THE SCHOOL FOR GOOD MOTHERS by Jessamine Chan

Frida Liu has a “very bad day” and leaves her eighteen-month-old daughter home alone for two and a half hours.  As a result, she must spend a year at the School for Good Mothers, which is actually a school for bad mothers who need to become good mothers.  The beginning of the book, before Frida enters the school, is tense and suspenseful, but her time at the school involves too much angst and hand-wringing.  The students are assigned a robotic doll, reminiscent of the artificial friend in Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun, who has human-like capabilities.  Frida names hers Emmanuelle, which the doll struggles to pronounce.  Frida and Emmanuelle are a team in the quest for Frida’s parental rights being restored.  Their practice sessions include subjects such as stranger/danger and empathy for those less fortunate, but Emmanuelle initially sees a homeless person as stranger/danger, not as someone in need.  I like the idea and originality of this novel more than its actual substance.  Eventually, the author paints herself into a corner with Frida’s many failings--with only one way out.

THE RABBIT HUTCH by Tess Gunty

Vacca Vale is a fictitious Indiana city that was once a thriving industrial metropolis.  Now it is dying, and developers plan to demolish a sizeable greenspace.  The title of the book refers to an affordable housing apartment complex in which most of the characters reside.  There are rabbits in the story as well, not to mention in the somewhat disturbing epigraph.  Blandine is an exceptionally bright and beautiful young woman who has aged out of the foster system, as have her three male teenaged roommates whose moral compasses are seriously skewed.  Blandine’s personal mission is to stop the developers by peppering them with voodoo dolls and whatnot.  One oddball character who sweeps in from California is the son of a famous but now deceased actress.  He likes to paint his almost naked body with the liquid from glow sticks and then barge into the home of someone with whom he has a bone to pick.  At first, I found the storyline depressing and not exactly cohesive, but then I laughed out loud occasionally.  Overall, though, I would say that this book is a bit dark—about a depressed city and its unfortunate denizens.  In a long and seemingly unrelated section of the book, gifted high school student Tiffany becomes romantically involved with a 42-year-old married teacher.  Her connection to the Rabbit Hutch comes not so much as a surprise as a confirmation of what the author has led us to suspect.  Here’s my favorite passage from that section:

“It’s clear to her that he would be happier in a coastal city.  It’s clear to him that she would be happier in a different species.”

I hope that species is not rabbits.

THE HERO OF THIS BOOK by Elizabeth McCracken

Whether or not I like an author depends a lot on which of their books I read first.  In the case of Elizabeth McCracken, I loved The Giant’s House, but if I had read Niagara Falls All Over Again or Bowlaway first, I probably would not still be reading her books.  This book, however, is another winner for me.  Marketed as a novel, it’s mostly a memoir and totally a paean to the author’s beloved but now deceased mother.  The first-person narrator is in London visiting, contemplating and commenting on various sites she had visited with her mother or would have liked to.  Her mother had mobility issues her entire life, due to cerebral palsy—a diagnosis that the narrator/daughter was not aware of until she became an adult.  The prose here is smart, funny, and touching, but if you’re looking for a meaty plot, don’t expect to find one here.  The narrator also reflects on the craft of writing and insists that a character’s physical characteristics be described.  I couldn’t agree more.  I always find it frustrating if I cannot picture a character in my mind.  In this case, the author describes her mother quite vividly, including her diminutive stature and her eyebrows, “which were like nobody else’s.”  Oddly enough, I did not find the narrator’s mother to be all that endearing.  Even the narrator owns up to some of her mother’s faults.  Both of the narrator’s parents where hoarders, and her mother was unwilling to part with even one of four waffle irons that she never used.  The narrator admits that she and her mother were both terrible at managing money, but the narrator did discover after her mother’s death that her mother had financial resources that her mother never tapped, because she did not know they existed.  For someone obviously so intelligent, this lapse just baffles me.

TOM LAKE by Ann Patchett

Lara and her husband Joe own a Michigan cherry orchard, and all three of their adult daughters are at home helping out during the Covid lockdown.  It’s the perfect time for Lara to share the story of her brief career as an actress and her involvement with an actor named Peter Duke who became a movie star.  The rapt attention of her three daughters eggs Lara on, starting with her unplanned audition for the role of Emily in her high school’s production of Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town.  She goes on to play Emily in two other venues, and the final production is the one in which she meets Peter Duke, referred to simply as Duke throughout this book, who plays her father.  Lara so thoroughly embodies the Emily of the play, that the cast and crew call her Emily, which is also the name of her oldest daughter.  Two characters with essentially the same name occasionally caused me some mild confusion in distinguishing between the past and the present or the mother and the daughter, but not to a degree that detracted from my enjoyment of the story.  The real questions that we readers wanted answered were why she gave up acting, why did she break up with Duke, and how did she meet Joe.  The answers to all of these questions are unexpected.  This is just a delightful and beautifully written story of family and the regrettable mistakes we made when we were young.  Lara’s mistakes are myriad and embarrassing, often reflective of poor judgment, but they all lead to the contentment that she now enjoys.

TRUTH & BEAUTY by Ann Patchett

Lucy Grealy was an author and poet and a dear friend of Ann Patchett’s, ever since they were roommates at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop.  This homage to Lucy and to her friendship with Patchett is very readable but not quite riveting.  Lucy was a very needy person who just wanted to be loved, preferably by a man, despite the fact that she had tons of very devoted friends—both male and female.  As a child she developed cancer of the jaw, and her life was an endless series of surgeries intended to improve her appearance and her ability to eat and speak.  She achieved acclaim as a writer when she published Autobiography of a Face in 1994, but no surgeon was able to reconstruct her face satisfactorily.  She suffered mightily, even having her fibula removed so that it could be used to supplant her jaw bone, but the results were never as advertised.  My only complaint about this book is that Patchett never gave me reason to love Lucy, who reminds me so much of the character Jude in A Little Life.  I empathized with Lucy, but she squandered not only her friendships but also her talent and her financial gains.  Devotees like Patchett were constantly at her beck and call—financially, emotionally, and in person.  I just couldn’t figure out why, unless all her friends needed to be needed, and I don’t think that’s the case with Ann Patchett, at least.  Ann obviously genuinely loved Lucy, partly for her mind, I suppose.  One very telling incident in the book is where Lucy went on a date with George Stephanopoulos after he answered her personal ad in the New York Review of Books.  She did not seem disappointed at their failure to hit it off, but the question on all her friends’ minds was whether he knew in advance about her disfigured face.  She unraveled when someone actually asked her.

OUR MISSING HEARTS by Celeste Ng

This book's political angle hits uncomfortably close to home.  The Crisis, a period of economic collapse, yielded way to a dystopian, fascist, xenophobic society with a Stepford tinge to it.  I would say that this book is prescient with its glimpse of what could be coming, but some aspects of it are already here, such as the removal of banned books from school libraries.  The right-wing extremist government described here has discovered that the most effective way to scare people into doing its bidding is to threaten to take away their children.  Sound familiar?  Parents who don’t parrot the government line will have their children placed in foster homes, and countless children have been relocated, thanks to a government-sanctioned vigilante system.  Twelve-year-old Noah Gardner, nicknamed Bird, would be in danger of being removed if his mother hadn’t fled and gone into hiding after a line from one of her poems became the rallying cry for subversives.  This book works well when it is firing a warning shot about what could be ahead for this country, but other aspects of the plot seem a little too convenient.  For example, Bird’s mother acquires the assistance of an old friend who happens to be extremely wealthy with access to some sophisticated technology, and the reunion of Bird with an old school friend in a completely different city struck me as an unlikely coincidence.  The small cast of characters gives the book an intimacy that contrasts with the global issues this book raises, and the plot moves along nicely, except for a section in which Bird’s mother goes into way too much descriptive detail of the Crisis.  I could have skipped that section and not missed out on anything.

UTOPIA AVENUE by David Mitchell

Utopia Avenue is the name of a very talented eclectic band assembled in England in the 1960s.  The backdrop of this musical era helps make this a nostalgia trip worth taking.  Griff, the drummer, is the only member of the band who does not sing or write, but he endures a tragic event that threatens to derail his career.  Jasper, the superb lead guitarist, has spent time in a mental health facility because of noises in his head that disrupt his life.  Dean is the bass player who left home as a teenager after his father burned his guitar and treasured memorabilia.  The keyboardist is a woman nicknamed Elf, who is not elfin but had moderate success previously in a folk duo.  I loved all four of these musicians, as well as their manager, Levon, but the plot drags at times, despite the sprinkling of cameo appearances by Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, John Lennon, David Bowie, and a bunch of others.  And let’s face it, this is a very long book that leans heavily on character development.  Dean is the closest to being a stereotypical rock star, and, although both he and Elf probably would have a shot at a solo career, the band members are very supportive of one another.  They become a close-knit family, despite the fact that, except for Jasper and Dean, they were strangers before they came together as a band.  Some healthy competition among them serves as an impetus for each of them to perform at their optimum level.  The biggest squabble among them is deciding whose single they will release first—Jasper’s, Dean’s, or Elf’s.  Ultimately, they roll the dice—literally.