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.

BAD SUMMER PEOPLE by Emma Rosenblum

A young boy discovers a dead body in the intriguing opening to this book, but the rest was a disappointment.  The title should be Bad Shallow People, although “bad” is really too nice a word for these despicable rich folks with no conscience.  Cheating with one’s husband’s best friend and cooking the books at the tennis club are mild compared to the other dirty deeds performed here.  By the end I realized that these awful people were even more unscrupulous than I thought.  I know this book is supposed to be funny and satirical, but it did not strike me as either.  The characters are almost all mean-spirited, and their actions just become increasingly outrageous as the book progresses.  The references to the competitiveness at the tennis tournament struck a chord with me, as a tennis player, but the rest was just not my thing. I was surprised that a twenty-year-old could work as a bartender in New York, but he is one of the few who is mostly innocent of any wrongdoing.  Even a woman not on Fire Island, where the action takes place, concocts a false sexual harassment accusation against a co-worker, jeopardizing his job.  Retribution here is way worse than the crime being avenged, so that everyone has to watch their step—sometimes quite literally.

YELLOWFACE by R.F. Kuang

My favorite novel involving plagiarism is Old School by Tobias Wolff, which took place long before social media became a thing.  This book has a lot in common with The Plot by Jean Hanff Korelitz, which did involve online harassment, and in both cases the character being harassed is guilty of plagiarism.  The Korelitz book is more of a mystery, but I think I would have appreciated this book more if it were not so similar.  In this book, June, a mediocre writer, steals the book draft of her dead friend, Athena, who is a celebrated Asian-American author.  June is vilified not only because she is suspected of plagiarism but also because, as a white woman, the resulting book about the Chinese Labour Corps in WWI is considered “inauthentic.”  Kuang gives a nod here to American Dirt, which was similarly criticized.  How much of June’s novel is her own work is not really clear, but the fact that she stole the idea and the plot causes her to vacillate between mind-numbing guilt and brazen indignation toward her accusers.  June rationalizes her actions in every way possible, even viewing the stolen novel as payback to Athena for stealing June’s personal story about a possible rape.  I enjoyed this book very much for the most part, but June’s constant hand-wringing and obsession with public perception of her book became tedious at times.  She occasionally falls into a state of deep depression but cannot stop herself from reading the online allegations and negative reviews.  Rarely, though, does she consider coming clean about the origins of the book.  Once the lie is out there, she can’t unsay it and chooses instead to dig in her heels.

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.

ABSOLUTION by Alice McDermott

Alice McDermott’s novels are generally somewhat sedate, but this one takes place in Saigon during the early 1960s.  However, the young wives of American engineers and intelligence personnel are rarely in dangerous circumstances, especially if they stick to their villas, protected by walls and barbed wire.  Our first-person narrator, Patricia, soon comes under the influence of Charlene, a “dynamo” who is determined to spread a little cheer to the Vietnamese people, including a leper colony and the children’s ward of a hospital.  Whether the trinkets and Saigon Barbies she distributes are really worth the time and effort is questionable, and a gift she bestows at the end is beyond the pale.  Decades later back in the States, Charlene’s daughter and a kind young man named Dominic that Patricia knew in Saigon are neighbors in Maryland, and this coincidence seems unlikely and unnecessary.  His story is a compelling one, but I think it could have been conveyed via a different pathway.  Even more unlikely is the fact that my favorite line in the book is actually a quote from Stalin:  “If one man dies of hunger, that is a tragedy.  If millions die, that is a statistic.”  What a sad but true statement, and it applies to more types of fatalities than just hunger.

SOMEONE by Alice McDermott

Alice McDermott’s novels often seem to be about unexceptional people in unexceptional circumstances, but somehow she makes their story worthy of our attention with her lyrical prose and attention to detail.  Here we have Marie, who is neither attractive nor ambitious, and she is not particularly smart, getting her left and right mixed up with unfortunate consequences.  When her first suitor, Walter Hartnett (sometimes spelled Harnett in the hardbound version--an inconsistency which I found weird for such a respected author), talks about their getting married, she is all in.  Then he suddenly tells her that he is marrying someone else, and her world is shaken.  She eventually moves on, gets a job, gets married, and raises a family. Ho hum, right?  Not so fast.  The birth of her first child is quite a nightmare, and her job at a funeral home is a surprisingly good fit.  The surrounding characters have even more drama to offer, especially her handsome older brother who abruptly leaves the priesthood--and the “someone” who eventually becomes her husband.

CHILD OF MY HEART by Alice McDermott

Fifteen-year-old Theresa is an only child of middle-class parents who live in the Hamptons in the hope that their beautiful daughter will land a wealthy husband.  She has been ushered into adulthood a bit too fast, having become a popular babysitter and dog-walker almost as soon as her age reached double-digits.  During the summer in which this novel takes place she has also taken on care of her 8-year-old cousin, Daisy, who accompanies Theresa as she walks from house to house and performs her duties.  One of Theresa’s charges is Flora, a toddler, who is routinely left on the porch in her stroller for Theresa to pick up, take to the beach, provide lunch, bathe, and entertain.  More alluring than Flora, though, is her father, a successful artist in his 70s.  Two aspects of Theresa’s life drive this novel:  the not-so-subtle advances Flora’s father makes toward Theresa and the worrisome bruises on Daisy’s body that beg for medical attention.  Theresa’s responses to both of these situations are problematic.  In both cases, I felt that she made the wrong decisions and that she was a foolish teenager, but then I had to rethink my opinions and ask myself if perhaps her choices were not so unwise.  There are arguments to be made on both sides, and I love how the author does not provide consequences or pass judgment but just allows us readers to draw our own conclusions.