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.