PEOPLE PERSON by Candice Carty-Williams

If there’s one thing I like less in a book than bad writing, it’s a silly plot.  This book reminds me of Fredrik Backman’s Anxious People, and maybe it’s no coincidence that both have the word “people” in the title.  Here we have five half-siblings (same father, four different mothers) trying to dispose of a body that wasn’t really dead.  After this wacky incident, the story improves somewhat but not enough.  Dimple (a ridiculous name in a ridiculous plot) is the half-sibling whose ex-boyfriend Kyron slips and cracks his head open after he tries to strangle Dimple.  She scratches his face in an effort to slip out of his grasp and fears that those scratches will mark her as a murderer.  She then enlists the assistance of her four half-siblings, whom she has met only once, and they all reach the unlikely agreement that they should wrap Kyron in a tarp and bury him at a construction site.  After Kyron comes back to life, he attempts to blackmail Dimple, not knowing that she had four accomplices.  I get that this is supposed to be a feel-good story about family members coming together, but I would have liked a less ludicrous crisis as a catalyst to their bonding.  Plus, Dimple’s role as a social media influencer just makes her that much more of a caricature rather than a robust character.  Thank you to Book Club Favorites at Simon & Schuster for the free copy for review.

A SLOW FIRE BURNING by Paula Hawkins

Someone has slashed Daniel Sutherland’s throat.  Miriam, who lives in the houseboat next to his, discovers the body.  As it turns out, Daniel was not a nice guy, and several people may have wished him dead.  The police suspect Laura, as she was seen, covered in blood, leaving Daniel’s place the morning of his murder.  However, Daniel’s family members raise our suspicions as well.  His Aunt Carla and her ex-husband, Theo, lost their 3-year-old son fifteen years ago while Carla’s alcoholic sister, Angela, was babysitting.  The toddler fell to his death from Angela’s balcony while Daniel was still a child, and forgiveness has been hard to come by.  Angela preceded Daniel in death by just a few weeks, presumably as a result of a fall, so that we can eliminate her as a suspect.  Miriam’s best friend Lorraine was brutally murdered when the two girls were abducted as teenagers, and Laura has issues with anger management, due to a brain injury she suffered as a child.  In the middle of all these deaths and traumatic injuries is Irene, who befriends Laura, and Laura can definitely use a friend.  I liked this novel so much better than The Girl on the Train.  The plot is easy to follow, and most of the characters who are not dead have some redeeming qualities.  All of the women, except poor Angela, are pretty feisty.  Laura’s occasional violent outbursts mostly seem warranted as self-defense, while Miriam lives with survivor’s guilt, wondering if she should have made an effort to save Lorraine.  Irene almost goes too far in trying to solve the various mysteries at hand on her own.  Confrontation with possible murderers is never a good idea, but Irene uses her reputation as a silly old woman to good effect.

A TOWN CALLED SOLACE by Mary Lawson

Three main characters inhabit this novel—Clara, Liam, and Elizabeth, each of whom headlines the chapters.  Clara is eight years old, and her 16-year-old sister Rose has disappeared after one of many arguments with her mother.  Clara spends her time in a vigil by the window, awaiting Rose’s return, and taking care of her nextdoor neighbor’s cat, Moses.  That neighbor, Elizabeth, is now deceased, and Liam Kane, her heir, has moved into Elizabeth’s house.  His presence is puzzling to Clara, since her parents have chosen not to burden her with the news of Elizabeth’s death.  This novel makes a good case for not sheltering children from this kind of news, because not only does their secrecy erode Clara’s trust in her parents, but she initially mistakes Liam for a burglar.  Liam is not, in fact, Elizabeth’s son, but Elizabeth became very attached to him after her five miscarriages when he desperately needed parental love.  He was a neighbor’s son whose mother focused all of her energy on two sets of twin girls and found Liam to be an annoying and difficult burden.  Elizabeth was more than happy to take up the slack and look after Liam as frequently as his mother would allow.  A catastrophic mistake on Elizabeth’s part ended her relationship with Liam and his family, but she resumes contact with him after he is an adult.  He is now going through a divorce, has quit his accounting job, and has moved into Elizabeth’s house.  This novel bears some resemblance to Anne Tyler’s books in that it takes place in a small town with no real villains.  However, I found this book to be much more engaging, particularly with the intrigue and anguish surrounding the missing Rose.  My favorite character, however, is not one of the main three but rather Moses, the elusive cat.  I particularly love this sentence in the book, from page 188:

“She [Clara] fed Moses and then sat on the floor and watched him turn himself into triangles and squares and circles inside boxes until Mr. Kane stuck the key in the lock, whereupon Moses turned himself into a cat again and skedaddled.”

A CHILDREN'S BIBLE by Lydia Millet

A group of families are vacationing together in a very large waterfront house.  The kids, completely unsupervised except by one another, are the main characters, with the heavy-drinking parents in the background.  In fact, the parents are basically a collective entity, and the kids are playing a guessing game as to who belongs to whom; no one really wants to claim their own parents.  This book initially called Lord of the Flies to mind, but the kids are a little older, much more compatible, and basically seem better off without the adults’ interference.  When a huge storm befalls them, flooding the property and knocking out power, the kids have the good sense to head for a farm, where they have an ample supply of just about everything.  Then a pregnant mother shows up, followed by a band of violent outlaws, and things start to deteriorate rapidly.  Up until this point, the novel has been pretty lighthearted, but the arrival of the villains isn’t the only bad news.  The survival of the planet is at stake here.  The teenaged narrator, Evie, finds that her 9-year-old brother, Jack, has acquired a child’s version of the Bible and has captured an assortment of wild animals, like Noah but without the pairings, in an effort to save them from destruction.  This book may be an allegory of sorts, but Jack is astute enough to see the Bible as one as well.  He equates God with nature and Jesus with science, and his reasoning for doing so is very clever.  There are lots of other Bible story parallels, but the backbone of the novel is not an allegory.  The kids blame their parents’ generation for not being good custodians of our planet and rightfully so.  This novel can be seen as a call to action.  Ignoring the problem will not make it go away.

WHAT ARE YOU GOING THROUGH by Sigrid Nunez

Like her novel The Friend, this Sigrid Nunez novel addresses the death of, yes, a friend.  This time the death is planned but has not happened yet.  The narrator agrees to stay with her terminally-ill friend in the final days before the friend takes a euthanasia pill.  This book takes not only a very thoughtful look at the death of a person, but one character, who turns out to be the narrator’s “ex,” crusades to warn that the death of our planet is not only imminent but unavoidable—so much so that he laments the upcoming birth of his third grandchild.  Despite this maudlin subject matter, the narrator regales us with such funny reflections and remembrances that we forget to be sad.  There are so many great stories scattered throughout this novel, including one ostensibly about the cat on the cover and one about an elderly woman who tries to reform the scammers who constantly call her.  Although the narrator’s ex paints a gloom-and-doom portrait of humanity as being too stupid to save their own planet, the narrator reminds us that empathy and compassion still exist and that being there for someone can be fulfilling yet all-consuming.  Ultimately, the narrator’s anxiety moves away from the loss of her friend and on to the aftermath, in which she is expected to lie about her complicity in her friend’s euthanasia plan.  At one point the narrator notes that even a sad movie can be uplifting if the story is told in a beautiful way.  That same observation applies to this novel. 

LEAVE THE WORLD BEHIND by Rumaan Alam

This novel begins with a seemingly innocuous family vacation in a remote Airbnb but soon becomes one terrifying incident after another.  Clay and Amanda are parents to two teenagers, Rose and Archie, and I don’t want to give too much away about their nightmare of a vacation.  Suffice it to say that each scary moment turns into a frantic frenzy on the part of Clay and Amanda, often with the two of them having to come to an uncomfortable consensus about what to do.  Safety is tantamount to all their decision-making, but also pinning down the best course of action to avoid jeopardizing their family is a constant conundrum.  Compassion has a small role here, too, but self-preservation trumps it, as a lack of information fuels anxiety and outright fear.  Sanity starts to wear thin as it becomes increasingly obvious that the world is not OK, thanks to some unusual wildlife appearances.  This book keeps you guessing and ends way too soon.

THAT KIND OF MOTHER by Rumaan Alam

This is not at all the book I expected from an Indian-American man.  Nor would I have expected to enjoy a book that celebrates motherhood, integrity, and doing the right thing.  That is not to say that the main character, Rebecca, is not flawed, because, while she may be a good mother, she is not a particularly good sister/wife/friend.  She is, to say the least, completely absorbed in the poetry she strives to write and the duties that befall her when her beloved Black nanny dies in childbirth.  No shrinking violet, Rebecca can be so wrong about some things when she steadfastly believes that she is right.  One might also say that she is impulsive when she decides to take in an infant Black boy—her nanny’s orphaned child--to raise alongside her white toddler son without consulting her husband.  Then she is particularly naïve about how to raise a Black child and bristles at the stern advice she receives from the Black couple—the boy’s older sister and her husband--who declined to raise him themselves.  The only big mystery is who fathered the nanny’s child, but that question is resolved without fanfare, although, honestly, I was hoping for something scandalous.  What this novel lacks in suspense it makes up for in beautiful writing and one superbly drawn character.  The other characters—husband, nanny, nanny’s grown daughter—are depicted adequately enough that we get a sense of who they are, but, more importantly, who they are to Rebecca and vice versa.