DINOSAURS by Lydia Millet

Gil is a filthy rich unmarried man in his mid-forties, and he feels guilty about the fact that he did nothing to earn the money he inherited.  When his long-term girlfriend abruptly moves out, he decides to walk from Manhattan to a home he has purchased sight unseen in Phoenix.  This book is about Gil’s journey, which has nothing to do with the walk and everything to do with the people he meets in Phoenix, particularly the nextdoor neighbors.  Ardis and Ted become close friends with Gil, who also bonds with their 10-year-old son, Tom.  Some bad things happen here, including some injurious bullying and illegal hunting of birds at night, but, by and large, this is a feel-good novel, because the bad guys generally are held accountable.  There are a few sad events, but the author does not dwell on those.  Gil’s parents were killed by a drunk driver when Gil was four, and that driver contacts Gil after completing his prison sentence.  Gil’s response is a bit of a head-scratcher but further reflects his discomfort with having too much money.  Gil’s new girlfriend, Sarah, notes that Gil is willing to go to bat for everyone but himself.  Again, his feeling of unworthiness is in play here, but when he draws his ex-girlfriend into admitting why she stayed with him as long as she did, she sets him free.  I read this book all in one day, and what a pleasant day it was.

REMARKABLY BRIGHT CREATURES by Shelby Van Pelt

Giant Pacific octopuses (not octopi) may be exceptionally bright, but this novel exaggerates their abilities to include reading.  I don’t think so.  I can see this book as an animated movie, but I found it not only unrealistic—intentionally, I’m sure—but also very predictable.  Marcellus, the octopus, a sometimes first-person narrator here, lives in an aquarium and frequently escapes from his tank, knowing that he can spend a maximum of eighteen minutes out of the water.  He also knows that he is fast approaching the end of his expected life span.  Tova, an elderly cleaning lad at the aquarium, becomes Marcellus’s friend and accomplice.  Her husband has died recently, and her son drowned mysteriously at the age of eighteen.  Then along comes Cameron, a ne’er-do-well who is on a quest to find his biological father.  He takes over Tova’s cleaning shift while she is temporarily injured.  Marcellus proves himself to be even smarter than we thought, putting two and two together, and has to devise a way to pass his observations on to these two humans.  Ahem.  I can almost imagine reading this book to a child as a series of bedtime stories, minus a few plot points and some of the language, as this is a fast read with no long sentences or unfamiliar vocabulary.  If you want to read a more intelligent book about intelligent animals in captivity, try T.C. Boyle’s Talk to Me instead.

NOW IS NOT THE TIME TO PANIC by Kevin Wilson

Two bored, awkward teenagers pool their writing and artistic talents to create a poster with a cryptic message and mysterious drawings.  Then they clandestinely plaster hundreds of copies all over their small Tennessee town.  Twenty years later a journalist finds out who was responsible.  That’s the whole plot in a nutshell, and it’s just not enough to carry an entire novel.  Frankie, who comes up with the words on the poster, which become sort of a mantra for her, considers her and Zeke’s summer stunt to be the most important event in her life.  The mystery of who caused the “Coalfield Panic of 1996” is heightened by the fact that Frankie and Zeke are such unlikely candidates. The town’s residents attribute the poster’s words to various sources, such as the Bible, a rock song’s lyrics, a satanic incantation, a mini-manifesto, or some obscure passage from a famous author.  I really enjoyed Kevin Wilson’s Perfect Little World and Nothing to See Here, but this novel just seemed a little thin to me.  I kept expecting something monumental to happen, but it never did, although a few people who are not even characters in the novel reach a tragic end due to the town’s obsession with the posters, leading to some guilty feelings on the part of the perpetrators.  My favorite character is Frankie’s single mother, who is so unflappable, even when she catches Frankie and Zeke making out on the couch.  She harbors a secret that she reveals to Frankie late in the novel, and my reaction was, “Of course!”  Still, this minor revelation is not nearly enough to save this novel, but I’ll bet most readers can readily recite the two beguiling sentences on the poster by the time they finish the book.

WANDERING STARS by Tommy Orange

The word planet is derived from the Greek word for wandering star, as the planets were seen to wander across the night sky against the background of stationary stars.  This book opens with a character named Jude Star and then wanders on to his son Charles and other progeny.  Actually, the book doesn’t really wander; it’s pretty sequential, but the relationships to previous characters are a little hard to follow.  Suffice it to say that alcoholism is rampant throughout this family.  Orvil eventually becomes the main character, as he and his friend Sean wander into drug addiction, aided and abetted by Sean’s father who makes and supplies their drugs.  All of these characters are at least partially Native American.  They have fled massacres and survived bullet wounds and occupied Alcatraz, but the substance abuse stories are the hardest for me to read, and they just go on for too long.

LESSONS by Ian McEwan

The two defining chapters in Roland Baines’s life involve women, and we learn of them early in the book.  First, he has an affair at fourteen with his piano teacher.  Propelled by the Cuban Missile Crisis into this unfortunate relationship, Roland fears the world will be obliterated before he has experienced sex with a woman.  The second major event in his life is his wife’s abandonment of him and their infant son in order to focus on a literary career.  She deems collateral damage to be unavoidable.  Roland himself is a man of many talents, none of which he nurtures.  Time and again he fails to act but merely reacts, as world events such as Chernobyl and Covid-19 provide a backdrop for his inertia.  The contrast here is between his inaction and his wife’s pursuit of her art at the expense of everything else, including love.  Roland, on the other hand, excels at music, poetry, and tennis but eschews all of them for reasons unknown, perhaps lack of ambition, but he still has devoted friends and family, including his in-laws.  For me, this book never elicited any emotional response and did not keep me engaged.  The few surprises, such as Roland’s parents’ history, do not really change the trajectory of Roland’s life in any measurable way.   Ultimately, I think the point is that Roland is content with the life he has and that being a star in some capacity is not a ticket to happiness or fulfillment.  However, such a life does not make for a great read.

BLACK DOGS by Ian McEwan

I am not sure you can actually write a memoir for someone else, but that seems to be the premise here.  The first-person narrator not only proceeds to write someone else’s memoir, but he confesses that after his parents died and he went to live with his adult sister’s family, he often hijacked his friends parents, intentionally showing up at their homes while their son was away.  The same thing occurs with his attachment to his wife’s parents, and he periodically interviews his mother-in-law, June, to compose a book about her life, alongside her mostly estranged husband, Bernard.  Both June and Bernard embraced communism after WWII, but a terrifying incident involving two black dogs during their honeymoon sent June down a different path.  A couple of other acts of violence are committed in this book—one in Berlin after the wall comes down and one in a restaurant where a father viciously strikes his son.  The narrator witnesses both of these latter events, but June’s experience with the black dogs is not fully clear to the reader until very late in the book.  Until that point, although we know the impact that this encounter had on her life, the dogs are merely symbolic of evil.  June eventually shares her belief that evil that resides in all of us, and another anecdote regarding black dogs indicates that they are also an avatar for the Gestapo.  The thing that struck me most about this book is that, although we in the U.S. rarely think about WWII, Europe is still wary in its aftermath.

THE INNOCENT by Ian McEwan

Leonard is an Englishman in his mid-twenties who was living with his parents when he was reassigned to a top secret project in Berlin.  It’s the 1950s, and the Berlin Wall has not been constructed yet.  A British/American team is tunneling under East Berlin with some sophisticated communications equipment so that they can eavesdrop on the Russians.  Leonard is naïve in many ways, including romance, shows signs of poor judgment, and is easily manipulated.  He falls in love with a divorced German woman, Maria, whose ex-husband still beats her up from time to time.  This fact alone would seem to be a red flag, but Leonard is no saint, either, imagining that Maria would enjoy being sexually assaulted.  What??  He is well aware that the Russians often raped civilian women as they swept into Germany after WWII.  Leonard’s wrong-headedness is not a matter of being innocent at all and totally defies logic.  In other words, Leonard is not the most lovable protagonist, and his behavior becomes even more appalling as the novel progresses.  In fact, he’s something of a bumbling idiot, but McEwan is known for his clueless characters who just seem to dig themselves into a deeper and deeper hole.  This and other underground tunnel metaphors abound, including the dark nature of this novel.

THE CHILD IN TIME by Ian McEwan

Stephen Lewis, a children’s book author, is in the checkout line with his 3-year-old daughter, Kate, when she suddenly disappears—presumably abducted.  As you might expect, Stephen’s marriage to Julie starts to crumble and they separate.  In the meantime, his friend Charles, a well-known politician, and his wife, Thelma, a physicist, have moved out of the city.  Charles has abandoned his career in an attempt to reclaim his childhood by climbing up and down a tree barefoot.  Stephen now distances himself from his friend, who is clearly mentally ill, while Stephen’s only real responsibility is participating in the work of a committee that is preparing a report on raising children.  The plot obviously focuses on children, specifically a missing child and the grief that ensues, but the title also mentions time, which is Thelma’s specialty and what her husband is trying to reverse.  In fact, there is a momentary glimpse into the past in which Stephen witnesses a rendezvous between his parents before his birth.  This book perhaps invites a second reading, as one reviewer implied that possibly a rogue time traveler smuggled Kate into another time period.  Hmmm.  I don’t think I buy that, and of course I have no idea what the author intended.  The bottom line is that her grieving parents are trying to find their way without her.  And, as bleak as this novel is, the ending makes reading it worthwhile.

AFTERLIVES by Abdulrazak Gurnah

In the early 1900s in East Africa, two young African men join the German army’s fight against the British.  Ilyas has a young sister under his protection but returns her to a life of physical abuse so that he can join the German colonial army in its fight.  The big question may be why, but the bigger question concerns his fate.  The other man is Hamza, who has never met Ilyas, but falls in love with his sister, Ayfia, after he has returned to his village after the war and she has been rescued by the man whom becomes Hamza’s work supervisor.  Both Ilyas and Hamza owe their literacy to the Germans, but Hamza suffers serious injuries that were not sustained in battle.  Ultimately, we have a love story set against a backdrop of European colonialism—first Germany’s and then Britain’s—in East Africa.  More importantly, I think, is the sense of community that surrounds these characters.  Some of their elders are obviously cruel, but others are willing to accept and assist someone like Hamza in need of a leg up.  Despite taciturn and even hostile exteriors, many people, including a pastor and a German officer, help Hamza become an asset to the community.  For anyone not familiar with the geography of East Africa or the impact of WWI on that part of the world, the historical aspect of this novel may be confusing.  However, the family saga is not.  It is easy to follow, and I found myself getting caught up in the lives of these characters, who like Hamza and Afiya, hope to catch a break after enduring so much adversity.

SIGNAL FIRES by Dani Shapiro

This novel opens with a terrible car accident.  Fifteen-year-old Theo is driving, because his older sister, Sarah, is intoxicated.  Another teenager in the car does not survive.  Sarah claims to be the driver, not only to protect Theo, but also because she so casually threw him the keys.  This tragedy becomes a secret that Sarah and Theo’s family will never discuss.  Years later a younger family moves in across the street, and, although the two families never socialize with one another, their lives become entangled.  This other family’s son, Waldo, has a genius-level IQ but is a disappointment to his father whose expectations Waldo will never meet.  Waldo’s passion is astronomy with a healthy dose of physics and maybe even a bit of metaphysics.  His interest in the death of stars leads him to a philosophy about the death of people as well, and his depth of perception is totally invisible to his father, who has anger management issues.  These two families are troubled in completely different ways.  Waldo’s is basically dysfunctional, while Sarah and Theo have guilt issues that go unaddressed.  The fact that their parents refuse to talk about the accident just adds fuel to the fire.  If you are thinking that this novel leans toward the melancholy, you would be right, but it is much more.  Sarah, Theo, and Waldo all have to figure out a way to navigate lives whose foundations are shaky.

WESTERN LANE by Chetna Maroo

Gopi and her two older sisters live in England and are still reeling after their mother’s death.  Their father has decided to turn his energies toward making his daughters excellent squash players.  Meanwhile, their father’s brother and his wife, who live in Edinburgh, have offered to raise one of the girls.  Eleven-year-old Gopi, our first-person narrator, is the most likely candidate, but she is also the best squash player by far.  She becomes friends with a boy named Ged who plays squash at the same facility, and they both register for a major tournament that will take place in a few months.  This tournament becomes the focus of most of the book’s characters, but an overheard remark leads to events that threaten Gopi’s participation.  This book definitely has melancholy overtones, but the prospect of the tournament keeps both the characters and the reader engaged.  The specter of the dead mother looms over everyone, and too many decisions seems to require debate over what she would do if she were still alive.  This frequent review of the dead mother’s possible opinion stifles her family’s ability to move forward and into a life without her.  The father is obviously depressed and struggling to be motivated to keep the family afloat, while he suffers disapproval over his friendship with Ged’s mother.  I don’t want to make this post longer than the book itself, but Ged’s mother, who has very little to say in this book, is probably my favorite character.  What she does say is wisely protective of her son and not open to discussion, and she stands her ground firmly without wavering.  Gopi’s aunt is also intransigent on a completely different issue and in her mind is protective of Gopi.  In reality, her stance is rooted in a bias regarding what girls should and should not do.

EASTBOUND by Maylis de Kerangal

Aliocha is twenty years old and has been conscripted into the Russian army.  And if that’s not bad enough, he is on the Trans-Siberian Railway, headed to an unknown destination.  After being attacked by another conscript, he decides that escape is the only answer.  Easier said than done, but he enlists the help of a French woman, Helene, who has left her Russian lover, with no particular destination in mind.  Here are two people who don’t know where they are going, but this train is going to take them there.  Helene sees another spontaneous fugitive like herself in Aliocha, a total stranger, but Aliocha is not above using intimidation in his frantic effort to convince Helene, or even a child, to assist him.  Packed with tension, everything about this book is small—the number of pages, the timeline of just a few days, and the cramped space of the train, contrasting with the vast Siberian landscape on the outside.  The setting is perhaps a bit claustrophobic intentionally, adding to the feeling of desperation that Aliocha is experiencing.  However, Helene’s plight, serving as his accomplice, is just as dire.  This book speeds along at a much faster clip than the 60 kph train.

EITHER/OR by Elif Batuman

Selin, a sophomore at Harvard, was born in the U.S. but is of Turkish descent, speaks some Hungarian, and is learning Russian.  She has never had sex, never been kissed, and never been asked out on a date.  Her shoe size is eleven and a half.  This novel reads like a year-long diary and may contain an excessive amount of navel-gazing, but it had me at the first page.  Selin has a wry sense of self-deprecating humor, which contradicts her obsession with death, and she over-analyzes almost everything.  This novel is funny in an erudite sort of way and would appeal to anyone who likes a heavy dose of philosophy (Kierkegaard) with their fiction.  It is all about a personal journey—destination unknown—and  culminates in a really wild actual summer trip, sponsored by a company that recruits college students to investigate and write about foreign travel “off the beaten path.”  This whirlwind final section is absolutely my favorite part of the book and sets us up for a sequel.  Sign me up!  Selin’s freshman year is the subject of Batuman’s other novel, The Idiot, which I have not read.  If I had read it, I might be able to keep up with her vast circle of friends, with names like Svetlana and Lakshmi.  At one point she meets a guy whose name even she has trouble pronouncing, so that she just refers to him throughout the book as the Count, like a character in an Iris Murdoch novel.  To say that Selin is well-read is an understatement.  I am afraid that she puts me to shame in that department.

CALLING FOR A BLANKET DANCE by Oscar Hokeah

Ever is the main character in this story, but his prominence is not initially apparent, as he is only six months old.  Part Cherokee, part Kiowa, and part Mexican, we follow his development from an angry and unmanageable child to a man who works with troubled kids, although that transition seemed very abrupt to me.  His first wife, Lonnie, bears him three children, who become his responsibility when she becomes a meth addict.  Ever struggles to keep his family safe and whole and even adds a fourth charge named Leander, an adolescent whose fury and accompanying violence closely resemble Ever’s own issues at that age.  This book is largely about family, especially in the various Native American communities, but Ever’s relatives have problems of their own, especially alcoholism and drug abuse.  Both Ever and his sister, Sissy, both pin their romantic hopes on unworthy candidates for partners, making their journey toward keeping their heads above water that much harder.  This book bears some similarities to several of Louise Erdrich’s novels, and I found this one easier to follow in terms of the relationships between the characters.  Another plus is that this book has a very straightforward timeline.  However, there’s just not enough of a plot here to hold my attention.  The most memorable section of the book is the final chapter, but up until that point, the book is mostly poignant, with a feeling of inevitable hopelessness.

CHECKOUT 19 by Claire-Louise Bennett

I do not understand why the New York Times named this one of the ten best books of 2022.  It basically has only one character—the female narrator—and no plot.  This book is mostly a litany of books and authors that the narrator has read and some nebulous stories that she has written.  For reasons I cannot fathom the author sometimes switches from first person to third person, making me wonder if both are the same character but always deducing that they are.  We get sidelong glances into her life with few real specifics until near the end when she describes two rather significant horrifying events.  There are several scenes with a guy named Dale, whom the narrator does not claim as a boyfriend “but often behaved just as if he were.”  His actions made me wonder why on earth she would spend any time with him, boyfriend or not.  To top it all off, paragraph breaks are at a minimum, so that I can flip to almost any page, and nonstop words occupy both sides.  For me, this book was a chore to read with no reward for my effort.

THE BOOK OF GOOSE by Yiyun Li

Two inseparable adolescent girls, Agnes and Fabienne, in rural France in the 1950s decide to write a macabre book.  They enlist the help of a man whose wife has died recently in order to get the book published, but actually Fabienne is the author, and Agnes is merely the scribe.  Agnes follows Fabienne’s every lead and seems to have no identity apart from her relationship with Fabienne.  In their conversations, it is evident that Fabienne tells Agnes not only what to do but what to think.  However, when the book is accepted for publication, Fabienne wants no credit whatsoever.  In other words, this is plagiarism with permission.  Agnes goes to Paris to meet with the publisher and eventually moves to England to attend a finishing school for girls, where she becomes somewhat of a rebel in her own right.  Death figures prominently in this book, as it does in the book the girls write, but this is a coming-of-age story in which a one-sided friendship dominates the plot.  Fabienne is not only the creative and somewhat sadistic half of this pair; she is probably brighter than Agnes but has had to abandon formal schooling in order to tend to her family’s farm animals.  Agnes may not be that brilliant but does prove to have a pretty fertile imagination herself, as she writes some stories while the two girls are separated that are her work alone.  As a result, I was never really sure if she didn’t really deserve some, if not most, of the accolades she received for her book.  This novel wasn’t torturous to read, but neither was it engrossing.  Agnes narrates the story as a married adult woman living in the U.S. and reflecting on her friendship with Fabienne, as well as her experiences as a celebrated child prodigy who is presumed to have written a book.  The degree to which these experiences have shaped her life is somewhat nebulous, and it is equally unclear whether Agnes outgrows Fabienne during her time away, or vice versa.

VLADIMIR by Julia May Jonas

This novel made me think of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?.  As in Albee’s play, the plot focuses on two couples, all four of whom write and teach at a small, pricey New England college—upstate New York, in this case.  The first-person unnamed narrator here is the wife in the older of the two couples.  She and her husband have an open marriage, but he is facing possible termination due to a series of affairs he had with female students, some of whom have filed grievances.  To be clear, these occurred before the college outlawed such relationships, and all of these students were consenting adults.  The narrator merely shrugs off her husband’s infidelities, because she has had several flings of her own.  Now her lustful imagination is going wild over a new professor named Vladimir, and a teaser at the beginning of the novel hints at weird things to come.  The narrator goes completely off the rails, but the only consequences she suffers are for seemingly being complicit in her husband’s sexual peccadilloes.  As in the Albee play, this is a boozy bunch, but I don’t mean to sound judgmental.  In fact, one major theme here is that one couple’s marriage contract should not be the subject of speculation or disapproval by outside parties.  I agree wholeheartedly with their right to choose the parameters of their marriage, even if theirs is not the type of marriage that most of us want for ourselves.  In any case, this is what good writing looks like, and the author kept me engaged throughout.  However, the editing sorely needs some grammatical improvement.  For example, on page 190, a sentence begins with this phrase:  “The thought of he and Sid and Alexis all working together.”  Ouch.  That makes my teeth hurt.

NORTH WOODS by Daniel Mason

A novel spanning centuries is usually about multiple generations of a family, but that is not the case here.  An apple orchard in western Massachusetts is the tie that binds as this book chronicles the lives of its owners, and what a curious bunch they are.  Just as I would become engrossed in the story of, for example, an artist who falls in love with a writer, we abandon their story and move on to the next inhabitants of the yellow house on the property.  Then some of the residents never really leave; they live on as ghosts who may annoy a subsequent resident, causing that resident to be deemed mentally ill.  One would expect life surrounding an apple orchard to be serene, but this property sees murders, a séance, a narrowly avoided lobotomy, wild animal attacks, you name it, not to mention the ghosts’ shenanigans.  It’s more like an enchanted forest that is not immune to devastation itself, as it suffers blight, insect invasions, and clearing of the land by humans, of course.  I really enjoyed Daniel Mason’s The Piano Tuner and especially The Winter Soldier, but, for me, this is more of a novel to admire than to sink your teeth into.  I have to say that the ending is absolutely my favorite part—not necessarily the storyline but the way the author so skillfully and stealthily misleads the reader, offers clues, and then enlightens.

SWIFT RIVER by Essie Chambers

Diamond is the only Black person left in Swift River, now that her father has disappeared.  She is a 300-pound teenager who lives with her white mother.  She has never met any of her father’s family, but she gets to know them via letters that start arriving from her father’s cousin Lena.  Since her mother does not drive, forcing them to hitchhike from place to place, Diamond has been tucking away some of her earnings from her job at the local motel so that she can take driving lessons.  She has aced the written test and now finds herself practicing driving along with her classmate Shelly under the tutelage of a frisky young man. This would all be funny if it weren’t so sad—Diamond’s eating habits, her loneliness, her mother’s poor judgment, and especially the uncertainty of her father’s whereabouts.  He is presumed dead, but Diamond and her mother have had to wait seven years to obtain a death certificate that will free up his life insurance money.  In one flashback Diamond’s father gives her a $100 bill when she loses a tooth while they are away from home.  This is not a family that can afford tooth fairy gifts of $100, and I did not understand why her father did this.  Diamond and her mother are both shocked, but the ultimate fate of the $100 bill is even weirder.  Thanks to superb writing, though, this book was a joy to read.  On the one hand, I did not love having most of Diamond’s family history conveyed via sometimes lengthy letters that appear in the book.  However, this technique limited the number of timelines in the rest of the narrative to just stuff that happened during Diamond’s lifetime and made it easy to recognize what was ancient history.  Thank you to Book Club Favorites at Simon & Schuster for the free copy for review.

MECCA by Susan Straight

The title refers to a small agricultural town in southern California, inhabited by a number of characters in this book, along with their extended families.  The first such character is Johnny Frias, a highway patrolman, whose family has lived in California for generations.  Matelasse, originally from Louisiana, works in a flower shop, supports her two sons, and is separated from her husband, who wishes he were Brazilian.  Ximena works in a cosmetic surgery spa, and then later becomes the housekeeper for a very wealthy woman, who calls her “X.”  Ximena is an undocumented Mixtec woman from Oaxaca who speaks almost no Spanish.  The fly in the ointment for all of these characters is ICE—the acronym for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.  All of these characters are connected in some way, and this book is ultimately about family, whether blood-related or not.  One person’s problem or mistake becomes the entire family’s problem to solve; everyone has everyone else’s back.  Many characters have little to no relationship with their biological parents, and an “uncle” may have served as a father, even though he may be a friend of a relative, rather than an actual relative.  These relationships are hard to keep up with sometimes, and the cast of characters is quite large.  A character may appear briefly and then reappear in a more important role.  In other words, the plot is a rather intricate jigsaw puzzle, which I liked theoretically but found a bit challenging to piece together.

SUDDENLY by Isabelle Autissier

This intense book was exhausting to read, and I had to keep reminding myself that it was fiction.  Louise and Ludovic enjoy a months-long sailing trip and decide to explore a remote island on which visitors are forbidden.  A violent storm comes up, and the unthinkable happens.  Actually, it is quite imaginable, given the circumstances, but Louise and Ludovic are ill-prepared for it, in either experience or equipment.  This pair is deeply in love, but they could not be more different in temperament or stature.  Ludovic is tall, handsome, charming, affable, dangerously optimistic, and has zero common sense.  Louise, although a very petite woman, is an experienced climber, and she knows when the conditions dictate caution.  Despite being the sensible one of the two, she yields to Ludovic, frequently against her better judgment, with life-threatening results.  At one point she makes every effort to do what obviously needs to be done, but he thwarts her with his own ill-conceived, impossible plan.  She ultimately faces a moral dilemma and makes a fateful decision that is her decision alone, in order to maximize the chance of survival.  This decision is the crux of the entire plot, and I would argue that she makes the right one.  However, her actions afterward are hard to endorse.  Even when she later grapples with guilt about the decision, I don’t believe that she ever confronts the horrific and selfish mistake she makes afterward.

THE FURROWS by Namwali Serpell

Cassandra Williams, our first-person narrator, is 12 and her brother, Wayne, is 7 when Cassandra tries to rescue Wayne from drowning.  She loses consciousness on the beach from the effort.  When she awakens, she knows that Wayne is dead, but his body is nowhere to be found, and a stranger drives Cassandra home.  Closure is impossible, Cassandra’s parents divorce, and her mother forms a foundation called Vigil for the families of missing children, holding out hope that Wayne is still alive.  The remainder of the book is largely a series of Cassandra’s encounters with the now-grown Wayne, which I assumed to be dreams.  These events are all described in intricate detail, but there are similarities among all of them, not the least of which is some sort of apocalyptic disaster during the encounter.  This series eventually becomes a bit redundant, causing me to say to myself, “Here we go again.”  Then everything changes, and we are in a different narrative altogether with a different first-person narrator—a man this time, with the same name as Cassandra’s brother.  What??  The title initially refers to ocean waves but then seems to encompass other wave-like natural dangers, especially earthquakes and tsunamis, and one philosophical character describes time, not specifically as having furrows, but certainly with that implication.  So…maybe Cassandra’s encounters with her brother were not dreams but were intended to represent some alternate reality.  This book is enigmatic, especially the ending, and not always one I was eager to resume.  It was not hard to follow, though, and from time to time I can appreciate a book that I can’t completely get my head around.

JAMES by Percival Everett

This book has received so many accolades, but I just did not love it.  I did love that the author elevates Jim, the runaway slave who accompanies Huckleberry Finn on his adventures down the Mississippi River.  Jim, in this retelling, hides the fact that he can read and write and is familiar with a smattering of erudite philosophers, especially Voltaire.  He and other slaves disguise their intellect behind a mask of dialect that they employ only in the company of white people.  Even on the river, Jim becomes a slave to the white people he encounters, including the notorious con men, the Duke and Dauphin, despite trying to convince them that he is Huck’s slave.  In an unusual exchange, Jim becomes the property of a blacksmith, but a blackface minstrel group admires Jim’s singing voice and pays the blacksmith to release Jim to their custody.  They assure him he is not a slave, but yet he can’t leave the group because of their investment.   So…OK, he’s an indentured servant but with no timeline in which he’ll be free?  Jim’s creativity in trying to survive while on the run sometimes backfires, as in the case where he pretends to be the slave of another runaway, Norman, who can pass as white.  The scheme is for Norman to sell Jim so that Jim can escape and be resold again and again.  Then two of them will split the money, but I cannot fathom how they neglected to account for the possibility of Jim being beaten and shackled while in the possession of their first buyer.  Also, as in Twain’s original, Jim does not disclose until late in the book that a body found at the beginning of their journey was that of Huck’s cruel father.  Given that Huck is on the run from his father, why would Jim withhold this information when he could set Huck’s mind at ease?  I would have liked the author to have offered an explanation for this deception.  For me, the idea of this book is just way more appealing than the book itself, which drags, especially in the beginning.

HEAT 2 by Michael Mann and Meg Gardiner

This crime thriller is a sequel to the 1995 movie Heat, which I think I saw but do not remember at all.  No matter.  I loved this book anyway, and I think it stands just fine on its own, although at times the multiple timelines confused me.  Also, there are two groups of bad guys.  One group of bad guys, led by Neil McCauley, although they are really bad, sometimes do good things, but the other group of bad guys, led by Otis Wardell, are psychopathically bad to their core.  Then we have the good guys, primarily Detective Vincent Hanna, who is no saint himself.  He has a drug problem and doesn’t think twice about pushing a bad guy off a roof.  The two groups of bad guys cross paths at one point, resulting in your typical bloodbath.  Years later, although earlier in the book, Chris Shiherlis, who thinks of McCauley as a brother by another mother, lands in Paraguay, ready to start a whole new chapter in his life.  Shiherlis, rather than Detective Hanna, attains main-character status in this book, as he takes sides in a business war between competing Chinese families in Paraguay.  He eventually becomes involved in business activities that I never fully understood, but I do know these activities generally involved less overt violence than some of the heists he and McCauley pulled off.  Otis Wardell, on the other hand, keeps turning up like a bad penny, leaving tortured and bludgeoned bodies in his wake.  He is one scary, evil dude.  If gory stories make you queasy, skip this one, but personally I would rather read this kind of stuff than see it in living color on the screen. All that said, I still hope there’s a movie.

HAPPINESS FALLS by Angie Kim

I wish authors and editors would realize that the eBook format does not accommodate footnotes very well.  They all appear at the end of the chapter, so that all context is forgotten.  Also, a chart with highlighting showed no highlighting whatsoever on my kindle.  All that aside, this book is a missing-person mystery with a bunch of other unnecessary asides, and because of these diversions, I did not like it as well as Miracle Creek.  Adam, a stay-at-home dad, disappears after an outing with his son Eugene, who is autistic and, due to other complications, unable to speak.  Eugene returns alone, visibly agitated.  The family, especially Mia, Adam’s twenty-something daughter and first-person narrator, entertain various theories about what happened to Adam:  he ran off with a mistress, or he committed suicide because of a cancer diagnosis, or worst of all, Eugene pushed him into a raging river.  No one can quite fathom any of these scenarios, and it becomes increasingly likely that Adam is dead.  This novel is very suspenseful, but it has too many distractions, the primary one being Adam’s research into the quantification of happiness.  Really?  The book’s early examples of how unpredictable happiness is and how it is relative to a baseline, such as winning the lottery or suffering a paralyzing injury, are intriguing.  However, this “happiness quotient” is a topic that the author overemphasizes throughout the book, and I don’t really understand why.  It seems to be a theory that she wanted to convey somewhere, and this novel was as good a vehicle as any.

IF I SURVIVE YOU by Jonathan Escoffery

For some reason I thought this book was a novel, and that misconception may have skewed my impression of it.  It is actually a collection of linked stories about Jamaican-heritage families in Miami, and the same family appears in almost all of the stories.  Also, I think the title is a bit of a double entendre, as it could mean “if I survive what you are doing to me” or “if I outlive you.”  Trelawney is the primary recurring character, who addresses himself or the reader, not sure which, as “you,” who may be the “you” in the title.  I’m just guessing here.  In any case, identity, particularly ethnic identity, is a big factor in Trelawney’s life, as he is confused by the fact that some people see him as white, most Americans think he is Black, and some people think he’s Latino, although he speaks no Spanish.  Speaking of language, one chapter/story is completely told in Jamaican patois, and an audiobook would be the way to go in this case, as trying to sound out the words in my head detracted from the storyline.  However, it’s only one chapter/story, and the rest is relatively easy to read, as far as the language is concerned.  The content is not so easy to read, as these characters endure all kinds of hardships at the hands of not only other Americans but also their own families, and sometimes they knowingly self-sabotage.  Anyway, back to the identity theme, here’s a snippet of a conversation on page 23 between Trelawney and a white warehouse co-worker:

“’What do you care?  You’re not Black.  You’re Jamaican,’ he [the co-worker] says.  ‘I have a Jamaican friend who explained the difference to me.’  You wish his friend could come explain the difference to you.”

NIGHT WATCH by Jayne Anne Phillips

This book just does not measure up, despite its Pulitzer Prize, to this author’s Lark and Termite and Quiet Dell, both of which I loved.  The two timelines, 1864 and 1874, are very well delineated, but the characters are somewhat one-dimensional—either all good or all evil. It takes place in West Virginia and opens with an 1874 section in which “Papa,” whose true colors will be revealed later, is delivering Eliza and her daughter ConaLee to a plush mental health asylum.  He instructs them to use false names and not reveal their mother/daughter relationship. When we revert to ten years earlier, we find that Eliza’s beloved husband has left his family to become a sharpshooter in the Union army.  Their surrogate caretaker will be Dearbhla, their “granny neighbor,” who raised Eliza’s husband and, to some degree, Eliza herself.  I liked the plot, but, honestly, this book put me to sleep, as the plot seems secondary to all the wordy descriptions and characters whose purpose is unclear, particularly in the asylum. The most glaring example is a boy named Weed who wanders the grounds and pops up in scene after scene. However, I could not decipher what he contributed to the storyline.  Maybe he, the cook, another inmate and a few employees are meant to add color to the ambience of the asylum, but they are just not that colorful.  ConaLee, Eliza, a doctor, a raging inmate, and, of course, the night watch, all have important roles, but the rest of the asylum characters occupy way too many pages whose objective seems to be to extend the length of the book.  Does a novel need to be a minimum length to win the Pulitzer for fiction?  Also, there is a bit of magical realism that is used to glue some events together.  Surely an author of this caliber could have come up with a better device.

LUCY BY THE SEA by Elizabeth Strout

This novel takes up where Oh William! left off, but it’s not imperative that you read Oh William! first.  In fact, Strout’s characters from previous novels appear flit from book to book.  This one, though, is narrated by Lucy Barton, who headlines several of Strout’s novels.  Lucy herself is a respected author, who clawed her way out of poverty but still thinks of herself as a coward.  It’s 2020, and we all know what happened, especially in New York.  Lucy is very much in disbelief about the pandemic, but her ex-husband, William, a retired parasitologist, whisks her off to Maine before things get bad.  This is very much a COVID novel, as this pair hunkers down for the duration, all the while trying to ensure that other family members are safe as well.  Adapting to life in lockdown, away from her two adult daughters, is at first a struggle for Lucy, and she doesn’t even feel like writing.  The aforementioned daughters are dealing with challenges of their own, unrelated to but certainly not lessened by the pandemic.  William definitely comes off as a more likeable character in this novel than in the previous one, since he becomes more of a take-charge individual whose mission is to keep Lucy safe.  He also has to fend off pandemic deniers who don’t think steering clear of their asthmatic son is necessary, even though they have continued socializing indoors.  Lucy and William ultimately have to figure out how to put up with each other again while sharing a living space and having limited interaction with other people.  Lucy sometimes narrates whatever comes into her head, such as the fact that William doesn’t like to watch her floss her teeth.  As always, Strout’s prose is rich but simple, and I just can’t get enough of it.

HONEY & SPICE by Bolu Babalola

Kiki, the first person narrator, is in her second year at Whitewell, a fictional English university, where she has a campus radio program called “Brown Sugar” that provides women with empowering advice on dating.  Her audience becomes incensed when she is seen kissing Malakai, a new student whom she dubbed “Wasteman” on one of her recent broadcasts.  The purpose of the kiss was actually to scare off a guy that Kiki was trying to ditch.  She and Malakai then create a plan that involves pretending to date one another in order for her to rebuild respect among the other Black women on campus and keep her viewership intact.  Malakai is something of a player, and Kiki keeps her social interactions to a minimum, but they are both relationship-avoidant in different ways.  They both have to move out of their comfort zone in order to keep up appearances for the sake of their ruse—Kiki becoming more open to social activities and Malakai limiting himself to one woman.  These two predictably fall in love, but their insecurities don’t allow them to admit it, as each is concerned that the other is just faking it.  The plot does not really offer any big surprises, but the two characters have a certain charm that keeps the book from becoming too much of a cliché.  I will warn readers that there is some Yoruba dialog—all translated—and quite a bit of slang that I did not understand—not translated.  Also, the repeated use of “I” where “me” is grammatically correct really grated on me.  Constantly having to read “between Malakai and I” or “leaving Malakai and I” and the like sounded like fingernails on a blackboard to my ears.

SHRINES OF GAIETY by Kate Atkinson

Two teenagers, Freda and Florence, have run away from home in the last 1920s to seek fame and fortune as dancers in London.  Freda has some talent, but Florence—not so much.  After pocketing an unexpected inheritance, Gwendolen Kelling dashes off from her Yorkshire home and her job as a librarian to search for the girls, at the behest of Freda’s half-sister.  Gwendolen and a policeman named Frobisher find that they can help one another out if Gwendolen will do some undercover snooping at the Amethyst, a bar owned by the notorious Nellie Coker, who has recently been released from prison.  Gwendolen proves herself to be calm and capable in an emergency and finds herself managing Nellie’s swankiest watering hole.  Gwendolen may be the heroine of this novel, but Nellie’s six children—2 men and 4 women—are the colorful characters here, particularly the men.  I would say that all six are adults, but several of them don’t really fit that category in terms of their behavior.  London does not come off very well, either, as the police force is mostly corrupt if not downright dangerous to those it is supposed to protect, and the city is rife with pickpockets and purse snatchers.  The author handles all of the characters, plots and subplots with her usual deftness, and her way with words always delights.  One of my favorite passages is on page 147, in a paragraph regarding three of Nellie’s daughters:

“Both Betty and Shirley were excellent dancers, almost professionally spry, unlike Edith, who had two left feet.  (‘Even possible three,’ Betty said.)  They had talked about setting up a dance academy within one of the clubs, where members would pay extra to learn the latest dances or polish up the old ones. Nellie was ruminating on the idea.  They doubted she would ever digest it.”

CANARY GIRLS by Jennifer Chiaverini

Helen’s husband, Arthur Purcell, is managing one of his industrialist family’s manufacturing plants, which has been converted from a sewing machine factory to a munitions arsenal.  World War I has just broken out, and Lucy’s husband, Daniel, an architect and star footballer (soccer player) has joined a British infantry regiment.  April is a former domestic servant who goes to work in the Purcell factory’s Danger Building, loading fuses with TNT.  Lucy obtains a more skilled position at the same factory, and they become teammates on the company’s women’s football team.  Helen, who becomes a liaison between management and the many women working in her husband’s factory, soon discovers that handling TNT is a health hazard for the workers and gives their skin a yellow tint.  Hence, the moniker “canary girls.”  Respiratory issues are an even bigger problem, and Helen does what she can to improve the safety of the workers.  At the top of the hazards list, however, is the risk of an explosion, and no metal objects or incendiary materials are allowed in the building.  This novel follows the lives of these three women in particular but the plight of the canary girls in general.  They bond on the football pitch and share in their concerns for one another’s health and welfare, but they continue to work under these conditions because the money is better than anything they can find anywhere else.  Also, they seem to have a genuine desire to contribute to the war effort and an appreciation for the essential nature of their jobs.  I did not revel in the prose here, but the novel moves at a pretty brisk pace and gave me an in-depth look at the circumstances that kept the canary girls working in an unsafe and unhealthy setting.

THE FRAUD by Zadie Smith

Who exactly is the title character in this novel?  There are several candidates, all real historical figures and all men.  Eliza Touchet, however, is the central character here, a widow who resides in the home of her cousin, William Ainsworth, for decades.  Ainsworth is a novelist whose work becomes increasingly ponderous and less popular as the years go by, and as his friend Charles Dickens surpasses him as a celebrated author.  At one point, Smith intimates that Ainsworth may not have been the originator of his early books’ plots, and it is perhaps for this reason that Ainsworth becomes a writer of historical fiction and loses his literary audience.  During this period in England in the 1800s a trial takes place that commands Mrs. Touchet’s attention, as well as that of Ainsworth’s second wife, a former maid named Sarah.  The trial involves a “Claimant’s” insistence that he is Sir Roger Tichborne and that he survived a shipwreck in which all other occupants died.  All evidence indicates that the Claimant is an opportunistic fraud, but a former slave named Andrew Bogle corroborates the Claimant’s unlikely story.  While Sarah joins the ranks of the Claimant’s supporters, Mrs. Touchet seeks out Bogle and elicits his personal history.  The writing here is excellent but does not quite compensate for the dreary, staid storyline and lack of suspense.  Plus, the timeline meanders and isn’t always obvious.  Mrs. Touchet is an intriguing character, in that she adores Ainsworth, feeding his ego with compliments even as her inner voice derides his abysmal later manuscripts.

WINTER WORK by Dan Fesperman

The Berlin wall has just come down, and former East German intelligence officials are either destroying documents or trying to sell them to the CIA.  This novel opens with the death of one such Stasi officer who was apparently in the “sell” camp and possibly murdered by a competitor.  Emil Grimm, who was friends with the dead officer, now seeks to make his own deal with the Americans.  His wife is dying of ALS and is playing matchmaker to Emil and her caretaker, Karola.  Emil just wants money and passports to get all three of them out of Germany.  Claire, his CIA contact, begins to sympathize with Emil and his desperation and puts her own life at risk to cut a deal with him.  The Russian KGB operatives, stereotypically burly and violent, serve as the main villains here.  This novel is basically an imagined story behind the acquisition of the Rosenholz files, which gave the U.S. a trove of information regarding alleged East German spies.  The writing in this book is perfunctory, but the pacing is decent, and the historical context is fascinating.  I have not read much, if anything, about the immediate aftereffects of Cold War and the reunification of Germany.  Certainly I never considered how so many people lost their jobs, and I don’t mean just the Stasi employees.  Granted, they were engaged in efforts to infiltrate and undermine U.S. and European government entities, but their custodial staff, for example, were not.  I think it’s a bit risky for the author to paint Emil as someone deserving of a bailout, but it works.

BOOK LOVERS by Emily Henry

Nora is a literary agent who agrees to accompany her younger sister, Libby, to Sunshine Falls, NC, for a month in August.  The town is the setting for a best-selling novel that one of Nora’s most successful clients has written.  Libby tries to break down Nora’s all-work-and-no-play image by creating a checklist of things to accomplish in Sunshine Falls—go skinny-dipping, ride a horse, sleep under the stars, and save a floundering local business, among other things.  One item is specifically for Nora—go on dates with two locals.  Libby herself is married with two young daughters but appears to be struggling with a personal issue that she refuses to share with Nora, who has tried to be both mother and father to Libby for most of their lives.  Charlie Lastra, the executive editor at a NY publishing house, passed on the Sunshine Falls novel, but Nora (literally) runs into him in a bar there.  Too convenient?  Too coincidental?  Who cares?  On the one hand I think of this novel as a guilty pleasure, but it has some of the best verbal sparring I have ever read.  Yes, it’s a rom-com, but I was hooked by the sparkling repartee as much as by the smoldering love story.  I must be a romantic at heart, because this is one of those books that I just cannot get out of my head.

SEA OF TRANQUILITY by Emily St. John Mandel

I loved Mandel’s Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel, but this novel was a disappointment for me.  I also generally love time travel novels, including Stephen King’s 11/22/63 and Scott Alexander Howard’s The Other Valley.  In this book, however, I was never invested in the characters, and the plot was just too complicated.  If ever there was a novel that demanded a reread, this is it.  About halfway through the novel I realized that Gaspery, born in the 2400s, is the main character. He grew up in a domed colony, nicknamed Night City because the lights were too expensive to repair, on the moon.  His sister Zoey works for the mysterious Time Institute on Earth, and Gaspery secures a position as a time traveler for the Institute.  Zoey warns him that the job is dangerous, since the Institute will not tolerate interference in the past.  The characters whom he visits in the past are introduced in the first half of the book, and by the time Gaspery’s visits take place, I had forgotten the details of these characters’ lives.  The author does not address how Earth survives global warming nor how life is different on Earth four centuries from now.   In fact, everything is about the same, except for colonization and travel to and from our moon, as well as Saturn’s moon, Titan.  Of course, the time travel is futuristic, if you believe that we will be able to do that someday, but Mandel really has something else in mind with the time travel, and I didn’t buy that at all.  My favorite incident in the novel is when Gaspery learns that his cat is an unwitting time traveler who came from 1985.  Gaspery is stunned by that revelation, but as Zoey says, “Honestly, Gaspery, what difference would it make.  A cat’s a cat.”  Priceless.

PINEAPPLE STREET by Jenny Jackson

This novel about a filthy rich family focuses on three very smart women.  Darley gave up her trust fund so that she could marry Malcolm without a pre-nup and gave up her career as well.  Georgiana, Darley’s younger sister, works for a non-profit and becomes romantically involved with Brady, who works at the same company.  Sasha is married to Cord, Darley and Georgiana’s brother, and lives in the family home, which is still littered with childhood keepsakes and deteriorating furniture that Cord’s family will not allow Sasha to get rid of.  Plus, Sasha’s sisters-in-law privately refer to her as GD—Gold Digger—and erroneously believe that she did not sign a pre-nup.  All the talk of lost jewelry, deb balls, lunches at the club, and private schools was just too much privilege for me.  Don’t get me wrong; these are not bad people, but their problems, by and large, are not problems that I can really relate to.  And, as in many of these family dramas, there are secrets galore.  Georgiana has a secret that is basically tearing her apart, and she shares it with Sasha, in confidence, of course.  Then when the secret finally is revealed, everyone is mad at Sasha for not telling everyone sooner.  But, wait.  Isn’t that what someone is supposed to do with a secret?  Keep it a secret, right?  Darley and Malcom also have a secret, until they finally realize that the longer they hold on to the secret, the worse the humiliation is going to be.  At times I just wanted to throw up my hands and tell these people to get over themselves.

LIGHT PERPETUAL by Francis Spufford

A German bomb demolishes a London Woolworth’s in 1944, and five of the victims are children.  The substance of this novel is what might have been for these kids, but the premise is lost as the author chronicles their what-if lives over the succeeding decades.  In fact, the Blitz is never mentioned again, and, although this novel honors the bombing victims, it becomes just five separate stories that barely intersect.  Alec is a typesetter for the London Times and outlives that technology but reinvents himself in pedagogy.  Vern is a serially bankrupt real estate developer who stoops to swindling an unsuspecting potential investor.  (We feel that the world would have been a better place without him.)  Ben is a diminutive schizophrenic man who works as a double-decker bus ticket-taker.  His mental illness limits his options until he meets a woman who changes everything.  The two girls, Jo and Val, are twin sisters who veer off in completely different directions.  Jo becomes a backup singer and girlfriend to an American rock star, while Val marries a homicidal neo-Nazi who goes out every night looking to pick a fight with any random person of color.  Yikes!  My problem with this novel is its lack of cohesion.  It is like reading five novellas concurrently or like layering lasagna ingredients until they run out.  We are introduced to each of the five characters, and then we revisit them a decade or so later, then again, and so on and so forth.  I get that it would not have been realistic for them to have been in and out of each other’s lives, but I would have preferred some overlap rather than five parallel storylines with almost nothing in common.

THE SEVEN MOONS OF MAALI ALMEIDA by Shehan Karunatilaka

Maali is a 1980s war photographer in Sri Lanka with a box of incriminating hidden photos that he wants to come to light.  Unfortunately, Maali is dead.  He is now a spirit residing in the In Between for seven days and floats around to observe anyone who speaks his name.  He therefore serves as an omniscient narrator, commenting on what happens in the aftermath of his death.  He would also like to discover who murdered him, and there are possibilities aplenty.  This book was a challenge to read, not only because I’m not familiar at all with Sri Lanka’s history, but also because the characters have long and unfamiliar names, making them difficult for me to distinguish.  The author seems to assume that the reader is familiar with the historical events in Sri Lanka’s history, the vocabulary, and the names and acronyms of the various warring factions.  I tried to keep up but failed miserably, and although I didn’t understand half of what was happening in the country, the parts of the book that I did understand were powerful.  The author reveals insights into humanity’s struggles that are worth mentioning.  For instance, he notes that no major religion forbids rape and that all civilizations are built on genocide.  Think about it.  On page 345 Maali’s father says this:

‘”You know why the battle of good vs evil is so one-sided, Malin?  Because evil is better organized, better equipped and better paid.  It is not monsters or yakas or demons we should fear.  Organised collectives of evil doers who think they are performing the work of the righteous.  That is what should make us shudder.’”

That sounds too frighteningly familiar.

LESSONS IN CHEMISTRY by Bonnie Garmus

I have resisted reading this book, because it was basically the “It” book of 2022.  Where the Crawdads Sing was the last “It” book that I read, and it did not live up to the hype.  However, Lessons in Chemistry may well be the funniest book I have ever read.  Although some tragic and horrifying events do occur in this novel, it is mostly the triumphant story of Elizabeth Zott, a chemist in the 1950s who is constantly victimized by misogynists, particularly in the workplace.  Being an unwed mother does not help, either, but she lands a job as a TV chef, where she eschews all the trinkets that the studio has provided as kitchen décor.  Instead, she treats cooking as science and even calls her home kitchen the “lab”—not exactly a misnomer, since it contains a centrifuge, beakers, and a Bunsen burner.  In one episode, she advises cutting slits in the top crust of chicken pot pie and describes how it will otherwise behave like Mt. Vesuvius.  The fact is that she is a terrific cook and beautiful as well, but her TV show largely focuses on empowering women to believe in themselves and what they can accomplish and shed stereotypes.  She also has a dog whose vocabulary numbers in the hundreds and an extremely precocious four-year-old daughter who stuns the kindergarten librarian by asking for books by Norman Mailer.  Of course, not everyone is as brilliant as Elizabeth, her daughter, and her dog, and I expect that some people will be turned off by Elizabeth’s attitude, which borders on arrogance.  I, however, as well as her fictional TV viewers, found her to be delightful, inspiring and courageous, although at times overly forthcoming.  What TV personality in her right mind would offer that she’s an atheist in the 1950s?  Speaking of the 1950s, I loved all the references to that era’s popular TV fixtures, such as the Jack LaLanne Show and The Huntley-Brinkley Report.  Garmus’s writing style, in addition to provoking laugh-out-loud responses, felt sort of breathless, or maybe that was just my reaction to the zippy pace of the novel.  I hope the author has another book in her with a heroine who leaps off the page like Elizabeth Zott does.