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.