THE DEMON OF UNREST by Erik Larson

Erik Larson has a knack for turning history into a page turner.  Here he tackles the events leading up to the Civil War, chronicling Lincoln’s early presidency and paying particular attention to Fort Sumter, which Lincoln misspelled as “Sumpter.”  The commander of the fort was Major Robert Anderson, a 55-year-old former slave owner from Kentucky who sympathized with the South but whose loyalty lay firmly with the Union Army.  Communication between the fort and Washington, D.C., was unreliable and scarce, so that Anderson and his men were totally in the dark as to if and when they would receive reinforcements or even vital provisions, as they were running out of food.  Meanwhile, the surrounding Confederates were bringing in tons of artillery, all in plain sight of Ft Sumter.  Costly mistakes were made both at the fort and at the White House, to the point that the fall of Ft Sumter was not only unsurprising but basically a forgone conclusion.   It also became increasingly apparent that the two sides did not understand one another at all, and neither side expected or wanted a protracted war.  The South was convinced that cotton was an all-important asset and that slave labor was a requirement for cultivating it, or at least that was their justification for slavery.  Anyone who still believes that the Civil War was caused by any issue other than slavery needs to read this book.

DEAD WAKE by Erik Larson

In typical Erik Larson fashion, two narratives dominate this book—that of the Lusitania and that of the submarine that destroyed it.  However, there are a whole lot of other intriguing stories, particularly the question of why the Lusitania did not have a naval escort and why it entered the U-boat-infested St. George’s Channel in the first place.  British intelligence knew of the danger and either wanted it torpedoed so that the U.S. would enter WWI or didn’t want the Germans to find out that the Brits were intercepting and decoding the German transmissions.  Neither excuse seems very noble, but then the U.S. President, Woodrow Wilson, was lovestruck at the time, and Winston Churchill was in France.  The weather and the tide schedule were also uncooperative, so that a whole confluence of bad luck doomed the ship, including a torpedo that was slightly off course.  The book also gives details about a number of passengers, but these backstories are not nearly as compelling as the survival stories.  A couple of women, presumed dead and brought on board rescue ships, rejoined the living.  Nonfiction is not really my thing, but Erik Larson rarely disappoints, and this book kept me engrossed all the way through.  Maybe I gained a little more in-depth knowledge—pun intended—about WWI-generation German submarines than I really needed, but I have to say that I found that more fascinating than the opulence of the Lusitania.

IN THE GARDEN OF BEASTS by Erik Larson

After several other men have turned down the job, William Dodd abandons a life of academia to become U.S. ambassador to Germany in 1933.  This is a time in which Hitler is gaining more power and amassing a huge army in defiance of the Treaty of Versailles.  Despite the rising tensions, Dodd brings along his wife and two grown children to Berlin.  Dodd’s daughter, Martha, is quite the femme fatale and becomes cozy with an assortment of American writers, German Nazis, and one Russian who may have been a spy.  This book focuses largely on the writings of Martha and her father, both of whom at first downplay the potential for Hitler’s regime to survive and wreak havoc.  Roosevelt’s administration is even less concerned about the turmoil in Germany, and the metaphor about boiling a frog in warm water comes to mind:  the danger isn’t obvious until it’s too late to escape the consequences.  Eventually, Hitler’s ruthlessness and murder of Jews, rivals, and anyone who contradicts him become impossible for Dodd to ignore.  However, convincing the U.S. that Hitler intends to take over Europe is especially difficult, given that the State Department views Dodd’s appointment as a mistake.  His chief mission is to persuade Germany to repay their debt to the U.S. government, but Dodd knows they do not have the money.  Dodd is by no means heroic and even displays hints of racism and anti-Semitism. Nor does he have the personality or charisma to exert any influence on the German political situation, but probably no one else does, either.  He is, however, principled in his ultimate refusal to socialize with the Nazis, although the State Department argues that an ambassador’s job involves building a relationship with the government of the country to which he has been assigned.  Perhaps Dodd’s greatest achievement is his documentation of what he witnesses, both in his diary and in his correspondence.  He is, unfortunately, not a flashy protagonist, making the narrative rather dry, and we all know the horror of what eventually happens.  This may not be my favorite Erik Larson book, but, once again, he has turned a piece of history into a very readable, albeit terrifying, book.

CLEAR by Carys Davies

A Scottish landowner hires John Ferguson to evict Ivar, the only occupant of a remote island.  This would seem to be an unpleasant task for a minister, but Ferguson needs the money.  Before he has even had a chance to settle in after the treacherous journey, Ferguson takes a bad fall, rendering him unconscious.  Ivar finds him and nurses him back to health, so that Ferguson is now indebted to Ivar and thus even more reluctant to accomplish his assigned duty.  This interruption to Ivar’s isolation, rather than an inconvenience, gives him an unexpected respite from his monotonous daily routine.  As for Ferguson, he makes an effort to learn Ivar’s language, communicating with whatever sign language gets his point across and creating a written glossary of the words he learns. The remoteness of the island and its gloomy weather seem to spell doom for one or both men.  I’m not sure how I thought this would turn out, with several moments that made me uneasy, but the conclusion totally came out of left field.  Plus, Ferguson has a gun, and I expected that it would have to come into play at some point.

SEASCRAPER by Benjamin Wood

Thomas Flett is a weary “shanker” who goes out twice a day at the Irish Sea’s low tide with a cart and horse to harvest shrimp.  He’s a twenty-year-old bookworm who had to drop out of school at fifteen to help support his unwed mother.  His is a hard life, but he yearns to become a musician and hides his guitar in the horse’s shed.  The slow pace of this book accelerates to hyperspeed when American movie director Edgar Acheson shows up with a lucrative offer for Thomas.  Edgar wants to film a movie on the beach that Thomas knows extremely well, and Thomas will serve as Edgar’s shore guide, making sure that they avoid deadly sinkholes.  The ominous cold, rainy, and foggy atmosphere provides a strong sense of foreboding and portends of catastrophes to come.  Not only is this a quick read after the dread sets in, but the action all takes place over the course of roughly 24 hours.  Another plus is that there are only about half a dozen characters to keep track of.  The feeling of impending doom propels this novel forward, as does Thomas’s longing for a different life that he seems destined never to experience.

COME & GET IT by Kiley Reid

Millie is a 24-year-old Resident Assistant for a women’s dorm at the University of Arkansas.  Agatha is a successful author and visiting professor, also at the University of Arkansas, who intends to interview students there for her next book.  However, that project gets sidelined in favor of stories for Teen Vogue when she discovers that she can eavesdrop on three students who live in the suite next to Millie’s.  Things get really messy eventually, but we have to wade through hundreds of uneventful pages in the meantime.  The plot for most of the book is somewhere between thin and non-existent, as I kept wondering where on earth this was going.  Retaliatory dorm pranks make some of the characters seem particularly immature and unlikeable.  Other characters prove themselves to be guilty of insanely bad judgment, particularly Kennedy, one the students in the suite next to Millie’s.  She’s a transfer to the U of A due to an incident that led me to think she has some kind of personality disorder, but I’m certainly not qualified to diagnose it.  Millie is in line for a promotion to Resident Director next term, but she disappoints by displaying a streak of cowardice near the end.  Agatha, whose ethical compass definitely shows signs of needing an adjustment, is the one who at least has a backbone, facing up to her misdeeds and offering financial reparations.  I’m not sure what this book is supposed to be about, but perhaps it’s a statement on our transactional society, and it doesn’t bode well.

ENTITLEMENT by Rumaan Alam

Brooke is a young, beautiful, Vassar-educated Black woman who goes to work for Asher Jaffee, a white billionaire in his eighties.  Her job is to help Asher give away his money, and she becomes his protégé, undergoing a transformation in the process.  Brooke first comes to Asher’s attention with her outspokenness and her attempt to return a $200 expense check that she claims to find unethical.  However, her ethics seem to dissolve as she inserts herself into Asher’s lavish lifestyle and comes to feel that she deserves the same perks, such as a chauffeur and a gorgeous New York apartment.  Does she expect Asher to look the other way when she charges expensive clothing to the foundation’s credit card and exaggerates her income in order to qualify for a mortgage?  Brooke is delusional and, from this reader’s standpoint, unlikeable.  Asher has encouraged her to go after what she wants, but she takes that advice to an extreme.  For a book that is largely about a charitable organization, this novel seemed heartless to me.  Asher, whose intentions appear altruistic on the surface, is trying to minimize his tax liability and paying almost a million dollars for a painting for his wife’s birthday.  He is still making more money than he gives away.  All this money being thrown around so casually and carelessly for personal use by a supposed philanthropist is a little nauseating, but maybe that’s the point.

GOOD MATERIAL by Dolly Alderton

Thirty-five-year-old Andy is a mediocre comedian, wallowing in self-pity.  His breakup with Jen has rocked his world, and even his longtime friends no longer want to hang out with him.  Dolly Alderton, please do not write another book like this, as a whiny novel does not make for a good read.  I loved Ghosts and kept expecting this novel to veer in a more positive direction or for Andy to incorporate some of his more outrageous post-breakup experiences into his comedy routine.  His short-lived residence on a boat, his therapy session under false pretenses, and his landlord’s correspondence with Julian Assange would all seem to provide some good fodder for laughter, and I guess they do eventually.  However, we don’t receive any real relief from Andy’s pathetic obsession until late in the novel when Jen explains exactly why she had to end her relationship with him.  Any sympathy that I could muster for Andy went straight down the tubes after hearing her side of the story.  I would be more optimistic that Andy has learned from this experience if Jen would share with him what went wrong.

WILD DARK SHORE by Charlotte McConaghy

Dominic Salt and his three children—Raff, Fen, and Orly—are caretakers of the remote island of Shearwater near Antarctica and are tasked with preserving the United Nations’ seed vault.  These seeds are intended to enable humans to survive when all else is destroyed by climate change.  Shearwater was at one time a research station, but now the Salts are there alone until a boat comes to remove them and the seeds from Shearwater in 6 weeks.  And what an eventful six weeks they will be, beginning with Fen’s rescue of a woman named Rowan who is barely alive, while the captain of Rowan’s boat did not survive their shipwreck.  As Rowan is being nursed back to health, we discover that her husband, Hank, was the head of the research station, but we don’t really know what happened to him.  Clues emerge one by one, but the Salt family has secrets galore, including the big one regarding Hank’s whereabouts.  This novel fits into multiple genres, as it is a mystery, a survival story, a love story, and perhaps even a ghost story, all rolled into one.  I found the briskly paced plot to be gripping, as this family is beset by one disaster after another, but the book tugged at my heartstrings as well.  A scene with beached whales moved me almost to tears.  The characters are few, and each one is grieving a tragic loss or shouldering almost unbearable guilt.

THE HUNTER by Tana French

Cal Hooper, the ex-Chicago detective whom we met in The Searcher, is still trying to live peacefully in rural Ireland, with little success.  Trey, the teenage girl whom Cal has taken under his wing, is now his carpentry business partner, thus improving her standing in the community.  Then her con-man father, Johnny, reappears after a four-year absence with a smooth talker from London and a plan to swindle the local farmers.  Trey is seemingly all-in on the scam, since she still blames the locals for the death of her older brother.  However, Trey is possibly in over her head, and Cal is at a loss as to how to protect her, since she has not confided her plans to him.  Then someone is murdered, and law enforcement gets involved, in the person of a very competent detective from Dublin.  Reading this book is a pleasure from beginning to end, and I think it stands on its own for those who haven’t read its predecessor.  I read The Searcher too long ago to remember much, other than the characters of Trey, Cal, and Cal’s girlfriend, Lena.  What intrigued me the most was trying to figure out who the murderer was, and every possibility I came up with seemed unlikely.  The murderer’s identity was the most satisfying revelation in the novel, as that person was not even on my radar.  This book is much richer than your everyday whodunit, and Tana French proves that she can write a mystery novel as well as anybody.

HUNTED by Abir Mukherjee

A bomb is detonated in a Los Angeles shopping mall, killing dozens of people, including the young woman who planted the bomb.  Shreya is an FBI agent investigating the bombing, and when she is focused on a case, nothing will stop her, including orders from her boss.  Meanwhile, an American woman, Carrie, travels to London to meet with a man, Sajid, from Bangladesh.  Carrie has a letter from her son that indicates he likes a girl who is Sajid’s daughter and that they may both be involved with the terrorist group who bombed the mall.  Carrie then whisks Sajid off to the U.S. so that they can find and save their respective offspring.  The narrative follows these two on their ill-advised escapade, plus the workings of the terrorists and the FBI.  The author deftly handles each narrative and keeps the action flowing with plenty of suspense.  The terrorist group is basically a cult, helmed by a white-haired woman named Miriam, with no access to news media.  She assigns her young Muslim acolytes to plant the bombs, making them appear to be suicide bombers but using their deaths as a smokescreen for the group’s real purpose. The naïve recruits, however, are not aware that they are going to be sacrificed.  Carrie’s son, who is the one assembling the bombs, realizes after the mall bombing what is going on and plans his and Sajid’s daughter’s escape.  Though not an edge-of-your-seat thriller, the pacing is very good and so is the writing.  The action, which includes lots of chase scenes, moves from the West coast to Florida in the blink of an eye, and several twists come to light in the final pages. 

WHAT WE CAN KNOW by Ian McEwan

Critics didn’t dub this author Ian Macabre for nothing, and this book solidifies that reputation.  For the first 150 pages, the highbrow plot treads water as Thomas Metcalfe in 2120 narrates his search for a lost poem from 2014.  Not much has changed in 100 years except that a bunch of landmasses and species of flora and fauna have disappeared, thanks to climate change upheaval and a tsunami caused by a manmade screw-up. The missing poem’s celebrated author read the poem, an homage to his wife, at a dinner party and insisted that there be no other copies.  The poem was a gift, and his wife could do with it as she pleased.  No one has seen it since.  The poet’s wife was a published author herself but abandoned her writing career to become basically a tradwife.  Finally, our first half narrator, Thomas rediscovers a forgotten note in his coat pocket, and things start to get rolling.  His tedious search for the lost poem morphs from an archive search to a more literal hunt for buried treasure.  Part II is something else entirely, but readers will recognize the narrator and the other characters from the 21^st century dinner party.  This is where the storyline indeed becomes macabre, and a lost boy in a train station is just a tiny warmup for what is to come.  Unfortunately, some readers will probably abandon this book before they get to the good stuff.

THE SAFEKEEP by Yael van der Wouden

Isabel lives alone in her family home in the Netherlands in 1961.  She has a sharp tongue and doesn’t mind using it, even with strangers like her older brother’s new girlfriend, Eva.  When her brother has to leave the country for a month on business, he insists that Eva stay with Isabel.  Isabel can’t really object, although she does try, because she has no claim to the house, which will eventually belong to her brother.  For the first two weeks these two women are like oil and vinegar, but then things change when Isabel comes in from a date and describes her discomfort with the whole evening.  Their détente segues into desire for one another that both view as forbidden, although Isabel’s younger brother lives with his male lover. This development, however, is not the most jaw-dropping aspect of the novel.  A startling disclosure--well past halfway through the novel--changes the whole timbre of the book, rewarding your patience for sticking with it.  This book may not be a thriller, but it definitely has a twist that I did not see coming.  I failed to pick up on several clues that could have prepared me for the unexpected revelation, and I was glad to have an electronic copy so that I could go back and search the pages I had already read.  The manner in which the plot unfolds is exquisite.

BEAUTYLAND by Marie-Helene Bertino

Adina is secretly an extra-terrestrial in a human body, born to a human mother, and has been sent to report on the life of earthlings. She communicates with her alien people by fax surreptitiously.  Her communiques are filled with keen observations, although occasionally she draws an errant but humorous conclusion.  She sends wise reflections on irrational human behaviors, customs, and beliefs to her superiors, but their replies are terse and not exactly encouraging.  Even so, Adina longs to fit in with her human counterparts but is an alien in numerous ways.  When asked to report on a sporting event, she describes the grass, the players, their interactions with the coaches, but nothing about the outcome.  Her response to her exasperated editor is that everyone knows the outcome, and her readers surprisingly agree.  Adina eventually discovers that her missives to another world are of interest to her fellow humans on Earth, and she receives a more positive response from her human audience than she ever received via fax. One thing that I did not like about this book is the format.  I prefer traditional chapter breaks, but this novel, although the timeline is sequential, has a break every few paragraphs, making it feel a little choppy to me.  Still, I found Adina’s story tender and hopeful about humankind in a way that Theo of Golden is not.  It also does what Orbital failed to do, which is move you.

BAD BAD GIRL by Gish Jen

If you think that Gish Jen’s novel about her mother will be a loving homage, guess again.  Her mother endured the Japanese occupation of Shanghai during WWII, then emigrated, by herself, to the U.S. after college, and obtained her master’s degree.  She then got married before completing her dissertation for her PhD and raised five children, with Gish being the second, following her brother Reuben.  However, Gish’s memories of her mother, who died in her 90s during Covid, are anything but fond.  While Gish was a child, her mother beat her regularly.  Even as an adult, Gish was constantly seeking attagirls from her mother, but none were forthcoming.  Gish’s mantra seems to be “Look what I did for you, and you didn’t even thank me.”  Then there’s Gish’s “beloved father,” also Chinese, who beat her with a metal stake to the point that the injuries kept her out of gym class for three months.  I cannot fathom why she adored him.  There was one humorous anecdote where Gish and a female classmate lobbied to be allowed to take shop in school.  They were granted the concession of being able to use the shop after class, and the shop teacher is a riot.  However, this one incident does not salvage this otherwise very depressing novel.  I suppose that writing this novel was cathartic and validating for the author, but reading it was not a pleasant experience.

THE REFORMATORY by Tananarive Due

Like The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead, this novel takes place at a Florida reform school for boys.  It’s 1950, and the KKK terrorizes Black people, and their children can land in the notorious Gracetown School, based on the real Dozier School, for minor scuffles, like kicking a white boy.  Robert Stephens is 12 years old and has been in the care of his 16-year-old sister since their father, a union organizer and civil rights activist, has had to flee to Chicago.  Young Robert’s sentence at the reformatory is supposed to be only six months, but his father’s reputation marks him for bullying by both the other students and the administration.  His ability to see the ghosts of the boys who have died there earns him a potential reprieve, but “catching haints” has its own set of consequences.  If he fails to deliver, he will be whipped, left in a shed overnight, and be raped by the headmaster, but Robert feels a kinship with the ghosts, who don’t want to be turned to dust and collected in the headmaster’s jar.  His dilemma drives him to a dangerous decision that drives the most gripping part of the book.  The gruesome tortures that the boys endure are not recounted in such a way as to give the reader nightmares, but they certainly left me hoping that the evil men would get their due. Sadly, the administrators of the real Dozier School never paid a price for their cruelty and for the deaths of the boys whose lives they cut short.

GODWIN by Joseph O'Neill

An elusive African soccer phenom, dubbed Godwin, barely appears in the novel, other than in black and white soundless video.  In fact, the first section of the novel is about a cooperative of technical writers in Pittsburgh with two women as co-leads, Annie and Lakesha.  Mark, a member of the co-op, gets into a scuffle with office security, and takes some accrued time off.  Timing is everything, ass his half-brother, Geoff, hoodwinks Mark into coming to Europe to help with a business opportunity.  Why not?  Except that Geoff is sleazy and unreliable, not to mention broke.  Mark is obviously being taken for a ride at his own expense.  This is where the soccer video surfaces, as Geoff wants to find Godwin and become his agent.  This tale morphs into a wild goose chase of epic proportions with a side dish of dirty office politics involving a proxy fight at the co-op.  These two storylines are equally compelling, although a French soccer agent’s longwinded account of the quest to find Godwin is a little too detailed.  Do we care that Godwin’s hunting skills are just as astonishing as his soccer skills?  How the co-op and soccer plotlines converge at the end is a very pleasant surprise.  I found this book to be a refreshing break from the usual family drama and romantic liaisons.  There actually is some family drama here, but not in the usual sense and not as the main attraction.

LONG ISLAND by Colm Tóibín

You don’t have to have read Brooklyn to enjoy this novel, but it helps.  This novel takes place two decades later, and Eilis’s husband, Tony, has fathered a child with another woman.  That woman’s husband intends to leave the baby on Eilis’s doorstep after it is born.  Eilis is having none of it, vowing never to raise that child, and makes plans to visit Ireland for her mother’s 80^th birthday.  On her previous visit two decades ago, Eilis and Jim Farrell fell in love, but Eilis left abruptly because she was already secretly married to Tony.  Now the tables are turned, because Jim is secretly engaged to the widow Nancy Sheridan, Eilis’s former best friend, while Eilis’s marriage is on the rocks.  Talk about star-crossed lovers!  These two just cannot get their timing right, and their secrets are not helping, either.  All would be well with Eilis and Jim, but Nancy is the fly in the ointment who is already making big plans for after her wedding.  I enjoyed everything about this love triangle, or quadrangle maybe. I supposed the reader could choose to be on team Tony or team Jim, but there’s really no contest.  I would put Nancy in the role of villain, but she really isn’t, until she becomes aware that Jim and Eilis still have a thing for each other.  What I did not enjoy was how the plot eventually just fizzles.

LONG ISLAND COMPROMISE by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

Not as good as Fleishman Is in Trouble, this novel is full of despicable characters who don’t deserve what they have and are too unlikeable to care about.  It’s the story of the very wealthy Fletcher family whose lives are upended when Carl, father of three and owner of a polystyrene (Styrofoam) factory, is kidnapped.  After the ransom is paid, he returns home, but nothing remains the same.  His youngest, Jenny, is not even born when this event occurs, but as an adult she too bears the trauma that haunts her family.  All three adult kids are totally dysfunctional in their own ways and dependent on the family fortune to fund their wacky lives.  That’s not to say that this novel doesn’t have some good moments.  One of my favorites is when the middle child, Beamer, a failing screen writer, overdoses on speed.  The novel moves at breakneck speed through this episode, raising my heartrate and my expectations for more of the same, only to be disappointed when the plot returns to the silly missteps of these rich lowlifes. Jenny at least tries to break the mold by becoming a union organizer and giving away all of her money, but she, too, is rudderless, with or without the money.  The best part is the revelation about the kidnapping, which is sort of a side note near the end.

CREATION LAKE by Rachel Kushner

Sadie Smith is not her real name, and she’s a 34-year-old American spy for hire.  Her current job is to infiltrate and ultimately destroy a subversive commune in rural France.  She has hacked the email account of this group’s mentor, an old man named Bruno who seems more obsessed with hieroglyphics, caves, the night sky, and Neanderthals than with advising the radical group.  For me, good writing does not salvage this book, which fails as an espionage novel, since the plot lacks suspense and Sadie is completely unlikeable.  She has a certain swagger that falls short of being charismatic, and she drinks too much.  Also, she is living alone in her boyfriend’s family’s mansion, but because she’s a short-timer, she doesn’t bother throwing away her liquor bottles or washing the dishes, until she schedules a tryst with her lover from the commune.  In fact, she always drinks from the cup that is the least dirty.  Her slovenliness is a minor personality flaw compared to the manner in which she uses other people.  I get that this is her job, and she’s good at it, except for being fired by the FBI when her mark was exonerated due to entrapment.  Reading this book was not exactly a chore, but it wasn’t a delight, either.  In fact, Bruno’s musings on our prehistoric predecessors and celestial navigation were the best part.  He makes a big deal about how to locate Polaris (the North Star), although I learned that a long time ago and have since assumed that it was common knowledge.  Apparently not.  The biggest mystery of this novel is the origin of the title, and I’m going to crown The Flamethrowers as my favorite Rachel Kushner novel.

THE FLAMETHROWERS by Rachel Kushner

Motorcycles, art, and radical politics dominate this captivating novel, told by a woman in her early twenties, whom we know only by the nickname Reno—her hometown.  Her narration comes across as somewhat detached, making her story all the more alluring, which begins with her becoming the fastest woman in the world in 1975—on a motorcycle at the Bonneville Salt Flats.  Some books are page-turners, and some just make you want to savor every page to make it last as long as possible.  This book is the latter type, although most chapters end with a surprising event.  Then the author delays telling us the consequences of the event for a chapter or two.  Intermittent diversions, such as dinner parties for New York artists and gallery owners, cause the plot to stall and become tedious at times.  After hearing about a group of anarchists in New York at one of these dinner parties, Reno then becomes more than just a bystander to another group of anarchists in Italy who are protesting against the company her boyfriend’s family owns.  This is definitely my favorite Rachel Kushner novel so far, as Reno’s misadventures in Utah, New York, and Italy all held me rapt until another unwanted dead space in the novel cropped up.

THE CORRESPONDENT by Virginia Evans

Sybil Van Antwerp, the title character, is a retired lawyer in her 70s who keeps up with family and friends largely via snail mail.  She also has no qualms about writing to famous authors, including Ann Patchett, Kazuo Ishiguro, Larry McMurtry, and Joan Didion, and I loved her commentary on their books.  Her various personal problems come and go, but the overarching problem in her life is her guilt and grief over the death of one of her children.  Plus, she was so distraught at the time that she failed to show compassion in the legal case of an immigrant man.  To me, this is a bigger failing than the neglect that contributed to her son’s death.  In any case, the book has several problems, including the fact that it has no plot. Nor is it suspenseful.  At times the identity of the sender of a letter addressed to Sybil is not obvious, and I think the author could have alleviated that source of confusion.  That said, this may not be my favorite epistolary novel, as it falls short of The Egyptologist and The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, but it is somewhat addictive.  It’s not exactly a page turner, either, but every time I sat down to read it, I kept saying to myself that I would read just one more letter, and that plan would repeat itself through another dozen or so.

MARTYR! by Kaveh Akbar

Cyrus Shams is a 30-year-old Iranian-American with a death wish.  The only thing stopping him from committing suicide is that he wants his death to matter.  The book he is writing about martyrs is supposed to be his legacy, if he could just actually manage to write it.  When he was three months old in Iran, his mother’s commercial flight to visit her brother was shot down by an American Navy missile cruiser.  Hence Cyrus’s obsession with meaningless death.  Ironically, Cyrus’s father takes a job on a chicken farm in Indiana, so that Cyrus grows up in the country whose military killed his mother.  As an adult, Cyrus struggles with addiction, particularly alcoholism, but has been clean for two years when he travels to New York to meet an artist dying of cancer.  There is a twist at the end of this book, but it is not sufficient to redeem the rest of this slow-paced, depressing novel.  Also, the twist results from a very implausible coincidence, making the plot more absurd than thought-provoking.  My biggest problem with the book, though, is that provides no real incentive to keep reading. Its best value is that of a cure for insomnia, as drowsiness set in whenever I tried to read more than five pages at a sitting.

INTERMEZZO by Sally Rooney

Two brothers, a decade apart in age, are both mourning the recent death of their father for different reasons.  Ivan, the younger brother, is a 23-year-old chess wizard with a degree in theoretical physics and questionable social skills.  Peter is a lawyer in his early thirties with a substance abuse problem who fights for the welfare of the underdog, including equal rights for women in the workplace. The age difference between these two is nothing compared to the contrast in personalities.  Peter views Ivan as a child, and Ivan views Peter as arrogant and condescending.  Now, what makes this novel hum, besides the sibling friction, is their lusty romantic relationships.  Peter’s longtime girlfriend, Sylvia, has been relegated to friend status, due to a severe accident that has rendered her unable to be a complete sexual partner.  To fill the gap, Peter has become involved with a woman his brother’s age, Naomi, who has no job, no money, and no place to live.  The one flaw in this book for me is that I never could really understand Peter’s affection for her.  Ivan, on the other hand, falls in love with a delightful woman Peter’s age named Margaret who is still married to her absent alcoholic husband.  In other words, both men have girlfriends who are not traditionally age-appropriate.  I guess you’re either a Sally Rooney fan or you’re not, and I am solidly in the fan camp.  I adored everything about this novel—the characters, the plot, the writing, and especially the inner workings of the characters’ minds.  Please, may I have another?

CONVERSATIONS WITH FRIENDS by Sally Rooney

Two 21-year-old women who do poetry readings, Frances and Bobbi, meet Melissa, a photographer, and her husband Nick, a very handsome but not particularly famous actor.  The novel seldom diverges from interactions among these four people, except for the inner thoughts of Frances, the first-person narrator.  Frances and Bobbi were lovers at one time, but now they are just very good friends.  Frances develops a crush on Nick, who is twelve years older than Frances, which blossoms into her first sexual relationship with a man.  Her guilt is assuaged by the fact that Nick and Melissa no longer share a bed and don’t seem to have a very close marriage.  Although Nick and Frances communicate regularly online and in person, neither is able to express their feelings about the relationship, partly because neither seems to have a clue about what their feelings are.  Frances tries to shield herself from becoming too attached to Nick by making flippant and sometimes hurtful remarks to him.  I just wanted these two to start being honest with each other for a change and for Frances to stop vacillating about whether she cares about Nick or not.  Obviously, Nick is equally to blame, since he never feels secure in their relationship and is ambivalent about his marriage.  Frances also chooses not to open up to Nick or Bobbi when health and money issues arise.  These side plots don’t really distract from the main issue at hand, but, of course, plot is not a high priority in any of Sally Rooney’s novels.  Still, she somehow holds the reader’s attention with characters who don’t seem to be able to make up their minds. 

ALL FOURS by Miranda July

Our unnamed first-person narrator is a fairly well-known 45-year-old multimedia artist who refers to her child with gender-neutral pronouns.  She’s a creative, progressive thinker and becomes even more so as the plot develops.  Her tale begins with a planned three-week trip in which she will drive from Los Angeles to New York and back.   However, she stops at a motel in Monrovia and remains there until her scheduled return home, all the while giving her husband false and sparse details about experiences on a route that she has not actually traveled.  She meets a handsome thirty-year-old man named Davey and employs his wife to remodel her motel room.  Ok, this scenario is ludicrous, but the narrator has money to burn, so why not?  She is also helping this young couple fund their nest egg, even as she becomes friendly with Davey, who offers to show her around town.  When he takes his shirt off during a hike, her sexual attraction to him goes full throttle, and things go from heated to steamy in a hurry.  The visceral, lusty first half of this novel held my rapt attention, but the plot cools down significantly in the second half and becomes more about the narrator having to grapple with two issues.  One is the anticipated loss of her libido during perimenopause, and the other, naturally, is the precarious state of her marriage.

ALL THE COLORS OF THE DARK by Chris Whitaker

I loved the beginning and ending of this book, but the middle gets bogged down in the mire of a relentless quest, funded by robbing banks.  I think 100 pages could be shaved with no detrimental impact to the plot.  Anyway, it’s an epic saga that involves a 13-year-old boy with one eye, nicknamed Patch, who intervenes when a beautiful girl his age is in the process of being abducted.  Instead, Patch gets stabbed and disappears.  Patch’s mother is an alcoholic who could barely cope before Patch vanished, but Patch’s best friend, a girl named Saint, refuses to believe that Patch is dead.  She regularly engages with the police department, particularly Chief Nix, to ensure that the search for Patch continues.  There are more than a few serendipitous coincidences, plus another that could be deemed unfortunate, depending on your perspective.  For some reason I did not mind the huge role that luck played in this novel, but some other aspects were a bit outlandish.  For example, a boy suddenly becomes a talented artist, despite having never previously shown any interest in painting, and recreates a town on canvas with a high degree of exactitude, strictly from a verbal description.  Love in many forms is an important theme here, as is evil in the form of a couple of characters that brought to mind Eric Rudolph.  Vengeance plays a role as well and exacts a high price.

HEARTWOOD by Amity Gaige

If you’re thinking of hiking the Appalachian Trail, this book might change your mind.  Valerie is a nurse who has taken on the upper half of the trail in order to repair her soul after witnessing so many patients dying from Covid.  In Maine, nearing the end of her trip, she fails to meet up with her husband at their rendezvous point.  Bev is a 6-foot-tall game warden in her 50s who is heading up the search for Valerie.  She has battled misogyny in her job for her entire career, but the battle to find Valerie is wearing on her even more, as she has to report the lack of progress each day to Valerie’s husband and parents.  The third woman in this story is Lena, a wheelchair-bound retired scientist in a senior-living facility who at first thinks the missing hiker could be her daughter.  When she finds out otherwise, she continues to ponder Valerie’s whereabouts, along with a young man with whom she chats on social media.  Valerie’s story is told through a journal that she claims keeps her sane, but in order to lighten her pack she has previously jettisoned the tracking device that would have made the search for her quite easy.  At times I felt that this novel should have been named Heartbreak instead of Heartwood, as Valerie’s situation becomes more and more dire and Bev’s exasperation becomes increasingly palpable.  Even Lena becomes so exasperated that she destroys her computer in a temper tantrum.  As for Valerie, we ultimately find that her altruism is not always well placed, especially when self-preservation is at stake.

MARGO'S GOT MONEY TROUBLES by Rufi Thorpe

As an unmarried nineteen-year-old with a newborn, Margo has more problems than just money.  Margo’s mother is also a single mom, but Margo’s father, former pro wrestler named Jinx, is a more active dad, even with a whole other family, than the father of Margo’s infant son.  To address her money troubles, Margo creates an OnlyFans account after viewing the content that a female wrestler has created.  I had never heard of this social media platform until I read this book, but it’s a subscription service that specializes in sexual content.  Consequently, this book is not for prudes, as Margo goes about photographing her own body parts and offering to rate her subscribers’ body parts.  Things don’t get really interesting until word gets out to various family members (no pun intended) about how Margo is making ends meet.  Then her difficulties increase exponentially, yielding an anxiety-inducing read, as she faces the prospect of losing custody of her child.  This worrying possibility is definitely not funny, and although the tone of the book is fairly light, I would not classify this novel as humorous.  I have to say that I like the idea of his book better than the actual book.  The author successfully makes the point that sex workers, especially those like Margo who are basically selling pornography without ever having a sexual encounter, can still be responsible and loving parents.

SO FAR GONE by Jess Walter

Rhys Kinnick has been living off the grid for seven years and doesn’t recognize his grandchildren when they come knocking on his door.  Their mom, Bethany, has taken off and left a note for a neighbor to deliver the kids to Rhys, despite his self-imposed exile from the family.  However, Bethany’s husband, Shane, has sent goons from his right-wing militia to move the kids to Rampart, a vigilante training facility masquerading as a church, more or less.  Rhys decides to be proactive for a change, and his ex-girlfriend suggests he team up with another of her ex-boyfriends, Chuck, who happens to be an ex-cop.  Chuck is a trip, as is Rhys’s inquisitive nine-year-old grandson, Asher, who loves to do things that he is not good at, such as jump over creeks and compete in chess tournaments.  This novel, a combination of family drama and adventure, is a pleasure to read from start to finish, with the exception of a chunk in the middle that recounts Bethany’s counseling session with her therapist, who suggests that Bethany’s choices in men stem from her fraught relationship with her father.  Daddy issues?  Really?  Fortunately, this section is just a minor blip as the plot moves on to Bethany’s whereabouts and altercations with the Rampart crazies.  The family drama angle has Rhys wondering why he isolated himself in the first place and what he needs to do to get back into Bethany’s good graces.  Witty dialog provides an element of humor to a story of regret and reunion, peppered with a fair amount of gunplay.

ONYX STORM by Rebecca Yarros

The series stagnates with this book, which just does not pack as much of a punch as the first two—Fourth Wing and Iron Flame.  It is pleasurable enough to read, but nothing noteworthy happens, although Violet does start to settle into her role as a leader.  Perhaps the author intended this book to serve as a transitional story, since it is supposed to be the middle book in a series of five.  However, I think the middle book should be more of a peak than a valley.  We have the usual dragons, battles, rescues, deaths, and, of course, sex, but I’m not as anxious to read the next book as I was to read this one.  Two quests dominate the plot, and one of those is successful but somehow a letdown.  Also, it starts just where Iron Flame left off, and in the year since I read that one I’ve forgotten a lot of the details.  The author does not really make an effort to remind the reader of the roles these many characters play.  I hope she reiterates some background in the next novel, because apparently it will not be coming out for a while.  There is a page in this one that lists the royal leaders and some of the main characters, their bonded dragons, and their magical signets.  However, the relationships among the characters are not shown, and some characters are missing from the list.  For sure this book does not make sense unless you have read the other two, but I suspect you could jump from book two to book four without missing a beat.

THEO OF GOLDEN by Allen Levi

A mysterious 86-year-old Portuguese man named Theo moves from New York to Golden, Georgia (fictional town), for reasons unknown.  A coffee shop in Golden called the Chalice has a wall displaying 92 well-drawn portraits of Golden residents, and Theo decides to buy them, one by one, and bestow them upon the person depicted.  When I saw where this was going, I was glad this book was only 400 pages, as I figured the author could not include all 92 of these denizens’ backstories.  Our title do-gooder gains some beloved friends in the process of presenting these gifts, including a CPA, a homeless woman, a street musician, a one-armed bartender, and a cellist.  Theo remains a man of mystery until the very end, but, other than that, suspense is severely lacking, as is any serious conflict.  Both the writing and the subject matter are pablum suitable for a sixth grader.  I felt that the book was making a point about empathy and human kindness, but if I wanted to hear a sermon, I would go to church.  On that note, Theo speaks often of heaven and is a regular church service attendee.  Ultimately, his main motivation seems to be atonement, but the eventual revelation of Theo’s history does not provide the jolt I was hoping for.  All in all, this book is so sweet that it made my teeth hurt.

BEHIND THE BEAUTIFUL FOREVERS by Katherine Boo

Annawadi is a slum of around 10,000 people near the Mumbai airport.  The author, an investigative journalist, focuses on a few families, especially the children.  Abdul—age unknown—is not in school because he is supporting his very large family as a garbage broker.  Basically, he sorts and buys recyclable garbage from scavengers—also children—and sells the stuff to a recycling plant.  He is one of many savvy and enterprising boys who profit from the refuse around the airport. His world, however, is upended when an argument with a neighbor woman prompts her to set herself on fire.  Abdul’s father is dragged off to jail, and Abdul is thrown in with him when he goes to help his father.  The author tells this story in a clear-eyed fashion without melodrama, but she makes it clear that the woman committed suicide, and no crime was committed.  And this is not the only suicide in the book; rat poison seems to be the elixir of choice for offing oneself.  Some residents become addicted to sniffing the Indian version of Wite-Out, which is also used there to patch up wounds.  What really stands out about this book, however, is the degree of corruption that exists. Law enforcement is non-existent, because the police are acting solely based on who is paying them the most.  Even more astonishing is the fact that people living in the slum are also profiting by extorting money, and one woman and her daughter raise funds for a non-existent non-profit.  The poverty here lies in a thriving city of global financial importance with a population roughly the same as Florida’s.  I find it hard to imagine how the inequities will ever be erased.

DREAM COUNT by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Three women from Nigeria, all of whom are friends, and one woman from Guinea have stories to tell, but only the latter has sizzle.  Chia is an aspiring travel writer with enough family money to travel in style, whether she sells her story or not.  She is hung up on two men—one who ditched her and never treated her with respect and another who was married.  Zikora’s boyfriend skedaddles when she becomes pregnant, even though he agreed that she could stop taking birth control pills.  (He apparently didn’t understand the possible consequences!)  Omelogor cooks the books for a corrupt Nigerian financial institution and uses some of her ill-gotten gains to help struggling Nigerian women.  She also has a website that is sort of an advice column for men, which provides some much-needed humor.  Chia and Zikora are somewhat obsessed with finding “Mr. Right,” while Omelogor is not really interested in a long-term committed relationship.  In any case, none of their stories and failed romantic relationships are really worth reading about.  The Guinea woman, Kadiatou, however, is completely different.  She has legal asylum status in the U.S. and is working as a hotel maid when her life unravels in a gut-wrenching way.  Her situation is a fictionalized version of an event that occurred in 2011, and her terror of being deported to some degree diminishes her desire to seek justice.  I loved Adichie’s insightful Americanah, but this book just does not measure up to that standard.  The Nigerian women are smart and attractive but have less substance than the women in Sex and the City.  Kadiatou’s is a heart-pounding story that doesn’t emerge until about 250 pages into the book.  Until then, there is a lot of whining and hand-wringing.

BEAUTIFUL UGLY by Alice Feeney

Like The Plot and Yellowface, this book involves a writer who steals another author’s work.  However, that is not the main storyline.  Grady is unable to write while he grieves the disappearance of his wife, Abby, a year ago.  His agent suggests that he move to an isolated Scottish island where he can perhaps focus on his next book.  However, the island turns out to be full of mysterious happenings, including glimpses of what Grady believes are his wife, plus some gruesome history.  What follows is a suspenseful, macabre tale in which the only lovable character is Grady’s dog and in which revelations expose Grady as a highly unreliable narrator.  This is neither the best nor the worst thriller I have ever read, but I wish the characters had more depth.  Plus, the plot is kind of out there, just like the island on which it takes place, and reliance on a Magic 8 Ball for advice is ridiculous.  If this whole novel were not morbid enough, Grady and Abby always substituted the phrase “I hope you die in your sleep” for “I love you.”  Yikes.  It’s not hard to imagine where this is going, but how we get there is down a twisty, unpredictable path.

THE STOLEN QUEEN by Fiona Davis

If you want a plot that is fairly realistic in a novel, this is not the book for you.  Plus, the three main characters in the book—Charlotte, Annie, and her mother Joyce—are lacking in common sense.  This deficiency does not deter Annie and Charlotte from suddenly traveling to Egypt to try to find and recover an artifact that was stolen from the Metropolitan Museum in New York.  (Nineteen-year-old Annie whose occupations are mainly waitress and housekeeper has never traveled abroad but miraculously happens to have a current passport.) Charlotte is also on a personal quest to discover what happened to her husband and infant daughter after a shipwreck on the Nile forty years ago.  Why did she wait so long?  She believes in a curse supposedly applied by a female pharaoh whom Charlotte is trying to prove was unfairly maligned.  Trying to clean up that pharaoh’s reputation would seem to negate the curse, right?  Charlotte is theoretically a smart woman, and Annie has a knack for solving riddles, but they are just not very wise, if you ask me, as they both knowingly put themselves in harm’s way.  I can live with bumbling characters who stumble onto vital discoveries, but I would prefer a plot that doesn’t border on fantasy.  The author builds suspense fairly well, but the writing leaves a lot to be desired, as does the believability factor. 

THE DIRECTOR by Daniel Kehlmann

The opening of this novel is priceless.  Wilzek leaves his sanatorium in a chauffeured car so that he can appear on TV as a talk show guest.  Unfortunately, his dementia is such that he really has no idea where he is going and becomes somewhat unhinged during his on-air interview.  We learn that he was an assistant to the Austrian director, G.W. Pabst, but we don’t discover his role in the story until much later.  Wilzek is fictional, but Pabst, whose life dominates the narrative, was a real person who directed silent movies and then later movies with sound in the U.S.  He knows that as a director he is only as good as his last project and returns to Europe as things are heating up in Nazi Germany.  The author paints him as a comical character in many ways, but the circumstances are anything but.  Negotiating how to make a worthwhile movie that is subject to Nazi scrutiny is a tightrope that Pabst walks with questionable success.  Besides the opener, another hilarious scene is a book club meeting attended by Pabst’s wife and wives of Nazi party members.  Only one author is really suitable for a discussion in which the walls may have ears, and that author’s work is not exactly great literature.  This novel will make you want to look up biographical info on Pabst and the movie he makes of a novel by the author his wife’s book club always reads.  The twist at the end is fictional but definitely one of the highlights.

I AM HOMELESS IF THIS IS NOT MY HOME by Lorrie Moore

The best thing about this book is that it’s short.  A close second is the fabulous writing.  However, the plot is bizarre.  Actually, there are two storylines that intersect eventually.  The first is a series of letters written by a rooming house proprietor shortly after the Civil War.  She describes a handsome lodger who seems to be John Wilkes Booth, although she never says so.  The second storyline is the one that is extremely weird and unfortunately occupies most of the pages.  Finn is a history teacher who doesn’t believe in homework and who doubles as a math teacher.  He sits at the bedside of his dying brother who is hanging on to life by watching the World Series.  Then Finn gets a phone call demanding that he drive halfway across the country because something has happened to his mentally ill ex-girlfriend, Lily.  He immediately abandons his brother and jumps in the car.  It turns out that Lily has finally accomplished the suicide she has always wished for. However, her wish for her body to be given to the Body Farm, the forensic anthropology site at the University of Tennessee, was not fulfilled.  Finn is completely enthralled with Lily--dead or alive, it seems, and she’s actually in some kind of undead state--maybe.  Anyway, why is Finn with the dead(?) ex-girlfriend who didn’t want to live and not with the brother who does?  Also, how does Finn do such a massive amount of driving on almost no sleep?

CITY ON FIRE by Don Winslow

In a novel about the Rhode Island mob in the 1980s (who knew there was such a thing?), I don’t mind wise guy grammar in the dialog, but the author applies it inconsistently in the third-person narrative as well.  For example, on page 3, we have “what he doesn’t know,” but then on page 5, there’s “He don’t have it in him to cheat.  She don’t mind he looks at other women… .”  I found these choices disconcerting, but this novel still works, if you don’t mind a high body count.  A turf war develops between the Irish mob and the Italian mob, after a long period of uneasy détente.  Marty Ryan’s alcoholism has forced him to yield his power position on the Irish side to John Murphy.  Marty’s son Danny, the protagonist here, is married to John Murphy’s daughter but has never earned a seat at the table.  With a baby on the way, Danny is tempted to take the Feds’ offer to rat out the mob on both sides and get out.  The question is which “family” deserves his loyalty, given that he thinks of Pat Murphy as more of a brother than a brother-in-law.  Unfortunately, Pat’s brother Liam has a propensity for igniting powder kegs.

THE COVENANT OF WATER by Abraham Verghese

A matchmaker pairs a twelve-year-old girl with a 40-year-old widower in southern India in 1900.  The groom sees his bride for the first time at the wedding and balks at marrying a child, but the wedding takes place anyway.  Not consummated for years, the marriage actually works out well, but the bride learns that she has married into a family in which someone in every past generation drowns.  We follow this family for three generations through thick and thin.  Other characters have their own story, including two surgeons, one of whom is Scottish, but everyone has ties to the family of our original couple.  There is enough tragedy here—children dying in unusual ways, a lover dying in a fire, a mother abandoning her child, a man becoming an opium addict—to sink this book into a melodramatic tearjerker, but instead it always manages to lift the reader up into a world where sunny horizons await.  For example, a retreat for lepers becomes a self-sufficient community where everyone pitches in.  Of course, a novel that covers this much ground is going to be long, and this one is exceptionally so.  The tragedies keep the plot moving forward, but they are merely setbacks to lives that refuse to stay mournful indefinitely.

THE EMPEROR OF GLADNESS by Ocean Vuong

Hai is a 19-year-old Vietnamese-American on the brink of suicide when an elderly Lithuanian immigrant, Grazina, talks him out of jumping from a bridge.  Ultimately, Hai saves her as well, by moving in with her and becoming her de facto caretaker.  Grazina is still having flashbacks of Russians and Nazis, and Hai plays along during these episodes to calm her down, calling himself Sgt. Pepper.  Hai still has a drug problem after rehab and has convinced his mother that he is in medical school.  In reality he is working a minimum wage job at HomeMarket, whose menu sounds a lot like the now almost defunct Boston Market.  The misfit employees of HomeMarket, including Hai’s cousin whose mother is incarcerated, become Hai’s family, along with Grazina.  The characters in this novel are well-developed, colorful and poignant, as all are struggling with an assortment of problems—mental, physical, financial, you name it.  However, the tone never descends into melancholy.  The writing is mostly good but is occasionally overdone and pretentious, and the pace is glacial.  The opening chapter in particular is purely descriptive of the setting, and we have to make it to Chapter 2 to get to the aborted suicide.  A road trip near the end has the potential to provide a spark but doesn’t really deliver.