CONVERSATIONS WITH FRIENDS by Sally Rooney

Two 21-year-old women who do poetry readings, Frances and Bobbi, meet Melissa, a photographer, and her husband Nick, a very handsome but not particularly famous actor.  The novel seldom diverges from interactions among these four people, except for the inner thoughts of Frances, the first-person narrator.  Frances and Bobbi were lovers at one time, but now they are just very good friends.  Frances develops a crush on Nick, who is twelve years older than Frances, which blossoms into her first sexual relationship with a man.  Her guilt is assuaged by the fact that Nick and Melissa no longer share a bed and don’t seem to have a very close marriage.  Although Nick and Frances communicate regularly online and in person, neither is able to express their feelings about the relationship, partly because neither seems to have a clue about what their feelings are.  Frances tries to shield herself from becoming too attached to Nick by making flippant and sometimes hurtful remarks to him.  I just wanted these two to start being honest with each other for a change and for Frances to stop vacillating about whether she cares about Nick or not.  Obviously, Nick is equally to blame, since he never feels secure in their relationship and is ambivalent about his marriage.  Frances also chooses not to open up to Nick or Bobbi when health and money issues arise.  These side plots don’t really distract from the main issue at hand, but, of course, plot is not a high priority in any of Sally Rooney’s novels.  Still, she somehow holds the reader’s attention with characters who don’t seem to be able to make up their minds. 

ALL FOURS by Miranda July

Our unnamed first-person narrator is a fairly well-known 45-year-old multimedia artist who refers to her child with gender-neutral pronouns.  She’s a creative, progressive thinker and becomes even more so as the plot develops.  Her tale begins with a planned three-week trip in which she will drive from Los Angeles to New York and back.   However, she stops at a motel in Monrovia and remains there until her scheduled return home, all the while giving her husband false and sparse details about experiences on a route that she has not actually traveled.  She meets a handsome thirty-year-old man named Davey and employs his wife to remodel her motel room.  Ok, this scenario is ludicrous, but the narrator has money to burn, so why not?  She is also helping this young couple fund their nest egg, even as she becomes friendly with Davey, who offers to show her around town.  When he takes his shirt off during a hike, her sexual attraction to him goes full throttle, and things go from heated to steamy in a hurry.  The visceral, lusty first half of this novel held my rapt attention, but the plot cools down significantly in the second half and becomes more about the narrator having to grapple with two issues.  One is the anticipated loss of her libido during perimenopause, and the other, naturally, is the precarious state of her marriage.

ALL THE COLORS OF THE DARK by Chris Whitaker

I loved the beginning and ending of this book, but the middle gets bogged down in the mire of a relentless quest, funded by robbing banks.  I think 100 pages could be shaved with no detrimental impact to the plot.  Anyway, it’s an epic saga that involves a 13-year-old boy with one eye, nicknamed Patch, who intervenes when a beautiful girl his age is in the process of being abducted.  Instead, Patch gets stabbed and disappears.  Patch’s mother is an alcoholic who could barely cope before Patch vanished, but Patch’s best friend, a girl named Saint, refuses to believe that Patch is dead.  She regularly engages with the police department, particularly Chief Nix, to ensure that the search for Patch continues.  There are more than a few serendipitous coincidences, plus another that could be deemed unfortunate, depending on your perspective.  For some reason I did not mind the huge role that luck played in this novel, but some other aspects were a bit outlandish.  For example, a boy suddenly becomes a talented artist, despite having never previously shown any interest in painting, and recreates a town on canvas with a high degree of exactitude, strictly from a verbal description.  Love in many forms is an important theme here, as is evil in the form of a couple of characters that brought to mind Eric Rudolph.  Vengeance plays a role as well and exacts a high price.

HEARTWOOD by Amity Gaige

If you’re thinking of hiking the Appalachian Trail, this book might change your mind.  Valerie is a nurse who has taken on the upper half of the trail in order to repair her soul after witnessing so many patients dying from Covid.  In Maine, nearing the end of her trip, she fails to meet up with her husband at their rendezvous point.  Bev is a 6-foot-tall game warden in her 50s who is heading up the search for Valerie.  She has battled misogyny in her job for her entire career, but the battle to find Valerie is wearing on her even more, as she has to report the lack of progress each day to Valerie’s husband and parents.  The third woman in this story is Lena, a wheelchair-bound retired scientist in a senior-living facility who at first thinks the missing hiker could be her daughter.  When she finds out otherwise, she continues to ponder Valerie’s whereabouts, along with a young man with whom she chats on social media.  Valerie’s story is told through a journal that she claims keeps her sane, but in order to lighten her pack she has previously jettisoned the tracking device that would have made the search for her quite easy.  At times I felt that this novel should have been named Heartbreak instead of Heartwood, as Valerie’s situation becomes more and more dire and Bev’s exasperation becomes increasingly palpable.  Even Lena becomes so exasperated that she destroys her computer in a temper tantrum.  As for Valerie, we ultimately find that her altruism is not always well placed, especially when self-preservation is at stake.

MARGO'S GOT MONEY TROUBLES by Rufi Thorpe

As an unmarried nineteen-year-old with a newborn, Margo has more problems than just money.  Margo’s mother is also a single mom, but Margo’s father, former pro wrestler named Jinx, is a more active dad, even with a whole other family, than the father of Margo’s infant son.  To address her money troubles, Margo creates an OnlyFans account after viewing the content that a female wrestler has created.  I had never heard of this social media platform until I read this book, but it’s a subscription service that specializes in sexual content.  Consequently, this book is not for prudes, as Margo goes about photographing her own body parts and offering to rate her subscribers’ body parts.  Things don’t get really interesting until word gets out to various family members (no pun intended) about how Margo is making ends meet.  Then her difficulties increase exponentially, yielding an anxiety-inducing read, as she faces the prospect of losing custody of her child.  This worrying possibility is definitely not funny, and although the tone of the book is fairly light, I would not classify this novel as humorous.  I have to say that I like the idea of his book better than the actual book.  The author successfully makes the point that sex workers, especially those like Margo who are basically selling pornography without ever having a sexual encounter, can still be responsible and loving parents.

SO FAR GONE by Jess Walter

Rhys Kinnick has been living off the grid for seven years and doesn’t recognize his grandchildren when they come knocking on his door.  Their mom, Bethany, has taken off and left a note for a neighbor to deliver the kids to Rhys, despite his self-imposed exile from the family.  However, Bethany’s husband, Shane, has sent goons from his right-wing militia to move the kids to Rampart, a vigilante training facility masquerading as a church, more or less.  Rhys decides to be proactive for a change, and his ex-girlfriend suggests he team up with another of her ex-boyfriends, Chuck, who happens to be an ex-cop.  Chuck is a trip, as is Rhys’s inquisitive nine-year-old grandson, Asher, who loves to do things that he is not good at, such as jump over creeks and compete in chess tournaments.  This novel, a combination of family drama and adventure, is a pleasure to read from start to finish, with the exception of a chunk in the middle that recounts Bethany’s counseling session with her therapist, who suggests that Bethany’s choices in men stem from her fraught relationship with her father.  Daddy issues?  Really?  Fortunately, this section is just a minor blip as the plot moves on to Bethany’s whereabouts and altercations with the Rampart crazies.  The family drama angle has Rhys wondering why he isolated himself in the first place and what he needs to do to get back into Bethany’s good graces.  Witty dialog provides an element of humor to a story of regret and reunion, peppered with a fair amount of gunplay.

ONYX STORM by Rebecca Yarros

The series stagnates with this book, which just does not pack as much of a punch as the first two—Fourth Wing and Iron Flame.  It is pleasurable enough to read, but nothing noteworthy happens, although Violet does start to settle into her role as a leader.  Perhaps the author intended this book to serve as a transitional story, since it is supposed to be the middle book in a series of five.  However, I think the middle book should be more of a peak than a valley.  We have the usual dragons, battles, rescues, deaths, and, of course, sex, but I’m not as anxious to read the next book as I was to read this one.  Two quests dominate the plot, and one of those is successful but somehow a letdown.  Also, it starts just where Iron Flame left off, and in the year since I read that one I’ve forgotten a lot of the details.  The author does not really make an effort to remind the reader of the roles these many characters play.  I hope she reiterates some background in the next novel, because apparently it will not be coming out for a while.  There is a page in this one that lists the royal leaders and some of the main characters, their bonded dragons, and their magical signets.  However, the relationships among the characters are not shown, and some characters are missing from the list.  For sure this book does not make sense unless you have read the other two, but I suspect you could jump from book two to book four without missing a beat.

THEO OF GOLDEN by Allen Levi

A mysterious 86-year-old Portuguese man named Theo moves from New York to Golden, Georgia (fictional town), for reasons unknown.  A coffee shop in Golden called the Chalice has a wall displaying 92 well-drawn portraits of Golden residents, and Theo decides to buy them, one by one, and bestow them upon the person depicted.  When I saw where this was going, I was glad this book was only 400 pages, as I figured the author could not include all 92 of these denizens’ backstories.  Our title do-gooder gains some beloved friends in the process of presenting these gifts, including a CPA, a homeless woman, a street musician, a one-armed bartender, and a cellist.  Theo remains a man of mystery until the very end, but, other than that, suspense is severely lacking, as is any serious conflict.  Both the writing and the subject matter are pablum suitable for a sixth grader.  I felt that the book was making a point about empathy and human kindness, but if I wanted to hear a sermon, I would go to church.  On that note, Theo speaks often of heaven and is a regular church service attendee.  Ultimately, his main motivation seems to be atonement, but the eventual revelation of Theo’s history does not provide the jolt I was hoping for.  All in all, this book is so sweet that it made my teeth hurt.

BEHIND THE BEAUTIFUL FOREVERS by Katherine Boo

Annawadi is a slum of around 10,000 people near the Mumbai airport.  The author, an investigative journalist, focuses on a few families, especially the children.  Abdul—age unknown—is not in school because he is supporting his very large family as a garbage broker.  Basically, he sorts and buys recyclable garbage from scavengers—also children—and sells the stuff to a recycling plant.  He is one of many savvy and enterprising boys who profit from the refuse around the airport. His world, however, is upended when an argument with a neighbor woman prompts her to set herself on fire.  Abdul’s father is dragged off to jail, and Abdul is thrown in with him when he goes to help his father.  The author tells this story in a clear-eyed fashion without melodrama, but she makes it clear that the woman committed suicide, and no crime was committed.  And this is not the only suicide in the book; rat poison seems to be the elixir of choice for offing oneself.  Some residents become addicted to sniffing the Indian version of Wite-Out, which is also used there to patch up wounds.  What really stands out about this book, however, is the degree of corruption that exists. Law enforcement is non-existent, because the police are acting solely based on who is paying them the most.  Even more astonishing is the fact that people living in the slum are also profiting by extorting money, and one woman and her daughter raise funds for a non-existent non-profit.  The poverty here lies in a thriving city of global financial importance with a population roughly the same as Florida’s.  I find it hard to imagine how the inequities will ever be erased.

DREAM COUNT by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Three women from Nigeria, all of whom are friends, and one woman from Guinea have stories to tell, but only the latter has sizzle.  Chia is an aspiring travel writer with enough family money to travel in style, whether she sells her story or not.  She is hung up on two men—one who ditched her and never treated her with respect and another who was married.  Zikora’s boyfriend skedaddles when she becomes pregnant, even though he agreed that she could stop taking birth control pills.  (He apparently didn’t understand the possible consequences!)  Omelogor cooks the books for a corrupt Nigerian financial institution and uses some of her ill-gotten gains to help struggling Nigerian women.  She also has a website that is sort of an advice column for men, which provides some much-needed humor.  Chia and Zikora are somewhat obsessed with finding “Mr. Right,” while Omelogor is not really interested in a long-term committed relationship.  In any case, none of their stories and failed romantic relationships are really worth reading about.  The Guinea woman, Kadiatou, however, is completely different.  She has legal asylum status in the U.S. and is working as a hotel maid when her life unravels in a gut-wrenching way.  Her situation is a fictionalized version of an event that occurred in 2011, and her terror of being deported to some degree diminishes her desire to seek justice.  I loved Adichie’s insightful Americanah, but this book just does not measure up to that standard.  The Nigerian women are smart and attractive but have less substance than the women in Sex and the City.  Kadiatou’s is a heart-pounding story that doesn’t emerge until about 250 pages into the book.  Until then, there is a lot of whining and hand-wringing.

BEAUTIFUL UGLY by Alice Feeney

Like The Plot and Yellowface, this book involves a writer who steals another author’s work.  However, that is not the main storyline.  Grady is unable to write while he grieves the disappearance of his wife, Abby, a year ago.  His agent suggests that he move to an isolated Scottish island where he can perhaps focus on his next book.  However, the island turns out to be full of mysterious happenings, including glimpses of what Grady believes are his wife, plus some gruesome history.  What follows is a suspenseful, macabre tale in which the only lovable character is Grady’s dog and in which revelations expose Grady as a highly unreliable narrator.  This is neither the best nor the worst thriller I have ever read, but I wish the characters had more depth.  Plus, the plot is kind of out there, just like the island on which it takes place, and reliance on a Magic 8 Ball for advice is ridiculous.  If this whole novel were not morbid enough, Grady and Abby always substituted the phrase “I hope you die in your sleep” for “I love you.”  Yikes.  It’s not hard to imagine where this is going, but how we get there is down a twisty, unpredictable path.

THE STOLEN QUEEN by Fiona Davis

If you want a plot that is fairly realistic in a novel, this is not the book for you.  Plus, the three main characters in the book—Charlotte, Annie, and her mother Joyce—are lacking in common sense.  This deficiency does not deter Annie and Charlotte from suddenly traveling to Egypt to try to find and recover an artifact that was stolen from the Metropolitan Museum in New York.  (Nineteen-year-old Annie whose occupations are mainly waitress and housekeeper has never traveled abroad but miraculously happens to have a current passport.) Charlotte is also on a personal quest to discover what happened to her husband and infant daughter after a shipwreck on the Nile forty years ago.  Why did she wait so long?  She believes in a curse supposedly applied by a female pharaoh whom Charlotte is trying to prove was unfairly maligned.  Trying to clean up that pharaoh’s reputation would seem to negate the curse, right?  Charlotte is theoretically a smart woman, and Annie has a knack for solving riddles, but they are just not very wise, if you ask me, as they both knowingly put themselves in harm’s way.  I can live with bumbling characters who stumble onto vital discoveries, but I would prefer a plot that doesn’t border on fantasy.  The author builds suspense fairly well, but the writing leaves a lot to be desired, as does the believability factor. 

THE DIRECTOR by Daniel Kehlmann

The opening of this novel is priceless.  Wilzek leaves his sanatorium in a chauffeured car so that he can appear on TV as a talk show guest.  Unfortunately, his dementia is such that he really has no idea where he is going and becomes somewhat unhinged during his on-air interview.  We learn that he was an assistant to the Austrian director, G.W. Pabst, but we don’t discover his role in the story until much later.  Wilzek is fictional, but Pabst, whose life dominates the narrative, was a real person who directed silent movies and then later movies with sound in the U.S.  He knows that as a director he is only as good as his last project and returns to Europe as things are heating up in Nazi Germany.  The author paints him as a comical character in many ways, but the circumstances are anything but.  Negotiating how to make a worthwhile movie that is subject to Nazi scrutiny is a tightrope that Pabst walks with questionable success.  Besides the opener, another hilarious scene is a book club meeting attended by Pabst’s wife and wives of Nazi party members.  Only one author is really suitable for a discussion in which the walls may have ears, and that author’s work is not exactly great literature.  This novel will make you want to look up biographical info on Pabst and the movie he makes of a novel by the author his wife’s book club always reads.  The twist at the end is fictional but definitely one of the highlights.

I AM HOMELESS IF THIS IS NOT MY HOME by Lorrie Moore

The best thing about this book is that it’s short.  A close second is the fabulous writing.  However, the plot is bizarre.  Actually, there are two storylines that intersect eventually.  The first is a series of letters written by a rooming house proprietor shortly after the Civil War.  She describes a handsome lodger who seems to be John Wilkes Booth, although she never says so.  The second storyline is the one that is extremely weird and unfortunately occupies most of the pages.  Finn is a history teacher who doesn’t believe in homework and who doubles as a math teacher.  He sits at the bedside of his dying brother who is hanging on to life by watching the World Series.  Then Finn gets a phone call demanding that he drive halfway across the country because something has happened to his mentally ill ex-girlfriend, Lily.  He immediately abandons his brother and jumps in the car.  It turns out that Lily has finally accomplished the suicide she has always wished for. However, her wish for her body to be given to the Body Farm, the forensic anthropology site at the University of Tennessee, was not fulfilled.  Finn is completely enthralled with Lily--dead or alive, it seems, and she’s actually in some kind of undead state--maybe.  Anyway, why is Finn with the dead(?) ex-girlfriend who didn’t want to live and not with the brother who does?  Also, how does Finn do such a massive amount of driving on almost no sleep?

CITY ON FIRE by Don Winslow

In a novel about the Rhode Island mob in the 1980s (who knew there was such a thing?), I don’t mind wise guy grammar in the dialog, but the author applies it inconsistently in the third-person narrative as well.  For example, on page 3, we have “what he doesn’t know,” but then on page 5, there’s “He don’t have it in him to cheat.  She don’t mind he looks at other women… .”  I found these choices disconcerting, but this novel still works, if you don’t mind a high body count.  A turf war develops between the Irish mob and the Italian mob, after a long period of uneasy détente.  Marty Ryan’s alcoholism has forced him to yield his power position on the Irish side to John Murphy.  Marty’s son Danny, the protagonist here, is married to John Murphy’s daughter but has never earned a seat at the table.  With a baby on the way, Danny is tempted to take the Feds’ offer to rat out the mob on both sides and get out.  The question is which “family” deserves his loyalty, given that he thinks of Pat Murphy as more of a brother than a brother-in-law.  Unfortunately, Pat’s brother Liam has a propensity for igniting powder kegs.

THE COVENANT OF WATER by Abraham Verghese

A matchmaker pairs a twelve-year-old girl with a 40-year-old widower in southern India in 1900.  The groom sees his bride for the first time at the wedding and balks at marrying a child, but the wedding takes place anyway.  Not consummated for years, the marriage actually works out well, but the bride learns that she has married into a family in which someone in every past generation drowns.  We follow this family for three generations through thick and thin.  Other characters have their own story, including two surgeons, one of whom is Scottish, but everyone has ties to the family of our original couple.  There is enough tragedy here—children dying in unusual ways, a lover dying in a fire, a mother abandoning her child, a man becoming an opium addict—to sink this book into a melodramatic tearjerker, but instead it always manages to lift the reader up into a world where sunny horizons await.  For example, a retreat for lepers becomes a self-sufficient community where everyone pitches in.  Of course, a novel that covers this much ground is going to be long, and this one is exceptionally so.  The tragedies keep the plot moving forward, but they are merely setbacks to lives that refuse to stay mournful indefinitely.

THE EMPEROR OF GLADNESS by Ocean Vuong

Hai is a 19-year-old Vietnamese-American on the brink of suicide when an elderly Lithuanian immigrant, Grazina, talks him out of jumping from a bridge.  Ultimately, Hai saves her as well, by moving in with her and becoming her de facto caretaker.  Grazina is still having flashbacks of Russians and Nazis, and Hai plays along during these episodes to calm her down, calling himself Sgt. Pepper.  Hai still has a drug problem after rehab and has convinced his mother that he is in medical school.  In reality he is working a minimum wage job at HomeMarket, whose menu sounds a lot like the now almost defunct Boston Market.  The misfit employees of HomeMarket, including Hai’s cousin whose mother is incarcerated, become Hai’s family, along with Grazina.  The characters in this novel are well-developed, colorful and poignant, as all are struggling with an assortment of problems—mental, physical, financial, you name it.  However, the tone never descends into melancholy.  The writing is mostly good but is occasionally overdone and pretentious, and the pace is glacial.  The opening chapter in particular is purely descriptive of the setting, and we have to make it to Chapter 2 to get to the aborted suicide.  A road trip near the end has the potential to provide a spark but doesn’t really deliver.