THE WORLD AND ALL THAT IT HOLDS by Aleksandar Hemon

Rafael Pinto steps outside his Jewish family’s pharmacy in Sarajevo and witnesses the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.  Thus begins WWI, and what would seem to be an auspicious beginning for this book.  Pinto lands on the front lines, along with the handsome Osman, and the two become devoted lovers.  The storyline is a series of Pinto’s adventures, including imprisonment, near starvation, a six-year trek across the desert, a sandstorm, and almost wasting away in opium dens.  Pinto becomes the protector of a child named Rahela, who may be Osman’s biological daughter, and whose responsibility is the only thing standing between Pinto and the fulfillment of his death wish.  The storyline here should be exciting, but I found that the writing style does not supply sufficient verve.  A British spy appears in the narrative from time to time to spice things up, but moments that grabbed my attention were just too infrequent.  Also, the author includes many untranslated sentences and songs in Bosnian or German or Spanjol, which is a version of Spanish.  Frankly, I didn’t mind getting to leapfrog these sections, as skipping these foreign phrases propelled me to the finish a little faster.

BIOGRAPHY OF X by Catherine Lacey

X is a fictional artist and author with a mysterious past and more pseudonyms than you can count on both hands.  Her biographer is C.M. Lucca, a journalist and X’s widow.  The backdrop is alternative history, like Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America.  In 1945, as imagined here, the U.S. was divided into the Southern, Northern, and Western Territories.  The Southern Territory, as you might guess, was extremely right-wing, and X was a rare escapee whose multiple identities helped her evade authorities.  Fact and fiction overlap in odd ways here, as X became friends with David Bowie, Connie Converse, and Susan Sontag, to name a few real-life notables.  Some fictional elements seem to be intentionally outrageous, with real people in different roles with different ideologies, such as the naming of Ronald Reagan as a Green Party presidential candidate.  These humorous asides don’t quite redeem this novel, though, in which Lucca seems to be so much in X’s thrall, even eight years after X’s death, as to be a bit pathetic.  She completely subjugates herself to X, even abandoning her career, which she may be resurrecting by setting the record straight about X’s history.  X is a woman beloved by many, but I didn’t find her the least bit lovable.  She’s definitely enigmatic, disappearing for weeks without explanation, expecting Lucca to carry on in her absence. Most of the remarks that Lucca quotes X as saying are completely incomprehensible and borderline nonsensical.  The photos scattered throughout are a treat, though, and this could be one of those books where it’s more fun to look at the pictures than to read it.

BROOKLYN CRIME NOVEL by Jonathan Lethem

Novels like this, especially with “Novel” in the title, should come with a disclaimer stating that its format is atypical.  Like Flights by Olga Tokarczuk, this book has no plot per se but is a series of vignettes.  It does have a bunch of characters, none of whom have proper names, and keeping them organized in my brain was impossible, since all the stories are shaken up and dealt piecemeal throughout the book.  On the plus side, this book takes a nostalgic look at a Brooklyn childhood in the midst of gentrification, despite everyday muggings.  Surprisingly, the muggers described here are mostly not adults, and weapons may be fictitious.  Mothers send their children out into the world with money hidden in their socks and “mugging money” in their pockets to appease the muggers. The problem is that snippets of narrative jump back and forth in time so that characters appear and then don’t appear again until much later.  The ambience that the author generates is vivid, and there’s a whole section on funny muggings, which morph into non-muggings in which the intended victim ingeniously thwarts the muggers.  On the flip side, we have a violent rape and a fake rape, but both the rapist and his non-raping ally have to face consequences.  Life is definitely not fair in this setting, but the author implies that Giuliani’s subsequent “stop and frisk” policy was not necessarily an improvement.

VENGEANCE IS MINE by Marie NDiaye

The translator of this novel tells us that Maitre is the title given to French lawyers, and Maitre Susane is the main character here.  She agrees to take as a client a woman, Marlyne, who drowned her three children, but that crime does not seem to bother her as much as the fact that she may have met the woman’s husband as a child, and that encounter may not have been totally innocent.  Remembrances of this encounter causes a rift between Maitre Susane and her parents—her father in particular—the reason for which I never grasped.  Another case she is pursuing is that of her housekeeper, Sharon, who is seeking legal residency status.  Sharon is an enigma in more ways than one but stubbornly refuses to provide her marriage certificate to Maitre Susane, who requires that document for Sharon’s case.  These two puzzles are never resolved, nor is the title, as far as I am concerned.  Vengeance is whose and for what?  I have to say that I was intrigued by Marlyne the most, especially the two radically different reasons she gives for murdering her children.  Both motives are equally unhinged, and in one description of her motivation, she describes her crime as premediated, but in her other explanation, she claims that she had no plans to kill them until the moment that she decided to do it.  She is a monster but still a more fascinating character than Maitre Susane.

CROOK MANIFESTO by Colson Whitehead

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

THE GREAT RECLAMATION by Rachel Heng

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

COLORED TELEVISION by Danzy Senna

Jane, a novelist, and her husband, Lenny, a visual artist, are house-sitting for Jane’s friend Brett in his opulent L.A. home while Brett is in Australia.  Jane is writing a sprawling novel about mulattos, like herself, and Lenny is working on paintings for a show in Japan.  Their credit card debt is mounting, but they are treating Brett’s possessions as their own, even drinking all of his very expensive vintage wines.  When Jane finishes her novel and her editor tells her that it will tank Jane’s career if published, Jane decides to take a page out of Brett’s book, so to speak, and get work in television.  Lying to her husband and to Brett about the fate of her novel, among other things, Jane soon finds that she has spun a tangled web of lies that is probably going to unravel at some point and cause her life to spiral out of control.  The first one hundred pages or so of this book fell completely flat for me, and then it became a book about a woman doing incredibly stupid and dishonest things.  I just totally ran out of sympathy for Jane, who aspires to Brett’s lifestyle but is going about it all wrong.  Eventually we discover that she is not even the most deceitful character in the book, nor does she have the gumption to confront that person, perhaps because she is just as guilty herself.  There is some karma in the stealing-of-intellectual-property department, but, other than that, everyone here gets off the hook too easily.

THE BIRD HOTEL by Joyce Maynard

Irene’s name used to be Joan, but her mother’s involvement in a radical group’s bomb detonation forces her and her grandmother to adopt new identities.  Then another tragedy strikes in Irene’s life. She contemplates suicide but instead impulsively joins a group of strangers on their bus headed south of the border.  She has left all her belongings behind, but she does have her passport, thinking that it might be useful in identifying her body after jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge.  A man on the bus implausibly gives her $1500, and she eventually lands at a small hotel somewhere in Central America.  Despite this auspicious start, the rest of the book is mostly serene, and the pace is just too pokey.  Even devastating natural disasters and personal betrayals seem to be accepted as par for the course, although maybe nothing is as bad as what Irene has already been through.  I just felt that this novel lacked zing, despite the revolving door of characters who stay at the hotel.  It also has way too much foreshadowing for my taste; I prefer to be surprised.  I did like that the author dishes out a heavy helping of karma for the scoundrels.

THE BERRY PICKERS by Amanda Peters

There is just not enough happening in this novel.  I guess you could say that it is long on characters and short on plot.  A four-year-old Indigenous girl from Nova Scotia named Ruthie disappears from a Maine berry farm in 1962 where her family works every year.  The family receives only cursory help from local law enforcement in searching for her, and that racial bias repeats itself when her older brother is killed in a fight, trying to protect a drunken man.  Ruthie then re-emerges as Norma with a white family, questioning why her skin is darker but receiving flimsy answers.  As an adult, her biological brother Sam recognizes her in Boston and calls to her by her birth name, which she recognizes, but her white mother’s sister whisks her away.  The only real mystery here is how Ruthie/Norma got from point A (her real family) to point B (her white family).  That’s all I really wanted to know.  The writing is good, with a few grammatical annoyances that may or may not have been intentional, but the book overall just did not offer any other incentive to keep reading.  A side plot involves her biological brother Joe who becomes volatile and then a wanderer as he deals with guilt related to both siblings’ deaths, but his story is just not that compelling.  Neither is Norma’s, for that matter, given that she never makes an effort to find out her true story until she overhears a conversation that shocks her into reality.

THE MAYTREES by Annie Dillard

Toby Maytree is a poet in Cape Cod, but his poetry is pretty straightforward, compared to the writing in this novel.  Are all of Annie Dillard’s books like this?  Maytree’s wife is Lou, an artist and a woman of few words, and she eventually has a son named Petie.  Then everything changes, but I won’t go into that and spoil pretty much the entire plot.  The book flap describes the prose here as “spare,” but I think the People magazine review, which calls it “oblique,” is more accurate.  Non sequiturs frequently appear in otherwise normal paragraphs that I thought I understood until I realized that I didn’t.  I was constantly confused about the characters’ ages, for example.  On the plus side, I found many sentences that state succinctly an illuminating thought about life in general or describe a person or place perfectly.  For example, on page 24, we have this:  “Jane’s hair overwhelmed two barrettes and a rubber band.”  However, these gems just do not compensate for the obscure allusions, over-the-top vocabulary, and weird word usage, such as “every last man jack” on page 126.  What does that mean?  OK, I looked it up, and I gather it’s a common idiom, just not one that I was familiar with.  Now I am.

HAPPY PLACE by Emily Henry

Harriet’s happy place is Sabrina’s Maine cottage where they and their good friend Cleo spend a blissful week with their significant others every year.  This year is bittersweet, as it will be their last, since Sabrina’s father is selling the cottage.  (Why doesn’t Sabrina just buy it??)  Unbeknownst to everyone else, Harriet and her fiancé, Wyn, broke up five months ago, but he is there anyway, making things awkward so that Harriet’s happy place is not so happy.  Emily Henry’s ever-sparkling dialog does not quite offset the formulaic plot this time, and Harriet and Wyn’s witty repartee does not bring them any closer to solving the dilemma that broke them up in the first place.  These two perfectly exemplify a communication breakdown.  I loved all the characters in Book Lovers, not just the leading pair, but here the other characters seem very one-dimensional, or maybe even zero-dimensional, and don’t really contribute anything to the storyline.  As for plot, there’s really not much.  Maybe I loved Book Lovers because it was my first Emily Henry exposure, and now this book just feels like a cheap imitation.

BABEL by R.F. Kuang

Three foreign-born students, two men and one woman, enter the translation program at Oxford in the 1800s.  They become fast friends as outsiders, along with one native British student, as they prepare for a career in magic.  Does this sound Harry-Potterish?  It did to me, but this story is much darker, and the magic involves pairs of words in different languages that are inscribed on silver bars.  If etymology is your thing, this is the book for you, but I just found it tedious after a while.  Robin Swift, self-named after his English biological father snatches him from a cholera epidemic in Canton, China, is the main character.  He and his two best friends, one from Calcutta and one from Haiti, wrestle with their identity and struggle for acceptance, despite being native speakers of languages much in demand in their curriculum.  In fact, the silver bars, housed in an Oxford tower called Babel, basically control everything in the UK, from the water supply to transportation.  When a former student tries to recruit Robin for clandestine Robin-Hood-like purposes, Robin has to reevaluate his role in a global power grab.  Ultimately, the question for Robin is whether the end justifies the means and whether he wants to risk deportation or incarceration.  He also grapples with the question of whether the future that has been laid out for him is really what he wants or whether he would be happier if he had never left China.  I like the premise, but this book is just too long, and the final standoff goes on seemingly forever.  Also, I do not like footnotes in a work of fiction, and this novel has tons of them.  They would have driven me even crazier if I had read this on a kindle.

MOTHER DOLL by Katya Apekina

I’m not sure if this book has zero plot or two plots.  If it’s two plots, neither is to my liking.  One involves Zhenia, a young rudderless woman, and the other involves her great-grandmother, Irina, who is deceased.  Irina tells her story to Zhenia via a medium, and no one seems to question how ludicrous this is.  Also, the author does not clearly delineate the two stories, except that Zhenia’s is third-person and Irina’s is first-person.  I had to remind myself constantly that the “I” was Irina.  Basically, Irina is trying to atone for leaving her daughter Vera, Zhenia’s beloved grandmother, in a Russian orphanage.  Neither Zhenia’s nor Irina’s story, nor Vera’s for that matter, held my interest.  By far the most unusual story is that of Paul, the medium, but he doesn’t get nearly as much coverage as the women.  Zhenia’s mother Marina, a biologist, seems the most grounded, but she gets short shrift as well, and human interaction is not her strong suit.  I think Irina’s history as a Russian revolutionary definitely has the potential to keep the reader engaged, but it just fell flat for me, and her betrayal of a beloved teacher left me scratching my head.  Rasputin’s cameo grabbed my attention during his brief appearance in the novel, but it wasn’t nearly enough to salvage it for me, and I would have appreciated a little more background regarding this period in Russian history.

LEAVING by Roxana Robinson

Do not read this book.  Seriously.  It’s tedious at times with a lot of hand-wringing and some heavy-handed justice being dealt.  The premise is a love story between two sixty-somethings, and I felt like I was reading a letter in a newspaper advice column.  Sarah and Warren were young lovers who split up due to a couple of misunderstandings on Sarah’s part.  They then went their separate ways and married other people.  Sarah is now divorced with two well-adjusted adult children, whereas Warren is married with a grown daughter.  When Warren decides to leave his wife, his daughter becomes outraged and completely cuts him off from all communication.  Really?  His wife and daughter both insist that he is destroying the family by choosing to live his own life.  I found all this drama absurd, and, yes, I know it happens, but it’s still absurd for a man to be held hostage by his daughter who is no longer part of his household.  Sarah’s daughter’s assessment of both Warren and his daughter is spot-on, even though she has never met either of them.  If you’re looking for characters who attain some level of redemption, skip this one.  It’s depressing but not a tear-jerker.  One section that is very tense—life and death--is the best part, and I can’t complain about the writing.

SECOND PLACE by Rachel Cusk

The title refers to a rustic guest cabin on the same property as the narrator’s main house.  The fiftyish narrator, known to us simply as M, offers the cabin to a formerly renowned artist, known to us as L. L’s work had a life-changing effect on M in her younger days, but his relevance to the art world has since faded.  He shows up with a beautiful young woman named Brett, who turns out to be quite wealthy and adept at a number of tasks.  The narrator is stunned and disappointed that L brought along a girlfriend, and we have to wonder what exactly was M’s motivation in inviting him.  She is married to Tony, who is a salt-of-the-earth guy whose portrait L wants to paint.  M fumes that she is not to be the subject of one of L’s paintings, but it soon becomes obvious that L intensely dislikes M, especially as she humiliates herself trying to gain his favor.  I’m not sure who comes across worse in this novel, L or M, as L behaves like an entitled brat, and M is making a royal mess of her life, as she has apparently done in the past.  M seems to be aware that L is a snobbish, cruel boor but still yearns for his attention and approval, despite the fact that her husband is a much better man.  This novel is small in terms of number of pages but weighty in content, I suppose, and contains a lot of abstract philosophizing that I did not understand.  Sometimes the sentences just did not make sense to me and threatened to put me to sleep.  And what’s with all the annoying exclamation points?  Wake-up calls, maybe?  At times, I felt as though I were reading an email written in all caps.

ALL THIS COULD BE DIFFERENT by Sarah Thankam Mathews

Sneha, fresh out of college, moves to Milwaukee for a job.  She is all alone, now that her parents have moved back to India, after her father was deported due to a work scandal in which he was not involved.  Her family does not know that she is gay.  This secret is just one example of her inability to stand up for herself.  Her neighbor/property manager continually berates her for the noise, even if there is none, and she eventually discovers that her boss has not paid her in months.  Sexually abused by an uncle in India, Sneha feels that she does everything wrong and eventually puts her quest for romantic love on hold in favor of finding friendship.  That quest is quite successful, as she meets Tig, who has a vision for a commune-like existence in a big house but no plan for how to pay for such a house.  Sneha then falls in love with Marina but is unable to express her true feelings, and this reticence, among other issues, renders their relationship unstable.  This is just way too much twenty-something angst for me, although I get that part of Sneha’s lack of assertiveness stems from her tenuous immigrant status.  She accumulates a coterie of genuinely good friends who become her caring family, in the absence of actual family members who are “two oceans away.”  For me, Sneha is a very frustrating protagonist, who allows Marina to misinterpret a statement that Sneha makes. This misunderstanding mushrooms into a big fat lie, robbing me of any respect I had for Sneha.

MEMPHIS by Tara M. Stringfellow

I was excited to read this book about my hometown, but I felt that it was a bunch of characters in search of a plot.  The book follows four generations of Black women who have been dealt some tragic blows, in the form of grief as well as domestic violence.  Worst of all, though, is the horrific attack on three-year-old Joan by her male cousin, Derek.  When Joan’s mother, Miriam, flees her abusive husband, taking 10-year-old Joan and her younger sister back to the scene of the crime to live with Derek and his mom, August, I wanted to pull my hair out.  Needless to say, Derek’s psychopathic behavior has not improved, but family members are no longer the targets of his aggression—good news for Joan but not for other innocent people.  The Derek situation does provide some level of nausea-inducing suspense, but the zigzagging timeline is not conducive to creating a narrative that keeps the reader engaged, and the writing style is simplistic and uninspired.  On the plus side, this book does evoke some vivid images, such as the beauty parlor in the basement of August’s house, where she works magic on her friends’ and neighbors’ hair.  All of these women strive to support their families, minus the husbands who have been cut down too young or whose abuse has forced their wives to escape to safer venues.

SWEET, SOFT, PLENTY RHYTHM by Laura Warrell

The characters who populate this novel are some of the least endearing ever.  The central character, Circus Palmer, whose name reminds me of Chili Palmer from Elmore Leonard’s Get Shorty, is a musician and a player, and I’m not just referring to his occupation as a jazz trumpeter.  He is the handsome father of Koko and ex-husband of her mother, Pia, who carries a torch for him long after he has skedaddled.  And she is not the only woman who is hopelessly in love with Circus, despite knowing his penchant for other women.  The only women in this novel with any degree of self-esteem are the few who do not fall victim to his charm, including Odessa, whom he meets on the train and who ignores his invitation to one of his gigs.  Maggie, a successful drummer, is another woman in his circle and appears to be someone Circus sincerely cares for, until she announces that she is pregnant with his child.  And let’s not forget his daughter, Koko, a teenager who is so messed up that I can almost understand why Circus avoids spending time with her.  She lives in sort of an unhealthy, upside-down fantasy world, partly stemming from the neglect of both her parents.  This novel desperately needs someone with a moral compass to anchor it, even if only from the periphery.  Some characters do eventually mature, and some basically go off the deep end.  The writing is decent, but I just could not develop any respect for this motley crew and found it hard to be anyone’s cheerleader.

REMARKABLY BRIGHT CREATURES by Shelby Van Pelt

Giant Pacific octopuses (not octopi) may be exceptionally bright, but this novel exaggerates their abilities to include reading.  I don’t think so.  I can see this book as an animated movie, but I found it not only unrealistic—intentionally, I’m sure—but also very predictable.  Marcellus, the octopus, a sometimes first-person narrator here, lives in an aquarium and frequently escapes from his tank, knowing that he can spend a maximum of eighteen minutes out of the water.  He also knows that he is fast approaching the end of his expected life span.  Tova, an elderly cleaning lad at the aquarium, becomes Marcellus’s friend and accomplice.  Her husband has died recently, and her son drowned mysteriously at the age of eighteen.  Then along comes Cameron, a ne’er-do-well who is on a quest to find his biological father.  He takes over Tova’s cleaning shift while she is temporarily injured.  Marcellus proves himself to be even smarter than we thought, putting two and two together, and has to devise a way to pass his observations on to these two humans.  Ahem.  I can almost imagine reading this book to a child as a series of bedtime stories, minus a few plot points and some of the language, as this is a fast read with no long sentences or unfamiliar vocabulary.  If you want to read a more intelligent book about intelligent animals in captivity, try T.C. Boyle’s Talk to Me instead.

NOW IS NOT THE TIME TO PANIC by Kevin Wilson

Two bored, awkward teenagers pool their writing and artistic talents to create a poster with a cryptic message and mysterious drawings.  Then they clandestinely plaster hundreds of copies all over their small Tennessee town.  Twenty years later a journalist finds out who was responsible.  That’s the whole plot in a nutshell, and it’s just not enough to carry an entire novel.  Frankie, who comes up with the words on the poster, which become sort of a mantra for her, considers her and Zeke’s summer stunt to be the most important event in her life.  The mystery of who caused the “Coalfield Panic of 1996” is heightened by the fact that Frankie and Zeke are such unlikely candidates. The town’s residents attribute the poster’s words to various sources, such as the Bible, a rock song’s lyrics, a satanic incantation, a mini-manifesto, or some obscure passage from a famous author.  I really enjoyed Kevin Wilson’s Perfect Little World and Nothing to See Here, but this novel just seemed a little thin to me.  I kept expecting something monumental to happen, but it never did, although a few people who are not even characters in the novel reach a tragic end due to the town’s obsession with the posters, leading to some guilty feelings on the part of the perpetrators.  My favorite character is Frankie’s single mother, who is so unflappable, even when she catches Frankie and Zeke making out on the couch.  She harbors a secret that she reveals to Frankie late in the novel, and my reaction was, “Of course!”  Still, this minor revelation is not nearly enough to save this novel, but I’ll bet most readers can readily recite the two beguiling sentences on the poster by the time they finish the book.