WINTER WORK by Dan Fesperman

The Berlin wall has just come down, and former East German intelligence officials are either destroying documents or trying to sell them to the CIA.  This novel opens with the death of one such Stasi officer who was apparently in the “sell” camp and possibly murdered by a competitor.  Emil Grimm, who was friends with the dead officer, now seeks to make his own deal with the Americans.  His wife is dying of ALS and is playing matchmaker to Emil and her caretaker, Karola.  Emil just wants money and passports to get all three of them out of Germany.  Claire, his CIA contact, begins to sympathize with Emil and his desperation and puts her own life at risk to cut a deal with him.  The Russian KGB operatives, stereotypically burly and violent, serve as the main villains here.  This novel is basically an imagined story behind the acquisition of the Rosenholz files, which gave the U.S. a trove of information regarding alleged East German spies.  The writing in this book is perfunctory, but the pacing is decent, and the historical context is fascinating.  I have not read much, if anything, about the immediate aftereffects of Cold War and the reunification of Germany.  Certainly I never considered how so many people lost their jobs, and I don’t mean just the Stasi employees.  Granted, they were engaged in efforts to infiltrate and undermine U.S. and European government entities, but their custodial staff, for example, were not.  I think it’s a bit risky for the author to paint Emil as someone deserving of a bailout, but it works.

BOOK LOVERS by Emily Henry

Nora is a literary agent who agrees to accompany her younger sister, Libby, to Sunshine Falls, NC, for a month in August.  The town is the setting for a best-selling novel that one of Nora’s most successful clients has written.  Libby tries to break down Nora’s all-work-and-no-play image by creating a checklist of things to accomplish in Sunshine Falls—go skinny-dipping, ride a horse, sleep under the stars, and save a floundering local business, among other things.  One item is specifically for Nora—go on dates with two locals.  Libby herself is married with two young daughters but appears to be struggling with a personal issue that she refuses to share with Nora, who has tried to be both mother and father to Libby for most of their lives.  Charlie Lastra, the executive editor at a NY publishing house, passed on the Sunshine Falls novel, but Nora (literally) runs into him in a bar there.  Too convenient?  Too coincidental?  Who cares?  On the one hand I think of this novel as a guilty pleasure, but it has some of the best verbal sparring I have ever read.  Yes, it’s a rom-com, but I was hooked by the sparkling repartee as much as by the smoldering love story.  I must be a romantic at heart, because this is one of those books that I just cannot get out of my head.

SEA OF TRANQUILITY by Emily St. John Mandel

I loved Mandel’s Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel, but this novel was a disappointment for me.  I also generally love time travel novels, including Stephen King’s 11/22/63 and Scott Alexander Howard’s The Other Valley.  In this book, however, I was never invested in the characters, and the plot was just too complicated.  If ever there was a novel that demanded a reread, this is it.  About halfway through the novel I realized that Gaspery, born in the 2400s, is the main character. He grew up in a domed colony, nicknamed Night City because the lights were too expensive to repair, on the moon.  His sister Zoey works for the mysterious Time Institute on Earth, and Gaspery secures a position as a time traveler for the Institute.  Zoey warns him that the job is dangerous, since the Institute will not tolerate interference in the past.  The characters whom he visits in the past are introduced in the first half of the book, and by the time Gaspery’s visits take place, I had forgotten the details of these characters’ lives.  The author does not address how Earth survives global warming nor how life is different on Earth four centuries from now.   In fact, everything is about the same, except for colonization and travel to and from our moon, as well as Saturn’s moon, Titan.  Of course, the time travel is futuristic, if you believe that we will be able to do that someday, but Mandel really has something else in mind with the time travel, and I didn’t buy that at all.  My favorite incident in the novel is when Gaspery learns that his cat is an unwitting time traveler who came from 1985.  Gaspery is stunned by that revelation, but as Zoey says, “Honestly, Gaspery, what difference would it make.  A cat’s a cat.”  Priceless.

PINEAPPLE STREET by Jenny Jackson

This novel about a filthy rich family focuses on three very smart women.  Darley gave up her trust fund so that she could marry Malcolm without a pre-nup and gave up her career as well.  Georgiana, Darley’s younger sister, works for a non-profit and becomes romantically involved with Brady, who works at the same company.  Sasha is married to Cord, Darley and Georgiana’s brother, and lives in the family home, which is still littered with childhood keepsakes and deteriorating furniture that Cord’s family will not allow Sasha to get rid of.  Plus, Sasha’s sisters-in-law privately refer to her as GD—Gold Digger—and erroneously believe that she did not sign a pre-nup.  All the talk of lost jewelry, deb balls, lunches at the club, and private schools was just too much privilege for me.  Don’t get me wrong; these are not bad people, but their problems, by and large, are not problems that I can really relate to.  And, as in many of these family dramas, there are secrets galore.  Georgiana has a secret that is basically tearing her apart, and she shares it with Sasha, in confidence, of course.  Then when the secret finally is revealed, everyone is mad at Sasha for not telling everyone sooner.  But, wait.  Isn’t that what someone is supposed to do with a secret?  Keep it a secret, right?  Darley and Malcom also have a secret, until they finally realize that the longer they hold on to the secret, the worse the humiliation is going to be.  At times I just wanted to throw up my hands and tell these people to get over themselves.