PROPHET SONG by Paul Lynch

Unease escalates into an avalanche of chaos when a totalitarian regime takes over Ireland.  Eilish, a microbiologist, is left to manage her three teenagers and an infant after her husband is detained.  Plus, Eilish’s father’s dementia is getting worse, but he refuses to leave his home.  She has her hands full, and then her seventeen-year-old son joins the rebellion after he receives a conscription notice from the regime.  Eilish’s sister lives in Canada, so that it would behoove her to get the rest of her family out, but she stubbornly refuses to believe that things can get any worse, and she holds out hope that her son and husband will return home.  The situation continues to spin out of control, and the breakneck pace of the novel makes it frightening, to say the least.  In fact, this novel may supplant The Exorcist, which I read in 1974, as the scariest book I have ever read, and there is nothing supernatural about this one.  Also, the title is misleading for a book this gripping that feels all too real.

ORBITAL by Samantha Harvey

Here we glimpse 24 hours inside an orbiting space station on the day of the first moon landing since the Apollo project.  The six characters—four astronauts and two cosmonauts—are in need of a plot in order to keep this reader engaged and awake.  I liked the message of this book a lot more than the book itself, as the author indulges in quite a bit of philosophizing about Planet Earth as this vessel goes around and around.  Monotonous?  Maybe, but the six characters seem to be eternally in awe, seeing Earth from 250 miles away as what should be a borderless utopia.  However, they also witness the effects of pollution and climate change brought on by Earth’s human inhabitants but don’t seem to dwell on our shortcomings.  The book reminds us that everyone who has ever walked on the moon was an American—a fact that one of the Russian cosmonauts laments.  I was also surprised, though I shouldn’t have been, at how steep a toll weightlessness takes on the human body.  No amount of exercise can compensate for the absence of gravity on a body that is supposed to bear its own weight.

ALL THE SINNERS BLEED by S.A. Cosby

What a refreshing departure this book is from the not-so-great critically acclaimed books I’ve read this year.  Ok, maybe refreshing is not the best word for a book about the grisly torture and murder of several Black children, but it definitely held my attention.  Titus Crown is the Black sheriff of a Virginia county with its share of Southern white nationalist racists, including some of Titus’s deputies.  The novel opens with a Black school shooter who kills only one person—a beloved white teacher.  Titus’s deputies bring down the shooter, and the county is divided along race lines in its support of the shooter or the victim, who turns out to be a violent pedophile.  The teacher had a partner in his crimes against children, and that sicko is still at large, leaving a trail of mutilated bodies in his wake.  Titus has his hands full not only with this case but also with his hot-headed brother, a deputy on the take, an old girlfriend who materializes, and his current girlfriend, who is not quite the firecracker that the old girlfriend is.  Plus, Titus is still wracked with guilt over a case that spelled his departure from the FBI and desperately wants a better outcome for this one.  He is a good man and a good sheriff, but he is also serving as a detective here, and we are rooting for him to find the clue that will be the linchpin to identifying the monster who is still out there before the body count goes any higher.

CROOK MANIFESTO by Colson Whitehead

It’s the 1970s, and Ray Carney has retired from fencing stolen goods, but now he needs to score sold-out Jackson Five concert tickets for his daughter.  Really?  Pair that with the “one last job” plot, and I’m not exactly on board.  The author mashes together several other plots, several years apart, and I found the book very difficult to follow.  Ray is not even as prominent a character as his friend Pepper, who serves as security guard, crime solver, and locater of missing persons.  Arson is rampant throughout Harlem during this time period apparently, thanks to firebugs like a movie director named Zippo, for obvious reasons, and corrupt politicians who line their pockets with urban renewal kickbacks.  The cops are all on the take, of course, but when they started murdering each other, I was taken aback.  The setting may be bleak, but Colson Whitehead is still quite a wordsmith, and I marvel at some of the dynamite sentences he creates.  On page 15, he writes, “He conjured the lonely scene awaiting Foster at home. . .hoisting squealing grandchildren all day like barbells.”   Then on page 195, he says, “Then again, Pepper himself had visited ten of these United States—eleven if you count Connecticut. . .   A cup of coffee costs the same all over and the person who serves it is miserable in the same way. . .”.  Still, great sentences do not necessarily make a great novel, and I just prefer something that hangs together a little better.

LOOT by Tania James

Abbas is a teenager who does woodworking in 18^th century India, alongside his brothers and his father.  His talent for making beautiful toys has come to the attention of the local ruler, despite Abbas’s father’s disdain for such trivial pursuits.  Soon Abbas finds himself employed to carve a large tiger that will also roar and play music; a French clockmaker named Du Leze will supply the sound effects.  This collaboration launches Abbas on an unexpected life of adventure that includes a deadly battle, a sea voyage, an attempted heist, and a conflagration.  I devoured this novel that features a variety of settings, an eventful plot, and charming characters.  Who could ask for more?  Plus, although the characters here are fictional, the tiger that was created for a sultan actually does exist and is currently on display at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.  I must add a visit there to my bucket list.

THE GREAT RECLAMATION by Rachel Heng

Is modernization a good thing or a bad thing?  It is certainly disruptive to the ecosystem and a way of life that depends on that ecosystem.  On page 355, the main character, Ah Boon, suggests “… perhaps there was a way for progress and past to coexist.”  Then again, maybe not.  He witnesses—and participates in--the evolution of Singapore, starting with the WWII occupation by the Japanese, and continuing until 1963, when Singapore is on the brink of becoming a burgeoning first-world entity.  At the beginning Ah Boon is a seven-year-old boy in a fishing village, but he is not a hardy youngster like his older brother.  His uncle, who becomes the family patriarch, wants Ah Boon to follow in his father’s footsteps as a fisherman.  The girl whom Ah Boon has grown up with and whom he loves dearly wants him to join the fight for Communism.  Ah Boon soon embarks on a totally different path when a new community center is built nearby.  I liked the historical aspect of this novel and the fact that the changes that Singapore endured are seen through Ah Boon’s eyes.   I also admired the author’s ability to remain neutral and not take sides in the clash between traditional ways and infrastructure improvements.  However, I needed something to hold my attention, and that something was lacking.

THE MIGHTY RED by Louise Erdrich

Kismet Poe is graduating from high school and has two boyfriends.  One of them, Gary, is a popular athlete with a tendency toward recklessness, but he presents Kismet with an engagement ring, and she is too shocked to say no.  Her other boyfriend, Hugo, is planning to find a job in the oil fields so that he can earn enough money to win Kismet’s affection, whether she is married to Gary or not.  As for Kismet, she seems smart and industrious but allows Gary to coax her into a marriage she doesn’t really want.  Why she cannot extricate herself from this plan is somewhat of a mystery.  Her mother, Crystal, is devastated that Kismet is abandoning her college plans to marry Gary, while Gary’s mother is ecstatically planning a lavish wedding.  After Kismet reluctantly and hilariously says her wedding vows, she becomes something of a Cinderella figure, but Gary is no prince.  We, and Kismet, finally become privy to the details of an event that puts Gary in an even worse light, if that is even possible.  Since this book takes place in an agricultural community, Erdrich manages to weave in her concerns about the ecological impact of sugar beet farming, but she also sprinkles in more humor than I recall from her other novels.  In fact, this is my favorite book of hers since The Master Butchers Singing Club.  Crystal and Kismet are the delightful anchors here, and the storyline makes for an entertaining read.  Even Gary, with all his flaws, is more pathetic than despicable.

SAM by Allegra Goodman

The first half of this book made me anxious, but I stuck with it, and I’m glad I did.  The title character is a petulant child, and she is the chief anxiety producer.  Her single mother, Courtney, is a saint—working two jobs to make sure that her two children have better opportunities than she had.  Sam’s ability to climb door frames inspires her ne’er-do-well father to take her to a climbing gym, and thus begins Sam’s love/hate relationship with climbing.  The narrative recounts Sam’s life until she is about nineteen or so, making this a true coming-of-age novel.  As difficult as she is as a child, she is worse as a teenager, making some very wrong-headed decisions.  The second half of the book becomes much more palatable, as she falls in with a group of twenty-something-year-old rock climbers.  She may not be their peer age-wise, but she is the best climber, and she seems to be making progress toward figuring out what she wants in life.  Lapses in judgment still plague her, though, as does regret regarding her relationship with her father.  The fact that her mother maintains her sanity through all of Sam’s screw-ups is what gave me hope that Sam would find her way to adulthood with her own sanity intact.  Failures can be learning experiences, and Sam has plenty of those on which to build.  Climbing is almost too obvious a metaphor here.  When Sam falls, she dusts herself off and launches herself right back up the boulder.