LIGHT PERPETUAL by Francis Spufford

A German bomb demolishes a London Woolworth’s in 1944, and five of the victims are children.  The substance of this novel is what might have been for these kids, but the premise is lost as the author chronicles their what-if lives over the succeeding decades.  In fact, the Blitz is never mentioned again, and, although this novel honors the bombing victims, it becomes just five separate stories that barely intersect.  Alec is a typesetter for the London Times and outlives that technology but reinvents himself in pedagogy.  Vern is a serially bankrupt real estate developer who stoops to swindling an unsuspecting potential investor.  (We feel that the world would have been a better place without him.)  Ben is a diminutive schizophrenic man who works as a double-decker bus ticket-taker.  His mental illness limits his options until he meets a woman who changes everything.  The two girls, Jo and Val, are twin sisters who veer off in completely different directions.  Jo becomes a backup singer and girlfriend to an American rock star, while Val marries a homicidal neo-Nazi who goes out every night looking to pick a fight with any random person of color.  Yikes!  My problem with this novel is its lack of cohesion.  It is like reading five novellas concurrently or like layering lasagna ingredients until they run out.  We are introduced to each of the five characters, and then we revisit them a decade or so later, then again, and so on and so forth.  I get that it would not have been realistic for them to have been in and out of each other’s lives, but I would have preferred some overlap rather than five parallel storylines with almost nothing in common.

THE SEVEN MOONS OF MAALI ALMEIDA by Shehan Karunatilaka

Maali is a 1980s war photographer in Sri Lanka with a box of incriminating hidden photos that he wants to come to light.  Unfortunately, Maali is dead.  He is now a spirit residing in the In Between for seven days and floats around to observe anyone who speaks his name.  He therefore serves as an omniscient narrator, commenting on what happens in the aftermath of his death.  He would also like to discover who murdered him, and there are possibilities aplenty.  This book was a challenge to read, not only because I’m not familiar at all with Sri Lanka’s history, but also because the characters have long and unfamiliar names, making them difficult for me to distinguish.  The author seems to assume that the reader is familiar with the historical events in Sri Lanka’s history, the vocabulary, and the names and acronyms of the various warring factions.  I tried to keep up but failed miserably, and although I didn’t understand half of what was happening in the country, the parts of the book that I did understand were powerful.  The author reveals insights into humanity’s struggles that are worth mentioning.  For instance, he notes that no major religion forbids rape and that all civilizations are built on genocide.  Think about it.  On page 345 Maali’s father says this:

‘”You know why the battle of good vs evil is so one-sided, Malin?  Because evil is better organized, better equipped and better paid.  It is not monsters or yakas or demons we should fear.  Organised collectives of evil doers who think they are performing the work of the righteous.  That is what should make us shudder.’”

That sounds too frighteningly familiar.

LESSONS IN CHEMISTRY by Bonnie Garmus

I have resisted reading this book, because it was basically the “It” book of 2022.  Where the Crawdads Sing was the last “It” book that I read, and it did not live up to the hype.  However, Lessons in Chemistry may well be the funniest book I have ever read.  Although some tragic and horrifying events do occur in this novel, it is mostly the triumphant story of Elizabeth Zott, a chemist in the 1950s who is constantly victimized by misogynists, particularly in the workplace.  Being an unwed mother does not help, either, but she lands a job as a TV chef, where she eschews all the trinkets that the studio has provided as kitchen décor.  Instead, she treats cooking as science and even calls her home kitchen the “lab”—not exactly a misnomer, since it contains a centrifuge, beakers, and a Bunsen burner.  In one episode, she advises cutting slits in the top crust of chicken pot pie and describes how it will otherwise behave like Mt. Vesuvius.  The fact is that she is a terrific cook and beautiful as well, but her TV show largely focuses on empowering women to believe in themselves and what they can accomplish and shed stereotypes.  She also has a dog whose vocabulary numbers in the hundreds and an extremely precocious four-year-old daughter who stuns the kindergarten librarian by asking for books by Norman Mailer.  Of course, not everyone is as brilliant as Elizabeth, her daughter, and her dog, and I expect that some people will be turned off by Elizabeth’s attitude, which borders on arrogance.  I, however, as well as her fictional TV viewers, found her to be delightful, inspiring and courageous, although at times overly forthcoming.  What TV personality in her right mind would offer that she’s an atheist in the 1950s?  Speaking of the 1950s, I loved all the references to that era’s popular TV fixtures, such as the Jack LaLanne Show and The Huntley-Brinkley Report.  Garmus’s writing style, in addition to provoking laugh-out-loud responses, felt sort of breathless, or maybe that was just my reaction to the zippy pace of the novel.  I hope the author has another book in her with a heroine who leaps off the page like Elizabeth Zott does.

HOW TO SAY BABYLON by Safiya Sinclair

This book definitely provided a learning experience, especially with regard to the origins and beliefs of Rastafari.  I did not previously know that the Rasta revered Haile Selassie, the former emperor of Ethiopia, who staved off Mussolini’s invasion and ruled the only African country never colonized.  In fact, the word Rastafari comes from Haile Selassie’s name prior to becoming emperor, which was Ras Tafari Makonnen.  I also did not know that Rastafari is very paternalistic, and women are definitely second-class citizens whose main function is to serve men.  The author grew up in a Rasta household in Jamaica where, fortunately, education was encouraged.  She, along with her brother and two sisters, were very bright and excelled in school, largely due to their mother’s love of books and learning.  Safiya’s father was a musician whose extreme distaste for all things foreign still did not prevent him from regularly performing covers of Bob Marley songs in the tourist hotels.  He, however, did not extend acceptance of non-Rasta influences to the rest of his family.  At one point, Safiya opted to forego an opportunity for a modeling contract in the U.S., because she feared her father’s ire if she cut her dreadlocks.  And well she should, because his temper tantrums were horrific.  Plus, the scoundrel shamelessly flaunted his girlfriends in front of his family.  I was very frustrated that Safiya continued to return to Jamaica following several trips to the U.S. where she went to college on scholarship and achieved recognition for her poetry.  Her need for her father’s approval, which seemed to be unattainable, made me think of a battered wife who finds it impossible to leave her tormentor.  As in many of those cases, Safiya also needed his financial support.  This bleak memoir was painful to read, not only because of what Safiya and her siblings went through, but also because their father never suffered any consequences for his actions.

THE MAID by Nita Prose

Molly is a hotel maid who seems to be on the autism spectrum.  She misinterprets other people’s emotions and sarcastic comments, and consequently she is a poor judge of character.  A man whom she thinks of as a boyfriend steals her nest egg, leaving her to struggle to make ends meet.  She is, however, a model employee, very focused on tidiness, at least until she discovers the dead body of Charles Black, a wealthy and regular guest at the hotel.  Molly’s social inadequacies, if you want to call them that, make her a target for those who want to shift the blame to someone ill-equipped to fight back.  She soon discovers that she has helpful resources that she did not even know about, in addition to her own sharp memory and observations.  Molly is a plucky heroine with a strong ethical base, but she has no scruples about hiding the truth when she feels she needs to protect someone.  I would brand this a cozy mystery—no sex, no gunfire, and no resemblance to reality.  Still, I enjoyed trying to distinguish the good eggs from the bad eggs, especially since Molly’s judgment is suspect.