YOU DREAMED OF EMPIRES by Alvaro Enrigue

I think this is supposed to be reimagined history with a heavy dose of humor, but it did not work for me.  It is basically about the meeting of Cortez and Montezuma, but it is very hard to follow, partly because the setting can change in a heartbeat.  One minute we are reading about the Spaniards in a temple, and the next paragraph is about Montezuma’s sister/wife in the palace.  Then we switch back to the Spaniards or to the translator who goes AWOL.  Much confusion stems from the unfamiliar Aztec names, amplified by the fact that the author sometimes refers to characters by their names and sometimes by their titles.  Cortez has two titles—one Aztec and one Spanish—and is also known, in our English translation, as the captain general.  Some of the names of lesser characters are translated into two lines of English.  There is some almost funny stuff here, such as when the Spaniards get lost in Montezuma’s labyrinthine castle and try to follow the kitchen smells to avoid going in circles.  One of the Spaniards almost gags on his lunch, due to the odors exuded by the Aztecs, but I can’t imagine that the Spaniards smelled much better, especially since their most important personal hygiene task was cutting their toenails.  Anyway, here’s a priceless line from page 128:

“In Mexico, authority has always flowed from the smack of a flip-flop.”

I’m not even sure what that sentence means, but I do know it’s not the only intentional anachronism.  Montezuma, portrayed here as being obsessed with hallucinogens and the Spaniards’ horses, sways to the beat of a T.Rex song.

REJECTION by Tony Tulathimutte

This may not be my least favorite book ever, but it’s close.  These linked stories are about angry people who, despite their efforts, are experiencing rejection in a major way.  To be clear, this is not a novel.  Some stories are sad, some are surprising, and some are just absurd, with characters that are more like caricatures then real people.  One character has a fantasy so outrageous that I can almost imagine it as a pornographic cartoon. I concede that some characters have very unfortunate physical characteristics, causing their mental health to suffer and leading them to wallow in self-pity.  Social media plays a large role here, and the lingo, acronyms and texting shorthand kept me from understanding everything that happens, and I didn’t bother to investigate further.  Identity is a major theme, and in one story the protagonist refuses all labels as far as ethnicity, gender, whatever, refusing to be pigeonholed and ultimately being resigned to a life online. If this book is supposed to be funny, I missed the point.  If I am supposed to empathize with these offbeat characters, I have to admit that I could not warm up to them or even feel sorry for them as social outcasts, and I could not wait to be done with this book.  I have obviously aged out of this type of literature.

HEADSHOT by Rita Bullwinkel

The title could refer to a professional photograph, but that’s not the case.  Here we are talking about boxing but not just blows that result in a black eye or bloody nose.  Here the author is getting into the minds of eight teenage girls who are competing in a national boxing tournament at a rundown gym in Reno.  One girl was on duty as a lifeguard when a young boy drowned, and her negligence still haunts her.  Another girl recites the value of pi to umpteen decimal places under her breath while she is boxing.  One wears weird hats, such as a raggedy coonskin cap, as a scare tactic.  Another is a 15-year-old whose quarterfinal bout is against her 17-year-old cousin.  The lives of these girls are almost as compelling as the fights themselves.  The book dissects each bout from quarterfinals to final but primarily from inside both fighters’ heads.  As another reviewer noted, this novel does not depend on dialog, as it has none.  Also, the outcome of each match is almost moot, especially as far as these girls’ futures are concerned.  In fact, the author gives us a glimpse of each girl’s adult life, especially her career as it relates to their teenage selves, which, in every case but one, has nothing to do with boxing.  I loved the format of this book, especially the tournament brackets which helped me keep straight who competed against whom.  The problem for me is that, unique as this book is, there is no real drama, no protagonist, and no real plot that you can sink your teeth into.

WE WERE THE UNIVERSE by Kimberly King Parsons

Breast-feeding a four-year-old seems weird to me, but what do I know?  So does lying to your therapist, but I don’t think therapy was really Kit’s intent anyway.  I think she goes to therapy to placate her well-grounded saintly husband, Jad, who tolerates her unpredictable behavior.  The heart of the story, though, is Kit’s grief over the untimely death of her sister, Julie, who had problems with drugs and alcohol.  Kit and Julie were very close, parenting each other from childhood due to the lack of supervision from their mother, a nurse of sorts who took care of her patients but not her daughters.  Now that Kit is a mother and wife, she has had to give up two of her favorite pastimes—casual sex and hallucinogens.  The loss of these activities forces her to continually relive her past, which just makes Julie’s absence all the more painful.  Kit, Julie, and their poor excuse for a mother are just not characters that I could warm up to.  Kit may not have succumbed to drugs and alcohol to the extent that her sister did, but she’s definitely off-balance in other ways—panicking at the grocery store checkout or wandering off to a bar and a dog park without her phone and wallet while her toddler is at gymnastics. Jad remarks late in the book that he loves Kit but that she scares him.  No kidding.

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.