BLONDE FAITH by Walter Mosley

Easy Rawlins, private investigator, is back on the job in 1967 Los Angeles.  Life, however, is not easy for Easy as he endures racism everywhere he goes and laments that his ex-girlfriend Bonnie is about to marry someone else.  Three man have gone missing, and Easy sets out to find them.  His longtime nefarious friend Ray “Mouse” Alexander is being sought by the cops for the murder of Pericles Tarr, who is also missing and not necessarily dead.  Christmas Black delivers his eight-year-old daughter to Easy’s care without so much as a note and then vanishes.  In order to locate these three missing persons whose disappearances are certainly linked, Easy calls in a lot of favors from his many colorful acquaintances and banks a few more.  The breezy writing style and dialog belie the seriousness of the subject matter, making it difficult for me to immerse myself in this book.  Easy is at times his own worst enemy, especially when it comes to his relationships with women.  To say that he is depressed is putting it mildly, and his sobriety is constantly challenged by the craving for a drink to drown his sorrows.  I want to root for Easy, and certainly he is a top-notch investigator, but his personal woes make this novel a definite downer.

THE MORNINGSIDE by Tea Obreht

Sil and her mother are refugees living on an island that has been partially destroyed by flooding.  News comes in the form of an anonymous radio correspondent called the Drowned City Dispatcher.  When Sil’s Aunt Ena passes away, Sil’s mother slips seamlessly into Ena’s job as their building superintendent for the Morningside, a high-rise whose penthouse is occupied by a mysterious woman with three huge dogs.  Sil’s mother also moonlights as a salvage diver, and there is plenty to salvage.  While Sil’s mother is very secretive about their past life, Ena has regaled Sil with magical tales, and Sil feels compelled to investigate to find out if they are true.  She enlists the help of Mila, another young girl who lives in the building, and Lewis May, a former superintendent of the building who dubs Sil “Snoopy.”  The problem with this book is not the writing, the characters, or the dystopian plot; it just moves along too slowly.  I think I dozed through some important pages and then had to reread them after I finished the novel.  Also, a strand of magical realism permeates the novel, and I am generally not a fan, although some authors handle it better than others.  Here it just robs the climate change warning of the seriousness it deserves.

MY FRIENDS by Hisham Matar

On a lark, Khaled, a Libyan student at the University of Edinburgh, and his friend Mustafa travel to London to participate in an anti-Qaddafi demonstration at the Libyan embassy.  Shots are fired from the embassy into the crowd, and both young men suffer gunshot wounds.  Both survive, but the rest of the book pretty much chronicles the after-effects of this event, which actually did take place in 1984.  Neither Khaled nor Mustafa can return to his studies, because fellow Libyan students will rat them out. Nor can they return to Libya, as their identities may be known to the Qaddafi regime.  Their only choice is to remain in England with asylum status, too fearful of censors to tell their families what has happened.  A third man, Hosam, a writer whom Khaled knows by reputation, joins the storyline after a chance encounter with Khaled at a hotel.  Reading this, I was concerned about the fates of these three men, especially Khaled, who narrates the story in first person, but I would say that this novel is more educational than enjoyable.  The author presents a poignant picture of three men in exile, and it’s especially heartbreaking, given that Khaled is so young—just a teenager--at the beginning.  He navigates his unexpected life courageously and without dwelling too much on the what-ifs.

FIRE EXIT by Morgan Talty

Charles is the adult son of white parents but was raised by his white mother and Penobscot stepfather on a reservation in Maine.   Since he has no Penobscot blood, Charles lives just the other side of the river from the reservation, where he can see the home of his daughter, Elizabeth.  Elizabeth’s mother, Mary, has raised her daughter to believe that she is the daughter of Mary’s Penobscot husband. Charles is obsessed with having his daughter know that he is her biological father.  Mary, on the other hand, is adamant that this knowledge will upset Elizabeth and jeopardize her standing in their Native American community. However, Elizabeth seems to have inherited mental illness—depression—from Charles’s mother, Louise, who now also suffers from dementia.  Unfortunately, there is just not enough here to make for an engrossing novel, and I was not invested in Charles or any of the other characters.  His two friends, Bobby (an alcoholic) and Gizos, whose lie during their childhood made Charles a pariah, are not exactly paragons of virtue.  I would have liked Elizabeth’s story to have been a little more fleshed out, but that is not possible since the book is told from Charles’s perspective, and he is very much in the dark about Elizabeth’s life.  Charles is a good soul; he’s just not very remarkable.

PLAYGROUND by Richard Powers

Todd and Rafi are two very smart guys who meet in high school and bond over chess.  They remain very close friends in college, even after a woman enters the picture.  Then their paths diverge as Todd becomes addicted to software development and later founds a social media company that incorporates an idea provided by Rafi.  Todd becomes fabulously wealthy and begins developing AI, while Rafi’s great love is literature.  A totally separate storyline is that of Evelyne, whose father throws her into a pool with an early aqualung prototype.  This event propels her into oceanography, and her sections of the book are mind-boggling descriptions of the world that exists at the bottom of the sea.  Most of the earth is water, so that we land dwellers have no concept of the vast and mostly unexplored depths of our planet.  This fact is so obvious and yet so underappreciated.  Anyway, the ending of this novel was so puzzling to me that I had to read some other reviews and then reread a portion of the ending.  Todd provides some italicized narration addressed to an unknown entity, and I have to admit that I find italics annoying to read.  However, the difference between Todd’s narrative and the narrative in normal type is important to an understanding of the novel, and I missed that distinction entirely.  This book deserves a reread.

PINK SLIME by Fernanda Trias

The title refers to the nickname of Meatrite, a mystery meat product that is providing sustenance to a region in the midst of a pandemic, caused by red algae on the ocean.  When the wind blows, its deadly spread of the algae forces everyone to stay indoors, including the unnamed narrator who is taking care of a boy named Mauro with an eating disorder.  His syndrome causes him to be eternally hungry, and the narrator cannot leave him alone, as he will eat anything he can get his hands on, including inedible items like cotton balls.  Mauro’s wealthy parents leave him, along with a hefty supply of food, at the narrator’s apartment for months at a time.  Although the narrator tells her mother that she plans to move to the safety of Brazil, she lingers, possibly for the sake of Mauro, possibly in order to continue to visit her ex-husband, Max, who has been exposed to the red wind but had a chronic rather than an acute fatal response to it.  In fact, all three characters are lingering—Mauro in the narrator’s care, Max in the “Clinics” where he is not well enough to leave, and the narrator, who is stuck in a stasis that is not sustainable. This novel belongs to the genre now dubbed “cli-fi” for climate change fiction.  Rain is non-existent, and only when the fog rolls in is it safe to be outside.  Power outages are frequent, and phone service is spotty.  Water doesn’t seem to be an issue, so thank heavens for that, but this is a world that is becoming uninhabitable.  The fish are dead, and the birds have disappeared.  This scenario does not seem that farfetched.

THE ORCHARD by Peter Heller

This is my least favorite Peter Heller book, and it is not his usual adventure story.  In fact, it seems to be three characters in search of a plot, plus a slew of Chinese poetry.  This is just not my thing, although I love Heller’s writing style and his three lovable characters here, unencumbered by a storyline.  Frith and her mother, Hayley, have decamped to a remote Vermont cabin to live off the land and off the grid, although Hayley still translates ancient Chinese poetry as a side hustle to bring in some real money.  Otherwise, they are struggling to make ends meet by selling apples and maple syrup.  Rosie, a neighbor with a phone and the usual conveniences, becomes a welcome fixture at the cabin and sort of an adopted family member.  Firth narrates this story from her adult perspective as she reflects on her unconventional childhood.  I kept waiting for something to blow up this idyll, but what finally happens, although fairly monumental, isn’t sudden or unanticipated and doesn’t really disrupt the calm atmosphere of the novel to a significant degree.  I just needed more—a jolt of some sort or a trajectory toward something unexpected.

THE CEMETERY OF UNTOLD STORIES by Julia Alvarez

Alma Cruz has enjoyed a successful literary career in the U.S., but now she has inherited a piece of land in her homeland—the Dominican Republic.  She returns there with plans to create a cemetery for all of her unfinished stories, and she literally buries the manuscripts.  However, these stories, particularly the ones about her father and about Bienvenida Trujillo, refuse to be silent.  Alma hires a neighbor woman, Filomena, as caretaker and as a listener for the buried stories, which are narrated in this novel alongside those of Alma and Filomena.  I guess this is OK as far as magical realism goes, but it didn’t quite work for me.  Bienvenida Trujillo was the ex-wife of the murderous Dominican dictator, and apparently there is scant info about her life after the marriage ended.  Alvarez paints a complete but obviously somewhat fictional portrait of her that is one of the highlights of the novel, possibly second only to Filomena’s backstory.  Also, there’s a possible link between Filomena and one of the storytellers, but we never find out for sure.  That connection was the nugget that held my attention through the latter part of the book, but the author just left me hanging.  Afterlife is still my favorite Alvarez novel, by far.

IN THE TIME OF THE BUTTERFLIES by Julia Alvarez

The Mirabal sisters are fighters, especially Patria, Minerva, and Maria Teresa, who, along with their husbands, join the resistance to Trujillo, murderous dictator of the Dominican Republic from the 1930s until 1961.  A fourth sister, Dede, who was not as involved in the mission to end Trujillo’s reign, stayed home the day her sisters were assassinated on their way home from visiting their husbands in prison. The author blends fact and fiction to construct a novel that looks back on the lives of the four sisters, with each of the chapters focused on one of them.  As the only survivor, Dede’s chapters dominate, but her rather mundane personal story does not. The backstories of the other sisters are not all that thrilling, either, and I was never clear on what motivated them to risk their lives in opposition to Trujillo.   This novel has merit as a history lesson, but I am not a fan of this type of semi-biographical fiction, as the author seems to be constrained by what actually happened.  I have found the same to be true of novels by T.C. Boyle, Alice Hoffman, Zadie Smith and Maggie O’Farrell in which they are fictionalizing the lives of historical figures.  However, I generally love these authors’ novels that spring strictly from their imaginations.  I think that Ariel Lawhon does a better job than most with writing an engrossing novel about a real person.  Perhaps she just chooses subjects whose lives are good fodder for a novel and are obscure enough to allow for some thrilling embellishments.

ANITA DE MONTE LAUGHS LAST by Xochitl Gonzalez

Anita de Monte may indeed laugh last, but since it’s beyond the grave, I don’t think it counts.  Here, her defenestration comes at the hands of her husband, a famous artist, but Anita’s life and death closely resemble that of a real woman whose husband was acquitted of her murder.  Obviously, an abundance of magical realism exists in this novel, and I am not really a fan.  Fortunately, another storyline involves Raquel Toro, whose life parallels Anita’s in many ways.  She is sacrificing her agency to a successful artist, and she becomes basically his satellite.  Anita realizes that her identity is in peril but keeps thinking that the problem will go away.  Raquel, on the other hand, despite opinions to the contrary from family and friends, thinks that her relationship with Nick is completely balanced.  This novel just does not really work for me.  It’s too predictable for one thing, and both of these smart, talented women just frustrated the heck out of me.  One positive is the humor, particularly when Anita’s ghost manifests itself as a bat who tortures her husband and his girlfriend.  Even more funny is when Anita mimics a Spanish accent at a dinner party in order to humiliate her husband.  She is much spunkier than Raquel whose cluelessness just annoyed me.

LIKE HAPPINESS by Ursula Villarreal-Moura

Tatum Vega is living a contented life in Chile when an American journalist contacts her about her past relationship with Mateo Dominguez, a successful author.  Another woman has accused Mateo of sexual assault, and, although Tatum did not experience any physical abuse in her relationship with Mateo, she can imagine the possibility of it occurring with someone else.  Tatum and Mateo’s relationship was mostly platonic, even when he spent a month with her in Cape Cod while she was housesitting.  It all began when Tatum sent Mateo a fan letter, and he actually responded.  They became friends, but it was an odd friendship in which he called all the shots.  It’s clear that Tatum loved Mateo, but it’s also clear that his feelings for her were something entirely different.  He paid off most of her student loan, so what exactly did he expect in return?  The answer to that question is not revealed until very late in the novel, but it is not shocking.  In fact, it’s just sad, given that Tatum was pretty much devoted to him for a decade.  This was abuse of an entirely different nature, basically psychological, and for some reason Tatum was blind to it.  I found it very hard to respect her and not just because Mateo’s domination of her life was entirely consensual.  She also had a good education but lacked the impetus to look for a job that matched her qualifications.  On the other hand, she was not entirely spineless, as she did have the gumption to get out of other unhealthy situations, including dumping a lover who developed a drug habit.  The entire narrative is Tatum in first person addressing Mateo, as if telling her story will somehow deliver retribution.  I think not.  Catharsis, maybe.

THE ROAD FROM BELHAVEN by Margot Livesey

I expected more from Margot Livesey than this tired plot.  Scottish teenage farm girl Lizzie falls for city boy Louis and becomes pregnant.  She is at first elated, assuming that Louis will marry her right away.  Wrong.  He wants to finish his apprenticeship as a tailor, and that’s three years away.  I don’t know if Lizzie is naïve or just not very smart, but she has a knack for making really bad judgment calls.  She abandons her daughter to the child’s great-grandparents, as she runs back to Louis after having a vision of him with another woman.  Trying to hold on to her man is obviously more important than the well-being of her child, and I just couldn’t sympathize with Lizzie anymore.  To her credit, she is spunky and a hard worker, but nothing can redeem her, in my opinion, from choosing her lover over her child, and I don’t think that the author makes a good case for us readers to feel that Lizzie deserves a second chance.  Her visions have always proven to predict some unfortunate future event, but these visions seem superfluous to the plot, except in one case in which her vision actually allows for advance preparation to prevent tragedy and loss of life.  I view magical realism such as this as something of a cop-out for the author to solve a plot problem that could be better handled in a realistic manner.

COME & GET IT by Kiley Reid

Millie is a 24-year-old Resident Assistant for a women’s dorm at the University of Arkansas.  Agatha is a successful author and visiting professor, also at the University of Arkansas, who intends to interview students there for her next book.  However, that project gets sidelined in favor of stories for Teen Vogue when she discovers that she can eavesdrop on three students who live in the suite next to Millie’s.  Things get really messy eventually, but we have to wade through hundreds of uneventful pages in the meantime.  The plot for most of the book is somewhere between thin and non-existent, as I kept wondering where on earth this was going.  Retaliatory dorm pranks make some of the characters seem particularly immature and unlikeable.  Other characters prove themselves to be guilty of insanely bad judgment, particularly Kennedy, one the students in the suite next to Millie’s.  She’s a transfer to the U of A due to an incident that led me to think she has some kind of personality disorder, but I’m certainly not qualified to diagnose it.  Millie is in line for a promotion to Resident Director next term, but she disappoints by displaying a streak of cowardice near the end.  Agatha, whose ethical compass definitely shows signs of needing an adjustment, is the one who at least has a backbone, facing up to her misdeeds and offering financial reparations.  I’m not sure what this book is supposed to be about, but perhaps it’s a statement on our transactional society, and it doesn’t bode well.

ENTITLEMENT by Rumaan Alam

Brooke is a young, beautiful, Vassar-educated Black woman who goes to work for Asher Jaffee, a white billionaire in his eighties.  Her job is to help Asher give away his money, and she becomes his protégé, undergoing a transformation in the process.  Brooke first comes to Asher’s attention with her outspokenness and her attempt to return a $200 expense check that she claims to find unethical.  However, her ethics seem to dissolve as she inserts herself into Asher’s lavish lifestyle and comes to feel that she deserves the same perks, such as a chauffeur and a gorgeous New York apartment.  Does she expect Asher to look the other way when she charges expensive clothing to the foundation’s credit card and exaggerates her income in order to qualify for a mortgage?  Brooke is delusional and, from this reader’s standpoint, unlikeable.  Asher has encouraged her to go after what she wants, but she takes that advice to an extreme.  For a book that is largely about a charitable organization, this novel seemed heartless to me.  Asher, whose intentions appear altruistic on the surface, is trying to minimize his tax liability and paying almost a million dollars for a painting for his wife’s birthday.  He is still making more money than he gives away.  All this money being thrown around so casually and carelessly for personal use by a supposed philanthropist is a little nauseating, but maybe that’s the point.

GOOD MATERIAL by Dolly Alderton

Thirty-five-year-old Andy is a mediocre comedian, wallowing in self-pity.  His breakup with Jen has rocked his world, and even his longtime friends no longer want to hang out with him.  Dolly Alderton, please do not write another book like this, as a whiny novel does not make for a good read.  I loved Ghosts and kept expecting this novel to veer in a more positive direction or for Andy to incorporate some of his more outrageous post-breakup experiences into his comedy routine.  His short-lived residence on a boat, his therapy session under false pretenses, and his landlord’s correspondence with Julian Assange would all seem to provide some good fodder for laughter, and I guess they do eventually.  However, we don’t receive any real relief from Andy’s pathetic obsession until late in the novel when Jen explains exactly why she had to end her relationship with him.  Any sympathy that I could muster for Andy went straight down the tubes after hearing her side of the story.  I would be more optimistic that Andy has learned from this experience if Jen would share with him what went wrong.

BAD BAD GIRL by Gish Jen

If you think that Gish Jen’s novel about her mother will be a loving homage, guess again.  Her mother endured the Japanese occupation of Shanghai during WWII, then emigrated, by herself, to the U.S. after college, and obtained her master’s degree.  She then got married before completing her dissertation for her PhD and raised five children, with Gish being the second, following her brother Reuben.  However, Gish’s memories of her mother, who died in her 90s during Covid, are anything but fond.  While Gish was a child, her mother beat her regularly.  Even as an adult, Gish was constantly seeking attagirls from her mother, but none were forthcoming.  Gish’s mantra seems to be “Look what I did for you, and you didn’t even thank me.”  Then there’s Gish’s “beloved father,” also Chinese, who beat her with a metal stake to the point that the injuries kept her out of gym class for three months.  I cannot fathom why she adored him.  There was one humorous anecdote where Gish and a female classmate lobbied to be allowed to take shop in school.  They were granted the concession of being able to use the shop after class, and the shop teacher is a riot.  However, this one incident does not salvage this otherwise very depressing novel.  I suppose that writing this novel was cathartic and validating for the author, but reading it was not a pleasant experience.

LONG ISLAND COMPROMISE by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

Not as good as Fleishman Is in Trouble, this novel is full of despicable characters who don’t deserve what they have and are too unlikeable to care about.  It’s the story of the very wealthy Fletcher family whose lives are upended when Carl, father of three and owner of a polystyrene (Styrofoam) factory, is kidnapped.  After the ransom is paid, he returns home, but nothing remains the same.  His youngest, Jenny, is not even born when this event occurs, but as an adult she too bears the trauma that haunts her family.  All three adult kids are totally dysfunctional in their own ways and dependent on the family fortune to fund their wacky lives.  That’s not to say that this novel doesn’t have some good moments.  One of my favorites is when the middle child, Beamer, a failing screen writer, overdoses on speed.  The novel moves at breakneck speed through this episode, raising my heartrate and my expectations for more of the same, only to be disappointed when the plot returns to the silly missteps of these rich lowlifes. Jenny at least tries to break the mold by becoming a union organizer and giving away all of her money, but she, too, is rudderless, with or without the money.  The best part is the revelation about the kidnapping, which is sort of a side note near the end.

CREATION LAKE by Rachel Kushner

Sadie Smith is not her real name, and she’s a 34-year-old American spy for hire.  Her current job is to infiltrate and ultimately destroy a subversive commune in rural France.  She has hacked the email account of this group’s mentor, an old man named Bruno who seems more obsessed with hieroglyphics, caves, the night sky, and Neanderthals than with advising the radical group.  For me, good writing does not salvage this book, which fails as an espionage novel, since the plot lacks suspense and Sadie is completely unlikeable.  She has a certain swagger that falls short of being charismatic, and she drinks too much.  Also, she is living alone in her boyfriend’s family’s mansion, but because she’s a short-timer, she doesn’t bother throwing away her liquor bottles or washing the dishes, until she schedules a tryst with her lover from the commune.  In fact, she always drinks from the cup that is the least dirty.  Her slovenliness is a minor personality flaw compared to the manner in which she uses other people.  I get that this is her job, and she’s good at it, except for being fired by the FBI when her mark was exonerated due to entrapment.  Reading this book was not exactly a chore, but it wasn’t a delight, either.  In fact, Bruno’s musings on our prehistoric predecessors and celestial navigation were the best part.  He makes a big deal about how to locate Polaris (the North Star), although I learned that a long time ago and have since assumed that it was common knowledge.  Apparently not.  The biggest mystery of this novel is the origin of the title, and I’m going to crown The Flamethrowers as my favorite Rachel Kushner novel.

MARTYR! by Kaveh Akbar

Cyrus Shams is a 30-year-old Iranian-American with a death wish.  The only thing stopping him from committing suicide is that he wants his death to matter.  The book he is writing about martyrs is supposed to be his legacy, if he could just actually manage to write it.  When he was three months old in Iran, his mother’s commercial flight to visit her brother was shot down by an American Navy missile cruiser.  Hence Cyrus’s obsession with meaningless death.  Ironically, Cyrus’s father takes a job on a chicken farm in Indiana, so that Cyrus grows up in the country whose military killed his mother.  As an adult, Cyrus struggles with addiction, particularly alcoholism, but has been clean for two years when he travels to New York to meet an artist dying of cancer.  There is a twist at the end of this book, but it is not sufficient to redeem the rest of this slow-paced, depressing novel.  Also, the twist results from a very implausible coincidence, making the plot more absurd than thought-provoking.  My biggest problem with the book, though, is that provides no real incentive to keep reading. Its best value is that of a cure for insomnia, as drowsiness set in whenever I tried to read more than five pages at a sitting.

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.