CHENNEVILLE by Paulette Jiles

John Chenneville wakes up from a coma in a Civil War infirmary in Virginia.  Slowly but surely he begins to remember his past and makes his way home to Missouri.  There he discovers that his sister and her family have been brutally murdered by a sheriff’s deputy named Dodd.  Thus begins Chenneville’s quest for vengeance as he travels through Indian Territory and into Texas, tracking Dodd.  Chenneville himself becomes a suspect in another murder so that he is both the hunter and the hunted.  This is a rather low-key adventure novel in which Chenneville encounters both the worst and the best kind of people along his journey.  He has to be wary at every juncture, but he is savvy and possesses good survival skills, including knowledge of Morse code, which comes in handy more than once.  He is also compassionate and seems to attract stray animals, while Dodd leaves a trail of horses that he has literally ridden to death.  Chenneville is such a good man that he is a bit one-dimensional, but my support for him did not waver until I realized that he was potentially sacrificing the prospect of a happy life in order to continue his pursuit of Dodd.  Predictability is one of the weaknesses of this novel, but Jiles still knows how to spin a good yarn and manages to weave in characters from her other novels.  In fact, Dodd himself, who adopts several aliases, actually appears in Simon the Fiddler under a different name.  Nifty.

SIMON THE FIDDLER by Paulette Jiles

This may be my least favorite Paulette Jiles book.  As the Civil War is winding down, the title character puts together a ragtag but talented musical group that meanders through southwest Texas, playing gigs at parties, saloons, and hotels.  Simon becomes smitten with Doris, a beautiful Irish lass who is serving out a 3-year contract as the governess for Colonel Webb’s daughter.  Doris is constantly having to fight off the Colonel’s attempts to get her alone at his new home in San Antonio, while Simon plots how to make his way there from Galveston and marry her.  They surreptitiously send letters to one another via the Colonel’s maid, as the Colonel has forbidden almost all outside contact for Doris.  This has the makings of a very good novel, and the author’s writing is exquisite, but the storyline is just not very peppy.  The beginning is lively, and so is the ending, but the middle drags, and the characters of Simon’s bandmates are not fully developed.  Sure, one of them likes to quote Poe, but the other two, except for an early letter-writing subterfuge, could have been left out altogether.  News of the World was such a standout, but this novel was a bit of a disappointment.

LIGHTHOUSE ISLAND by Paulette Jiles

Abandoned as a toddler, twenty-something Nadia Stepan embarks on a dystopian adventure in 2198, cleverly lying her way out of capture by the powers-that-be, who think that live executions on TV are suitable entertainment.  Water is the most precious commodity, with everyone suffering from dehydration and trying to subsist on their rationed quart per day.  Nadia is on a quest to reach Lighthouse Island, a resort advertised on TV.  Along the way, she meets James, a demolitions expert/cartographer in a wheelchair, and he immediately falls in love with her.  (Really)  Fortunately, he has connections that allow Nadia to switch identities with a prison counselor.  He also gives her a card that provides dispensation of food and drink from vending machines and gains her entry to various sites that would otherwise be off-limits.  Although the timeline of this book is completely sequential, it is hard to follow at times, particularly when it gets into the radio communications.  Plus, all of the characters except James and Nadia have very minor roles, and the plot feels sort of slapped together at times.  I did enjoy this novel to a degree, but it didn’t move me or teach me anything or raise compelling questions, except possibly about the disastrous state of the environment 200 years from now, and that’s no surprise.  In fact, I thought it was a bit unimaginative in that it doesn’t suggest major technological advances in communication and transportation.  Perhaps the author is suggesting that the oppressive, reactionary government has basically stifled all innovation.

BLACK SHEEP by Rachel Harrison

Named as one of the top horror books of 2023 by the New York Times, this book is not believable enough to be scary.  However, it is macabre entertainment of the first order, almost like a sequel to Rosemary’s Baby but less grim.  In fact, this book needs its own sequel.  Vesper is a twenty-something young woman waiting tables since her escape from the cult-like religious enclave in which she grew up.  I was thinking maybe Scientology, but that’s not nearly creepy enough.  Vesper receives a mysterious anonymous invitation to the wedding of her former best friend and her former boyfriend and decides what the heck.  Now that she’s been fired from her job, she may as well go home to visit her estranged family.  She also has high hopes of seeing her elusive and charismatic father there.  Vesper’s icy mother is a former horror movie actress whose home décor includes myriad props from her films.  This is the perfect Halloween read—an eerie treat with a snarky but relatable first-person protagonist.  The author taunts us with clues about the identity of Vesper’s father, but these clues are not substantial enough to give it away.

CANDELARIA by Melissa Lozada-Oliva

I cannot think of anything good to say about this novel.  We have three generations of women here—sisters Paola, Bianca, and Candy, along with their mother Lucia, and her mother Candelaria.  However, this is not only a family drama (I guess); it is also a zombie story.  The action whips back and forth between Christmas Eve and the preceding year.  To say that this novel is very hard to follow is an understatement, with floating see-through televisions, characters eating other characters quite nonchalantly, and conversations where it is unclear who is speaking.  How exactly the zombies come into being is still a mystery to me, but it has to do with a cultish workout center called The Women’s Stone. Paola, who has renamed herself to Zoe after having disappeared for a decade, lands a job as a spin class instructor there and soon comes to suspect that something fishy is going on.  Candy, who did a stint in rehab after a drug overdose, becomes pregnant by Bianca’s dead ex-boyfriend, goes to an abortion clinic where they drug her and send her home, still pregnant, and is basically carrying some kind of messiah for the undead.  I couldn’t quite determine if this novel was supposed to be farcical or a serious horror story, but it was a nightmare to read, one way or the other.

My copy of this book was an advance reader’s edition, and the numerous typos further tarnished my reading experience.  Words and phrases were frequently left out or duplicated, and letters were transposed to form other legitimate but inappropriate words.

THE VASTER WILDS by Lauren Groff

A teenage girl escapes from the famine of Jamestown with a small sack of tools, including flint, a knife, and a cup.  She dons the boots of a smallpox victim and heads out into the frozen wilderness.  Already starving before embarking on this adventure, food is hard to come by, and she has to take her chances choosing leaves, berries, and mushrooms that she hopes will not kill her.  This story of survival inspired me to familiarize myself a bit with the history of Jamestown and why they couldn’t feed themselves.  Basically, their supply ships got caught in hurricanes, or the ships brought more people than supplies.  Plus, the English colonists had no experience with agriculture.  I’m not much of a history buff, but I found this fatal example of poor planning to be fascinating.  Anyway, back to our girl trying to put some distance between herself and the failed settlement, which can hardly be called civilized.  She has had various appellations, including Lamentations and Zed, but she contemplates naming herself, just as Adam named all the animals, according to the Bible.  In fact, when she’s not dodging wolves, bears, native Americans, and another escapee, she ponders the validity of the religion she has always known. Her physical struggle to say alive may get top billing here, but her suffering began long before, and her constant reassessment of life’s essentials is almost as impressive as her resourcefulness.

AUDITION by Katie Kitamura

I really liked A Separation, and I loved Intimacies, but this book I just didn’t get.  It’s a head-scratcher, for sure.  The novel has two distinct and somewhat contradictory halves, just like the play that the narrator is starring in.  Both halves involve three characters—the narrator, her husband Tomas, and a young man named Xavier whose looks and mannerisms are very similar to the narrator’s.  The first half ends with sort of a cliffhanger, in which Tomas texts the narrator that they need to talk.  Then the second half begins, and it is completely inconsistent with what we understood from the first half.  What do we have here?  A highly unreliable narrator, for sure, but is she also delusional?  While the first half is taut and fraught with unanswered questions, the second half eventually gets crazily out of hand when a fourth character, a young woman named Hana, joins the cast.  She is the catalyst to a bizarre family dynamic.  The title also has me baffled, although I did wonder at times if the two halves were supposed to be different versions of the same play.  The saving grace here is Kitamura’s fabulous writing, but I just wish she had tied up the loose ends of the first storyline instead of abruptly starting a second one that weirdly intersects the first but then veers off in a completely different direction.

THE PEACOCK AND THE SPARROW by I.S. Berry

Shane Collins drinks too much, smokes too much, and has affairs with married women.  He is an American spy in Bahrain during the Arab Spring of 2011.  His career is winding down, not just because of his bad habits, but also because he is in his fifties and is mediocre at his job.  He has recruited Rashid as an informant for the Opposition to the monarchy in power, but Collins is supposed to remain neutral and just report his findings.  However, as things start to heat up, Collins becomes increasingly inclined to take sides, as he is forced to choose whether to be loyal to Rashid or to his superiors.  To further complicate matters, he falls in love with a local artist who is half his age.  Collins is principled with regard to the safety of his informant but not so principled in his love life.  He may be a flawed protagonist, but somehow his flaws just make him that much more human.  Sometimes he is a despicable person, and sometimes he is compassionate.  Sometimes he makes big mistakes, and sometimes he is brilliant. The tension in this book is palpable, especially when Collins occasionally goes rogue and proves that he still has some tricks up his sleeve.  I loved everything about this book—the characters, the twisty plot, and the gritty setting.  On reflection, this novel is largely about manipulation, but the challenge is to figure out who is manipulating whom.  Collins is a manipulator but is also being manipulated.  I think that if you know you’re being manipulated, then it doesn’t count, but being caught unawares in a scheme where you misunderstood your role is a good indication that you are the puppet rather than the puppeteer.