IRON FLAME by Rebecca Yarros

Buckle up!  Fourth Wing was not a one-hit wonder, as this follow-up is just as breathtaking.  The author keeps a lot of plates spinning in the air without dropping a single one.  Violet and Xaden tackle a whole new set of problems in this world of dragons and magic that includes wielding lightning and commanding shadows.  Here we get some additional insight into Xaden’s past, some of which does not sit well with Violet.  I finally realized that their world does not seem so primitive, since magic basically replaces electronics, particularly when it comes to communication.  Magic even fuels their lighting.  Does it go too far?  Maybe occasionally, as new forms of magic keep popping up.  I can’t help wondering how much of this was in the author’s master plan and how much she makes up as she goes.  In any case, it’s a thrill a minute and a wildly exhilarating reading experience, with frantic battles, moral dilemmas, and a steamy love story that never quite settles into a comfortable relationship.  As for the non-human characters, Violet’s huge dragon, Tairn, gets all the best lines.

THE BIRD HOTEL by Joyce Maynard

Irene’s name used to be Joan, but her mother’s involvement in a radical group’s bomb detonation forces her and her grandmother to adopt new identities.  Then another tragedy strikes in Irene’s life. She contemplates suicide but instead impulsively joins a group of strangers on their bus headed south of the border.  She has left all her belongings behind, but she does have her passport, thinking that it might be useful in identifying her body after jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge.  A man on the bus implausibly gives her $1500, and she eventually lands at a small hotel somewhere in Central America.  Despite this auspicious start, the rest of the book is mostly serene, and the pace is just too pokey.  Even devastating natural disasters and personal betrayals seem to be accepted as par for the course, although maybe nothing is as bad as what Irene has already been through.  I just felt that this novel lacked zing, despite the revolving door of characters who stay at the hotel.  It also has way too much foreshadowing for my taste; I prefer to be surprised.  I did like that the author dishes out a heavy helping of karma for the scoundrels.

THE BERRY PICKERS by Amanda Peters

There is just not enough happening in this novel.  I guess you could say that it is long on characters and short on plot.  A four-year-old Indigenous girl from Nova Scotia named Ruthie disappears from a Maine berry farm in 1962 where her family works every year.  The family receives only cursory help from local law enforcement in searching for her, and that racial bias repeats itself when her older brother is killed in a fight, trying to protect a drunken man.  Ruthie then re-emerges as Norma with a white family, questioning why her skin is darker but receiving flimsy answers.  As an adult, her biological brother Sam recognizes her in Boston and calls to her by her birth name, which she recognizes, but her white mother’s sister whisks her away.  The only real mystery here is how Ruthie/Norma got from point A (her real family) to point B (her white family).  That’s all I really wanted to know.  The writing is good, with a few grammatical annoyances that may or may not have been intentional, but the book overall just did not offer any other incentive to keep reading.  A side plot involves her biological brother Joe who becomes volatile and then a wanderer as he deals with guilt related to both siblings’ deaths, but his story is just not that compelling.  Neither is Norma’s, for that matter, given that she never makes an effort to find out her true story until she overhears a conversation that shocks her into reality.

THE MAYTREES by Annie Dillard

Toby Maytree is a poet in Cape Cod, but his poetry is pretty straightforward, compared to the writing in this novel.  Are all of Annie Dillard’s books like this?  Maytree’s wife is Lou, an artist and a woman of few words, and she eventually has a son named Petie.  Then everything changes, but I won’t go into that and spoil pretty much the entire plot.  The book flap describes the prose here as “spare,” but I think the People magazine review, which calls it “oblique,” is more accurate.  Non sequiturs frequently appear in otherwise normal paragraphs that I thought I understood until I realized that I didn’t.  I was constantly confused about the characters’ ages, for example.  On the plus side, I found many sentences that state succinctly an illuminating thought about life in general or describe a person or place perfectly.  For example, on page 24, we have this:  “Jane’s hair overwhelmed two barrettes and a rubber band.”  However, these gems just do not compensate for the obscure allusions, over-the-top vocabulary, and weird word usage, such as “every last man jack” on page 126.  What does that mean?  OK, I looked it up, and I gather it’s a common idiom, just not one that I was familiar with.  Now I am.

THE WEDDING PEOPLE by Alison Espach

What a treat this fluffy but delightful crowd-pleaser of a book is.  It is so much fun, even though Phoebe, the protagonist, does not like the word “fun.”  It is also fun-ny.  My favorite line is on page 147, when a particularly acerbic character says, “Littering is a slippery slope.”  OK, you have to read this line in context for it to be funny, and it seems somehow disrespectful to describe a book as funny when the main character is initially planning her suicide.  Phoebe decides to do the deed in a swanky hotel where all the other rooms are occupied by a wedding party, and she soon gets swept up in their family dramas.  Lila, the uber-rich bride, is aghast that Phoebe might ruin her wedding by committing suicide, but obviously we would not have a book if Phoebe actually went through with it.  I didn’t even mind that the plot is totally predictable, because it’s so entertaining.  And, for a beach read, or for any read for that matter, the characters are exceptionally vivid.  I sometimes found it disconcerting that the author would paraphrase part of a conversation, but I was OK with that.  I just have one question:  What are side bangs?  We are talking about hair here.