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.