FROZEN RIVER by Ariel Lawhon

A New England midwife in 1789, Martha Ballard is a woman ahead of her time.  A champion of women’s rights, she is a compassionate champion of the many women bearing children who were conceived out of wedlock.  When an evil man, Joshua Burgess, turns up dead in the river, she testifies against Joseph North, who along with Burgess raped the pastor’s wife.  North, however, is a formidable opponent, given his wealth and standing, who wields power through threats and intimidation.  Martha attends to so many women that I found it difficult to keep them all straight, but Martha herself is a force to be reckoned with and is surrounded by a (mostly) supportive family, including her saint of a husband.  She does not suffer fools gladly, especially those who refuse to help themselves.  Some aspects of this novel seemed superfluous, including the existence of a rare silver fox whom Martha views as an omen.  Also, the book occasionally veers into the past and the events surrounding Martha’s marriage, and I rushed through these unnecessary detours, which could have been handled succinctly via Martha’s first-person narration. The pace of the main storyline, however, is brisk, as Martha rushes from one emergency to another.  The murder of Burgess sort of hovers in the background, never totally out of the picture and propelling itself to center stage from time to time.  There are enough evil men here and maligned women to fill two books, but the author failed to tie off one loose end regarding the fate of an unwanted newborn.  Martha, however, is the main attraction here and shows us what a woman with gumption and a strong sense of justice looks like, in any era.

VIGIL HARBOR by Julia Glass

What a fascinating cast of characters Julia Glass has conjured up for this novel.  Most of them live in an affluent Massachusetts town, but not all of the residents know one another, and I sometimes forgot about that.  However, Mike, a marine biologist, and Margo, a retired English teacher, do know each other, and their respective spouses have run away together.  Celestino is an undocumented Guatemalan immigrant whose residency status is a constant source of anxiety that his wife and son cannot really fathom.  Several more denizens of this community have their own chapters in the book, but a couple of interlopers with nefarious objectives bring danger to a community where people are not accustomed to locking their doors.  Generally, Julia Glass’s novels exude a sense of calm, even when the circumstances are dire, but this novel has a section that I would describe as gripping.  Though not a thriller by any means, here the author proves that she can produce some nail-biting suspense as well as deliver characters that we wish we could spend more time with.  She also throws in a bit of semi-magical realism with a tangential character named Issa who may be a selkie, shape-shifting between a human without a belly button and a seal.  I’m not sure what’s the point of making this character’s origin a mystery, but I rolled with it anyway.  Two of Issa’s lovers are prominent characters in the book; one thinks Issa is mentally unstable, and one thinks she is a supernatural being.  Definitely a head-scratcher there, but I assumed mental illness until late in the book when the author seems to be steering us toward a different viewpoint.  My chief gripe is that some of the chapters are in italics, and I did not want to linger there, just because of the font.

A HOUSE AMONG THE TREES by Julia Glass

What do an Oscar-winning actor, a celebrated children’s book author/illustrator, and a man dying of AIDS have in common?  They are all characters in this wonderful book, along with the main character, Tomasina (Tommy for short), who is the long-time live-in assistant to Mort Lear, the aforementioned author, who has died suddenly in an accident when the novel opens.  Tommy, as Mort’s executor, has a lot on her plate, including setting up a foundation for boys and explaining to a museum curator what Mort’s wishes were for his collection of drawings and manuscripts.  Tommy has devoted decades of her life to Mort.  She has no regrets about living in his shadow, as she has enjoyed the company of Mort and his fellow authors, has traveled the world for his book tours, and has accompanied Mort to numerous awards shows. I would not say that she lives vicariously through Mort, but her life has been tightly entwined with his for decades.  My favorite side-plot, however, is that of Nick Greene, who is set to play Mort in a Hollywood biopic and who wants to absorb as much about Mort’s life as possible.  The fact that Nick is humble and kind may seem a bit unrealistic, but fame is a relatively new phenomenon for him, and it has not gone to his head yet.  One wonders how long this will last, as everyone who meets him is starstruck.  This book’s plot takes a backseat to its characters, not all of whom are lovable, as well as the characters in Mort’s most celebrated books.  I did not want to come to the end of this book and thus allow these characters to live the remainder of their lives in my imagination rather than in Julia Glass’s.

THE PASSENGER by Cormac McCarthy

This novel has two great opening scenes.  The first is a young woman’s suicide by hanging.  The second is a sunken plane full of dead passengers.  Despite this auspicious beginning, I would describe this book as uneven.  Some parts I would give five stars, rating this the author’s best read since The Road, and other parts merit only two stars.  The main character is Bobby Western, a salvage diver, and the woman who commits suicide is his brilliant and beautiful sister, Alicia, a mathematician.  These two characters are in love with each other.  Seriously.  Most of the chapters are Bobby’s, but some are Alicia’s, and these latter ones just annoyed me, partly because they are in italics and partly because they are peopled with characters who are products of her schizophrenia.  Bobby, on the other hand, is mostly a man of few words, and although there is some great dialog here, I found it difficult to keep up with who was saying what.  Especially challenging is a long conversation between Bobby and another man about quantum mechanics, and physics is not my long suit.  More intriguing is the fact that the IRS freezes all of Bobby’s assets, although probably not for owing back taxes.  Rather, his problem seems to stem from the fact that a passenger was missing from the cabin of the underwater plane.  If I thought the sequel, Stella Maris, would further address this sinister situation, I would read it, but apparently it is just about Alicia’s psychiatric treatment.

THE CROSSING by Cormac McCarthy

Fortunately, I remember some of my college Spanish, as this book contains a lot of it, and the author doesn’t always translate it.  Some of it I ignored, some of it I got the main idea from the context, and some of it I looked up.  The timeframe is not really clear until later in the book when the U.S. enters WWII.  The protagonist, a teenager named Billy, rides off from New Mexico to return an injured wolf to Mexico, leaving behind his parents and younger brother and taking with him the family’s only firearm.  Billy encounters all sorts of people, both good and bad, in the course of his travels.  Without the good people, he never would have survived all three of his forays into Mexico, but, if it weren’t for the bad people, he might not have had to return there at all.  Billy has skills that serve him well most of the time, but luck can be a fickle companion. This book reminded me a bit of Huckleberry Finn without the humor and with a horse as the means of travel instead of a raft.  Since this is a Cormac McCarthy novel, you know it is going to be Dark with a capital D.  The section that I found most riveting is one in which a very competent doctor is patching up a bullet wound, where the bullet went straight through.  In another section that held my attention, a passerby treats a horse’s knife wound with a strange brew and a poultice.  I guess I just liked the healing better than the bloodshed.

SUTTREE by Cormac McCarthy

Cornelius Suttree is living on a houseboat near Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1951.  He makes a living—if you want to call it that—fishing on the river with trotlines.  Suttree is a friend to everybody he meets and the ultimate good Samaritan, usually to the detriment of his own well-being.  Some of these so-called friends he meets in jail, or more specifically, the workhouse, where he is occasionally confined for passing out in an inebriated state in a public place.  One previously incarcerated friend is Harrogate, a teenager who has been caught defiling watermelons—you can guess what that entails--that don’t belong to him.  Suttree gets dragged into various capers, most of which are illegal, such as poisoning bats, robbing banks, and disposing of dead bodies.  He always protests getting involved in these schemes but eventually finds it easier to go along than to resist.  The cast of ne’er-do-well characters in Suttree’s life is voluminous, and I finally gave up trying to keep them straight.  Suttree’s mysterious past proves that he has not always been someone to rely on, but we get only the briefest glimpse of that.  I suppose you could say that this book is darkly humorous, with the emphasis on “darkly.” It reads like a cross between Tobacco Road and Huckleberry Finn, but, ironically, almost every sentence contains a word that I don’t recognize.  Did I look them all up?  No, or I would still be reading this book.

THE GOD OF THE WOODS by Liz Moore

At a summer camp in 1975 in the Adirondacks, Barbara Van Laar, the daughter of the camp owners, goes missing.  Oddly enough, her younger brother, Bear, has been missing for over a decade, and the same serial killer was at large during both disappearances.  Hence, we actually have two mysteries to solve here.  Enter Investigator Judy Luptack, mostly underestimated because she is female.  She and the camp director, T.J. Hewitt, are the most competent women in this book.  Louise, a camp counselor, was partying the night of Barbara’s disappearance, but she basically just has bad taste in men.  The award for most insipid of the women is Alice Van Laar, Barbara’s mother, who has basically checked out and given herself over to alcohol and tranquilizers since her beloved son disappeared.  Her husband and his father are arrogant jerks who seem a little too tight-lipped to be innocent, but with red herrings galore, any guess is likely to be wrong.  The women, plus Barbara’s bunkmate and minus T.J., get multiple chapters in the book, as does the serial killer, so that the Van Laar men remain somewhat enigmatic.  The timeline goes back and forth, but the author labels the chapters very specifically to alleviate the guesswork.  I would have liked a little more suspense here, maybe some cliffhangers, but Judy is the character who captured my attention.  At 26, she has trouble breaking free of her parents, despite her successful career, because she is unmarried.  That problem seems more 1950ish than 1975 to me, but whatever.  And don’t let the length of this book turn you off, as this is a fast read, with mostly short chapters, so that stopping places are easy to come by, if you really want to stop.