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.

ENORMOUS WINGS by Laurie Frankel

A woman becoming pregnant at 77 years old seems far-fetched, but maybe it’s possible if a cancer drug she took in her forties also extended her fertility for a few more decades?  Pepper finds herself in this unlikely position after becoming sexually involved with Moth, a man who lives next door to her in a senior living facility.  What follows is partly a jab at anti-abortionists who won’t make an exception for a septuagenarian.  Pepper makes a valid point that they are obsessed with saving the fetus’s life, whether it is viable or not outside the womb, with no consideration for the mother or even for the baby’s welfare after it is born.  Except for these fanatical right-wingers and the paparazzi, the characters in this book are all good people with Pepper’s best interests at heart, especially a delightfully irreverent Episcopal priest.  The big question here is whether or not Pepper will carry her baby to term, and, if she does, will mother and baby both be healthy.  However, there’s one big unforeseen calamity that throws Pepper into a different sort of jam with potentially disastrous consequences.  Don’t expect great literature here, but some hilarious quips are bound to elicit at least a chuckle.

BEAR by Julia Phillips

Sam and her older sister, Elena, are barely scraping by on San Juan Island with their dying mother.  Sam is serving coffee, soft drinks, and packaged snacks on a ferry that operates between the islands and the Pacific Northwest mainland.  Elena works at the local country club and has been the primary breadwinner for years, especially during Covid, when Sam was unemployed.  Sam lives for the day when they will be able to sell their rundown home, which sits on prime real estate, and move to the mainland.  She basically eschews all relationships except family, while Elena secretly stews with frustration over the role she has had to assume.  Then a grizzly appears at their door and terrifies both of them.  However, Elena sees the bear as a welcome distraction and begins to relish additional encounters, while Sam begs her to recognize the danger.  This is not just about an unhealthy infatuation with a predatory animal, since the bear’s presence drives a wedge between the sisters.  The author does a great job of creating mounting suspense, as Elena becomes increasingly irrational about her enchantment with the bear, while Sam refuses to accept that her sister has gone off the deep end.  Of course, the big overriding question is whether the bear will ultimately be true to his nature or continue to behave as if he were Elena’s pet.

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.

HOW I WON A NOBEL PRIZE by Julius Taranto

The Rubin Institute is a haven for researchers, scientists, and professors with skeletons in their closets.  Helen, a very talented physicist whose specialty if superconductivity, does not have a sketchy past, but her mentor/collaborator is now a persona non grata as far as Cornell is concerned. In order to continue her research, she and her husband, Hew, relocate to the island where the Institute is located.  Hew’s liberal political slant makes this move really distasteful for him, and his and Helen’s marriage becomes somewhat rocky.  Helen suspects him of having an affair with a woman who was raped by one of the Institute’s residents, while she contemplates her own affair with her father’s favorite author.  I am not a physics person, and I found that the narrative having to do with Helen’s work was way over my head, but I learned something in the process.  I enjoyed the marital strife aspect of this book as well, since I could definitely see both sides of their argument.  Hew thinks that Helen should be more appalled about the crimes that the Institute’s residents have committed, whereas Helen contends that she really cannot do anything about it.  In any case, the concept of banishing misbehaving intellectuals to an island where they can continue to be productive without being policed or held accountable is intriguing but also alarming.