’s death as her podcast project.  Granby’s athletic trainer, Omar, has been serving time for the murder, but the evidence for his conviction now seems dodgy.  The “you” in this book is Denny Bloch, the music teacher at Granby, who increasingly becomes Bodie’s prime suspect, as more and more details emerge regarding Thalia’s relationship with him.  This book was a slow starter for me, but I got more into it as the story progressed and more and more clues were revealed.  Also, the author takes some detours that I found to be unnecessary distractions, particularly with regard to the past behavior of Bodie’s soon-to-be ex-husband.  Ultimately, I pegged the wrong person for the murder, meaning that I didn’t really have a clue.

THE LINDBERGH NANNY by Mariah Fredericks

I had misgivings about this book, as there is so much bad historical fiction out there.  However, I found myself engrossed in this story and wondering how factual it was.  (The author distinguishes fact from fiction in a section at the end.)  Plus, Charles Lindbergh’s admiration of Hitler and embrace of Fascism make him an unsympathetic historical figure.  However, this is not his story.  This is the very personal story of Betty Gow, the nanny who had to fight suspicion of her involvement in the abduction and death of a child she adored.  The first half of the novel, prior to the kidnapping, drags a bit, and, honestly, we don’t know how many pages we are going to have to read before the crime occurs.  The author wisely provides as much shock value as possible, given that we know what’s coming sooner or later.  She takes us on a twisty ride afterwards, with many seemingly innocuous events, such as phone calls prior to the kidnapping, suddenly becoming clues to the mystery of how it happened.  The Lindbergh’s household staff, as well as those working for Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s parents, all come under scrutiny during the investigation, as does Betty’s boyfriend.  Doubts as to any character’s innocence are sometimes put to rest and then resurrected.  Ultimately, everyone’s life is adversely affected, but none more than Betty Gow’s.

INFINITE COUNTRY by Patricia Engel

A Colombian family of three—Elena, Mauro, and baby Karina—go to the U.S. to escape the violence in their home country.  Ironically, the constant stream of shootings in the U.S. unsettles them and causes them to doubt the wisdom of their decision.  A bigger problem, of course, is their undocumented status.  Elena gives birth to two more children, Nando and Talia, while in the States.  In another weird twist, Talia, an American citizen, is sent to live with her grandmother in Bogotá, because Elena cannot work and care for an infant simultaneously.  By this time, Mauro has already been deported, so that we have a split family.  Plus, Elena did not really want to leave Colombia in the first place, and now she is torn about whether or not to stay in the U.S..  Fast forward fifteen years, and Talia has escaped from a juvenile detention center so that she can join her mother and siblings in New Jersey.  Everything I’ve said so far is pretty much the premise, but the other stuff that happens, in both Colombia and the U.S., is glossed over and told in a very detached manner.  In other words, this book did not grab me emotionally, except for the connection between Elena and Mauro, although no one would categorize this book as a love story, and the trepidation that Talia feels about reuniting with her mother, brother, and sister, whom she does not know at all.

APPLESEED by Matt Bell

Strange hybrids inhabit this novel.  Chapman is a faun—half man, half beast—who, along with his brother Nathaniel, marches westward during the early settlement of this country, planting apple orchards.  He manages to shapeshift into a man as necessary and is the author’s reimagining of John Chapman, aka Johnny Appleseed.  Two other storylines are futuristic and at times difficult to unravel, but they basically bring us to a world in crisis, due to climate change.  I feel a little guilty calling these sections sci-fi, since the consequences of climate change are anything but fiction, but there is definitely some not-yet-invented cloning and whatnot going on.  Another hybrid is C-433, who is a blue furry being (recycled from C-1 through C-432, plus some plastic replacement parts) and is gradually morphing into a tree, due to some biomass that C-432 threw into the mix.  The third storyline, which takes place sometime between the other two, involves John and Eury, childhood pals who built Earthtrust, a company that ostensibly intends to save the planet.  However, John abandons this enterprise when he discerns that Eury is becoming a little too drunk on her own power and is losing sight of their ultimate objective.  In fact, Eury is intent on saving humanity, at the expense of everything else, by monkeying around with the natural world.  The suspense in this novel, for me, was how the three storylines fit together, and I never caught on to the link between the Johnny Appleseed story and the other two.  Plus, the last name of John, of the John and Eury story, is Worth, which is also the last name of a farm family who befriend Nathanial and Chapman during their orchard-planting expeditions.  Huh?  Anyway, the author drives home the fact that Johnny Appleseed destroyed natural habitats by clearing land to plant apple trees.  Wildlife doesn’t stand a chance in the face of human proliferation.

HELLO BEAUTIFUL by Ann Napolitano

William’s 3-year-old sister dies when William is 10 days old.  The behavior of his parents after this tragic loss causes William to feel that he should have been the child who died.  Basketball becomes his refuge, and he “wills” himself to become tall.  He meets Julia in college, and her three sisters and parents soon become his surrogate family.  However, cracks begin to appear in the veneer of Julia’s close-knit family, and two almost simultaneous events send them into a tailspin.  The resulting fracture resembles what happened to William’s family, as Julia’s family goes from happy to splintered in a split second.  Another example of history repeating itself is William’s reaction to the birth of his own daughter.  From here the story becomes just too messy and somewhat tedious.  The author covers too many issues—depression, attempted suicide, coming out as gay, teenage pregnancy, alcoholism, cancer, estrangement, and, of course, the death of a child.  Also, the degree to which William’s parents distanced themselves from him seemed weird to me.  He had to have had some supervision and discipline when he was a child, as I don’t think he raised himself, and there was no indication that someone else did.  I kept hoping for something to draw me to this story, but, alas, the ending is melodramatic and predictable.

GOLD DIGGERS by Sanjena Sathian

Drinking molten gold?  That I’d never heard of until I read this book, which is a tale of alchemy, deception, and thievery, along with a will-they-or-won’t-they love story.  It doesn’t sound too healthy to me, but historically, drinking gold has held the unlikely promise of eternal youth.  Here, however, the goal is academic achievement.  Neil, our first-person narrator, is a sophomore in high school when he discovers that his neighbor, Anita, is consuming gold jewelry that belonged to people her mother wants her to emulate.  Yikes!  The idea is that Anita will, in theory, absorb the previous owner’s ambition or happiness or clarity or whatever.  Anita’s mom learned about this practice as a girl in India, where her parents applied this process to their high-achieving son, while ignoring the academic prospects of their daughter.  Neil, also Indian-American, wants in on this magic lemonade, but his pursuit of excellence backfires, leaving tragedy and guilt in its wake.  This book emphasizes the immense pressure that immigrant parents place on their children to ensure that they excel.  An Ivy League college is a must.  In other words, this is not your typical tale of immigrants endeavoring to lift themselves up by their bootstraps.  On the contrary, they are usurping the talent of fellow Indian immigrants and sometimes trampling them in the process.

A LIE SOMEONE TOLD YOU ABOUT YOURSELF by Peter Ho Davies

At first, I thought this book was primarily aimed at parents.  However, I am not a parent, and now I wonder if perhaps that is a good perspective to have when reading this book.  Either way, the author takes a clear-eyed look at parenthood from the viewpoint of an unnamed father.  The novel opens with a married couple debating whether or not to abort a fetus which is unlikely to survive.  The very slim possibility that it would survive and perhaps even flourish is cause for much consternation and vacillating about what to do.  They ultimately decide to have an abortion, and then years go by before they are willing to try again.  The wife eventually becomes pregnant again and carries the fetus to term, but complications arise immediately.  Then when the child becomes a toddler, he exhibits developmental problems.  The parents are very reluctant to have him tested but suspect that he is on the autism spectrum.  How these parents navigate their second-guessing of the abortion, alongside raising a “twice-exceptional” child is the stuff of the novel.  Humor rescues this novel from being overly harrowing, especially while the child is a fussy infant and the parents wonder if the drudgery and sleep deprivation will ever end.  The delightfully clever wordplay is lighthearted and contrasts with the introspective seriousness of the subject matter.  For example, in one scene, the couple discuss how one of them is, at any given time, the “sparent,” i.e., the spare parent.  Ultimately, though, this novel is about a father working through momentous decisions and struggles that we often associate strictly with women.  This vantage point and the beautiful prose distinguish this novel from others that address parental struggles.

DAMNATION SPRING by Ash Davidson

I expect an emotional response to a good book, but this novel just made me angry.  This is the second book I’ve read lately in which a man hides a huge financial fiasco from his wife.  The biggest problem, however, is that all of the characters seem to lack common sense.  It takes place in 1977, but even then, surely people knew that herbicides are not harmless, especially in their water supply.  The Erin Brockovich case didn’t happen until the early 1990s, but, hey, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring came out in 1962.  I just can’t fathom these people’s cluelessness, particularly after multiple miscarriages, stillborn babies, birth defects, and nosebleeds.  The book takes place in a redwood logging community, and I get that their livelihoods depend on destroying the environment, but when this destruction is the source of their own suffering, I would think that they would wake up.  Instead, their frustration just leads to violence and vengeance against the few among them who want to put a stop to the spraying of underbrush with a chemical related to Agent Orange.  Even the PhD who comes to run lab tests on the water supply is no saint.  He fuels conflict within the community, but most of their problems are self-induced.  This novel is very dark and just keeps getting darker, for both the people and the trees.

DEMON COPPERHEAD by Barbara Kingsolver

In the interest of full disclosure, I have not read David Copperfield, the book that inspired this one.  Here we have first-person narrator Damon Fields, aka Demon Copperhead, whose teenage mom has substance abuse issues and bad taste in men, with the possible exception of Demon’s father, who died before Demon was born.  Demon bounces around in the southwest Virginia foster system, buffeted from one bad situation to another.  There always seems to be someone in his life who does not want him to thrive.  Fortunately for us readers, the author tells this hard-luck story with ample doses of humor to soften the blows.  Even when things are going well for Demon, he is constantly looking over his shoulder, bracing for the next setback.  His expectation of doom becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy as he becomes his own worst enemy, self-destructing with some help from Dori.  She is a girl with whom he falls hopelessly in love, because or in spite of the fact that she has a lot in common with his mother.  Whatever else Demon sees in Dori is never quite clear, and I see her as a character who does not come across as particularly loveable.  Demon’s struggles sometimes seem never-ending, but he frequently comes up with some great words of wisdom.  In one of my favorite paragraphs, he says that studying for his GED “turned out to be a hell of a lot easier than being physical present to two more years of disgrace and overpriced drugs cut with sheep wormer.”  Then he adds that he thinks “most of humankind would agree that the hard part of high school is the people.”  So true, Demon, and I would further posit that the hard part of almost everything is the people.

MATRIX by Lauren Groff

Inspired by the life of a twelfth century poet, this novel about a reluctant nun never really gave me a reason to keep reading.  Deemed unmarriageable because of her unusual height, seventeen-year-old Marie is dispatched to any abbey in 1158 by Eleanor of Aquitaine, where Marie immediately assumes the role of prioress.  For the abbey, she represents one more mouth to feed, as they are all barely avoiding starvation.  All of a sudden, Marie decides to take her role seriously and starts making changes that will improve the situation.  She then begins seeing visions that motivate her to make additional improvements to secure the abbey from outsiders—namely men.  This novel focuses almost entirely on women and their successes in becoming self-sufficient.  The one occasion in which Marie invites stone masons into her enclave results in the pregnancy of a young novice, furthering cementing Marie’s resolve to keep men out.  My problem with this novel is that I kept waiting for some big event to change the course of the storyline, but it never came.  The plot is basically a flat trajectory with no peaks or valleys and virtually no significant suspense.  A medieval mystery it is not.  Plus, all of the other nuns at the abbey are basically a blur; I could barely keep straight which ones supported Marie’s various projects and which ones did not.  This book provides some historical perspective with a feminist slant, but I could have used a big moment or two.

NOT FOREVER BUT FOR NOW by Chuck Palahniuk

I think the author had a lot more fun writing this book than I had reading it.  It’s either darkly comic or comically dark; in any case, it is cheekily macabre—sort of like the Addams Family on steroids.  It took me a few chapters to thoroughly digest what’s going on here, but two brothers, Otto and Cecil, are more than just mischievous boys.  In fact, they are grown men still being bathed and dressed by their nanny.  Otto in particular has a soft spot for animals but thinks nothing of bumping off said nannies, tutors, governesses, and all of the household employees in general.  Some of Otto’s murderous behavior stems from the fact that the family is in the business of contract killing, but both boys use nature films to inspire them to be predators rather than prey.  To make this story even more disgusting, Otto and Cecil are sex partners with each other and everyone/everything else—blowup dolls, taxidermy, etc.  Is this a satire, and, if so, what is the author satirizing exactly?  The writing style is semi-entertaining, but the plot and characters are just not.  Thank you to Book Club Favorites at Simon & Schuster for the free copy for review.

THE WHISTLING SEASON by Ivan Doig

Ivan Doig died eight years ago and left a body of work about the West--more in the vein of Mark Twain than, say, Cormac McCarthy.  This has got to be the most wholesome, G-rated book I have read in a long time and is a nice departure from the bleak stuff I’ve been reading lately.  It’s basically a coming-of-age story that takes place in the early 1900s in rural Montana.  The Milliron family consists of a widower father and his three young sons—Paul, Damon, and Toby. No one in the family has culinary skills, but, nonetheless, the father, Oliver, is intrigued by a newspaper ad whose headline reads, “Can’t Cook But Doesn’t Bite.”  He decides to hire the woman, Rose, who arrives some weeks later by train, along with her uninvited brother, Morrie.  There’s obviously something fishy about this pair, but Rose turns out to be a very capable housekeeper, although she wasn’t joking about the “can’t cook” statement.  The erudite Morrie makes himself useful by chopping wood and the like until he is offered the job of teacher at the one-room school attended by the Milliron boys.  The schoolhouse is, in fact, the setting for most of the adventures in this novel, and Morrie has a knack for making sure the students learn more than just the 3 R’s.  Paul, the oldest son in the Milliron family, is the first person narrator, who has to grapple with some adult-sized dilemmas, and his after-school tutelage in Latin contrasts sharply with his feisty encounters with the school bully, whom he comes to pity rather than fear.  Rose obviously doesn’t bite and this novel lacks bite as well, but it definitely does not cruise along uneventfully, either.  The once-every-75-year appearance of Halley’s comet is an occurrence that captures the attention of the earthbound inhabitants of this novel, which doesn’t reach celestial heights but certainly provides a welcome breath of fresh Montana air.

FOOLSCAP by Michael Malone

Theo Ryan is a drama professor at a well-respected university in North Carolina.  He has written several plays but knows that only “Foolscap” has any merit.  His friend and renowned playwright Ford Rexford reads the play and helps Theo iron out a few kinks.  From here, things take off in some weird directions.  I don’t mind reading a madcap adventure now and then, but this book gets bogged down in university politics and petty bickering that I just found to be annoying and not pertinent to the plot.  Theo has all the necessary qualities for being a good leading man, and Ford is the stereotypical charismatic literary genius with a drinking problem and a short attention span when it comes to women.  The female characters are merely bit players, but my beef is more with the plot than the characters.  It’s almost like a comic version of a Dan Brown novel with Sir Walter Raleigh as the historical figure around whom much of the plot revolves.  King James I, who ordered the beheading of Sir Walter, is the only dastardly villain here, but even Theo is not immune to the occasional ethical lapse.  Ford is certainly not a good role model, but he dominates the narrative with his unpredictable antics, and he’s not part of the whining and gossipy university faculty.  He is sort of a modern-day incarnation of Sir Walter Raleigh, although Sir Walter’s vice seems to have been tobacco, not booze.

HELL OF A BOOK by Jason Mott

The “Hell” part of this book’s title is certainly appropriate, and the subject matter is very timely.  Jason Mott makes crystal clear the life-and-death hazards of being a Black man, or even a Black boy for that matter, in this country.  Even white people like myself are now aware that parents of Black boys must have “the Talk” with their sons about possible confrontations with the police.  These days armed citizens are just as much as threat, as they have been known to gun down Black men out for a run or Black teenagers who ring the wrong doorbell.  This novel was invaluable to me from an educational standpoint in reinforcing the dangers that Black citizens have to navigate, but I was not wild about the two (or three?) confusing storylines here.  “Soot” is the nickname that a bully gives a young boy whose skin color is particularly dark.  Soot’s third-person narrative alternates with the first-person narrative of an unnamed author whose first novel is wildly successful.  Because he is Black, the author is expected to be somewhat of a civil rights advocate—a role which he resists—during his whirlwind book tour.  My problem with this book is that Soot and the author could be the same person, or Soot could be the same child as The Kid, whom the author encounters from time to time but no one else can see.  The author knows that he has difficulty distinguishing the real from the imagined, but then Soot develops a similar problem.  And as for The Kid being invisible to other people, Soot believes that it is possible to make himself invisible.  In other words, the boundaries between these three characters’ stories are fuzzy, and I was somewhat put off by these blurred lines.  In any case, if you can look past this indecipherable overlap within the novel, there’s a vital message there.

THE RETURNED by Jason Mott

I honestly have never pondered what it would be like if the dead returned to life, completely intact.  In this novel, that is what happens, and the “Returned” person may show up on the opposite side of the world from where they died.  Harold and Lucille’s son Jacob died fifty years prior, when he was eight years old.  Now he’s back at just that age, but his parents are now elderly.  Harold is wary, but Lucille is all in, ecstatic that her son is back.  Then more and more people return from the dead, and they will soon perhaps outnumber the living.  A federal bureau starts setting up internment camps, including one in Arcadia, NC, where Harold and Lucille live.  When Jacob is sent to the camp, Harold accompanies him.  Meanwhile, one of their neighbors, whose wife is dead but has not returned, becomes enraged at how the internment camp is taking over the town and starts protesting the existence of the Returned, although he does not seem to have a concrete plan for getting rid of them.  I guess I’m just too pragmatic, but this plot was too absurd for me.  I don’t even know what genre applies to this book.  Fantasy?  It is not a horror story, as the Returned are not zombies with an evil agenda.  I like the author’s writing style and the fact that Lucille is a person who likes fancy words.  Apparently, the book’s message is about love and having a second chance to communicate with a departed loved one.  However, I felt that there is possibly a metaphor here about immigration and how difficult a problem it is for this country to solve, with more incoming than outgoing.

THE FUTURE by Naomi Alderman

Lai Zhen, an expertise on survival, finds herself under attack at a shopping mall.  She squeezes through ductwork as her assailant draws closer.  Then an unknown app called AUGR becomes active on her phone and gives her some timely advice on how to escape.  The source of the app seems to be Martha Einkorn, the assistant to the head of the world’s largest social network, with whom Zhen had a brief love affair.  Martha’s boss and two other technology moguls are preparing for the apocalypse.  They have stocked bunkers in out-of-the-way places, in case of a worldwide plague or nuclear disaster and made plans for quick getaway.  Martha is the only character with real-life survival skills, which she developed as the child of a fundamentalist cult leader.  Her role, as well as the major theme of the novel, are late revelations.  Clues lie in the parable of the Rabbit and the Fox, which formed the basis for one of Martha’s father’s sermons.  Even more telling is the recounting of the Biblical tale of Lot, in which Abraham asks God how many good people would there need to be in Sodom in order for God to save it. The plot of this novel is twisty and intriguing, but the characters are a bit flat.  Zhen is the heroine who becomes either a pawn in the machinations of the three head honchos or an accidental wrench thrown into their plans, and we’re not sure which, until the end.  This is probably one of many apocalyptic novels that the Covid-19 pandemic has spawned.  However, this novel is largely about preparedness, and we could have used more of that before 2020.  Thank you to Book Club Favorites at Simon & Schuster for the free copy for review.

THE PROPHETS by Robert Jones, Jr.

This book is a difficult read on several levels.  On the one hand, it waxes poetic in too lyrical and metaphorical a fashion and has too many internal soliloquies and musings.  All of these abstractions detracted from my appreciation of the characters and the plot.  On the other hand, it is a painful story of love and unbearable suffering on a Mississippi plantation with hundreds of slaves.  More specifically, this book is about two teenage Black slaves, Samuel and Isaiah, who love each other. Eventually, the white “Christian” landowners taint the overall acceptance of these two lovers, and even the other slaves are complicit in the physical torture that Samuel and Isaiah suffer.  The book also gives glimpses into an African tribe in which a woman is king and two men marry each other without any prejudice against their choice of partners.  Ironically, the slave traders are appalled when they witness this marriage but think nothing of kidnapping the whole tribe, putting them in chains and throwing them into the stinking hold of ship.  In other words, the author pulls no punches in this scalding story, and Samuel and Isaiah really don’t stand a chance.  The plantation’s young heir, Timothy, is also gay and forces Isaiah to have sex with him, not long after Timothy’s kooky mother wanders into Isaiah and Samuel’s sleeping quarters in the barn.  Her claim that they looked at her gives her husband an excuse to inflict a horrendous punishment on them.  Things come to a head in the last fifty or so pages, and I flipped through them as fast I could, given the excessive verbosity.  The ending, however, left me puzzled as to the fate of a number of characters.  Exasperating!

MILK FED by Melissa Broder

Rachel, our first-person narrator, has trouble finding a happy medium.  She has an unhealthy fixation on calorie-counting, partly thanks to her body-shaming mother, but when she does throw caution to the wind, she over-indulges in a big way.  Her sexual fantasies are equally over the top, especially after she meets plus-sized frozen yogurt scooper Miriam.  In fact, Rachel’s sexual appetite for a large woman is entwined with her food consumption of cakes, donuts, bread, you name it, when she lapses into an eating binge.  I get that Rachel has some mental health issues, for which she sees a therapist who insists that she put all contact with her mother on pause.  However, Rachel makes some unwise choices, such as blabbing to a co-worker about having sex with a male client.  This attempt at propping up her fragile ego has serious repercussions and certainly does not have the desired result of elevating Rachel’s status with the co-worker.  The good news is that Rachel’s relationship with Miriam does raise her self-image and her spirits, but her argument with Miriam’s Jewish Orthodox mother about the plight of Palestinians, although her stance may be laudable, gets her thrown out of Miriam’s home.  One problem I had with the book was at least one inconsistency in Rachel’s food mania.  Why does she have to go to Bed, Bath & Beyond to find a scale to weigh herself?  OK, I don’t profess to know anything about eating disorders, but if she were obsessed with her weight, wouldn’t she own a bathroom scale?  Does this have to do with the fact that she sees herself as a much heavier woman than she actually is, and the scale would force her to face the truth?  Sometimes I want to get to the end of a novel to find out what happens, and sometimes I want to finish so that I can move on to something else.  This book falls into the latter category.

THE LOVE SONGS OF W.E.B. DU BOIS by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

A book this long—too long, really—is bound to be immersive. It chronicles the lives of multiple generations of multiple ethnicities, as depicted in the multi-page family tree shown at the beginning of the novel.  I confess that I could not follow all the relationships, but I don’t think my bewilderment detracted from my understanding of most of the plot.  We are primarily invested in the life of Ailey Garfield, a Black woman, who weathers sexual abuse at the hands of her paternal grandfather.  Her sisters are also subjected to this abuse, and one of them ultimately succumbs to the trauma.  For me, this trauma that all three girls suffer is the seminal element of the book.  The fact that their grandmother is potentially complicit is unimaginable.  Plus, the girls’ physician father never suspects that his well-to-do father is a pedophile, nor does their mother, who disapproves of her daughters’ boyfriends who do not meet her patrician standards.  The author very effectively conveys the irony that the grandfather is so much more evil than the young men who exhibit their underprivileged upbringing by using bad grammar. And if the grandfather is not a despicable enough character, we also have a slave owner, Samuel Pinchard, one of Ailey’s white ancestors, who purchases young girls to serve as sex slaves.  One mother slices the face of her beautiful daughter so that Pinchard will not select her for his harem of children.  This stuff is difficult to read, not only because it is so horrific, but also because such ghastly behavior is not limited to fiction.  On a more positive note, I loved Ailey’s family’s discussion of whether Senator Obama might run for President, and their comment about the impossibility of a Black President in their lifetime.  Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction, in a good way.

THE GOOD LEFT UNDONE by Adriana Trigiani

My favorite thing about this novel is the title.  For me, it refers to good deeds that could have been performed but were not—sins of omission.  Also, if one purpose of reading is learning, then mission accomplished.  Apparently, the Blitz was not the only darkness that fell on Great Britain during WWII, and this novel educated me about their deportation of Italian men.  My high opinion of Winston Churchill just went down a notch, as he was responsible for this inhumane policy.   Unfortunately, I am not a fan of this author’s writing style.  I would describe it as short on adjectives and adverbs and long on clichés, such as cats being in command of their people rather than vice versa.  I also felt that the prose could have benefitted from a well-place metaphor or two.  The plot itself, except for the history lesson, is not particularly original, as it tells the story of several generations of women via a jagged timeline.  Domenica’s early adult life is the main adventure here, the gist of which is revealed at the beginning, thus squelching any possibility of suspense, and the rest of the storyline sort of all runs together.  I found it particularly difficult to keep track of Domenica’s son, son-in-law, grandson(s), etc., and finally gave up on that task, since the women are the focus anyway.  However, the fact that Domenica had a son puzzled me, as he shows up in the narrative long after Domenica has died.  Is there a gap in her story, or did I miss something?  Despite its length, this book is a fast read, and, for me, quickly forgotten.

THE SHOEMAKER'S WIFE by Adriana Trigiani

Full of implausible coincidences and near misses, this novel still brings to life two strong Italian characters, Enza and Ciro.  Enza comes from a large family and meets Ciro when he is hired to dig the grave of Enza’s beloved youngest sister.  Ciro knows even more about loss, because his father died in the U.S. in a mining accident, leaving his mother unable to cope with the responsibility of raising two sons alone.  She drops them off at a convent and retreats from their lives indefinitely.  Due to unfortunate circumstances, both Enza and Ciro land in New York, where their paths cross once again.  Ciro becomes a shoemaker’s apprentice, and Enza eventually leaves the cruel Hoboken household of a distant cousin, where her existence matches that of Cinderella, minus the glass slipper and prince.  She is a plucky, talented seamstress, however, and secures a job, along with her best friend, Laura, creating costumes for the Metropolitan Opera.  Needless to say, Enza’s life is more thrilling to read about than Ciro’s, as she becomes acquainted with Enrico Caruso and hobnobs with other cast members and staff at the Met.  We assume that she and Ciro will eventually reunite, but in the meantime, Enza has another prospect in the husband department.  This book may be a little too much of a fairy tale, but I became very attached to these two characters, who defy the odds to build a life together that looks a lot like the American Dream.

TRUST by Hernan Diaz

When do we get to the good part?  This is the question I asked myself through the first two sections of this novel.  (There are four in total).  The first section is a novel about Benjamin Rask, whose stock market expertise in the early 20^th century made him a very wealthy man.  The second section is an autobiography of Andrew Bevel, including a few placeholders whose details are apparently to be supplied later, whose story sounds quite similar to Rask’s.  Their wives even have similar interests—music, philanthropy—but differ in important ways, although both perish in a Swiss hospital.  The first section is cleverly written in such a way as to mirror Benjamin Rask’s personality—stilted and unemotional, although what happens to his wife is shocking and tragic.  Bevel’s autobiography is a little warmer, but the subject is just as dull, perhaps even more so.  The third section, narrated by a woman, enlightens us as to what is going on in the first two sections and finally gives us a reason to keep reading.  The final section, though, is in the voice of Andrew Bevel’s wife and is quite the eye-opener.  If I had known that this novel would take so long to gain traction, I might have skimmed the first two sections, but now I actually want to reread them.  This book is not a mystery novel nor is there much suspense, but the surprise in the final section definitely explains Bevel’s reticence on the subject of his wife.  This book unfolds in the most clever way possible, and the title’s duality in referring to both finance and to the reliability of the narration is nifty.