WHAT KIND OF PARADISE by Janelle Brown

I am pretty sure that faking one’s own death does not happen nearly as often in real life as it does in novels.  Like amnesia, I find it to be sort of a cheap plot device for allowing a character to gain a whole new identity.  Anyway, here we have a teenage girl, Jane, who lives off the grid with her father.  She is so isolated from the outside world and so dependent on her father for everything that she apparently has a case of Stockholm Syndrome, in that she is complicit in her own captivity.  However, when she discovers that he has been lying to her about a number of things, she plans her getaway, but her naïveté makes her escape quite precarious.  To me, this is more of an adventure novel than a thriller, and the plot is completely preposterous.  Still, it’s an enjoyable read as long as you are not expecting a literary masterpiece.  Jane is a fairly engaging protagonist, as long as you can buy into her blind fealty to her paranoid anarchist of a father, and I had a significant problem with that.  Her judgment is tainted by her father’s disdain for technology and authority, but her moral compass is intact, sort of.  And the behavior of her supposedly dead mother is just off-the-charts weird.  She takes the cake in the self-preservation department.

LAND by Maggie O'Farrell

I seem to be reading a lot of books these days with gratuitous magical realism.  This is another.  Once again, I don’t really see that it contributes anything to the storyline.  This novel’s other fault is that it is supremely dreary.  Tomás, the father of three children, is an Irish cartographer during the years after the famine.  He works for the British “redcoats” to have money to supplement his family’s meager farm income.  When the book opens, he is mapping a remote peninsula, with his ten-year-old son, Liam, as his assistant.  There Tomás encounters a magical pool that alters the trajectory of his family’s future.  His backstory is pretty bleak, but then so is the rest of the book.  The narrative eventually focuses on his sons and two daughters, Enda and Rose.  The other son, Eugene, is a good worker but never speaks, and we are never told why.  I don’t know if the author set out to take issue with Catholicism, but she does so very effectively and somewhat emphatically.  A viscount’s son may be the most evil character in the book, but the local priest is far from being kind and compassionate, especially when he is trying to perform an exorcism on Tomás.  Of course, I guess if you’re trying to destroy a demon, you may overlook the fact that you’re killing its host.  I appreciate a good epic family saga, and that’s what we have here.  I just wish it were a little less depressing.

AFTER YOU'D GONE by Maggie O'Farrell

Three generations of characters and a bouncy timeline make for a challenging but enjoyable read, even though the prologue begins with an attempted suicide by Alice, the main character.  We gradually learn her story from her reflections while in a coma, as well as third-person narration that often changes abruptly in both perspective and time period.  The author relies on context to get us settled into the right situation, and it works OK, although I didn’t really love having to wrap my head around what has happened and what is yet to happen in each scenario.  The crux of the novel is an epic love story between Alice and John, but why Alice tries to kill herself is a story that unfolds slowly, along with a family secret that has been withheld way too long.  Some parts of the novel are extremely romantic and other parts on extremely heartbreaking.  Frankly, I could have done with more romance and less heartbreak, which is actually more like soul-crushing grief.  Still, this is a book I always looked forward to resuming, partly because questions remained unanswered until the end but also because Alice was such a delightful and lovable character.  I wanted the best possible outcome for her.

THE VULNERABLES by Sigrid Nunez

Full of reflections on writing, aging, and a lot of other stuff, the main plot of this novel involves a young man, an older woman, and a parrot, all inhabiting a Manhattan apartment during the Covid lockdown.  The older woman, a writer, is the first-person narrator who is pet-sitting the parrot full-time while a visiting doctor occupies her own apartment.  Then the previous pet-sitter, a young man whose wealthy parents have thrown him out, returns to resume taking care of the parrot.  The narrator is none too happy with this sudden intrusion, as she has developed an affinity for the parrot herself.  This unlikely threesome forms the core of the book, but the narrator’s musings fill the majority of the pages and are full of anecdotes that may or may not support the narrator’s opinions.  The young man has mental health issues but is a kind soul who lives in the present without much concern for the future.  How these two bond with one another—and the parrot—makes for a sweet story in an “uncertain spring,” to quote the first sentence of the book.  Gallows humor is needed in times like these, and here are a couple of examples from this novel that contain more than just a grain of truth:

p. 142:  “I like that Alan Bennett said, For a writer, nothing is ever quite as bad as it is for other people, because, however dreadful, it may be of use.”

p. 143:  “And nutty epitaphs:  I know not everyone is unhappy about this.”

FAREWELL, AMETHYSTINE by Walter Mosley

Here’s another convoluted installment in the Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins, Los Angeles private investigator, series. Of course, a beautiful woman must be part of the cast, and here it is Easy’s client, Amethystine.  Her ex-husband, Curt, has gone missing, and it doesn’t take long for Easy to find his dead body.  The next question is why was he killed and by whom.  Another missing person is Easy’s cop friend, Melvin, whose disappearance may or may not be linked to Curt’s murder.  As usual, there are so many characters and so many twists and turns that it’s difficult to keep up with who are the good guys and who are the bad guys.  Of course, some, like Easy’s longtime friend Mouse, straddle the line, straying into doing bad things for good reasons.  Fearless Jones, who stars in another Mosley series, makes a cameo appearance here as well. Amethystine herself may not be entirely innocent, for that matter.  I would like Mosley’s work a lot more if the plot were not so intricate, but there’s no denying he has a way with words and has his finger on the pulse of the pitfalls that plagued Black people in 1969.  Easy may have escaped Louisiana, but he is still walking a tightrope in order not to piss off the white chief of police in L.A.  And I don’t usually take much note of the dust cover, but the purple lettering is perfect for a title that includes the name Amethystine.

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.

INLAND by Tea Obreht

As historical fiction, this book is a worthwhile read.  Camels as conveyances for supplies and mail in the mid-nineteenth century?  That was news to me.  One of the two main characters in this book is a camel driver during that time, but he is also a murderer on the run.  His timeline eventually intersects with that of Nora, a wife and mother in Arizona in the 1890s.   Her husband has been missing for three days, leaving her in desperate need of water but at times too proud or embarrassed to ask for it.  For me, Nora is the more intriguing character, but she makes some bad decisions with dire consequences.  She is also a prolific liar, stating at one point that lying is just as easy as saying nothing.  Many of her lies are cover-ups for cowardice, and in one case she admits the truth to her almost-lover, who spills the beans.  Living with her and her three sons is Josie, an orphaned distant relative, who also is harboring a whopper, and, ironically, Nora threatens her with a beating in order to drag the truth out of her.  Nora also berates Josie for her claimed ability to contact the dead, while Nora herself carries on conversations with her dead daughter, who is generally available to offer advice.  In other words, Nora is a supreme hypocrite.  She may be admirable in her strength, referring to herself as a “hard woman,” but I found her exasperating.  I am OK with that type of character in a novel, but here I felt that the storyline moved along a level plane, without enough highs and lows.  This is a pleasant enough read, but suspense is in short supply.