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.

THE LINCOLN HIGHWAY by Amor Towles

Now that 18-year-old Emmett is out of jail, he and his 8-year-old brother, Billy, plan to travel west to start a new life.  However, their plans are quickly defenestrated by Duchess and Woolly, who have escaped from jail as stowaways in the trunk of the warden’s car.  Duchess, who earned that nickname as a child, means well, sort of, but he creates way more problems than he solves, mostly at Emmett’s expense.  In fact, each time Emmett veers off to perform an errand or solve a sticky situation, we know that yet another calamity is on the horizon.  I kept thinking that he would eventually not allow Duchess to hoodwink him, but Emmett’s missteps continue, leaving Billy in the lurch, even when the trap seems obvious.  Billy may seem to be a vulnerable liability at times, but he remembers every piece of advice verbatim, applying these tidbits often with effective, and sometimes humorous, results.  And Duchess is not the only problem.  Billy occasionally finds himself having to rely on the kindness of strangers, but he finds it hard to distinguish which strangers are really kind, and which have darker motives.  Pastor John, who justifies his misdeeds as God’s will, is a threat.  Ulysses, on the other hand, is the foil to Pastor John and has been wandering for years, just like the mythical Greek Ulysses, whose story Billy shares with him.  Ulysses is then inspired to embark on a quest of his own, accompanied by another of Billy’s heroes.  In some ways this is a buddy novel in which Duchess is the instigator of mischief and Emmett is the easy mark, repeatedly caught unawares.  I noticed that the chapters are numbered backwards from 10, like a countdown.  A blast-off to what?  A new journey?

DEACON KING KONG by James McBride

I love the nicknames in this book, especially the men’s, and they make it easy to keep up with who’s who.  (Most of the women are Sister Somebody, and I could not keep them straight at all.)  Sportcoat. living in the projects in Brooklyn and still talking to the ghost of his wife who died a year ago, is a good-hearted drunk.  He makes a living doing odd jobs and has a marvelous green thumb.   However, when he shoots off the ear of the 19-year-old Deems, drug dealer and former star pitcher for the neighborhood baseball team, Sportcoat finds himself in the crosshairs of both the police and the drug kingpin.  Fortunately, he leads a somewhat charmed life, in denial about having shot Deems and about needing to lie low, and one particular pursuer keeps running into mayhem.  The author presents lots of opportunities for romance and redemption in this novel and does not disappoint, although several loose ends are never tied up.  One of the prevailing themes here is a sense of honor that governs even the lives of people like the Elephant, who deals in stolen goods.  Romance springs up in unlikely places, and, in the redemption department, Sportcoat believes that Deems’s salvation lies in his return to baseball.  Of course, Sportcoat has his own problems, not the least of which is his drinking problem.  The characters, plot, and writing style of this novel are all terrific, but occasionally the pace slows to a crawl.

SONG YET SUNG by James McBride

This book is so not your typical slavery novel; it’s much more nuanced, leaving the brutal beatings and separation of families to other writers.  In fact, it’s mostly an adventure story, where the villains are not the punishing landowners but are instead the folks who tracked down escapees and stole slaves so that they could sell them elsewhere.  The most despicable of these slave traders is Patty Cannon, who makes the mistake of imprisoning Liz Spocott, who has mystical powers and becomes known as the Dreamer.  She escapes from Patty’s imprisonment and frees a dozen or so other slaves in the process.  The action all takes place in Eastern Maryland, where oyster beds provide a living for most of the denizens, but Kathleen Sullivan has a farm and three slaves—a man named Amber, his sister, and her 17-year-old son.  All sorts of shenanigans ensue, including the kidnapping of a white child and encounters with the Woolman, a Black man who viewers describe as a ghost or the devil, because of his unkempt appearance and swiftness of movement.  The most ambivalent character is Denwood Long, who has come out of retirement to trace down the Dreamer.  He wants the money that her master will pay, but Denwood also recognizes the injustice of slavery, so that sometimes his humanity interferes with his job.  The only time that this book drags is when the author gets bogged down (pun intended) in a description of the swampy landscape.  Otherwise, the novel moves along at a good clip, with excellent character development, particularly of Amber, who is torn between helping his nephew escape to Pennsylvania, less than 90 miles away and staying on the farm to help Kathleen stay solvent.  Having no wife and children of his own, Amber has become attached to Kathleen’s eight-year-old son, whose father disappeared in a squall.  I particularly liked Kathleen, a strong, no-nonsense woman, who is also conflicted.  She could sell Amber in order to pay off her debts, but in addition to losing his help on the farm, she will not be able to guarantee that his subsequent owner will be as fair-minded as she is.