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.

BEHIND THE BEAUTIFUL FOREVERS by Katherine Boo

Annawadi is a slum of around 10,000 people near the Mumbai airport.  The author, an investigative journalist, focuses on a few families, especially the children.  Abdul—age unknown—is not in school because he is supporting his very large family as a garbage broker.  Basically, he sorts and buys recyclable garbage from scavengers—also children—and sells the stuff to a recycling plant.  He is one of many savvy and enterprising boys who profit from the refuse around the airport. His world, however, is upended when an argument with a neighbor woman prompts her to set herself on fire.  Abdul’s father is dragged off to jail, and Abdul is thrown in with him when he goes to help his father.  The author tells this story in a clear-eyed fashion without melodrama, but she makes it clear that the woman committed suicide, and no crime was committed.  And this is not the only suicide in the book; rat poison seems to be the elixir of choice for offing oneself.  Some residents become addicted to sniffing the Indian version of Wite-Out, which is also used there to patch up wounds.  What really stands out about this book, however, is the degree of corruption that exists. Law enforcement is non-existent, because the police are acting solely based on who is paying them the most.  Even more astonishing is the fact that people living in the slum are also profiting by extorting money, and one woman and her daughter raise funds for a non-existent non-profit.  The poverty here lies in a thriving city of global financial importance with a population roughly the same as Florida’s.  I find it hard to imagine how the inequities will ever be erased.

DREAM COUNT by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Three women from Nigeria, all of whom are friends, and one woman from Guinea have stories to tell, but only the latter has sizzle.  Chia is an aspiring travel writer with enough family money to travel in style, whether she sells her story or not.  She is hung up on two men—one who ditched her and never treated her with respect and another who was married.  Zikora’s boyfriend skedaddles when she becomes pregnant, even though he agreed that she could stop taking birth control pills.  (He apparently didn’t understand the possible consequences!)  Omelogor cooks the books for a corrupt Nigerian financial institution and uses some of her ill-gotten gains to help struggling Nigerian women.  She also has a website that is sort of an advice column for men, which provides some much-needed humor.  Chia and Zikora are somewhat obsessed with finding “Mr. Right,” while Omelogor is not really interested in a long-term committed relationship.  In any case, none of their stories and failed romantic relationships are really worth reading about.  The Guinea woman, Kadiatou, however, is completely different.  She has legal asylum status in the U.S. and is working as a hotel maid when her life unravels in a gut-wrenching way.  Her situation is a fictionalized version of an event that occurred in 2011, and her terror of being deported to some degree diminishes her desire to seek justice.  I loved Adichie’s insightful Americanah, but this book just does not measure up to that standard.  The Nigerian women are smart and attractive but have less substance than the women in Sex and the City.  Kadiatou’s is a heart-pounding story that doesn’t emerge until about 250 pages into the book.  Until then, there is a lot of whining and hand-wringing.

BEAUTIFUL UGLY by Alice Feeney

Like The Plot and Yellowface, this book involves a writer who steals another author’s work.  However, that is not the main storyline.  Grady is unable to write while he grieves the disappearance of his wife, Abby, a year ago.  His agent suggests that he move to an isolated Scottish island where he can perhaps focus on his next book.  However, the island turns out to be full of mysterious happenings, including glimpses of what Grady believes are his wife, plus some gruesome history.  What follows is a suspenseful, macabre tale in which the only lovable character is Grady’s dog and in which revelations expose Grady as a highly unreliable narrator.  This is neither the best nor the worst thriller I have ever read, but I wish the characters had more depth.  Plus, the plot is kind of out there, just like the island on which it takes place, and reliance on a Magic 8 Ball for advice is ridiculous.  If this whole novel were not morbid enough, Grady and Abby always substituted the phrase “I hope you die in your sleep” for “I love you.”  Yikes.  It’s not hard to imagine where this is going, but how we get there is down a twisty, unpredictable path.

THE STOLEN QUEEN by Fiona Davis

If you want a plot that is fairly realistic in a novel, this is not the book for you.  Plus, the three main characters in the book—Charlotte, Annie, and her mother Joyce—are lacking in common sense.  This deficiency does not deter Annie and Charlotte from suddenly traveling to Egypt to try to find and recover an artifact that was stolen from the Metropolitan Museum in New York.  (Nineteen-year-old Annie whose occupations are mainly waitress and housekeeper has never traveled abroad but miraculously happens to have a current passport.) Charlotte is also on a personal quest to discover what happened to her husband and infant daughter after a shipwreck on the Nile forty years ago.  Why did she wait so long?  She believes in a curse supposedly applied by a female pharaoh whom Charlotte is trying to prove was unfairly maligned.  Trying to clean up that pharaoh’s reputation would seem to negate the curse, right?  Charlotte is theoretically a smart woman, and Annie has a knack for solving riddles, but they are just not very wise, if you ask me, as they both knowingly put themselves in harm’s way.  I can live with bumbling characters who stumble onto vital discoveries, but I would prefer a plot that doesn’t border on fantasy.  The author builds suspense fairly well, but the writing leaves a lot to be desired, as does the believability factor. 

THE DIRECTOR by Daniel Kehlmann

The opening of this novel is priceless.  Wilzek leaves his sanatorium in a chauffeured car so that he can appear on TV as a talk show guest.  Unfortunately, his dementia is such that he really has no idea where he is going and becomes somewhat unhinged during his on-air interview.  We learn that he was an assistant to the Austrian director, G.W. Pabst, but we don’t discover his role in the story until much later.  Wilzek is fictional, but Pabst, whose life dominates the narrative, was a real person who directed silent movies and then later movies with sound in the U.S.  He knows that as a director he is only as good as his last project and returns to Europe as things are heating up in Nazi Germany.  The author paints him as a comical character in many ways, but the circumstances are anything but.  Negotiating how to make a worthwhile movie that is subject to Nazi scrutiny is a tightrope that Pabst walks with questionable success.  Besides the opener, another hilarious scene is a book club meeting attended by Pabst’s wife and wives of Nazi party members.  Only one author is really suitable for a discussion in which the walls may have ears, and that author’s work is not exactly great literature.  This novel will make you want to look up biographical info on Pabst and the movie he makes of a novel by the author his wife’s book club always reads.  The twist at the end is fictional but definitely one of the highlights.