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.