THE SCHOOL FOR GOOD MOTHERS by Jessamine Chan

Frida Liu has a “very bad day” and leaves her eighteen-month-old daughter home alone for two and a half hours.  As a result, she must spend a year at the School for Good Mothers, which is actually a school for bad mothers who need to become good mothers.  The beginning of the book, before Frida enters the school, is tense and suspenseful, but her time at the school involves too much angst and hand-wringing.  The students are assigned a robotic doll, reminiscent of the artificial friend in Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun, who has human-like capabilities.  Frida names hers Emmanuelle, which the doll struggles to pronounce.  Frida and Emmanuelle are a team in the quest for Frida’s parental rights being restored.  Their practice sessions include subjects such as stranger/danger and empathy for those less fortunate, but Emmanuelle initially sees a homeless person as stranger/danger, not as someone in need.  I like the idea and originality of this novel more than its actual substance.  Eventually, the author paints herself into a corner with Frida’s many failings--with only one way out.

THE RABBIT HUTCH by Tess Gunty

Vacca Vale is a fictitious Indiana city that was once a thriving industrial metropolis.  Now it is dying, and developers plan to demolish a sizeable greenspace.  The title of the book refers to an affordable housing apartment complex in which most of the characters reside.  There are rabbits in the story as well, not to mention in the somewhat disturbing epigraph.  Blandine is an exceptionally bright and beautiful young woman who has aged out of the foster system, as have her three male teenaged roommates whose moral compasses are seriously skewed.  Blandine’s personal mission is to stop the developers by peppering them with voodoo dolls and whatnot.  One oddball character who sweeps in from California is the son of a famous but now deceased actress.  He likes to paint his almost naked body with the liquid from glow sticks and then barge into the home of someone with whom he has a bone to pick.  At first, I found the storyline depressing and not exactly cohesive, but then I laughed out loud occasionally.  Overall, though, I would say that this book is a bit dark—about a depressed city and its unfortunate denizens.  In a long and seemingly unrelated section of the book, gifted high school student Tiffany becomes romantically involved with a 42-year-old married teacher.  Her connection to the Rabbit Hutch comes not so much as a surprise as a confirmation of what the author has led us to suspect.  Here’s my favorite passage from that section:

“It’s clear to her that he would be happier in a coastal city.  It’s clear to him that she would be happier in a different species.”

I hope that species is not rabbits.

THE HERO OF THIS BOOK by Elizabeth McCracken

Whether or not I like an author depends a lot on which of their books I read first.  In the case of Elizabeth McCracken, I loved The Giant’s House, but if I had read Niagara Falls All Over Again or Bowlaway first, I probably would not still be reading her books.  This book, however, is another winner for me.  Marketed as a novel, it’s mostly a memoir and totally a paean to the author’s beloved but now deceased mother.  The first-person narrator is in London visiting, contemplating and commenting on various sites she had visited with her mother or would have liked to.  Her mother had mobility issues her entire life, due to cerebral palsy—a diagnosis that the narrator/daughter was not aware of until she became an adult.  The prose here is smart, funny, and touching, but if you’re looking for a meaty plot, don’t expect to find one here.  The narrator also reflects on the craft of writing and insists that a character’s physical characteristics be described.  I couldn’t agree more.  I always find it frustrating if I cannot picture a character in my mind.  In this case, the author describes her mother quite vividly, including her diminutive stature and her eyebrows, “which were like nobody else’s.”  Oddly enough, I did not find the narrator’s mother to be all that endearing.  Even the narrator owns up to some of her mother’s faults.  Both of the narrator’s parents where hoarders, and her mother was unwilling to part with even one of four waffle irons that she never used.  The narrator admits that she and her mother were both terrible at managing money, but the narrator did discover after her mother’s death that her mother had financial resources that her mother never tapped, because she did not know they existed.  For someone obviously so intelligent, this lapse just baffles me.

TOM LAKE by Ann Patchett

Lara and her husband Joe own a Michigan cherry orchard, and all three of their adult daughters are at home helping out during the Covid lockdown.  It’s the perfect time for Lara to share the story of her brief career as an actress and her involvement with an actor named Peter Duke who became a movie star.  The rapt attention of her three daughters eggs Lara on, starting with her unplanned audition for the role of Emily in her high school’s production of Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town.  She goes on to play Emily in two other venues, and the final production is the one in which she meets Peter Duke, referred to simply as Duke throughout this book, who plays her father.  Lara so thoroughly embodies the Emily of the play, that the cast and crew call her Emily, which is also the name of her oldest daughter.  Two characters with essentially the same name occasionally caused me some mild confusion in distinguishing between the past and the present or the mother and the daughter, but not to a degree that detracted from my enjoyment of the story.  The real questions that we readers wanted answered were why she gave up acting, why did she break up with Duke, and how did she meet Joe.  The answers to all of these questions are unexpected.  This is just a delightful and beautifully written story of family and the regrettable mistakes we made when we were young.  Lara’s mistakes are myriad and embarrassing, often reflective of poor judgment, but they all lead to the contentment that she now enjoys.

TRUTH & BEAUTY by Ann Patchett

Lucy Grealy was an author and poet and a dear friend of Ann Patchett’s, ever since they were roommates at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop.  This homage to Lucy and to her friendship with Patchett is very readable but not quite riveting.  Lucy was a very needy person who just wanted to be loved, preferably by a man, despite the fact that she had tons of very devoted friends—both male and female.  As a child she developed cancer of the jaw, and her life was an endless series of surgeries intended to improve her appearance and her ability to eat and speak.  She achieved acclaim as a writer when she published Autobiography of a Face in 1994, but no surgeon was able to reconstruct her face satisfactorily.  She suffered mightily, even having her fibula removed so that it could be used to supplant her jaw bone, but the results were never as advertised.  My only complaint about this book is that Patchett never gave me reason to love Lucy, who reminds me so much of the character Jude in A Little Life.  I empathized with Lucy, but she squandered not only her friendships but also her talent and her financial gains.  Devotees like Patchett were constantly at her beck and call—financially, emotionally, and in person.  I just couldn’t figure out why, unless all her friends needed to be needed, and I don’t think that’s the case with Ann Patchett, at least.  Ann obviously genuinely loved Lucy, partly for her mind, I suppose.  One very telling incident in the book is where Lucy went on a date with George Stephanopoulos after he answered her personal ad in the New York Review of Books.  She did not seem disappointed at their failure to hit it off, but the question on all her friends’ minds was whether he knew in advance about her disfigured face.  She unraveled when someone actually asked her.

OUR MISSING HEARTS by Celeste Ng

This book's political angle hits uncomfortably close to home.  The Crisis, a period of economic collapse, yielded way to a dystopian, fascist, xenophobic society with a Stepford tinge to it.  I would say that this book is prescient with its glimpse of what could be coming, but some aspects of it are already here, such as the removal of banned books from school libraries.  The right-wing extremist government described here has discovered that the most effective way to scare people into doing its bidding is to threaten to take away their children.  Sound familiar?  Parents who don’t parrot the government line will have their children placed in foster homes, and countless children have been relocated, thanks to a government-sanctioned vigilante system.  Twelve-year-old Noah Gardner, nicknamed Bird, would be in danger of being removed if his mother hadn’t fled and gone into hiding after a line from one of her poems became the rallying cry for subversives.  This book works well when it is firing a warning shot about what could be ahead for this country, but other aspects of the plot seem a little too convenient.  For example, Bird’s mother acquires the assistance of an old friend who happens to be extremely wealthy with access to some sophisticated technology, and the reunion of Bird with an old school friend in a completely different city struck me as an unlikely coincidence.  The small cast of characters gives the book an intimacy that contrasts with the global issues this book raises, and the plot moves along nicely, except for a section in which Bird’s mother goes into way too much descriptive detail of the Crisis.  I could have skipped that section and not missed out on anything.

UTOPIA AVENUE by David Mitchell

Utopia Avenue is the name of a very talented eclectic band assembled in England in the 1960s.  The backdrop of this musical era helps make this a nostalgia trip worth taking.  Griff, the drummer, is the only member of the band who does not sing or write, but he endures a tragic event that threatens to derail his career.  Jasper, the superb lead guitarist, has spent time in a mental health facility because of noises in his head that disrupt his life.  Dean is the bass player who left home as a teenager after his father burned his guitar and treasured memorabilia.  The keyboardist is a woman nicknamed Elf, who is not elfin but had moderate success previously in a folk duo.  I loved all four of these musicians, as well as their manager, Levon, but the plot drags at times, despite the sprinkling of cameo appearances by Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, John Lennon, David Bowie, and a bunch of others.  And let’s face it, this is a very long book that leans heavily on character development.  Dean is the closest to being a stereotypical rock star, and, although both he and Elf probably would have a shot at a solo career, the band members are very supportive of one another.  They become a close-knit family, despite the fact that, except for Jasper and Dean, they were strangers before they came together as a band.  Some healthy competition among them serves as an impetus for each of them to perform at their optimum level.  The biggest squabble among them is deciding whose single they will release first—Jasper’s, Dean’s, or Elf’s.  Ultimately, they roll the dice—literally.

SLADE HOUSE by David Mitchell

As ghost stories go, this one is not particularly gruesome or even scary, but it’s a good one nonetheless, and actually, it’s more of a haunted house story.  Every nine years a small iron door on a narrow street leads to a mansion occupied by a brother and sister who need to consume the soul of another person in order to maintain their immortality.  The intrepid but unwise people who enter the mansion are seeking those who have come before them and disappeared, but their curiosity or quest for closure seems to outweigh their good sense.  Part of the problem, of course, is that most of these seekers doubt that paranormal entities even exist and therefore lack the wariness that might protect them.  Plus, sometimes one of the sibling villains will inhabit a host’s body and masquerade as a helpful guide when in fact they are luring their unsuspecting prey into a trap.  Since each character, except the siblings, is a fleeting entity, I would say that this book is definitely not a character study, but David Mitchell’s writing never disappoints, even with the somewhat repetitive plot.  Each time a new victim starts up the Slade House stairs, I wanted to shout, “No, no, no, don’t go,” but each time some temptation eggs them on.  I have read that this novel is a sequel to The Bone Clocks, but since I do not remember that novel at all, I can assure you that this novel’s supernatural storyline stands on its own quite well, without the prequel.  It may not be a Mitchell’s masterpiece, but I certainly enjoyed the ride.

BLACK SWAN GREEN by David Mitchell

Jason Taylor is the smart, funny, and especially endearing first-person narrator of this gem, which takes place in a small English town in the 1980s.  Jason has a stammer, which is different from a stutter, according to Jason, and it plagues his thirteen-year-old life almost as much as the bullies at school.  And if these problems weren’t torture enough, his parents’ marriage is on the rocks, and his sister is leaving for college.  (The prospect of a broken home is never really funny, but Jason’s mom hilariously punishes his father for his infidelity with an expensive project that backfires.)  Jason’s numerous adventures fill the pages of this novel, the most telling of which, I think, is when he finds the lost wallet of his primary nemesis.  Another good one is his race through a backyard gauntlet which he has to negotiate in order to join a vaunted school gang, and this obstacle course seems to be a metaphor for the many pitfalls of adolescence which he has to weave his way through on a daily basis.  Jason strives for acceptance into a peer group that is obviously not worthy of him, but, along the way, he learns some valuable life lessons about love, death, bigotry, and honesty—to name a few.  We also discover late in the novel that the burden of guilt weighs him down, even though he really bears no responsibility for the tragedy in question.  In other words, he holds himself to too high a standard at times, and he’s a sensitive kid, writing poetry under a pseudonym in order to avoid ridicule.  My only complaint, and it’s a minor one, is that Jason’s narration is full of contractions, even double contractions, such as “shouldn’t’ve,” that are difficult to read.  I think the author intends for these contractions to lend authenticity to Jason’s voice, but that authenticity would be easier to listen to than to read, and I think Jason would be just as authentic on the page without this distraction.

ZORRIE by Laird Hunt

Some authors have the talent to produce a novel, or at least a short novel, about a fairly unremarkable life.  Such is the case here.  Zorrie Underwood’s life begins with an unfortunate childhood in Indiana, followed by a job in which she and her co-workers routinely ingest radium while painting glow-in-the-dark clock faces during the Great Depression.  Fortunately, she stays only a few months at the clock factory and does odd jobs to get by until she marries a farmer.  Hers is the type of rural life in which tragedy and misfortune are commonplace, but it is not as sorrowful a story as you might imagine.  On the other hand, bliss and passion to be in short supply.  Zorrie is a hard worker who earns the respect of her community but, after her husband’s death, yearns for a close connection like the one she had with her two co-workers, Janie and Marie, at the clock factory.  Her integrity is unquestionable, but she is not perfect, and she pays dearly for her mistakes and misunderstandings.  Her story flows gently, with a few bumps in the road, so that even her early adventures feel pretty tame, due to the tone of the book.  This is neither an adventure story nor a sob story, but it’s a story that reminds us how everyday lives are full of tales worth telling.

THE MINISTRY OF TIME by Kaliane Bradley

So many time travel novels are about someone falling in love with a time traveler.  Such is the case here as well.  Five people are transported from various times in the past to twentieth century London and are collectively known to the title organization as expats.  A bridge—basically a chaperone/housemate—is assigned to each expat to help them adjust, monitor their activities, and report back to the Ministry.  Our narrator, Sarah, whose name I think is mentioned only once, is the bridge for Graham Gore, a nineteenth century naval commander.  All of the expats were presumed dead in their previous lives, and Graham was snatched from a failed Arctic exploration in which all of his fellow shipmates perished.  This is not my favorite time travel novel, as that honor goes to 11/22/63 by Stephen King.  However, I still found it to be a pretty entertaining read.  The two main characters are both charismatic, and the plot kept me engaged, despite the fact that distinguishing the characters was sometimes a challenge.  For one thing, the expats are often referred to by the year from which they were transported, and I found that aspect of the novel annoying.  Gore was 1847 or sometimes just 47, and I had enough trouble keeping up with the other expats, since their impact on the storyline waxed and waned, much less who went with what century or year.  The writing is passable and keeps the plot moving, but I hate foreshadowing in a novel, particularly in a suspenseful one, and there is some of that near the end that is wholly unnecessary.  Thank you to Book Club Favorites at Simon & Schuster for the free copy for review.

THE BOY IN THE FIELD by Margot Livesey

Three siblings—Matthew, Zoe, and Duncan—happen upon a badly beaten and barely conscious boy in a field.  This discovery has a marked impact on each of them, as does the realization that their father is having an affair.   Matthew, the oldest, embarks on a quest to determine who attacked the boy.  Sixteen-year-old Zoe becomes romantically involved with an older man.  Duncan, a talented young artists who is adopted, decides that he wants to find his birth mother.  In some ways, this book feels as though it is intended for a young adult audience, but the beautiful writing and zippy pace make for a good read for us older adults as well.  The mystery of who assaulted the boy may be the hub of the story, but the author focuses more on how the three siblings individually process the event and how it affects their lives.  The author also addresses how truth is not always knowable:  the boy whispers one word when they first find him, but the three kids each hear a different word.  A feeling of sadness pervades most of the novel, but the conclusion is almost too saccharine.  I’d rather have that than one that’s too harsh, but not everyone lives happily ever after, either.  The boy in the field serves as a catalyst for the growth of the three main characters, but I would have liked a little more exploration of his backstory.  As is often the case, the character who appealed to me most was an animal--Lily, Duncan’s very perceptive dog.

MERCURY by Margot Livesey

Mercury is the name of a very special horse—so special that Viv has sacrificed all of her ideals for this horse, which she does not even own.  Like Gone Girl, this novel contains Donald’s perspective, then Viv’s, and then goes back to Donald’s.  These two are married with children, and their marriage starts to go off the rails when Mercury comes to the stable where Viv works.  Her ambitions for Mercury, with herself as the rider, crescendos into an unhealthy obsession.  In fact, obsession is not even a strong enough word.  Viv’s passion for Mercury is more like an addiction.  I devoured this book.  The author drops a few too many broad hints of major trouble on the horizon, but she managed the suspense level really well with good pacing and excellent writing.  A moral dilemma eventually develops for Donald, and that, too, provided motivation for me to keep reading when I should have been doing other things.  Viv, on the other hand, is a somewhat one-dimensional character.  She may love her children, but her love of Mercury trumps everything else.  Donald’s biggest failing seems to be inertia, and he seems to be blind at times to what is going on with Viv.  Ironically, he is an optometrist, but his friend Jack, who manages to hide his blindness from his girlfriend initially, has better vision than Donald when it comes to a person’s true character.

BEAUTIFUL WORLD, WHERE ARE YOU by Sally Rooney

Whereas Normal People was about one on-again, off-again couple, two such couples inhabit this novel, which is largely epistolary.  Eileen and Simon, who live in Dublin, have known each other since childhood, but Eileen fears that she will lose Simon as a friend if she commits to being his lover.  Alice, Eileen’s best friend, is an author with two successful novels to her credit and is living rent-free in a large house on the coast.  She meets Felix, who works in a warehouse, on a dating app and then spontaneously invites him to Italy with her on a press junket for her latest book.  Alice and Eileen exchange lengthy emails on a number of topics, including the collapse of civilization and the meaning of beauty, until Eileen and Simon finally visit Alice and meet Felix.  While the women are constantly second-guessing themselves, the men seem to know what they want.  In fact, the women do not come across as particularly lovable, and I’m not sure what the men see in them.  Felix is my favorite character. He seems to have excellent insight into the psyches of the other three characters, as his observations usually prove to be accurate.  He may not be book-smart, considering that he has no intention of reading the books Alice has written, but he is able to peel back the layers of everyone else’s insecurities to see what makes them tick.  I love the dialog in this book, and I can hear in my mind the Irish lilt in Felix’s voice. 

A CALLING FOR CHARLIE BARNES by Joshua Ferris

At first, the title character completely turned me off, with his five marriages and countless absurd failed business ventures.  I thought this book was going to turn out to be a farce.  However, as the book unfolds, we find that Charlie has redeeming qualities, despite the marital infidelities and poor judgment with regard to building a business.  I wouldn’t go so far as to say that he has a heart of gold, but neither is he heartless.  At 68 years old, he convinces himself that he has pancreatic cancer and proceeds to alert his children regarding his imminent death.  Apparently this is not the first time that he has diagnosed himself with a terminal illness, and his children are rightfully skeptical.  I don’t know to what degree this novel is autobiographical, but the narrator is Charlie’s son Jake, who is a writer.  Jake holds his father in high esteem, despite his father’s flaws and the uneasy relationship Jake has with Charlie’s current wife, Barbara, who seems to love Charlie more than perhaps he deserves.  Certainly Barbara and Charlie grew on me as the story unfolded, but the book has basically two endings, sort of like Atonement or Life of Pi.   I was not wild about this device in any of these books.  I can understand a need for dual endings if unreliable memories are at play, but that’s not the case.  The author has a different purpose here, and it ties in with Jake having given his father an unfinished draft of a book that Jake has written about Charlie, which is obviously this novel.  Several family members read this draft and uniformly react to it negatively, even denying some of its obvious facts, perhaps giving Jake pause about whether the truth is always the best path.

THE UNNAMED by Joshua Ferris

Tim Farnsworth, a partner in a New York law firm, suffers from bouts of the ultimate wanderlust.  When the urge to walk hits him, he can’t stop until he drops.  He eventually falls asleep in his tracks, even if he is in his bathrobe and barefoot in a snowstorm.  This affliction has his doctors baffled and his wife, Jane, at her wit’s end.  She has tried handcuffing him to the bed, but that solution is just as impractical as insisting that he keep a backpack of warm clothing with him at all times.  As he embarks on one of his unplanned excursions, he encounters a man who claims to have the knife with which a woman was murdered.  Tim is defending the man charged with the murder but can’t interrupt his walk to get more info from the man with the knife.  This failing is almost as crushing for Tim as the effect that his walking has on his family.  His compulsion is not entirely believable and is no doubt a metaphor for something I can’t identify, although drug addiction comes to mind.  Equally unbelievable is the fact that his episodes do not elicit the harassment that vagrants often endure or the pilfering of his wallet while he is sleeping in inconvenient places.  In fact, his odysseys are largely uneventful, except for the toll they take on his body.  Still, the issues with his job and his family keep this unusual story from seeming too outrageously absurd.

THE HEAVEN & EARTH GROCERY STORE by James McBride

Jews and Blacks live semi-harmoniously in this semi-voluminous cast of characters.  In fact, at times I had to remind myself who was Jewish and who was Black, and if I couldn’t remember, then it just didn’t really matter.  This amalgamation of ethnicities occupy Chicken Hill, a section of Pottstown, PA, in the 1930s, along with the usual bigots.  The intricate plot at times bogs down but ultimately revolves around Dodo, a Black teenager who lost his hearing in a home explosion.  The neighborhood bands together to hide Dodo from the authorities who want to confine him to a huge mental institution where abuse is rampant.  Moshe and Chona, who own the title establishment, shoulder most of the responsibility for keeping Dodo safe, but he is the nephew of Nate and Addie.  These four are the heart and soul of the novel.  The final section of the book covers two overlapping schemes, one of which requires more moving parts than I could fathom ever being successful.  This book also has a number of side plots whose relevance is not obvious until the finale, and McBride makes sure that all of his puzzle pieces fit together in the end.  Although obviously focused on community and connection, the book opens with an unidentified skeleton whose story eventually unfolds.  McBride also throws in a sprinkling of disabilities.  Aside from Dodo’s deafness, a number of characters seem to have foot problems, giving a pair of shoemakers some bit parts in this story, and Chona has one leg shorter than the other.  I’m not sure what the point is, except to demonstrate more fully what a blended community could look like.  There are definitely some evil dudes here, but kindness and acceptance prevail.

THE NETANYAHUS by Joshua Cohen

This book needs a different title.  For one thing, it sounds like it’s about the family of Israel’s current Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and it is to some degree, but it’s fiction, although how much of it is fiction is not really clear.  Certainly the first person narrator is fictional--Ruben Blum, a history professor, specializing in the history of taxation (!) at a fictional college in the state of New York.  Blum’s family is also fictional, including his daughter, Judy, who will stop at nothing to get a nose job.  The event that finally prompts the nose job is one of the most memorable moments in the book.  The other noteworthy events involve the arrival of the Netanyahus and the bedlam that ensues.  It’s the late 1950s, and Ben-Zion Netanyahu, father of Benjamin, arrives at the college where Blum teaches for a job interview, with his wife and their three unbelievably ill-behaved children in tow.  Blum has been chosen to chaperone Netanyahu to his various appointments around campus, solely because he is also Jewish and is the only Jew employed by the college in any capacity.  One of Netanyahu’s tasks is to teach a class, and his lecture is enlightening in a twisted sort of way, but the most appealing aspect of this book for me is the dialog.  Blum’s quips are priceless throughout, and his wife, Edith, effectively voices her exasperation with the Netanyahu family’s behavior, as well as her husband’s failure to restore order.  Both Blum’s parents and his wife’s parents appear separately for visits, and they are disruptive and hilarious in their own ways but not rivaling the chaos that the Netanyahus are able to achieve.

GHOSTS by Dolly Alderton

I may not be the target audience, which is probably women in their thirties, for this juicy novel, but I devoured it with relish.  Nina, the first-person narrator, is a successful author celebrating her thirty-second birthday when the book opens.  After ending a seven-year relationship with Joe, she is now ready to play the dating game and signs up for a dating app.  She scoffs at most of the profiles but finally sets up a date with 37-year-old Max, an outdoorsy accountant.  Nina is also dealing with a rude and noisy neighbor and a father whose dementia is worsening at an alarming rate.  I found Nina’s biggest problem, however, to be the diverging lifestyles among Nina and her longtime friends, particularly those like Katherine who are now married with children.  Nina finds herself in the position of having to dodge landmines in conversations related to weddings and pregnancies, as well as having to accept that such friendships are now rather one-sided, with Nina having to make all the concessions to accommodate her friends with family responsibilities.  Nina is no slouch herself when it comes to shouldering responsibilities, although in my opinion she drinks too much, but her priorities have not changed as radically since college as those of her friends.  Her reflections on men and how they can father a child at any age are spot-on, and I love how she stands up to her inconsiderate neighbor and the ex-boyfriend who jilted her friend Lola.

THE BOOK OF FORM AND EMPTINESS by Ruth Ozeki

Fourteen-year-old Benny Oh and his mother, Annabelle, both have a problem with inanimate objects.  Since the death of Kenji, Benny’s father, Benny hears the voices of things like a table leg, which tells him the story of a toddler being tied to it.  Annabelle’s hoarding of useless stuff could result in their eviction and in Benny’s removal to foster care.  Benny’s issues lead him to do some really asinine things, and I felt for Annabelle as she struggles to keep her job and her sanity while Benny becomes increasingly more unmanageable.  At its heart, this book is an attack on the materialistic world in which we live. However, it also makes a statement on the inadequacy of our mental health system, although Benny’s problems would be a challenge for any doctor trying to diagnose and treat them.  I found this book to be a relatively fast read, despite its length, but I found some aspects of it to be unnecessary and confusing.  At times, the narrator is definitely a book or books, and sometimes Benny is the narrator.  It also contains snippets from a book called Tidy Magic, which Annabelle is reading, although her adherence to its advice is haphazard at best.  Whereas objects speak to Benny, Annabelle speaks to objects, as suggested in Tidy Magic, thanking them for their service before disposing of them.  Despite all this conversation with inanimate stuff, the only objects that actually come to life are the tidying-up book itself and a collection of words on refrigerator magnets that periodically rearrange themselves in a different order.  Then there’s the author of Tidy Magic, who lives in a Zen monastery.  She comes into the picture because Annabelle voices her frustrations to the author via email with no expectation of a reply, and I guess that’s why we need to know her situation.  The good news about this side plot is that the Zen author’s aide offhandedly offers a welcome explanation for Benny’s behavior.

DETRANSITION, BABY by Torrey Peters

Two trans women, Reese and Amy, fell in love, but then Reese cheated with married men, and Amy has detransitioned back to a man, because being a trans woman was just too difficult.  Now he muses that before he transitioned from a man to a woman, he felt like his body was a separate obedient entity, like a good dog.  Then he transitioned to Amy, and the dog disappeared.  That would seem to be a good thing, but then he implies that he detransitioned because he missed the comfort of the dog.  That’s all well and good, but the dog did not come back, and now he is going by Ames. Believing himself to be sterile due to hormone injections from his years as Amy, Ames has a sexual relationship with his boss, Katrina.  She becomes pregnant with Ames’s child, and Ames has to ‘fess up to his trans history.  Katrina reels from the shock of this revelation but then rebounds and pushes Ames to decide whether he wants to commit to being a father or not.  Ames, however, is still wrestling with his gender identity and has not ruled out the possibility of transitioning to a woman again.  He broaches the possibility that he, Reese, and Katrina all serve as the child’s parents.  What?  Well, OK, the family unit is evolving these days, and Katrina eventually warms up to the idea, adopting the attitude that queerness is cool.  This book was definitely an education for me, as I don’t know any trans men or women, at least none that I am aware of.  The three main characters are fully formed and in transition, in more ways than one. I have to say, though, that Katrina’s flexibility about how her child would be raised seemed radical to me.  Of course, fiction is fiction.

TOMORROW, AND TOMORROW, AND TOMORROW by Gabrielle Zevin

I struggled with this book and don’t understand why it has received so many accolades.  I had a long career as a software developer, so the technology aspect did not turn me off.  However, the two main characters, Sam and Sadie, did.  Yes, they experience a lot of trauma and grief, but Sam is very buttoned up emotionally, and Sadie just goes into hiding occasionally, waiting for someone to draw her out.  These two collaborators in video game design just got on my nerves.  I also found it odd that Sam does most of the speaking engagements whenever publicity for a newly launched product is required; he seems to relate better to strangers than to friends and co-workers.  My favorite character was Marx, Sam’s college roommate who joins Sam and Sadie’s company, Unfair Games, as a producer, but there’s just not enough of him spread across the pages.  I also loved Simon and Ant, who join the company much later, but they are basically NPCs (non-player characters, in video game jargon).  Every time I picked up this book I hoped to read about anyone but Sam or Sadie.  Near the end of the book, however, is a section that follows a player (or players) through a game called Pioneers.  Characters in this game interact in a more empathetic and heartfelt way than the human characters in the novel, although, of course, the players inhabiting the characters in Pioneers are human.  Plus, for non-gamers like myself, the game sequence gives more insight into how such games work and why they are popular.  This novel needed more stuff like this, although Pioneers did not really appear to be fun.  My takeaway is that video games provide an outlet for some people to shed their insecurities and interact with other people in an alternate universe.  I’m  not judging here but rather offering a not necessarily valid conclusion.