¡YO! by Julia Alvarez

I’m not really a fan of novels that are a series of vignettes, but this one works for me.  The stories all revolve around Yolanda García, whose name is often shortened to Yo, which is the pronoun “I” in Spanish, hence the title.  We learn at the beginning that Yo has just published a piece of fiction in which her various family members recognize themselves as characters, and they are not too happy about it.  What follows are basically episodes involving people in Yo’s life, including her three husbands, a landlady whose husband beats her, an English professor who is endlessly writing letters of recommendation for her (“once in a career there comes a student”), a boyfriend posing as a journalist to keep their relationship under wraps, and an assortment of family members.  I found all of these stories captivating, but the most memorable and shocking one is near the end, with the too-benign title of “The Stalker.”  Another surprise is the final story, in which Yo’s father recounts how Yo’s penchant for storytelling as a child placed her entire family in jeopardy.  Yolanda herself is a bit of enigma, kind and caring, but at times regretful, as we all are.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.