MILKMAN by Anna Burns

At first I thought this book took place in the future under a reactionary, repressive government, but, no, it’s Belfast in the 1970s.  (So glad I read Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing.)  The narrator is an 18-year-old Catholic girl whose life is pretty much dictated by the unrest and violence, and almost every family has at least one member killed in the ongoing turmoil.  Almost no names are used in this novel, and I found this quirk to be charming and funny, and I had less of an issue keeping the characters straight than I normally do.  The writing style is unusual, in a good way, and a little hard to describe.  It’s conversational and melodic and at times repetitive, and I loved it.  I also marveled at the little absurdities that loomed large during this turbulent era in Northern Ireland.  For example, the “renouncers” occasionally install a curfew, just as a show of power.  As for the title, there are actually two milkman characters—one who actually delivers milk and one who is a highly placed revolutionary whose last name is Milkman.  The author perfectly delineates these two characters without causing reader confusion.  The latter Milkman is stalking the narrator, and the rumor mill has already decided that she is having an affair with Milkman.  Her vehement, and truthful, denials go completely unheeded, making her life so Kafkaesque that she stops doing many of the activities that she loves.  She is known for reading while walking but gives up this habit when the community deems it arrogance, given that Milkman’s attentions immunize her from being mugged.  This upheaval spills over into her personal relationships.  The narrator’s maybe-boyfriend may be a target for a car bomb, perhaps because Milkman is jealous, but this threat is supposedly wielded as punishment for purchasing the supercharger from a rare Blower Bentley--not just because it is a British car but because it might have a Union Jack on it.  Outrageous, maybe, but still completely plausible.

VALENTINE by Elizabeth Wetmore

The title sounds like a romance novel; however, this is anything but.  Nor is it a love letter to Odessa, Texas, where it takes place in the 1970s.  A local oil worker, Dale Strickland, rapes and beats up a 14-year-old Latina girl, Gloria, who escapes to a nearby farmhouse.  The woman who lives there, Mary Rose, is the star of this novel and the star witness at Dale’s trial, since the young traumatized victim refuses to testify.  All of the other characters, except a homeless man, are Mary Rose’s female neighbors and their daughters.  (Casseroles are passed around to the point that I could not keep up with where they originated nor who finally ate them.)   There are a few editorial mistakes that annoyed me (“just desserts” should be “just deserts”) but I still appreciated the themes this novel so admirably addresses—justice, bigotry, power, courage, and cowardice.  The plot is not entirely original:  the town blames the victim and rallies around the smug attacker because he is the son of a local preacher.  Even Mary Rose’s husband tries to discourage her from rocking the boat.  However, feisty Mary Rose sticks to her guns, almost literally, as she and her daughter perform hours of target practice each day, just in case one of her many telephone harassers actually shows up in person on her doorstep.  Corinne, a neighbor whose husband, Potter, has killed himself rather than finally succumb to cancer, is completely lost and drinking herself into any early grave so that she can join her husband.  Potter was a tortured soul, suffering physically obviously but also blaming himself for not intervening when he and Corinne saw Gloria hop into Dale’s truck.  Despite the really bleak plot, the book is not humorless.  Ten-year-old Debra Ann, D.A. for short,  has eschewed her imaginary friends for the real Jesse, who is living in an appliance carton.  She steals supplies for him from her neighbors’ unlocked homes, and those women commiserate about how they must be losing their minds, given how many household items they’ve apparently misplaced.  Ultimately, Mary Rose’s righteous indignation almost leads to her undoing, but the Odessa women bring light to one another’s darkness.

WE BEGIN AT THE END by Chris Whitaker

Sissy Radley has been dead for thirty years after a she was hit by a car the age of seven.  The drunk driver was 15-year-old Vincent King, who is now being released from prison.  His childhood friend Walker is now a beaten-down cop battling Parkinson’s—a disease that he struggles to hide in order to keep his job.  Walker also tries to look out for two unfortunate children, 13-year-old Duchess and her 6-year-old brother Robin.  Their irresponsible mother is Star Radley, Sissy’s sister and Vincent’s old girlfriend, who herself is murdered early in the novel.  Vincent calls the cops from the scene and immediately becomes the only suspect, but the author throws one red herring after another our way, as well as Walker’s, as he tracks down every clue that might exonerate Vincent.  However, this is not a legal thriller, and, although a murder mystery--or more than one, actually--is at the heart of the plot, this novel is much more.  The tragedies that befall Duchess and Robin are almost too heartbreaking to bear, despite the hilarious spate of curse words that Duchess occasionally hurls that sometimes result in not-so-hilarious consequences.  One problem with this book, though, is the writing style, with gaps in sentences that I sometimes found difficult to bridge, especially at the beginning before I became accustomed to it.  Also, Duchess proudly brands herself an outlaw, and her almost ad nauseam proclamation of this avocation not only becomes annoying but also makes her seem much younger than she is.  What ultimately stands out in this novel is the theme of fierce loyalty, particularly Walker’s loyalty to Vincent and Duchess’s to Robin, so that love and loyalty become almost interchangeable.

REDHEAD BY THE SIDE OF THE ROAD by Anne Tyler

Micah Mortimer seems destined to remain single.  He is fastidious about keeping his home neat and clean, has his own business, and stays fit by going for a run every morning.  What’s not to like?  Still, his relationships eventually fizzle, and he fails to understand his role in these breakups.  When a young man named Brink comes to Micah’s house, thinking that Micah is his biological father, Micah’s organized life becomes a little messier.  Plus, Micah’s “lady friend” is afraid that she is about to be evicted for owning a cat and obviously expects Micah to step up and offer to allow her to move in.  In her mind, he could at least demonstrate some empathy or advice about her predicament.  Micah, however, needs more than a subtle hint to get the picture.  Anne Tyler always makes us appreciate good, solid people who nevertheless are not quite whole or not quite dialed in.  She also helps us see how a relationship can go off the rails due merely to a lack of communication.  Micah is a very well-adjusted person who just turns out to be slightly clueless at times.  This book has no dastardly villains, but it does not have a lot of passion, either.  Sometimes Tyler’s characters are too normal and ordinary to command my attention, but this book has a bit of suspense, although not of the nail-biting variety.

DINNER AT THE HOMESICK RESTAURANT by Anne Tyler

Pearl Tull’s husband, Beck, abruptly leaves her with three children to raise on her own.  Cody, the oldest, is as mean as a snake, playing tricks on his kinder and gentler younger brother, Ezra, to get him into trouble or just for the fun of it.  Cody is obviously jealous of Ezra’s even-tempered likeability and is sort of a male version of the title character in Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride.  Jenny becomes a doctor but seems destined to repeat her mother’s habit of striking and verbally abusing her children.  There are some LOL nuggets in this book, including a hilarious letter proposing marriage to Jenny.  Her terse reply is also funny, but this book goes from funny to dark in a heartbeat.  Plus, Pearl’s mistreatment of her children and Cody’s mistreatment of Ezra just overshadowed everything else for me.  Ezra is a saintly sort of character, but I found it hard to respect him; he needs to grow a backbone.  I really liked the ending, but the rest of the book is definitely a downer.  One character, Ruth, whose story I don’t want to give away here, is particularly unfortunate, and another, Josiah, deserves better in life, although he is not nearly as pitiable as Ruth.

THE LIONS OF FIFTH AVENUE by Fiona Davis

Something about this novel makes me think of a Nancy Drew mystery, although Nancy Drew is a more competent sleuth than the two women who headline this novel.  In 1913, Laura’s husband, Jack, is the superintendent of the main library on Fifth Avenue in New York, and their family lives in an apartment within the library building.  All is well until two things happen:  some rare books go missing from the library, and Laura gets a scholarship to journalism school.  Laura goes on to become a famous essayist on women’s rights, but her family suffers from her negligence.  What?  Laura’s feminist activities lose their impact when one considers what she forfeited, and I object to the author blaming Laura’s pursuit of a career for what happens.  Some eighty years later, Laura’s granddaughter, Sadie, is in charge of a collection of rare items, when, again, rare items start to disappear.  Sadie becomes an amateur detective, alongside a legitimate detective hired by the library, but manages mostly to implicate herself, due to several bonehead moves that are obviously going to come back to bite her.  Sadie decides to investigate the thefts from eighty years ago as well, thinking they may be connected somehow.  Huh?  Despite the implausibility of both of these crimes, I did find myself anxious to know whodunit and how, but the identities of the perpetrators are so ridiculous that I could only sigh with relief when I finished this novel.

GIRL IN ICE by Erica Ferencik

Val’s twin brother Andy has just died of an apparent suicide doing research on a remote island above the Arctic Circle.  Now Wyatt, Andy’s friend and colleague, has invited Val to bring her linguistic skills to that same island.  Apparently, Wyatt has thawed a young native girl from a crevasse near their research station, but she is speaking an undecipherable language.  Val, whose mental health is already teetering on the edge, decides to accept Wyatt’s offer, but her main objective is to find out what really happened to Andy.  I would classify this novel as an adventure/thriller, in the same vein as The River at Night, but I thought this book was a major improvement, primarily because Val, despite her vulnerabilities, is admirable, likable, and believable, even if the plot seems a bit farfetched.  Although not a mother herself, Val becomes a mother figure to the unfrozen girl, whose name turns out to be Sigrid.  Val is caring and protective of Sigrid, especially since Wyatt may or may not be trustworthy.  I found this book to be well-written and extremely suspenseful, although its first person narrative indicates that Val will survive.  For me, that helpful hint is not a bad thing.  I questioned more what was going to happen to Sigrid, as Wyatt’s motives become increasingly more suspicious and Val’s ability to shield Sigrid from Wyatt’s experiments appears to be insufficient.  Even here in Florida I feel shivery after reading this book—partly from the action and partly from the constant reference to the frigid weather.  Isolation is scary enough, when the few people around Val are nefarious characters, but the subzero temperatures add an additional fright factor.  Thanks to Simon and Schuster for the advance reading copy.