JAMES by Percival Everett

This book has received so many accolades, but I just did not love it.  I did love that the author elevates Jim, the runaway slave who accompanies Huckleberry Finn on his adventures down the Mississippi River.  Jim, in this retelling, hides the fact that he can read and write and is familiar with a smattering of erudite philosophers, especially Voltaire.  He and other slaves disguise their intellect behind a mask of dialect that they employ only in the company of white people.  Even on the river, Jim becomes a slave to the white people he encounters, including the notorious con men, the Duke and Dauphin, despite trying to convince them that he is Huck’s slave.  In an unusual exchange, Jim becomes the property of a blacksmith, but a blackface minstrel group admires Jim’s singing voice and pays the blacksmith to release Jim to their custody.  They assure him he is not a slave, but yet he can’t leave the group because of their investment.   So…OK, he’s an indentured servant but with no timeline in which he’ll be free?  Jim’s creativity in trying to survive while on the run sometimes backfires, as in the case where he pretends to be the slave of another runaway, Norman, who can pass as white.  The scheme is for Norman to sell Jim so that Jim can escape and be resold again and again.  Then two of them will split the money, but I cannot fathom how they neglected to account for the possibility of Jim being beaten and shackled while in the possession of their first buyer.  Also, as in Twain’s original, Jim does not disclose until late in the book that a body found at the beginning of their journey was that of Huck’s cruel father.  Given that Huck is on the run from his father, why would Jim withhold this information when he could set Huck’s mind at ease?  I would have liked the author to have offered an explanation for this deception.  For me, the idea of this book is just way more appealing than the book itself, which drags, especially in the beginning.

HEAT 2 by Michael Mann and Meg Gardiner

This crime thriller is a sequel to the 1995 movie Heat, which I think I saw but do not remember at all.  No matter.  I loved this book anyway, and I think it stands just fine on its own, although at times the multiple timelines confused me.  Also, there are two groups of bad guys.  One group of bad guys, led by Neil McCauley, although they are really bad, sometimes do good things, but the other group of bad guys, led by Otis Wardell, are psychopathically bad to their core.  Then we have the good guys, primarily Detective Vincent Hanna, who is no saint himself.  He has a drug problem and doesn’t think twice about pushing a bad guy off a roof.  The two groups of bad guys cross paths at one point, resulting in your typical bloodbath.  Years later, although earlier in the book, Chris Shiherlis, who thinks of McCauley as a brother by another mother, lands in Paraguay, ready to start a whole new chapter in his life.  Shiherlis, rather than Detective Hanna, attains main-character status in this book, as he takes sides in a business war between competing Chinese families in Paraguay.  He eventually becomes involved in business activities that I never fully understood, but I do know these activities generally involved less overt violence than some of the heists he and McCauley pulled off.  Otis Wardell, on the other hand, keeps turning up like a bad penny, leaving tortured and bludgeoned bodies in his wake.  He is one scary, evil dude.  If gory stories make you queasy, skip this one, but personally I would rather read this kind of stuff than see it in living color on the screen. All that said, I still hope there’s a movie.

HAPPINESS FALLS by Angie Kim

I wish authors and editors would realize that the eBook format does not accommodate footnotes very well.  They all appear at the end of the chapter, so that all context is forgotten.  Also, a chart with highlighting showed no highlighting whatsoever on my kindle.  All that aside, this book is a missing-person mystery with a bunch of other unnecessary asides, and because of these diversions, I did not like it as well as Miracle Creek.  Adam, a stay-at-home dad, disappears after an outing with his son Eugene, who is autistic and, due to other complications, unable to speak.  Eugene returns alone, visibly agitated.  The family, especially Mia, Adam’s twenty-something daughter and first-person narrator, entertain various theories about what happened to Adam:  he ran off with a mistress, or he committed suicide because of a cancer diagnosis, or worst of all, Eugene pushed him into a raging river.  No one can quite fathom any of these scenarios, and it becomes increasingly likely that Adam is dead.  This novel is very suspenseful, but it has too many distractions, the primary one being Adam’s research into the quantification of happiness.  Really?  The book’s early examples of how unpredictable happiness is and how it is relative to a baseline, such as winning the lottery or suffering a paralyzing injury, are intriguing.  However, this “happiness quotient” is a topic that the author overemphasizes throughout the book, and I don’t really understand why.  It seems to be a theory that she wanted to convey somewhere, and this novel was as good a vehicle as any.

IF I SURVIVE YOU by Jonathan Escoffery

For some reason I thought this book was a novel, and that misconception may have skewed my impression of it.  It is actually a collection of linked stories about Jamaican-heritage families in Miami, and the same family appears in almost all of the stories.  Also, I think the title is a bit of a double entendre, as it could mean “if I survive what you are doing to me” or “if I outlive you.”  Trelawney is the primary recurring character, who addresses himself or the reader, not sure which, as “you,” who may be the “you” in the title.  I’m just guessing here.  In any case, identity, particularly ethnic identity, is a big factor in Trelawney’s life, as he is confused by the fact that some people see him as white, most Americans think he is Black, and some people think he’s Latino, although he speaks no Spanish.  Speaking of language, one chapter/story is completely told in Jamaican patois, and an audiobook would be the way to go in this case, as trying to sound out the words in my head detracted from the storyline.  However, it’s only one chapter/story, and the rest is relatively easy to read, as far as the language is concerned.  The content is not so easy to read, as these characters endure all kinds of hardships at the hands of not only other Americans but also their own families, and sometimes they knowingly self-sabotage.  Anyway, back to the identity theme, here’s a snippet of a conversation on page 23 between Trelawney and a white warehouse co-worker:

“’What do you care?  You’re not Black.  You’re Jamaican,’ he [the co-worker] says.  ‘I have a Jamaican friend who explained the difference to me.’  You wish his friend could come explain the difference to you.”

NIGHT WATCH by Jayne Anne Phillips

This book just does not measure up, despite its Pulitzer Prize, to this author’s Lark and Termite and Quiet Dell, both of which I loved.  The two timelines, 1864 and 1874, are very well delineated, but the characters are somewhat one-dimensional—either all good or all evil. It takes place in West Virginia and opens with an 1874 section in which “Papa,” whose true colors will be revealed later, is delivering Eliza and her daughter ConaLee to a plush mental health asylum.  He instructs them to use false names and not reveal their mother/daughter relationship. When we revert to ten years earlier, we find that Eliza’s beloved husband has left his family to become a sharpshooter in the Union army.  Their surrogate caretaker will be Dearbhla, their “granny neighbor,” who raised Eliza’s husband and, to some degree, Eliza herself.  I liked the plot, but, honestly, this book put me to sleep, as the plot seems secondary to all the wordy descriptions and characters whose purpose is unclear, particularly in the asylum. The most glaring example is a boy named Weed who wanders the grounds and pops up in scene after scene. However, I could not decipher what he contributed to the storyline.  Maybe he, the cook, another inmate and a few employees are meant to add color to the ambience of the asylum, but they are just not that colorful.  ConaLee, Eliza, a doctor, a raging inmate, and, of course, the night watch, all have important roles, but the rest of the asylum characters occupy way too many pages whose objective seems to be to extend the length of the book.  Does a novel need to be a minimum length to win the Pulitzer for fiction?  Also, there is a bit of magical realism that is used to glue some events together.  Surely an author of this caliber could have come up with a better device.

LUCY BY THE SEA by Elizabeth Strout

This novel takes up where Oh William! left off, but it’s not imperative that you read Oh William! first.  In fact, Strout’s characters from previous novels appear flit from book to book.  This one, though, is narrated by Lucy Barton, who headlines several of Strout’s novels.  Lucy herself is a respected author, who clawed her way out of poverty but still thinks of herself as a coward.  It’s 2020, and we all know what happened, especially in New York.  Lucy is very much in disbelief about the pandemic, but her ex-husband, William, a retired parasitologist, whisks her off to Maine before things get bad.  This is very much a COVID novel, as this pair hunkers down for the duration, all the while trying to ensure that other family members are safe as well.  Adapting to life in lockdown, away from her two adult daughters, is at first a struggle for Lucy, and she doesn’t even feel like writing.  The aforementioned daughters are dealing with challenges of their own, unrelated to but certainly not lessened by the pandemic.  William definitely comes off as a more likeable character in this novel than in the previous one, since he becomes more of a take-charge individual whose mission is to keep Lucy safe.  He also has to fend off pandemic deniers who don’t think steering clear of their asthmatic son is necessary, even though they have continued socializing indoors.  Lucy and William ultimately have to figure out how to put up with each other again while sharing a living space and having limited interaction with other people.  Lucy sometimes narrates whatever comes into her head, such as the fact that William doesn’t like to watch her floss her teeth.  As always, Strout’s prose is rich but simple, and I just can’t get enough of it.

HONEY & SPICE by Bolu Babalola

Kiki, the first person narrator, is in her second year at Whitewell, a fictional English university, where she has a campus radio program called “Brown Sugar” that provides women with empowering advice on dating.  Her audience becomes incensed when she is seen kissing Malakai, a new student whom she dubbed “Wasteman” on one of her recent broadcasts.  The purpose of the kiss was actually to scare off a guy that Kiki was trying to ditch.  She and Malakai then create a plan that involves pretending to date one another in order for her to rebuild respect among the other Black women on campus and keep her viewership intact.  Malakai is something of a player, and Kiki keeps her social interactions to a minimum, but they are both relationship-avoidant in different ways.  They both have to move out of their comfort zone in order to keep up appearances for the sake of their ruse—Kiki becoming more open to social activities and Malakai limiting himself to one woman.  These two predictably fall in love, but their insecurities don’t allow them to admit it, as each is concerned that the other is just faking it.  The plot does not really offer any big surprises, but the two characters have a certain charm that keeps the book from becoming too much of a cliché.  I will warn readers that there is some Yoruba dialog—all translated—and quite a bit of slang that I did not understand—not translated.  Also, the repeated use of “I” where “me” is grammatically correct really grated on me.  Constantly having to read “between Malakai and I” or “leaving Malakai and I” and the like sounded like fingernails on a blackboard to my ears.