MOTHER DOLL by Katya Apekina

I’m not sure if this book has zero plot or two plots.  If it’s two plots, neither is to my liking.  One involves Zhenia, a young rudderless woman, and the other involves her great-grandmother, Irina, who is deceased.  Irina tells her story to Zhenia via a medium, and no one seems to question how ludicrous this is.  Also, the author does not clearly delineate the two stories, except that Zhenia’s is third-person and Irina’s is first-person.  I had to remind myself constantly that the “I” was Irina.  Basically, Irina is trying to atone for leaving her daughter Vera, Zhenia’s beloved grandmother, in a Russian orphanage.  Neither Zhenia’s nor Irina’s story, nor Vera’s for that matter, held my interest.  By far the most unusual story is that of Paul, the medium, but he doesn’t get nearly as much coverage as the women.  Zhenia’s mother Marina, a biologist, seems the most grounded, but she gets short shrift as well, and human interaction is not her strong suit.  I think Irina’s history as a Russian revolutionary definitely has the potential to keep the reader engaged, but it just fell flat for me, and her betrayal of a beloved teacher left me scratching my head.  Rasputin’s cameo grabbed my attention during his brief appearance in the novel, but it wasn’t nearly enough to salvage it for me, and I would have appreciated a little more background regarding this period in Russian history.

SMALL MERCIES by Dennis Lehane

Mary Pat is a feisty, white “Southie broad,” to use her words, in 1974.  She has lived her entire life in the projects of South Boston, which now face the eruption of a racially-motivated conflict stemming from a judge’s order to bus white students to a predominantly Black school.  Then Mary Pat’s seventeen-year-old daughter, Jules, goes missing on the same night that a 20-year-old Black man is found dead in a subway station near where Jules was last seen.  Mary Pat has already lost her first husband to organized crime and her son to drugs, and Jules’s disappearance is the last straw.  She goes on the warpath, seeking out anyone who might have information on Jules’s whereabouts and becoming a volatile vigilante in the process.  She makes a series of shocking discoveries about her neighbors and about Jules but also about herself and how she has fomented hate and bigotry in her own daughter.  This is a gritty, visceral, violent tale of vengeance, but the unabashed hostile racism is what makes it hard to digest at times.  Dennis Lehane, I do hope this is not your last novel, because it is one of your best.  It is full of really striking observations, and there are a few moments that lighten up the dark nature of this book.  On page 234, we have this reflection from a cop: “Damn, Bobby thinks, if I’d met Mary Pat five years ago and she worked the street like this?  I’d have made lieutenant by now.”  No doubt.

SINCE WE FELL by Dennis Lehane

Rachel is a TV journalist who wants to find out who her father is.  Her mother has died and has always refused to divulge his identity.  Then Rachel’s career and her marriage take a nosedive after she has an on-air panic attack in Haiti.  We know from the prologue that Rachel will shoot her husband but apparently not her first husband.  Her second husband is Brian, a former private detective whom Rachel had tried to hire to find her father.  After the Haiti fiasco, Rachel becomes increasingly reclusive and rarely ventures outside her home, but Brian encourages her to face her fears.  Except for the violent prologue, we would wonder if Lehane has moved from thrillers to character studies, and with a rare female protagonist to boot.  Then Rachel discovers that Brian may be leading a double life, and the real action begins, in more or less typical Lehane fashion, with lots of twists and turns.  One reviewer suggested that the author wrote this book with a movie deal in mind, but I can’t complain.  I will want to see the movie, too.

MOONLIGHT MILE by Dennis Lehane

This novel may lack some of Lehane’s usual bite, but, hey, it’s the last of the Angela Gennaro/Patrick Kenzie novels, and I’m willing to cut the author some slack.  Angie and Patrick are now married with a four-year-old daughter, when the girl from Gone, Baby, Gone reenters the picture, or not, as she has actually gone missing again more than a decade later.  Amanda McCready is now sixteen, sharp as a tack, and apparently does not suffer fools gladly, including her incompetent mother.  Patrick wants to make amends for having returned her to said mother in the first place and now must determine whether she has been kidnapped again or has simply taken off of her own accord.  The latter seems unlikely, since she needs to finish school in order to qualify for admission to an Ivy League university.  The real start of this novel is Amanda herself, absent or present, who overshadows Patrick and Angie with her guile and ability to bend others to her will.  Patrick and Angie are no slouches, but Patrick unwittingly challenges Russian Mafiosi, who, of course, threaten harm to his daughter.  Where is my favorite Lehane character—Patrick’s very capable sidekick, Bubba--in all this?  He takes a backseat as babysitter, and I did not like him in that role at all, even if he is the one person who can do the job effectively.  Anyway, I will miss our two intrepid investigators.

PRAYERS FOR RAIN by Dennis Lehane

Sometimes I just want to curl up with nothing but Dennis Lehane novels, especially the ones featuring private investigators Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro.  Patrick is the narrator, and, along with his daunting pal Bubba, deters a stalker from continuing to bother Karen Nichols.  Six months later Karen has done a swan dive from the top of a tall building, and Patrick is determined to find out why.  She seems to have run into a huge spate of very bad luck, including the death of her fiancé.  Although Patrick and Angie have gone their separate ways, Angie soon becomes involved in the case, and our two favorite gumshoes are casting looks of longing at one another—again.  I just can’t get enough of these characters, and, although the twisty plot is front and center, their relationship and their sparkling banter is enough to keep me turning the pages.  And let’s not forget Bubba, who can’t resist an opportunity to blow things up and make the bad guys wish they’d never been born.  When he’s involved in a conversation, he gets most of the funniest lines.  The adversary in this novel is an elusive baddie whose mission seems to be finding his target’s weaknesses and exploiting those until his victim basically self-destructs.  His true motive, however, remains a mystery until the very end.

FROZEN RIVER by Ariel Lawhon

A New England midwife in 1789, Martha Ballard is a woman ahead of her time.  A champion of women’s rights, she is a compassionate champion of the many women bearing children who were conceived out of wedlock.  When an evil man, Joshua Burgess, turns up dead in the river, she testifies against Joseph North, who along with Burgess raped the pastor’s wife.  North, however, is a formidable opponent, given his wealth and standing, who wields power through threats and intimidation.  Martha attends to so many women that I found it difficult to keep them all straight, but Martha herself is a force to be reckoned with and is surrounded by a (mostly) supportive family, including her saint of a husband.  She does not suffer fools gladly, especially those who refuse to help themselves.  Some aspects of this novel seemed superfluous, including the existence of a rare silver fox whom Martha views as an omen.  Also, the book occasionally veers into the past and the events surrounding Martha’s marriage, and I rushed through these unnecessary detours, which could have been handled succinctly via Martha’s first-person narration. The pace of the main storyline, however, is brisk, as Martha rushes from one emergency to another.  The murder of Burgess sort of hovers in the background, never totally out of the picture and propelling itself to center stage from time to time.  There are enough evil men here and maligned women to fill two books, but the author failed to tie off one loose end regarding the fate of an unwanted newborn.  Martha, however, is the main attraction here and shows us what a woman with gumption and a strong sense of justice looks like, in any era.

VIGIL HARBOR by Julia Glass

What a fascinating cast of characters Julia Glass has conjured up for this novel.  Most of them live in an affluent Massachusetts town, but not all of the residents know one another, and I sometimes forgot about that.  However, Mike, a marine biologist, and Margo, a retired English teacher, do know each other, and their respective spouses have run away together.  Celestino is an undocumented Guatemalan immigrant whose residency status is a constant source of anxiety that his wife and son cannot really fathom.  Several more denizens of this community have their own chapters in the book, but a couple of interlopers with nefarious objectives bring danger to a community where people are not accustomed to locking their doors.  Generally, Julia Glass’s novels exude a sense of calm, even when the circumstances are dire, but this novel has a section that I would describe as gripping.  Though not a thriller by any means, here the author proves that she can produce some nail-biting suspense as well as deliver characters that we wish we could spend more time with.  She also throws in a bit of semi-magical realism with a tangential character named Issa who may be a selkie, shape-shifting between a human without a belly button and a seal.  I’m not sure what’s the point of making this character’s origin a mystery, but I rolled with it anyway.  Two of Issa’s lovers are prominent characters in the book; one thinks Issa is mentally unstable, and one thinks she is a supernatural being.  Definitely a head-scratcher there, but I assumed mental illness until late in the book when the author seems to be steering us toward a different viewpoint.  My chief gripe is that some of the chapters are in italics, and I did not want to linger there, just because of the font.

A HOUSE AMONG THE TREES by Julia Glass

What do an Oscar-winning actor, a celebrated children’s book author/illustrator, and a man dying of AIDS have in common?  They are all characters in this wonderful book, along with the main character, Tomasina (Tommy for short), who is the long-time live-in assistant to Mort Lear, the aforementioned author, who has died suddenly in an accident when the novel opens.  Tommy, as Mort’s executor, has a lot on her plate, including setting up a foundation for boys and explaining to a museum curator what Mort’s wishes were for his collection of drawings and manuscripts.  Tommy has devoted decades of her life to Mort.  She has no regrets about living in his shadow, as she has enjoyed the company of Mort and his fellow authors, has traveled the world for his book tours, and has accompanied Mort to numerous awards shows. I would not say that she lives vicariously through Mort, but her life has been tightly entwined with his for decades.  My favorite side-plot, however, is that of Nick Greene, who is set to play Mort in a Hollywood biopic and who wants to absorb as much about Mort’s life as possible.  The fact that Nick is humble and kind may seem a bit unrealistic, but fame is a relatively new phenomenon for him, and it has not gone to his head yet.  One wonders how long this will last, as everyone who meets him is starstruck.  This book’s plot takes a backseat to its characters, not all of whom are lovable, as well as the characters in Mort’s most celebrated books.  I did not want to come to the end of this book and thus allow these characters to live the remainder of their lives in my imagination rather than in Julia Glass’s.

THE PASSENGER by Cormac McCarthy

This novel has two great opening scenes.  The first is a young woman’s suicide by hanging.  The second is a sunken plane full of dead passengers.  Despite this auspicious beginning, I would describe this book as uneven.  Some parts I would give five stars, rating this the author’s best read since The Road, and other parts merit only two stars.  The main character is Bobby Western, a salvage diver, and the woman who commits suicide is his brilliant and beautiful sister, Alicia, a mathematician.  These two characters are in love with each other.  Seriously.  Most of the chapters are Bobby’s, but some are Alicia’s, and these latter ones just annoyed me, partly because they are in italics and partly because they are peopled with characters who are products of her schizophrenia.  Bobby, on the other hand, is mostly a man of few words, and although there is some great dialog here, I found it difficult to keep up with who was saying what.  Especially challenging is a long conversation between Bobby and another man about quantum mechanics, and physics is not my long suit.  More intriguing is the fact that the IRS freezes all of Bobby’s assets, although probably not for owing back taxes.  Rather, his problem seems to stem from the fact that a passenger was missing from the cabin of the underwater plane.  If I thought the sequel, Stella Maris, would further address this sinister situation, I would read it, but apparently it is just about Alicia’s psychiatric treatment.

THE CROSSING by Cormac McCarthy

Fortunately, I remember some of my college Spanish, as this book contains a lot of it, and the author doesn’t always translate it.  Some of it I ignored, some of it I got the main idea from the context, and some of it I looked up.  The timeframe is not really clear until later in the book when the U.S. enters WWII.  The protagonist, a teenager named Billy, rides off from New Mexico to return an injured wolf to Mexico, leaving behind his parents and younger brother and taking with him the family’s only firearm.  Billy encounters all sorts of people, both good and bad, in the course of his travels.  Without the good people, he never would have survived all three of his forays into Mexico, but, if it weren’t for the bad people, he might not have had to return there at all.  Billy has skills that serve him well most of the time, but luck can be a fickle companion. This book reminded me a bit of Huckleberry Finn without the humor and with a horse as the means of travel instead of a raft.  Since this is a Cormac McCarthy novel, you know it is going to be Dark with a capital D.  The section that I found most riveting is one in which a very competent doctor is patching up a bullet wound, where the bullet went straight through.  In another section that held my attention, a passerby treats a horse’s knife wound with a strange brew and a poultice.  I guess I just liked the healing better than the bloodshed.

SUTTREE by Cormac McCarthy

Cornelius Suttree is living on a houseboat near Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1951.  He makes a living—if you want to call it that—fishing on the river with trotlines.  Suttree is a friend to everybody he meets and the ultimate good Samaritan, usually to the detriment of his own well-being.  Some of these so-called friends he meets in jail, or more specifically, the workhouse, where he is occasionally confined for passing out in an inebriated state in a public place.  One previously incarcerated friend is Harrogate, a teenager who has been caught defiling watermelons—you can guess what that entails--that don’t belong to him.  Suttree gets dragged into various capers, most of which are illegal, such as poisoning bats, robbing banks, and disposing of dead bodies.  He always protests getting involved in these schemes but eventually finds it easier to go along than to resist.  The cast of ne’er-do-well characters in Suttree’s life is voluminous, and I finally gave up trying to keep them straight.  Suttree’s mysterious past proves that he has not always been someone to rely on, but we get only the briefest glimpse of that.  I suppose you could say that this book is darkly humorous, with the emphasis on “darkly.” It reads like a cross between Tobacco Road and Huckleberry Finn, but, ironically, almost every sentence contains a word that I don’t recognize.  Did I look them all up?  No, or I would still be reading this book.

THE GOD OF THE WOODS by Liz Moore

At a summer camp in 1975 in the Adirondacks, Barbara Van Laar, the daughter of the camp owners, goes missing.  Oddly enough, her younger brother, Bear, has been missing for over a decade, and the same serial killer was at large during both disappearances.  Hence, we actually have two mysteries to solve here.  Enter Investigator Judy Luptack, mostly underestimated because she is female.  She and the camp director, T.J. Hewitt, are the most competent women in this book.  Louise, a camp counselor, was partying the night of Barbara’s disappearance, but she basically just has bad taste in men.  The award for most insipid of the women is Alice Van Laar, Barbara’s mother, who has basically checked out and given herself over to alcohol and tranquilizers since her beloved son disappeared.  Her husband and his father are arrogant jerks who seem a little too tight-lipped to be innocent, but with red herrings galore, any guess is likely to be wrong.  The women, plus Barbara’s bunkmate and minus T.J., get multiple chapters in the book, as does the serial killer, so that the Van Laar men remain somewhat enigmatic.  The timeline goes back and forth, but the author labels the chapters very specifically to alleviate the guesswork.  I would have liked a little more suspense here, maybe some cliffhangers, but Judy is the character who captured my attention.  At 26, she has trouble breaking free of her parents, despite her successful career, because she is unmarried.  That problem seems more 1950ish than 1975 to me, but whatever.  And don’t let the length of this book turn you off, as this is a fast read, with mostly short chapters, so that stopping places are easy to come by, if you really want to stop.

EVERYONE IN MY FAMILY HAS KILLED SOMEONE by Benjamin Stevenson

I have to admit that I enjoyed this novel, which exceeded my expectations by a long shot.  The main action takes place at an Australian ski resort, where our first person narrator, Ernest Cunningham, joins his family to celebrate the release of his brother Michael from prison.  In fact, Ernest was the witness who sealed Michael’s fate at the trial.  The event gets off to a rocky start when a dead body shows up in the snow before Michael has even arrived.  An inept cop named Crawford chalks the death up to exposure, until Sofia, Ernest’s stepsister, proves that in fact the dead man is a homicide victim.  Ernest becomes the de facto investigator of the crime, but he actually just writes books about how to craft a murder mystery novel.  We assume that he will eventually solve the crime, but in the meantime the plot is a bit overly intricate.  Past events related to Ernest’s brother Jeremy and their father, their connection to the man Michael murdered, and the disappearance of a girl named Rebecca McAuley are somewhat convoluted.  There are so many killers and so many murders that I found it challenging to keep up, and the family relationships just added another layer of confusion.  On the flip side, the main storyline hums along with Ernest as our entertaining guide and first-hand observer.  One loose end dangles at the end, and I think the author should have tidied that up a bit.

FOURTH WING by Rebecca Yarros

This book reached out and grabbed me and wouldn’t let go, with its passion, partially fueled by magic dragons, igniting the page, along with a generous helping of the f word.  This is an R-rated, super-addictive romantasy, which has Harry Potter elements to it but is definitely not for children.  Think more along the lines of Game of Thrones.  Also, I’m not sure how much it would appeal to men, so that I’ve now narrowed the audience down to adult women.  Much of the plot is predictable, but it’s still a thrill ride of the first caliber.  Twenty-year-old Violet is the first-person narrator who has to choose a quadrant in which to train for service to Navarre, and she has spent her entire life preparing to become a scribe—keeper of the archives.  However, her mother, a high-ranking military leader, insists that Violet become a Rider—of dragons, that is.  Many don’t survive the first test, which involves walking across a narrow, high parapet, where one misstep means falling to one’s death.  Those who do survive this and many other daunting tasks will have the opportunity to bond with a dragon who will endow them with magical powers.  As for the romance angle, it will be steamy enough to raise your heart rate.

THE CURSE OF PIETRO HOUDINI by Derek B. Miller

The appeal of this book eludes me.  It is a picaresque adventure story, but the uninspired writing style and molasses-like pace did not deliver.  The book starts out in first-person, narrated by a 14-year-old girl whom Pietro Houdini takes under his wing and assigns the name of Massimo—a boy’s name.  Massimo’s parents have been killed in a WWII bombing, and Massimo follows Pietro to an abbey for refuge.  When Massimo embraces his identity as a boy, the narration changes to third-person.  Then Massimo becomes a girl again but with another false name, and the narration remains third-person.  Guess what the final narration and identity change is?  Is this a stylistic choice or a metaphoric choice or what?  For me, it’s just kind of a mess.  As for the writing style, I would say that it is written for a12-year-old, except that it contains subject matter not appropriate for a juvenile.  Honestly, I would prefer to read a novel intended for a young audience than to read one intended for adults that has such a simplistic writing style.  The book does contain some humor and some historic information, but I was still glad when it was over.

BOOTH by Karen Joy Fowler

Sometimes I find historical fiction to be well-researched but poorly written.  This novel, although overly long, is both well-researched and written well enough.  The focus is on the Booth family and their ten children, several of whom die young from smallpox and cholera.  John Wilkes is one of the youngest Booth children and adored by all, despite some pretty despicable behavior, long before he assassinates Lincoln.  His father is a renowned Shakespearean actor, often performing drunk, and several of his sons, including John, follow in his footsteps, as both an actor and a drunk.  Even their spinster sister has a drinking problem, although she seems able to keep hers hidden by mostly staying home with their mother.  Speaking of their mother, she is not even legally married to their father, who abandoned his first wife and son but cannot really shake them off.  Although the author tried not to make John Wilkes the centerpiece here, I could not help but look for him on every page, anticipating the horrendous act for which he is known.  This novel does provide some context but does not attempt to make him out to be a good guy who made a bad mistake.  On the contrary, in his warped mind, he is performing a service to the country.  I found it puzzling that John Wilkes was such a proponent of slavery, while all of the other members of his family disagreed with his stance but chose to overlook it.  The various members of his family play the blame game—blaming a brother for throwing John out of the house, blaming his co-conspirators, blaming themselves for not having seen it coming, blaming Lincoln for going to the theater.

PROPERTIES OF THIRST by Marianne Wiggins

The heart of this story is Schiff, an American Jewish lawyer from the Department of the Interior.  He has been assigned the unpleasant task of setting up the Manzanar Internment Camp in California shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor.  Members of the filthy rich Rhodes family, whose land near the camp is being appropriated for a landing strip, are the supporting characters.  The patriarch is Rocky Rhodes (!), who is in a constant battle with the Los Angeles Water Department, who have helped themselves to the snow runoff in his valley.  Sunny Rhodes, Rocky’s daughter, owns a restaurant in town, and sparks fly between her and Schiff, although she is engaged to someone else.  What really lights up the page, though, is the dialog between Schiff and anyone else, and scenes that don’t involve Schiff are somewhat dry.  Fortunately, such scenes are infrequent.  This book stretches to over 500 pages, but I would have gladly followed Schiff for 500 more, especially since we are left with loose ends galore.  There is so much to savor here, though.  It has love, conflict, oppression, compassion, heartbreak, suspense—all wrapped in splendid prose.  The Japanese internment camp may be the reason that all these characters come together, but it is not really the centerpiece of the novel.  That honor belongs to the landscape and the characters, who do everything they can to lessen the severe hardship of the people whose lives have been upended by an event that they neither invited nor condoned.

THE LAST WHITE MAN by Mohsin Hamid

This slim novel is a parable that is a cross between Kafka’s The Metamorphosis and Saramago’s Blindness.  It also brings to mind John Howard Griffin’s memoir, Black Like Me.  Here we have a young white man named Anders who wakes up one day and discovers that he is now Black.  Furthermore, he does not look like his former self, but he has the same memories, preferences, aptitudes, body type, habits, etc., that he had before.  His father is wary of this Black man in his midst, but Anders’s friend Oona takes his new look in stride.  Then more and more people have the same experience of becoming Black and having to adapt to being treated differently, and not just by white people.  This is empathy on a whole new level and literally walking in the shoes of an oppressed ethnicity.  At first there is some unrest, but then that tapers off, and nothing much happens.  At some point during this transformation process for all white people, distinguishing between who used to be white and who has always been Black becomes nearly impossible. My take on this book is that the author is telling us that racial bigotry based on skin color makes no sense, and, of course, he is right.  If everyone were Black, that prejudice would disappear, but other biases might become more widespread.  Anyway, this book definitely provides food for thought in the what-if department.

LEAVING by Roxana Robinson

Do not read this book.  Seriously.  It’s tedious at times with a lot of hand-wringing and some heavy-handed justice being dealt.  The premise is a love story between two sixty-somethings, and I felt like I was reading a letter in a newspaper advice column.  Sarah and Warren were young lovers who split up due to a couple of misunderstandings on Sarah’s part.  They then went their separate ways and married other people.  Sarah is now divorced with two well-adjusted adult children, whereas Warren is married with a grown daughter.  When Warren decides to leave his wife, his daughter becomes outraged and completely cuts him off from all communication.  Really?  His wife and daughter both insist that he is destroying the family by choosing to live his own life.  I found all this drama absurd, and, yes, I know it happens, but it’s still absurd for a man to be held hostage by his daughter who is no longer part of his household.  Sarah’s daughter’s assessment of both Warren and his daughter is spot-on, even though she has never met either of them.  If you’re looking for characters who attain some level of redemption, skip this one.  It’s depressing but not a tear-jerker.  One section that is very tense—life and death--is the best part, and I can’t complain about the writing.

SECOND PLACE by Rachel Cusk

The title refers to a rustic guest cabin on the same property as the narrator’s main house.  The fiftyish narrator, known to us simply as M, offers the cabin to a formerly renowned artist, known to us as L. L’s work had a life-changing effect on M in her younger days, but his relevance to the art world has since faded.  He shows up with a beautiful young woman named Brett, who turns out to be quite wealthy and adept at a number of tasks.  The narrator is stunned and disappointed that L brought along a girlfriend, and we have to wonder what exactly was M’s motivation in inviting him.  She is married to Tony, who is a salt-of-the-earth guy whose portrait L wants to paint.  M fumes that she is not to be the subject of one of L’s paintings, but it soon becomes obvious that L intensely dislikes M, especially as she humiliates herself trying to gain his favor.  I’m not sure who comes across worse in this novel, L or M, as L behaves like an entitled brat, and M is making a royal mess of her life, as she has apparently done in the past.  M seems to be aware that L is a snobbish, cruel boor but still yearns for his attention and approval, despite the fact that her husband is a much better man.  This novel is small in terms of number of pages but weighty in content, I suppose, and contains a lot of abstract philosophizing that I did not understand.  Sometimes the sentences just did not make sense to me and threatened to put me to sleep.  And what’s with all the annoying exclamation points?  Wake-up calls, maybe?  At times, I felt as though I were reading an email written in all caps.