THE HOUSE IS ON FIRE by Rachel Beanland

Historical fiction can be educational, as is this novel about the Richmond Theatre fire of 1811.  I had never heard of this disaster, which Patrick Henry’s daughter, Sally, survived.  She, along with three other characters, headline the chapters and present their various perspectives on the events of that tragic night.  She was a patron the night of the fire, and in this telling, she jumped from a third floor window and survived.  Gilbert is a slave who caught a dozen white women who plunged into his arms from a second story window.  Cecily is Gilbert’s niece who sees the event and the city’s inability to identify the dead as an opportunity to flee to freedom.  Jack is a young stagehand whose actions contributed to the accident that caused the fire.  The book reads like a thriller as we follow Cecily’s escape plans and Jack’s efforts to quiet his conscience when his fellow theatre workers concoct a story of a slave revolt as a cover-up for their own mistakes in causing the fire.  However, the characters are fairly one-dimensional, especially the villains, including the blacksmith who owns Gilbert, and Cecily’s owner’s son, a brute who frequently rapes her.  However, the slave owners are not the only cruel characters.  Sally experiences a rude awakening when she discovers that many of the men in the theatre survived the fire by basically trampling the women.  So much for chivalry.  Thank you to Book Club Favorites at Simon & Schuster for the free copy for review.

APPLES NEVER FALL by Liane Moriarty

Joy Delaney has gone missing, but her four adult children and her husband take their sweet time about reporting her disappearance to the authorities.  She left them all a cryptic text message, but then the housekeeper finds Joy’s phone under the bed in the Delaney house.  Joy’ husband, Stan, with whom she ran a successful tennis academy, seems the most likely suspect, especially since he is enigmatically unconcerned.  Even more curious is the former presence of Savannah, an injured waif who showed up on the Delaneys’ doorstep several months ago and proceeded to insert herself into the household.  The fact that two seemingly intelligent adults would allow a complete stranger to move in and take over the cooking and housekeeping is incomprehensible, but then many aspects of this book are absurd.  What’s not absurd is the number of family secrets that trickle out one by one, adding intrigue to the mystery of Joy’s whereabouts, as well as dispelling the myth of the Delaneys’ perfect marriage.  Three of the four children have their own share of secrets, including, in some cases, the fact that their marriages/relationships have recently gone bust.  The plot sizzles at times, but this book falls more squarely into the cozy mystery category than the thriller genre.  The writing style is too simplistic, and the characters are too even keel to rev up our heartrates and inspire us to become truly worried about Joy.  Everyone, including the reader, seems to feel that Joy will turn up sooner or later.  Also, the author is not the least bit subtle about sharing odd tidbits that turn out to be incremental to the plot, such as the ugly rug, the dog that eats paper, the cat that steals laundry, and, of course, the hotshot tennis prospect that got away.

AFTERLIFE by Julia Alvarez

Antonia is still mourning the death of her beloved husband, Sam, after almost a year and finds herself at loose ends, until suddenly she has too much on her plate.  Her oldest sister, Izzy, has vanished en route to Antonia’s 66^th birthday party, and the girlfriend of her neighbor’s undocumented employee, Mario, needs a place to stay.  Unbeknownst to Antonia and Mario until her arrival, Estela, the undocumented teenaged girlfriend, is pregnant with another man’s child, and now Mario wants nothing to do with her.  Antonia finds herself torn between two crises while trying to stay true to her mantra of taking care of herself first.  Her reluctance to help Estela brings with it a heavy dose of guilt, since she knows that Sam would have helped Estela in every way possible.  Plus, Antonia is a Dominican immigrant herself.  As for the Izzy crisis, Antonia has three sisters working on that situation, all convinced that Izzy is mentally unstable, and Antonia questions whether her participation is even necessary.  She boomerangs between the Izzy problem and the Estela problem, both geographically and emotionally, and this tug-of-war between the two emergencies is the driving force in the novel.  The author vividly and eloquently paints Antonia as a truly relatable character who deftly juggles both crises while battling uncertainty about how much commitment she wants to make to either one.  Her sisters are tugging on her to help resolve the Izzy situation, and Sam, or at least the memory of Sam, is tugging on her to help Estela.  I have to admit that I felt that Estela was more in need of assistance than the sisters, but family pressures are difficult to deny, particularly when one family member has become a threat to herself.

THE PLOT by Jean Hanff Korelitz

Jake Bonner is a writer whose first novel was reasonably successful but whose subsequent efforts have been mediocre at best.  After a student named Evan Parker, who happens to be a decent writer, recounts to Jake the dynamite plot of a novel he plans to write, Jake expects to see that novel in print within a few years.  However, for some reason it has never come to fruition, and Jake discovers that Evan died shortly after completing Jake’s workshop.  Jake struggles to rationalize why he ultimately expands his student’s plot into a novel of his own:  it’s a story that is too good to go to waste.  The ensuing recognition of Jake’s novel comes with not only a fair amount of guilt but also a new girlfriend and some creepy missives from someone who apparently knows that his book’s storyline is not original.  One could argue that it’s always a bad idea to do something that will cause you to be constantly looking over your shoulder to see if someone is coming after you.  Jake’s dilemma, as he dodges questions about how he got the idea for his novel’s plot and pretends to be unfazed by the ever more threatening notes from someone calling themselves TalentedTom—clearly a reference to Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley about a man who covets the life of another man and ultimately takes it over.  Jake may be enjoying the accolades that rightfully should have belonged to Evan Parker, but there is more to the Ripley theme than just stealing the plot of another man’s novel.  Chapters of Jake’s blockbuster novel are interspersed throughout this book, so that we really have two novels here that converge.  The story of Jake’s inner turmoil and quest to uncover the identity of his nemesis is undeniably a page-turner—even more so than the stolen plot of his best-selling thriller.

HARLEM SHUFFLE by Colson Whitehead

Ray Carney is mostly an honest entrepreneur who owns a home furnishing store in Harlem in the early 1970s.  However, he does occasionally deal in stolen merchandise but only on a small scale, at least according to him.  However, his beloved cousin Freddie is a small-time crook and constant liability who sometimes involves Carney in his capers, with or without Carney’s consent.  Over the course of this novel, Freddie becomes involved in a burglary of a hotel’s safe deposit boxes, aligns himself with a drug dealer, and double-crosses a mobster.  Carney finds it tough to maintain his respectability as a businessman when he gets embroiled in Freddie’s various escapades, especially when the cops interrupt a meeting he has with a rep for a high-end furniture manufacturer.  Carney also engineers a caper of his own in order to get revenge against a banker who failed to deliver on a $500 bribe.  Although the writing is terrific, the pace of this novel is snail-like, despite the action-packed plot, not all of which I totally grasped.  The scene in the book that I can’t stop reading, because it is just too funny and vivid, takes place in a laundromat.  I won’t quote all the witticisms on pages 225-226, but these two sentences elicited a huge guffaw from me:

“The manager of the laundromat was a scrawny man in a saggy undershirt painted with sweat stains.  Launderer, heal thyself.”

I also learned about dorveille, or “dorvay” as Carney likes to spell it, is a period of wakefulness between two half-cycles of sleep.  Apparently, centuries ago, people slept in two shorter shifts rather than in one continuous 8-hour stretch.  Makes sense to me, except for the going to bed at dusk, although during Daylight Saving Time that might work out OK.

BLACK LEOPARD, RED WOLF by Marlon James

Yikes, reading this book was a chore.  This book is The Lord of the Rings on steroids, or maybe testosterone, complete with a wicked enchanted forest, but not nearly as engrossing or entertaining.  Tracker plays the Strider role here but without the charisma, and the quest is the search for a mysterious boy.  Violence abounds, along with shape-shifting characters, including the Leopard in the title who transforms himself into a man and back again.  Characters morph into other characters, and their behavior and personalities fluctuate as well; they are sometimes good guys and sometimes bad.  And don’t even get me started on the women, who are all witches, sorceresses, or otherwise despicable creatures, such as hyenas.  There is quite a bit of perfunctory sex, sometimes consensual, sometimes not, but almost all of it takes place between male characters.  In fact, the only really likeable character is Sadogo, a big-hearted oaf with a murderous past.  The mingi are cursed children—albinos, conjoined twins, a boy with no limbs—whom Tracker tries to save from all the evil entities, and they are pretty cool as well.  However, all the misogyny aside, the choppy sentences, constant savagery, pronouns with ambiguous antecedents, the zigzagging timeline, and a vast cast of characters whose names vary and whose allegiances are fluid, make this novel very difficult to follow and even more difficult to enjoy.  I am totally mystified as to why this book has garnered so much praise.

HOW MUCH OF THESE HILLS IS GOLD by C Pam Zhang

The first part of this book reminded me so much of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying.  Two orphaned children in the western U.S. are transporting their father’s rapidly decomposing body to an as yet undetermined burial place, as appendages drop off along the way.  They are abandoning their hardscrabble life in a mining community in the late 1800s for an uncertain future after Lucy fails to keep secret the family’s stash of gold bullion.  Lucy is twelve, and her sister Sam is nine, but partly due to their father’s urging after losing a newborn son, Sam(antha) passes as a boy.  Eventually, Lucy eschews life on the road, and their paths diverge, at least for a while, as both are looking for a place to call home.  The defining characteristic of these two kids is that they are Chinese-Americans, born in this country but forever treated differently because they look different.  Their quest for a sense of belonging is virtually unattainable, and their suffering, especially Lucy’s, has been augmented by physical abuse at the hands of their father after the loss of their mother.  We also learn the history of Lucy and Sam’s parents, and it is not pretty.  In fact, their story is so horrific, due to a catastrophe of their own making, that it’s a wonder they maintain any semblance of sanity afterward.  Although the pace of this novel definitely accelerates at about the halfway point, it still did not move me.  Plus, several stones in the plot are left unturned, such as whether Lucy finds out about her parents’ past, and we are left wondering about what happened to the kids’ mother.  I needed more closure on these two points, and the ending raises even more unanswered questions, so that the book feels unfinished.