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.

EVERYONE IN MY FAMILY HAS KILLED SOMEONE by Benjamin Stevenson

I have to admit that I enjoyed this novel, which exceeded my expectations by a long shot.  The main action takes place at an Australian ski resort, where our first person narrator, Ernest Cunningham, joins his family to celebrate the release of his brother Michael from prison.  In fact, Ernest was the witness who sealed Michael’s fate at the trial.  The event gets off to a rocky start when a dead body shows up in the snow before Michael has even arrived.  An inept cop named Crawford chalks the death up to exposure, until Sofia, Ernest’s stepsister, proves that in fact the dead man is a homicide victim.  Ernest becomes the de facto investigator of the crime, but he actually just writes books about how to craft a murder mystery novel.  We assume that he will eventually solve the crime, but in the meantime the plot is a bit overly intricate.  Past events related to Ernest’s brother Jeremy and their father, their connection to the man Michael murdered, and the disappearance of a girl named Rebecca McAuley are somewhat convoluted.  There are so many killers and so many murders that I found it challenging to keep up, and the family relationships just added another layer of confusion.  On the flip side, the main storyline hums along with Ernest as our entertaining guide and first-hand observer.  One loose end dangles at the end, and I think the author should have tidied that up a bit.

FOURTH WING by Rebecca Yarros

This book reached out and grabbed me and wouldn’t let go, with its passion, partially fueled by magic dragons, igniting the page, along with a generous helping of the f word.  This is an R-rated, super-addictive romantasy, which has Harry Potter elements to it but is definitely not for children.  Think more along the lines of Game of Thrones.  Also, I’m not sure how much it would appeal to men, so that I’ve now narrowed the audience down to adult women.  Much of the plot is predictable, but it’s still a thrill ride of the first caliber.  Twenty-year-old Violet is the first-person narrator who has to choose a quadrant in which to train for service to Navarre, and she has spent her entire life preparing to become a scribe—keeper of the archives.  However, her mother, a high-ranking military leader, insists that Violet become a Rider—of dragons, that is.  Many don’t survive the first test, which involves walking across a narrow, high parapet, where one misstep means falling to one’s death.  Those who do survive this and many other daunting tasks will have the opportunity to bond with a dragon who will endow them with magical powers.  As for the romance angle, it will be steamy enough to raise your heart rate.

THE CURSE OF PIETRO HOUDINI by Derek B. Miller

The appeal of this book eludes me.  It is a picaresque adventure story, but the uninspired writing style and molasses-like pace did not deliver.  The book starts out in first-person, narrated by a 14-year-old girl whom Pietro Houdini takes under his wing and assigns the name of Massimo—a boy’s name.  Massimo’s parents have been killed in a WWII bombing, and Massimo follows Pietro to an abbey for refuge.  When Massimo embraces his identity as a boy, the narration changes to third-person.  Then Massimo becomes a girl again but with another false name, and the narration remains third-person.  Guess what the final narration and identity change is?  Is this a stylistic choice or a metaphoric choice or what?  For me, it’s just kind of a mess.  As for the writing style, I would say that it is written for a12-year-old, except that it contains subject matter not appropriate for a juvenile.  Honestly, I would prefer to read a novel intended for a young audience than to read one intended for adults that has such a simplistic writing style.  The book does contain some humor and some historic information, but I was still glad when it was over.

BOOTH by Karen Joy Fowler

Sometimes I find historical fiction to be well-researched but poorly written.  This novel, although overly long, is both well-researched and written well enough.  The focus is on the Booth family and their ten children, several of whom die young from smallpox and cholera.  John Wilkes is one of the youngest Booth children and adored by all, despite some pretty despicable behavior, long before he assassinates Lincoln.  His father is a renowned Shakespearean actor, often performing drunk, and several of his sons, including John, follow in his footsteps, as both an actor and a drunk.  Even their spinster sister has a drinking problem, although she seems able to keep hers hidden by mostly staying home with their mother.  Speaking of their mother, she is not even legally married to their father, who abandoned his first wife and son but cannot really shake them off.  Although the author tried not to make John Wilkes the centerpiece here, I could not help but look for him on every page, anticipating the horrendous act for which he is known.  This novel does provide some context but does not attempt to make him out to be a good guy who made a bad mistake.  On the contrary, in his warped mind, he is performing a service to the country.  I found it puzzling that John Wilkes was such a proponent of slavery, while all of the other members of his family disagreed with his stance but chose to overlook it.  The various members of his family play the blame game—blaming a brother for throwing John out of the house, blaming his co-conspirators, blaming themselves for not having seen it coming, blaming Lincoln for going to the theater.

PROPERTIES OF THIRST by Marianne Wiggins

The heart of this story is Schiff, an American Jewish lawyer from the Department of the Interior.  He has been assigned the unpleasant task of setting up the Manzanar Internment Camp in California shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor.  Members of the filthy rich Rhodes family, whose land near the camp is being appropriated for a landing strip, are the supporting characters.  The patriarch is Rocky Rhodes (!), who is in a constant battle with the Los Angeles Water Department, who have helped themselves to the snow runoff in his valley.  Sunny Rhodes, Rocky’s daughter, owns a restaurant in town, and sparks fly between her and Schiff, although she is engaged to someone else.  What really lights up the page, though, is the dialog between Schiff and anyone else, and scenes that don’t involve Schiff are somewhat dry.  Fortunately, such scenes are infrequent.  This book stretches to over 500 pages, but I would have gladly followed Schiff for 500 more, especially since we are left with loose ends galore.  There is so much to savor here, though.  It has love, conflict, oppression, compassion, heartbreak, suspense—all wrapped in splendid prose.  The Japanese internment camp may be the reason that all these characters come together, but it is not really the centerpiece of the novel.  That honor belongs to the landscape and the characters, who do everything they can to lessen the severe hardship of the people whose lives have been upended by an event that they neither invited nor condoned.

THE LAST WHITE MAN by Mohsin Hamid

This slim novel is a parable that is a cross between Kafka’s The Metamorphosis and Saramago’s Blindness.  It also brings to mind John Howard Griffin’s memoir, Black Like Me.  Here we have a young white man named Anders who wakes up one day and discovers that he is now Black.  Furthermore, he does not look like his former self, but he has the same memories, preferences, aptitudes, body type, habits, etc., that he had before.  His father is wary of this Black man in his midst, but Anders’s friend Oona takes his new look in stride.  Then more and more people have the same experience of becoming Black and having to adapt to being treated differently, and not just by white people.  This is empathy on a whole new level and literally walking in the shoes of an oppressed ethnicity.  At first there is some unrest, but then that tapers off, and nothing much happens.  At some point during this transformation process for all white people, distinguishing between who used to be white and who has always been Black becomes nearly impossible. My take on this book is that the author is telling us that racial bigotry based on skin color makes no sense, and, of course, he is right.  If everyone were Black, that prejudice would disappear, but other biases might become more widespread.  Anyway, this book definitely provides food for thought in the what-if department.