A Good Season for Mysteries: Blue Heaven, Famous Last Words, and More

Titles. First of all, I'm bad at titles. In picking titles for workshops, I was never the one who came up with a catchy, clever, or evocative title. So if I wrote a book that needed a title more exciting than, say, Teaching the Social Sciences and History in Secondary Schools, I would need a lot of help. But I do sometimes wonder if marketing departments are providing a little too much help. This suspicion was strengthened at an event a few years ago at the Broomfield Library. Author Cynthia Swanson was asked why she had titled her book The Bookseller when that didn't really describe the book in any meaningful way. She replied that she had titled the book something else (I don't remember what her proposed title was, but it was much more evocative of the story), but the publisher suggested the alternative title because books with bookseller, bookshop, bookstore, or library in the title were very popular. Now, I suspect the new word that is sneaking into lots of titles is river. Just Google "Titles including river" and you'll see what I mean.

This story came to mind this spring when I read The Night We Lost Him, by Laura Dave. I immediately thought that title had been chosen to remind people of her previous book, The Last Thing He Told Me, which was very successful, made into an Apple TV series, etc. But the second book was not in any way a follow-up to the previous one, the title didn't fit the book all that well, and it certainly didn't add anything to the experience of reading the book (perhaps that's asking a lot of a title but at least try!). A couple of the books I liked this spring had titles that lived up to this expectation, so I think it's possible!

Okay, on to spring's favorite reads. 

Fiction

Fully two months into spring, I was afraid the Fiction section of this post might be empty, but luckily I came upon two good novels in a row in May! First was My Friends by Fredrik Backman, an author whose work I don't always love. But I loved My Friends, which, as you might expect, is an exploration of friendship--and art and surviving one's family. Louisa is an almost-18-year-old who has recently lost her best and only friend. She has found her way to an auction house where a painting she has loved since she stole a postcard depicting it from a foster home frig; she just wants to see the painting before it is sold but ends up causing a bit of a stir at the event. She escapes to an alley where she stumbles across a man who seems to be homeless but is actually the artist who created the painting. He recognizes her as a kindred spirit, buys the painting himself, and (when he dies the next day) arranges with his friend Ted to give her the painting. She freaks out and begs Ted to take her with him in his and the artist's home town to dispose of the artist's ashes. On the very lengthy train trip, amidst a number of adventures, Ted tells her the story of their group of four childhood friends. Ted and Louisa are both quirky characters but their stories and their evolving relationship are engaging and touching.

The relationship at the heart of Rental House by Weike Wang is less touching, but it is engaging. Nate and Keru are a couple who have decided not to have children. Nate is a white guy from a lower class Southern background; Keru is the only child of perfectionistic immigrants from China. When the book opens, they are on vacation at a Cape Code beach house. They have invited their parents to visit (not at the same time) and the visits reveal generational and cultural gaps that torment the couple. Five years later, they are on a different vacation, this time at a luxury bungalow in the Catskills, where they can't escape prejudices (the European couple in the next bungalow labels them DINKs and makes various assumptions about them) or their families. Rental House presents two slices of a couple's life and it doesn't reach a neat conclusion, which kept me thinking about families and how they affect relationships after I finished the book. 

Mysteries

I recently went to a great event sponsored by the Jefferson County (CO) Library System that featured several mystery writers, including C.J. Box, who I didn't realize had written a stand-alone mystery that won the Edgar award. So I immediately picked up Blue Heaven (an evocative title with an unexpected meaning) and quite enjoyed it. Two kids, mad at their mom and her boyfriend, decide to go fishing when they have an early release day from school. They have the misfortune to see a murder and then become targets of the killers, a group of retired LA cops (not a spoiler--it's revealed in the blurbs on the back of the book). Luckily, they happen to find a hero, rancher Jess Rawlins, a wonderful character. The book ends with a bloodbath followed by a kind of mystical series of conversations, an odd juxtaposition that somehow works. Definitely glad I read it.

I also enjoyed Famous Last Words, by Gillian McAllister (also a good title with multiple meanings in the story). On her first day back at work after nine months' maternity leave, Camilla is interrupted by a visit from the police, who inform her that her husband Luke is involved in a hostage situation--as the hostage-taker. After releasing one hostage and shooting the other two unidentified victims, Luke escapes and is not heard from for seven years. But then things start happening; Cam is in the process of having Luke declared legally dead but suddenly starts to think he might be alive and begins trying to figure out what really happened. The same events prompt Niall, the hostage negotiator who felt he failed during the initial siege, also begins investigating new leads. Working separately, the two move towards a more complete understanding of why Luke acted as he did and what has happened since. I figured out who the real culprits were before the end--something that I am not particularly good at (despite having read thousands of mysteries)--but it didn't ruin my enjoyment of the book.

Presumed Guilty, by Scott Turow, is more of a legal thriller than a mystery, although there's certainly a whodunit aspect to the book. Here, Rusty Sabich, the falsely accused protagonist of Presumed Innocent, takes on the job of defending his fiancee's son, who is accused in the murder of his on-again/off-again girlfriend, a brilliant, beautiful, and deeply troubled young woman. Around 70 percent of the book focuses on the trial, so if you don't like reading testimony, cross-examination, etc., you'll probably be bored--but I like that sort of thing. The book has a lot of similarities to its predecessor, beyond the title, which for sure is meant to evoke that earlier bestseller, which Apple TV recently remade as a series. But the title fits the story, and the legal maneuvering and mystery of who killed Mae kept me interested. 

The Examiner, by Janice Hallett, is presented in messaging app posts between and among a cohort of art students working on their master's in multimedia art, their instructor, other staff at the college, staff at a company for whom the students are creating an installation as their final examine, and the titular examiner, who reviews all their work to be sure it is being graded fairly. At first they seem like a fairly normal group, with people vying for the teacher's attention, accusing each of other of cheating, and the like. But gradually we learn more of their back stories and begin to suspect that some are not in the class to improve their artistic skills. I don't want to include any spoilers, but I'll just say I was impressed that Hallett used the unusual formal well, giving the characters depth and surprising me with plot developments. I read another of her books with a similar format, The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels, which I did not like quite as much and made me think I don't need to read a lot more books constructed in this manner--but I still respect the author's skill in constructing character and plot in this innovative way.

My online book group (University of Illinois alumni) chose Look Closer by David Ellis for its spring into summer book. It's set in a fictional Chicago suburb and features a U of C law professor as one of its highly unreliable narrators. I don't want to say much about the plot because it's so incredibly twisty (though it takes a while to get going). I'll just say a woman is found hanged the day after Halloween. Was it suicide? Murder--by a lover (but who?), a jealous wife, an intruder? If you can figure this thing out before the end, you're way smarter than me.

Nonfiction

Over the past several years, I have come to admire Adam Kinzinger's moral compass and courage, even though we disagree on many issues. Reading his book Renegade, I especially appreciated his commitment to service and his willingness to admit his mistakes/flaws. I also felt compelled to rethink my views on some folks (e.g., John Boehner), but most of all felt real sorrow for moderate Republicans who basically lost their party to nut jobs and people who place power over principle. I recommend reading his book and checking out what Adam is doing with his group Country First.

The French Ingredient: Making a Life in Paris One Lesson at a Time, by Jane Bertch provides an interesting take on French culture and relationships as she reflects on her decades living in Paris, first as a banker and then as the proprietor of a cooking school, La Cuisine. The most moving part of the book for me was her recounting of how she and her business partner dealt with the COVID pandemic, the ways in which small food businesses worked together to survive, and the joy she felt when they were able to reopen and see beloved clients again. I'm not sure what I learned from reading the book would make me a better visitor if I ever return to Paris, but maybe. And I'd definitely take a class at La Cuisine.

Space travel is not necessarily an interest of mine, but Adam Higginbotham's Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space, made many best of 2024 lists, so I checked it out--and I'm glad I did. I must admit that I was an adult when the Challenger disaster occurred, and I remember it vividly, but in terms of what happened after, all I really remember is that O-rings were somehow responsible. But, of course, humans were responsible--as Higginbotham documents, people knew that the O-rings could--and perhaps even were likely to--fail in cold temperatures and they recommended that the mission be scrubbed when temperatures at Cape Canaveral were below freezing that January in 1986. However, decision-makers did not heed the warnings and the result was disastrous. And, perhaps even worse, NASA did not seem to learn the lessons of this series of events, as there were problems that signaled what would happen to Columbia years later. As Higginbotham says, these disasters are a testament to "man's overconfidence in his own ingenuity" or as Richard Feynman wrote, "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."

Poetry

Still City by Oksana Maksymchuk is a collection of poems inspired by or about the war in Ukraine. As you might expect, most are grim, either through very literal descriptions or metaphor. In fact, I found myself reading the book much more quickly than it deserved because focusing too intently was debilitating. While reading, I couldn't help thinking about the program at the Longmont Museum I went to in February, at which curator Jared Thompson shared what he had heard from Ukrainians when he visited their country: they are tired of seeing and creating art about war. Let's hope they can move on to other themes soon. Meanwhile, here are a few of Maksymchuk's poems:

Drone Footage

When a shell strikes a person
there's a scattering

 resembling a flock of birds
taking off

hands flying in the air
signaling

feet levitating
in mid-ick

their avian shapes
casting shadows

lithe and carefree
from on high

Mother's Work

The remains
buried hastily
in the yard
recently ran about

with a shaggy dog
sewed a dress for a doll
bombed at Scrabble
sang a lullaby

Duck-Rabbit

a field, dry reeds
a path of ice

like a blot of ink--
a child on the ground

bright red on white
her arms reaching out

shot dead or 
making a snow angel?

New and Collected Poems, by Marie Howe, won the Pulitzer for poetry this year. I had only ever read a few of her poems, so I definitely wanted to read this collection. It's good, very good, but it's sometimes as depressing as the Maksymchuk collection written about an ongoing war. Death is a theme in many of the poems--the death of Howe's brother, our own inevitable deaths, the death of the planet. The first poem in the collection goes through the process of accepting one's age while recognizing that one does not understand death. Later, her dying brother focuses her attention on her own mortality.

Prologue

In the middle of my life--just past the middle--
walking along the street with our little dog Jack on a leash
--OK--just past the late-middle--

in what some might call early old age,
on a street crowded with children and tourists

my father dead, my mother dead,
my young husband gone from me and grown older (a father,
a husband now to someone else),

Jason dead, John dead, Jane and Stanley and Lucy and Lucie
and Billy and Tony and now Richard dead,
I came to the edge
and I did not know the way.

The Last Time

The last time we had dinner together in a restaurant
with white tablecloths, he leaned forward

and took my two hands in his and said,
I'm going to die soon. I want you to know that.

And I said, I think I do know.
And he said, What surprises me is that you don't.

And I said, I do. And he said, What?
And I said, Know that you're going to die.

And he said, No, I mean know that you are.

Many other poems draw on Biblical characters, stories, or themes, with an entire section inspired by Mary Magdalene, including a poem about the diversity of penises she experienced. These were not my favorites. I felt more positively about a number of poems about children and the experience of mothering and learning from children. I found this one particularly evocative:

Hurry

We stop at the dry cleaners and the grocery store
and the gas station and the green market and
Hurry up honey, I say, hurry,
as she runs along two or three steps behind me
her blue jacket unzipped and her socks rolled down.

Where do I want her to hurry to? To her grave?
To mine? Where one day she might stand all grown?
Today, when t=all the errands are finally done, I say to er,
Honey I'm sorry I keep saying Hurry--
you walk ahead of me. You be the mother.

And, Hurry up, she says, over her shoulder, looking
back at me, laughing. Hurry up now darling, she says,
hurry, hurry, taking the house keys from my hand.

And here's one of the most fabulous lines I've read in a while, though I'm not sure I know what it means: "and the wind makes music of what water was."

Favorite Passages

Nothing weighs more than someone else's belief in you.

The world is full of miracles, but none greater than how far a young person can be carried by someone else's belief in them. 

He feels like telling her that the artist didn't give her the painting because it was his inheritance, he gave it to her because he realized that she was the inheritance. Art is what we leave of ourselves in other people. But he doesn't quite know how to say that.

    --Fredrik Backman, My Friends (kind of love the contradictory truths)

Playground, The God of the Woods, and Other Favorite Winter Reads

Some notes on mysteries that weren't great but had something interesting about them . . . 

I didn't love House of Correction by Nicci French, but I was impressed by the author's ability to write a legal mystery from the standpoint of the accused, who is planning her defense from a jail cell and then acts as her own attorney in a manner that is entertaining (although certainly would not be allowed by an actual judge). It's really just another take on "ditzy girl solves the case when the dense police can't," but the ditzy girl is usually loved by everyone; here, she doesn't have a friend in the world except for her cellmate, who turns out to be an effective sleuth/lawyer. An interesting twist if not entirely successful.

I am not a huge fan of William Kent Krueger, although I know he's beloved and I do respect that he deals with important issues in his mysteries. Among the issues that underpin Spirit Crossing is violence against indigenous women and girls (and law enforcement's lack of attention to this epidemic). Somehow I wasn't as moved as I feel like I should have been by the book--but I cried at the Author's Note at the end, which was about a real woman who was trafficked, was rescued, built a life, and then was killed by a boyfriend. Reality has an impact.

Kelley Armstrong is an incredibly prolific Canadian novelist best known to me as the author of a mystery series set in a secret Yukon town where all of the residents are hiding from something, usually the law. Thus, I was interested in reading her YA novel Someone Is Always Watching to find that it had a somewhat similar underlying idea, except that it involves children. It's hard to say more without including spoilers, but it's entertaining. I'm not including it in the "favorite" section because the "surprise" is obvious fairly early to an adult reader and there are too many red herrings--but wondering about why the similar underlying theme is important to this author interested me. I might also note that I read several YA books in February, perhaps trying to escape the horror of being an adult in the current political situation. 

On to my favorite winter reads.

Fiction

I have to wonder at myself for really liking The World After Alice, by Lauren Aliza Green, because the two families at its core are so dysfunctional it should be painful. But somehow, it's not. The titular Alice committed suicide as a teenager (or at least we think she did). More than a decade later, her brother Benji and her best friend Morgan are getting married, after keeping their relationship secret from their family for years. Meanwhile, Morgan's father Peter is in love with Benji's mother Linnie, who is bringing a date to the wedding, a man who might have had an inappropriate relationship with Alice. And Benji's dad Nick has been let go from his job but hasn't told his second (younger) wife. Alice's presence hangs over the wedding like a monstrous cloud, and the conflicts are as bad as you might imagine. Yet, it's still somehow a good read. 

Long Island, by Colm Toibin, is a sequel to Brooklyn, a much-lauded book that I didn't love. However, I did really enjoy Long Island, despite the fact that, as the book progressed, the three main characters in the novel--Eilis Lacey, Jim Farrell, and Nancy (forgot her last name)--morph from sympathetic characters dealing with loneliness (among other challenges) to dishonest manipulators of their supposed friends/loved ones. Eilis, the heroine of Brooklyn, is already feeling alienated from her husband Tony's family--all of whom live on the same Long Island cul de sac--when a man shows up at her door to tell her his wife is having Tony's baby and that he will drop the baby on her doorstep when it is born. Unwilling to raise the child and unable to convince Tony and his family to have no part in raising the baby, she decides to retreat to her native Ireland for the summer. There, she reconnects with her fling from Brooklyn, Jim Farrell, who has become secretly engaged to her former best friend Nancy. The secrets the three are keeping erode their relationships and decision-making to a serious degree. The book's ending is abrupt--some readers clearly see it as a set-up for another sequel but I'm not so sure; Toibin may simply be illustrating what happens when bad decisions intersect.  

Nothing to See Here by Kevin Wilson is a book I resisted for a long time, even though I would see it on Libby or at the library--or being read by someone in public. A book about children who burst into flames seemed dumb. And maybe it is a little dumb, but it's also really good. Upper crust Southern girl Madison and scholarship girl Lillian are roommates at a boarding school when Madison gets framed by a rival; Madison's wealthy father then pays Lillian's mother to have Lillian take the fall. Expelled, Lillian falls back into a trailer park kind of existence, but she is still in sporadic touch with Madison, who is married to an older U.S. Senator. When Madison calls and asks Lillian to serve as "governess" for her husband's children by a previous wife--a position that will pay much more than the series of hourly jobs she's been working--Lillian agrees. She then finds out the reason the children need care is that they spontaneously combust from time to time and must be kept out of the way because Madison's husband may soon be nominated for Secretary of State. Crazy set-up, right? But what develops from there is touching, funny, occasionally infuriating--just really enjoyable. I've read reviews that say the novel is about female friendship, but I think it's about learning to care and be cared for.  

Richard Powers has the mind of a scientist and the soul of a poet, and they come together to create novels like those of no other authors. In Playground, his most recent book, the science is multifaceted--the importance and incredible diversity of the ocean ecosystem as well as AI and the threat it poses (oh, and Lewy body dementia--Powers is not averse to including odd human infirmities). The poetry emerges in the relationship between the sea and humans and in an exploration of a deep and ultimately painful friendship. The narrative goes back and forth in time and location, involves numerous characters, and can sometimes be confusing, but a twist at the end brings it together. The human/sea relationship is mostly seen through the character Evie, who is an obsessive diver, scholar, and author of an enchanting children's book about the sea (one reviewer described her husband as a Doug Emhoff-type character, which I found amusing). One of the young people enchanted by her book is Todd, a bright Evanstonian who very early sees the potential of computer games. He becomes friends with Rafi, a scholarship student at his prestigious high school. Rafi is a gifted poet and a lover of literature. The two obsessively play chess and then Go and head off to the University of Illinois together, but they have a falling out after graduation. Todd moves to San Jose to start his company, Playground, a platform something like Reddit but with a competitive element. Rafi stays in Urbana, working on his dissertation and eventually taking a job at the U of I library (one of the best in the country!). Eventually, all the main characters end up on a French Polynesian island where Todd has proposed building a modular floating city and the island's residents have been trying to figure out how to decide democratically whether to agree to the project (should children vote? how should animals' views be considered?). Despite saying a lot about the book, I haven't really captured it, so I'll just end by saying it's highly recommended.  (I feel compelled  to admit another reason that I love Powers' work is that it often involves the U of I as a setting--just reading a phrase like "north of Green" sparks memories. And the character Todd was involved with a project based on the groundbreaking Plato project, where a friend of mine was the art director for some years. How can I not love this, no matter how bad a reason it is for loving a novel?)

Mysteries

Winter started with a mystery that made a lot of "Best of 2024" lists--The God of the Woods, by Liz Moore. It opens in 1975 with camp counselor Louise discovering that 13-year-old Barbara Van Laar, the only surviving child of her wealthy family, is missing from her bunk at the camp near the Van Laar's estate. Years ago, before Barbara's birth, her brother Bear disappeared. A serial killer has escaped from a prison not too far away, and the Van Laars have been hosting a huge end-of-summer party, meaning suspects--both guests and an expanded staff--are numerous. The story switches between the times around the two disappearances and between multiple perspectives. One of the most interesting is that of a young police officer, Judy Luptack, who in 1975 has become one of the first female investigators in the New York State Police, who must navigate strict gender expectations of both the rich and the working class while following her instincts and the evidence to unravel what happened to the two Van Laar children. Moore introduces a variety of serious themes, including family dysfunction and dating violence, but she also knows how to plot a mystery. Very enjoyable.

I was probably first taken by Emiko Jean's The Return of Ellie Black because it was so entirely different from her YA book I had recently read, which was basically Princess Diaries in Japan. But then I got pulled in by the story. In the opening chapter, a young woman missing for two years suddenly reappears. Police detective Chelsey Calhoun, daughter of the late police chief and sister of a girl killed as a teenager, is determined to find the man or men who took Ellie. But, as she tirelessly works the case, the reader gradually begins to learn, through chapters narrated by Ellie, key pieces of information she has not told the police. These pieces of the story lead to several surprises that actually surprise to varying extents. Complicated and entertaining.

Nonfiction

Whether you think you know a lot about how social media operates or haven't a clue why you see what you see on FB or IG, I recommend Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality, by Renee DiResta. DiResta looks at how influencers, algorithms, and crowds/mobs/cults have created "bespoke realities" that challenge the public's understanding of what is true and what is a new form of propaganda. Herself the victim of online character assassination by conspiracy theorists whose false narratives about the work of her then institution, the Stanford Internet Observatory, resulted in threats to her family and a congressional subpoena, DiResta makes clear the toxic effects of the new media environment by detailing conspiracies around the COVID pandemic and the 2020 election. A must-read in our current screwed-up environment.

The Small and the Mighty, by Sharon McMahon, has a subtitle long enough to provide a good synopsis of the book: Twelve Unsung Americans Who Changed the Course of History, from the Founding to the Civil Rights Movement. Some of the "unsung" are actually fairly well known--Daniel Inouye, Norm Mineta, Booker T. Washington, Katharine Lee Bates. But McMahon adds depth to the stories we know, and it's rewarding to learn of the truly unsung (at least to me). For example, Clara Brown was an enslaved woman whose family was sold away; following emancipation, she searched for her family members while building a successful business in Colorado. Virginia Randolph was an African American woman who built a system of schools for black children in Virginia in the late 19th and early 20 century. Julius Rosenwald was one of the owners of Sears, who funded vocational/technical schools for African American children across the South. I recommend listening to the audio version of the text, as it is read by the author who sounds just like your favorite opinionated high school social studies teacher--wound up in her topic and ready to convince you it matters. As someone who took black history and lit courses in the late 60s/early 70s, I have a view of Booker T. Washington that doesn't necessarily align with McMahon's, but I appreciate the argument she makes. Very enjoyable read. 

Poetry

I've got two poem-a-day books I'm trying to keep up with in 2025 but I've also been reading some other collections (yes, I might be tooting my own horn a bit). I am a big fan of Kwame Alexander, so I picked up This Is the Honey: An Anthology of Contemporary Black Poets, which he edited. It includes a wide range of poems--poems celebrating African American culture, political poems, poems addressing the sacred, and more. Every reader is likely to find something that resonates. Some of my favorites include a poem celebrating butter by Elizabeth Alexander, a very funny prayer for a COVID-denying family by Frank X Walker, a comparison of hanging laundry with poetry (Maritza Rivera), and a Ruth Forman poem calling for resistance. Here's the Rivera poem for your enjoyment:

Hanging Laundry
by Maritza Rivera

Of all the chores
I did as a child

the one I hated most
was hanging laundry.

Clotheslines, clothespins
a basket of wee tee shirts
towels and bed linens:
my penance,
I saw nothing wrong
with just tossing them all
into the dryer and letting them
tumble into submission

but my insistent grandmother
would just not have it.
Why waste the warmth of the sun
she knowingly asked. Smell the tropical
breeze in the sheets she proclaimed.

I would say she had a point except
for the sudden downpour that always
followed once everything was
neatly hung and almost dry.

Running to rescue
hanging laundry
from the tears of angels
seemed so useless.

Now, here I am so many years later
seeing words hang like laundry

watching them bask in the warm
of an unsuspecting page awaiting
a cloud burst of ink.

Favorite Passages

Hope and truth could not be reconciled. The things that had filled her with awe were passing away. There was no other honest ending.

Without the ability to feel sad, a person could not be kind or thoughtful, because you wouldn't care or know how anybody else feels. Without sadness, you would never learn anything from history. Sadness is the key to loving what you love and to becoming better than you were. A person who never felt sad would be a monster.

    --Richard Powers, Playground (I could pick many more passages as well--these choices may be influenced by the fact that I am writing this early in Trump's second term.)

You know, at Vanderbilt, there was a kind of boy who wore pastel shorts and boat shoes. They wore seersucker, like they were racist lawyers from the forties. I hated them. They seemed like children but they already looked like middle-aged men. I called them Mint Julep Boys, like they missed the Old South because, even if there was horrible racism, it was worth it if it meant that they could be important by default.

     --Kevin Wilson, Nothing to See Here (see note above re Trump's second term)

American has been just, and it has perpetuated injustice. We have been peaceful, and we have perpetrated acts of violence. We have been--and are--good. And we have done terrible things to people who didn't deserve them. It has been the land of the free while simultaneously sanctioning oppression.

     --Sharon McMahon, The Small and the Mighty (note applies yet again)

Favorite Covers of 2024

As was true last year, I don't think a "best books of 2024" list from me would mean much, since I have only written about a few books that I liked all year. So again I think I'll share some covers I liked.  These are all books I read this year, so I haven't looked at all the books published this year (or confined myself to this year) as the folks at, say, The New York Times probably have. It's interesting to think about how covers, titles, and the interaction between the two affect what book you reach for on the library or bookstore shelf. I think they affect me less than they used to because I'm more likely now to be looking for something specific on my TBR list than just browsing--but sometimes you find the best stuff when you aren't looking for it!

Some of what I thought were trends last year are still around this year: women depicted from the back, vivid skies, flowers (see below for a flower design with a mostly light mood and another with a darker ambiance).  Maybe they're perennial features--after all, there is a limit to how much can be done with limited space that has to be shared with type.

When you think of it like that, it's amazing that designers come up with new and engaging ideas--and when the cover also reflects something about the book's content in a way that is more than "oh, this book is about a woman, so we'll put a woman on the cover," it's an achievement. Here are a few that fit that description. The first two are mysteries that make the connection to the content without resorting to the easy "dead body in the street" kind of image (dimes are a clue in Fall, while What Meets the Eye is about crimes that occur in the art world). The imagery in the second two, both works of nonfiction, may be obvious but is no less effective for that. The cover on the bottom left is something I don't normally like--simple or cartoonish line art--but this one captures the essence of the book so simply that I couldn't help liking it (spoiler alert: every time a husband goes into the attic, a different one comes back down). The cover on the bottom right is maybe  my favorite of the year, mostly because of the use of color, but the visual reference to the butterfly effect is also thought-provoking, as is the book. 

A designer that can do interesting but related things with the covers of a series has a particular skill in my view. Here's an example of that--a mystery series featuring an unusual nun as the protagonist. I really love these, in large part because of the colors. 

Last year I mentioned that I'm often perplexed by the changes of covers from edition to edition. But here are three different editions of the same book and I like all of them, even though they're quite different (Mrs. March is a book about a housewife losing her mind). 

Another topic I mentioned last year is why designers choose the photographs of people--authors or subjects of the books--that they do (and why, in some cases, the person agrees to it). What do you think of these choices? Although the photo of Dr. King is not the most flattering or exciting, I think the close-up is appropriate to the book, which is a close look at the good and less good of his life. The Nikki Giovanni photo is, to my mind, perfect, and I like the Brittney Griner photo as well; the two are similar in that they are both three-quarter profiles with the subject looking up, but the facial expressions give them very different "feels." I don't care for the picture on the cover of We Should Not Be Friends, perhaps influenced by the fact that I didn't love the book. But I think the photo is too small and says very little about the friendship on which the book focuses. 

What was your favorite cover of the year? Did you notice any design trends that you liked or disliked? 

Worse Than Nothing; You Think It, I'll Say It; and more Fall Favorites

 

There are still a couple of days left in fall, but it feels like winter this week (and it's almost Christmas), so here I go. Some downers this fall:

An irritant: If you read this blog, you know I can be kind of picky. I find it really annoying when someone who should know better (or should have an editor who knows better) totally messes up facts. I won't belabor the point, but I have to say the court room scenes in Middletide by Sarah Crouch and The 24th Hour by James Patterson and Maxine Paetro are so inaccurate it's laughable. 

A disappointment: I loved Stanley Tucci's memoir Taste, in which he wrote lovingly about food--cooking it, eating it, sharing it with family and friends--as he reflected on his life. So I was looking forward to What I Ate in One Year, which is essentially a diary of 2023. However, it lacked the emotion and descriptive writing of Taste; in fact, it read like a book that was cranked out to capitalize on the success of Taste, with little of the feeling and insight of that book. Perhaps comparing a book about one's life to a book about one year is unfair, but Stanley led us on (the cover even looks the same), and I don't like it!

Another disappointment: It happens fairly often that an author has a great premise but the book just doesn't live up to it. Imagine my excitement when I discovered Jessa Maxwell's The Golden Spoon, a mystery set in the midst of a television show strongly resembling The Great British Baking Show (one of my favorites). Imagine my disappointment when the plot was a mess and the characters were cardboard. 

But on to things I liked! 

Fiction

I am not a fan of Curtis Sittenfield. In fact, I actively hated her book about Hillary Clinton and didn't think much of either Prep or Sisterland (though I did find her silly take-off on Pride and Prejudice enjoyable). So I was surprised that I really liked her collection of short stories, You Think It, I'll Say It. The stories are about young to middle-aged women at a moment in their lives when they misperceive what is happening to them or make a bad decision or are searching for something that may or may not be there. In the title story, for example, a woman starts a flirtatious game with her husband's colleague, drastically misjudging what the game means to him. In "The Prairie Wife," a happily married lesbian wife and mother is angry when she discovers her first female lover has become a popular Ree Drummond-style Christian content creator married to "the stud in overalls." In "Off the Record," a reporter takes her fractious infant with her on a trip to LA to interview a starlet the reporter believes might actually be a friend; she is not. I'm not sure I gained huge insights into women's experiences, but the stories still resonated. 

Many of Peter Heller's books fall into a genre Denver Post reviewer Alison Borden calls "nature and men and danger." This isn't my favorite genre (as seen in my recent dis of the "man on the run" nature of the much-lauded James), but Heller does it so well I enjoy his books, and Burn is no exception. Jess and Storey are best friends who take an annual hunting trip. This year's is in Maine, where they soon encounter blown out bridges and burned towns (with a small number of dead bodies but no living ones). When they run out of gas, they must figure out how to get out of Maine, where they eventually learn secessionists are battling with government forces. Their escape is complicated when they find a young girl by herself. What is it that makes Heller's books good? His descriptions of nature, his insight into how the human mind works under stress (or at least the male mind), his building up of character through actions and memories. What wasn't so good about Burn? The ending!! A little resolution would go a long way!

Valentine, by Elizabeth Wetmore, is a grim story about a 14-year-old Latino girl, Gloria, who is brutally raped and nearly murdered by a roughneck working in the oilfields around Odessa, Texas, in 1976 and some of the local women affected by the crime. The book's chapters are told from different women's perspectives. While four women are central to the narrative, there are a few chapters from other points of view. The four primary characters are Gloria, who survives ; Mary Rose, who opened her door to the badly injured Gloria when she escaped from her attacker--the event changes Mary Rose's marriage and life; Corrine, a retired teacher and widow who drinks too much, puts up walls around herself, yet still becomes involved in helping others; Debra Ann, a 10-year-old whose mother has disappeared, leaving to spend the summer on her own while her father works. Teen pregnancy and violence against women (the owner of a bar where the roughnecks hang out warns the waitresses, "Keep your eyes peeled for the next serial killer") are prevalent. Yet the women somehow manage to maintain a modicum of autonomy. What I couldn't help thinking about while reading Valentine was how similar this fictional account feels to articles I've read about the recent oil boom in North Dakota. Sad. 

I didn't love The Sequel by Jean Hanff Korelitz, which is a sequel to her novel The Plot but is also a sequel to the plagiarized novel in that book (very meta). The Sequel's protagonist is the widow of the plagiarizing author of The Plot, who turns out to be (like many of Korelitz's characters) a horrible but interesting person. She starts out as relatively sympathetic, but everything we learn about her makes her increasingly villainous. I did enjoy the book but what made me decide to include it here is the very clever device Korelitz used to title the chapters--each is the title of a sequel by another author (It Starts with Us, Ready Player Two, More Tales of the City) but also content-appropriate to the chapter. I was so enchanted and impressed by this device (she includes a list of the related first novels for those of us with less literary knowledge) that it vaulted The Sequel onto the fall favorites list.

The Lion Women of Tehran, by Marjan Kamali, as the title suggests, is a novel about brave Irani women facing challenges posed by family, culture, and repressive regimes from the 1950s to the present.  But it's also a story about friendship. Ellie is from an upper-class family, thrust into temporary poverty when her father dies. At the public school she attends, she meets Homa, whose family is poor but loving. When Ellie's demanding mother agrees to marry her late husband's brother, they move back to an up-scale neighborhood and the girls' friendship languishes until Homa manages to enroll at Ellie's elite high school. Ellie is at first rude to her, afraid Homa's friendship will ruin her relationships with wealthier girls, but Homa quickly charms all the girls and their close friendship resumes until a betrayal causes a rift that lasts for years. 

Colored Television deals with so many issues I wasn't sure what author Danzy Senna was hoping we would take away from it. The protagonist, Jane, is a mixed-race novelist who has spent ten years writing her second book--she describes it as the Mulatto War and Peace, though it does not have a chronological narrative like the original W&P--only to have it rejected by her agent and publisher. When she decides to sell out to Hollywood, coming perilously close to plagiarizing a friend's idea in the process, her attempt is ironically both unsuccessful and successful. Meanwhile, her marriage to an artist whose work does not sell is on the brink, perhaps not surprisingly since she picked her husband because he matched a psychic's description. They move annually, housesitting, living in wealthy acquaintance's carriage houses, renting cruddy apartments, etc., all the while hoping to someday be able to live in a neighborhood they refer to as "Multicultural Mayberry." Their constant moves are hard on their two young children, one of whom has an unspecified learning challenge (it sounds like he is on the autism spectrum); his parents disagree on how to handle his issues. For me, Jane is such a mess that her fulminating on the issues mixed-race people face is less informative/compelling than the experiences of the teenage protagonist in Senna's first novel Caucasia  (a superior novel IMHO). Yet I find myself thinking about the book, which pushes it into the fall favorites category.

Mysteries

For a genre reader, discovering a new author whose book you enjoyed is a good thing. So I was happy to not only enjoy Close to Home by Cara Hunter, but to discover there are several more D.I. Adam Fawley mysteries. I feel a binge coming on. Anyway Close to Home involves an eight-year-old girl who seems to have gone missing while her parents were throwing a backyard barbeque. But questions arise about what really happened and how her family members might have been involved. There are a lot of twists, and I don't want to give them away, so I'll just say I recommend this mystery set in Oxford, England (but not referencing the university at all). BTW:  I discovered after drafting this that I had read a Hunter book before--a memory is a terrible thing to lose! 

Nonfiction

In words less scholarly than those of the author, I would describe Erwin Chemerinsky's book Worse than Nothing as an epic takedown of the originalists, demonstrating that originalism is not a coherent judicial theory, but a rhetorical ploy for justifying desired ideological results, quickly abandoned when it does not generate the favored outcomes. One of Chemerinsky's most interesting points is that, were the "originalist" justices sincere about their purported beliefs, rather than expanding the Court's power as they have recently done, they would be overturning Marbury v. Madison, as the originalist case for judicial review is weak to nonexistent. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the Supreme Court or not concerned about the direction it is going with the conservative super-majority. (Previously posted in slightly different form on Facebook)

I started watching the Netflix series based on Tembi Locke's memoir From Scratch and quit about half way in because it seemed like a stereotypical depiction of family drama in a bicultural/biracial marriage. So I'm not sure why I picked up the book, but I found it quite different and much better than the series. It's primary focus is how Tembi and her daughter dealt with the loss of their husband and father, Saro, and how spending summers in his homeland, Sicily, with his mother, other family members, and the small community where they lived was healing. It doesn't hurt that she also writes about food (Saro was a chef), one of my favorite things. I guess it's no surprise that the book would be better than the TV show (even though Locke was one of the creators of the show), but it definitely is.

Favorite Passages

While to our eyes, waves appear suddenly on the shore, their abruptness is an illusion. Waves begin their journey thousands of miles out at sea. They accumulate shape and power from winds and undersea currents for ages. And so, when you see the women in Iran screaming for their rights, please remember that hte force and fury of our screams have been gathering power for years.

     --Marjan Kamali, The Lion Women of Tehran

What if my own life was like a flower? Something I had to continually tend to and nurture. Sicily was the water and sun that fortified me to stand stronger in my life after loss. And maybe my leaving a rock at the cemetery, as an act of remembrance, had additional meaning. Maybe it was a symbol of the lasting permanence of Saro's love. His love, life, illness, and death had taught me so much but it was the undergirding of his love that was my salvation in loss.

     --Tembi Locke, From Scratch

The Great Divide, James, and Ship Fever: Reflecting on Historical Fiction

 I am not a huge fan of historical novels, for reasons having to do with the writing and the reading (or the aftermath of reading). I sense a lot of authors learn about an interesting event, do some research, and then write a book that informs people about the event while thinking that's enough to make a good novel--but, sadly, it's not. On the reader side--and maybe it's just me--I read a historical novel, realizing while reading that some parts of the book are accurate and some parts are fictionalized, but over time weave both the true and the fictional into my ideas about the past event. So basically all my historical "knowledge" is suspect. 

That's all an introduction to saying that somehow I just read three historical works of fiction  in a row; all were informative and well written--I liked them all though I didn't entirely love any of them (perhaps I am just fickle). The Great Divide, by Cristina Henriquez, focuses on the building of the Panama Canal and the effects of the massive effort on a range of people, from a teenage stowaway from Barbados who needs money to pay for an operation for her sister and has heard there are jobs in Panama to the researcher who has come to Panama to defeat malaria but instead loses his wife to the disease to the sisters who dedicate themselves to saving their village, whose destruction is threatened by the canal. Henriquez causes the reader to think about the impact of imperialism and "progress" at ground level, which is an achievement. However, I found there were too many characters and few were fully realized, so the book fell a bit flat as a novel.

James, by Percival Everett, is a reimagining of the character Jim from Mark Twain's classic Huckleberry Finn. In creating James, Everett explores the cruelty of slavery, particularly the treatment of so-called runaways. What I found most interesting was that he created a kind of reverse code switching, with enslaved people using standard English at home with their family and friends and the "patois" expected of them when addressing whites. I thought the book was well-done but it was too violent and too much of a "man on the run" plot for me to really enjoy it.

Finally, we come to Ship Fever, by Andrea Barrett, which is a National Book Award winner (1996)--had it not been part of my very slow project of reading award winners, I probably wouldn't have picked it up. It is a collection of short stories and the title novella, many of which feature characters who are scientists, some of which are strictly historical, others blending historical and contemporary stories. For example, in a story titled "The English Pupil," Linnaeus in old age is the protagonist; he is in terrible health, not entirely compos mentis; in a combination of thought and hallucination, he remembers his students, many of whom died on field expeditions he encouraged them to make. "The Behavior of the Hawkweeds," in contrast, is a contemporary story about a couple in an unhappy marriage, but it also includes history related to Gregor Mendel because the husband is a botany professor and the wife's grandfather actually knew Mendel (her husband loves to tell her grandfather's story to students and colleagues, but the wife thinks he does it badly and therefore keeps some secrets about the relationship from her husband). Perhaps the most notable piece is the title novella, which is the story of a young Canadian doctor who becomes involved in treating Irish immigrants who arrive in Canada suffering from typhoid. It's a grim story, but also informative and oddly touching. As with most collections of short fiction, I liked some of the pieces in this collection and didn't care for others. But I thought the novella "Ship Fever" was great. 

Heads of the Colored People, Real Americans, and Other Late Summer Favorites

Reading in late summer continued to be good, although I was sad that I didn't read any mysteries that I really loved. I thought I might rant a bit about the disappointment of books with terrible endings but decided no one needed to read that (plus I think I've gone on about this before). So here's some good stuff from the past 6 weeks or so.

Fiction

Real Americans is Rachel Khong's second novel and it's another sophomore success. The story is told from the perspectives of three generations of a Chinese American family. The first section, set around the turn of the 21st century, features Lily, the 20-something daughter of immigrant parents who are accomplished scientists. Lily isn't quite sure what her passion is--but she knows it's not science. Then she meets and marries the handsome, rich (and white) Matthew and they have a son; shortly after that big event, she discovers a link between their families that disturbs her greatly. From there we jump to 2021 and Lily's son Nick, who does not look at all Chinese but doesn't know his Anglo father and lives with his mother in an island near Seattle. He's an awkward teenager, who gets thrown for a loop when he learns who his dad is; their relationship ebbs and flows. The final section focuses on Mai, Lily's mother, both in her early life in China and in the present, when she meets Nick and tells him her story. Although the title suggests the book is about the immigrant experience--and it is--it's also about family relationships and secrets, life in Maoist China, teenage angst, and the impingement of science and its unscrupulous practitioners on human life--and I found all of it interesting. 

Send for Me, by Lauren Fox, was inspired by a box of letters from the author's great-grandmother that she discovered in her grandparents' belongings after their deaths. She collaborated with a German professor to translate the letters and then thought for 20 years about how to create a literary work based on the letters. The result is a moving account of a Jewish German family facing the increasing dangers of Germany in the 1930s. The younger generations--a daughter, her husband, and their baby--manage to escape, building a new life in Milwaukee. The parents remain behind, trying to get their papers in order to leave. Fox also jumps forward to the next generation, whose thoroughly American life is affected in ways she doesn't fully understand by her grandparents' and mother's experience as immigrants, not just fleeing evil but leaving family members behind amidst it. My description is definitely not doing the book justice--it's moving and insightful and I highly recommend it. 

Imagine being on a plane, heading home, going to a wedding, or working as a flight attendant. A woman gets up and walks down the aisle, telling each person--including a newborn--at what age and how they will die (the newborn will drown at age 7). Not long after the flight, passengers begin dying as she predicted, and the freakout begins. That is the premise of Liane Moriarty's latest, Here One Moment.  She advances the narrative with alternating chapters from the perspectives of the people dealing with the predictions and that of the woman making them. I've read a couple of other books with a similar premise but Moriarty pulls it together in a way that, oddly enough, makes you feel good about humanity.

A Woman Is No Man, by Palestinian American author Etaf Rum, is a disturbing read. I mention the author's ethnicity because if she were not of Palestinian heritage, I would have thought the book was stereotyping the culture. But because she is Palestinian, I must assume that her story of violent husbands and extreme restrictions on girls' life choices is based on the reality of at least some Palestinian Americans. The story involves three generations of women: Rafeeda, who saved money while living in a refugee camp so she and her husband could escape to the United States; Isra, a Palestinian girl whose family marries her off to Rafeeda's son when she is only 16; and Isra's daughter Deya, the oldest of her four daughters (she is shamed in her family for not giving birth to sons), all of whom are being raised by Rafeeda after Isra and Adam's deaths. Deya is a gifted high school student whose grandmother is seeking to arrange a marriage for her. The narrative moves around in time as the three women tell their stories, revealing family secrets and tragedies. Sad but powerful. 

Short Stories

As readers of this blog know, I am not generally a short story person. But I loved the darkly humorous pieces in Nafissa Thompson-Spires' Heads of the Colored People. Many stories relate specifically to the experiences of growing up and living as an African American, particularly a middle class African American. The protagonist of the title story, subtitled "Four Fancy Sketches, Two Chalk Outlines, and No Apology" is a young black man who does not conform to expectations--he has blond hair, wears blue contacts, and loves manga; on his way to ComicCon, he encounters a street artist and the police. "Belles Lettres" is an exchange of hostile letters between the highly educated mothers of the only two black students at a private school, funny yet sad, especially when one of the children emerges in subsequent stories bearing scars from her time at the school. Others to me, an older white woman, seemed to apply broadly. For example, "The Necessary Changes Have Been Made" details, with humor, the conflicts between faculty office mates at an HBCU. In one of my favorites, "Suicide Watch," Jilly considers suicide as a way to get more likes on social media--but can't decide what method would be most attractive. Favorite short story collection in a long time!

Nonfiction

Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder is Salman Rushdie's reckoning with the attempt on his life at a Chautauqua event in New York in August 2022. His memory of the actual attack is gripping, and his recover from the gruesome and extensive injuries he suffered is remarkable. Perhaps most interesting are his reflections on the meaning of violence, art, and life. The book is also a love story about his relationship with his wife, the writer and artist Rachel Eliza Griffiths. Her dedication and support were amazing, and the stress she endured was enormous (I must admit, however, that the love story did not resonate as much with me as it might have if she were not his fifth wife). I don't think I'm doing a good job of describing the book, but I think it's worth reading.

I didn't love Jamie Raskin's Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy. I found it somewhat repetitive and, to be honest, I had some trouble thinking about the family's grief after the death of Raskin's son (which is very movingly described) and January 6 simultaneously (although the Congressman was able to do so!). And perhaps I had already read enough January 6 books. However, it offered some explanations that were new to me and made it worth the read. First was Raskin's discussion of Trump's myriad violations of the Emoluments Clause; although I realized this was an issue, I now understand it in more detail. I also appreciated his brief discussion of why progressives should want to keep funding the police (albeit with improved recruitment and training) because right-wing terrorism is one of the most pressing public safety issues. Another small piece that I found very interesting was his account of being interviewed by Jake Tapper and finding the experience very rewarding because of the way Tapper posed questions that called on Raskin to think and to blend the personal and the political--evidently, feeling happy after an interview is an unusual experience. Perhaps the most surprising thing to me was that Raskin somehow believed it was possible all 100 Senators would vote for impeachment in the second impeachment trial--of course, he knew the case better than anyone, but come on . . . that was never going to happen.

Poetry

I love Nikki Giovanni and her 2020 book Make Me Rain: Poems & Prose did not disappoint. She celebrates African American culture and the joys of everyday life (she references quilts frequently). She also pillories racism, injustice, and Donald Trump (among other things). She also mentions transitioning so often in what I took to be a reference moving from one part of life to the next, including death, that I had to Google to make sure she's still alive (as of this writing, she is). And, best of all, her writing is deep but accessible--although I'm unsure what she means when she talks in several poems about going to Mars. Two samples:

Quiet (for Marvalene)

Quietly
you open a book
to let the sunshine in

Quiet
you hum a song
that you create
to let yourself relax

Quietly
you shed a tear
when you let a loved one
go to Heaven

Quiet
like bread rising
or your grandmother
sleeping.

Quietly
when you sew
a quilt to keep warm

Quiet
as the salt melts
in the bathwater

Quietly
Quietly
 Quietly

when you know
whatever else it is

you were loved. 

Excerpts from You Talk about Rape (for donald trump)

Give me left
overs
and I will create
a cuisine

Give me scraps
and I will create
a quilt

Give me life
and I will give us
all the moon
and the stars

Favorite Passages

Nothing was more fulfilling, it occurred to her, than giving back to others and letting people know about it.

     --Nafisi Thompson-Spires, Heads of the Colored People

In the presence of serious injuries, your body's privacy ceases to exist, you lose autonomy over your physical self, over the vessel in which you sail. You allow this because you have no alternative. . . . You allow people to do what they will with your body . . . so that you can live. 

I believe that art is a waking dream. And that imagination can bridge the gulf between dreams and reality and allow us to understand the real in new ways by seeing it through the lens of the unreal. 

Language, too, was a knife. It could cut open the world and reveal its meaning, its inner workings, its secrets, its truths. It could cut through from one reality to another. 

We created God to embody our moral instincts. 

    --Salman Rushdie, Knife

How the Light Gets In, Relinquished, and More Great Reading in the First Half of Summer

Oh, the joy--after what felt like a long spell of not finding many great books, summer has been bountiful, so bountiful I'm posting when the season is only half over. I hope the second half of the season will be equally rewarding. 

But before we get to my favorites, a mini-rant: It's odd when you see your town (okay, Denver's not exactly my town, but close enough) portrayed in a novel in a way that is nearly unrecognizable. That's the case with the Adrian McKinty's Hidden River. Granted, it's set in the early 1990s, when gang violence was in the headlines, but its portrayal of Denver as seedy and drug-ridden doesn't reflect my memories of the era. Also, the notion that a drug-addicted former Irish cop could come in and solve a crime that mystified the Denver police seems ridiculous (McKinty mentions more than once that the JonBenet case was never solved as a justification; of course, that was in Boulder but whatever, Adrian). 

Fiction

The first novels I really enjoyed so far this summer are from authors whose first novels I thought were great. And, as far as I'm concerned, there's no sophomore slump.

The first one may have had particular resonance because I started listening to it while on vacation with my teenage granddaughter, who had some "mean girl" stories to share--and meanness among young women is one of the aspects of Come and Get It, by Kiley Reid. The book's primary setting is a transfer student dorm at the University of Arkansas, with some detours to provide backstories on the three main characters: Agatha, a visiting professor who writes creative nonfiction; Millie, a resident advisor in the transfer student dorm; and Kennedy, a student who transferred to UofA after an incident at the University of Iowa that caused her to become a social media pariah. A variety of other students in the dorm also play significant roles, as Agatha decides to write about them, Millie tries to counsel them and control their shenanigans (as well as the other RAs, who are barely older/more mature than the students), and Kennedy tries to make friends. In the end, they all make some serious errors that culminate in a nerve-wracking incident. I've read reviews that focus on Reid's presentation of American consumerism as the major theme of the book, but I see it as something broader--the ways in which people (perhaps particularly young women) fail to connect at a meaningful level and the ways in which consumerism, economic differences, race, sexual politics, social media, parenting, and a host of other factors contribute to that failure. Kiley Reid is definitely becoming a favorite--and the audiobook narrator Nicole Lewis is also someone I would look for again.

The second, Anita de Monte Laughs Last, by Xochitl Gonzalez, focuses on sexism and racism in the art world--but in a very entertaining way. The story is told in two different time periods with a different Latina woman featured in each. In the mid-1980s, Cuban immigrant Anita is working hard to advance her art career when she meets and falls in love with prominent minimalist sculptor Jack, an ego-maniac who affects her life and career negatively--eventually to the max, throwing her out the window of his apartment (this isn't a spoiler as we know early on she is dead). In a magic realist twist, she can still operate in the world after death as long as her work is still seen--but Jack does what he can to make sure that it isn't. Meanwhile, in the late 1990s, Raquel is an art history major at Brown University, where she feels out of place among the children of the upper class who attend the Ivy League school. She is planning to write her senior thesis on Jack, her professor's idol, when she meets and falls in love with an older student who is also an admirer of Anita's former husband.  I'll leave the rest of the plot to be discovered along with how Anita's and Raquel's stories come together--but I enjoyed it. Again, I listened to the audiobook and have to say that the narrator who voices Anita is at times so over the top she's unpleasant to listen to. 

Joyce Maynard's How the Light Gets In is a sequel to her family drama, Count the Ways.   She picks up the story some years after that book ended, with matriarch Eleanor returning to the family farm to care for her dying ex-husband, Cam. After he dies, she stays on to care for their son Toby, who suffered a brain injury in the earlier book. As Toby moves toward greater independence, Eleanor's daughter Ursula, from whom she is estranged, is experiencing her own crisis--her husband and the father of their two children is becoming a drunk and a right-wing MAGA nut. Eleanor's son Al and the son of Cam's second marriage play lesser roles here, as do a number of other characters whose lives intersect with Eleanor and Toby's. Maynard deals with a number of social/political issues and events--parental alienation, climate change, school shootings, police killings of black men,  COVID, the election of Donald Trump. Generally these events aren't dealt with in depth, though descriptions still managed to resonate--Eleanor's party on election night 2016 reminded me of being at a friend's house, watching returns in disbelief, and her sorrow at the death of John Prine during the pandemic brought back how sad his loss was and also brought home the seriousness of the disease. Some things that I suspect the author intended as surprises didn't really surprise, and everything was wrapped up a bit too neatly at the end--but I still found the characters' deep love for each other and their individual growth moving. Maynard reads the audiobook herself and she is fabulous. 

I often question the quality of my education because there are so many classics I haven't read. Often, I lack the motivation to address this lacuna in my reading, but this month I picked up Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell, and am happy that I did. Set in a small, gossipy English town in the 1830s, Wives and Daughters is the story of Molly Gibson, a 17-year-old doctor's daughter whose  mother died when she was very young. When one of the doctor's apprentices expresses romantic interest in Molly, Dr. Gibson decides he must marry to provide a chaperone for Molly. His choice is the narcissistic social climber, Hyacinth who has a daughter, Cynthia, about the same age as Molly. Cynthia is beautiful and leaves a trail of jilted men behind her, but Molly loves and protects her. Like Jane Austen, Gaskell develops complex characters and presents social commentary within a romantic story. The book was originally published as a serial in the 1860s, which accounts for what I perceived as odd chapter breaks; sadly, the author died before she finished the last chapter, but it was completed by Frederick Greenwood, who apparently had knowledge of the author's plans. 

Mysteries/Thrillers

Bright Young Women, by Jessica Knoll, is a fictionalized retelling of the Ted Bundy story (known here only as "the defendant") from the perspectives of one of his Washington victims, a young lesbian named Ruth, and Pamela Schumacher, the president of the Florida State University sorority where two women were killed and two severely injured. The narrative flows between the two women and from the 1970s to the present; the two women are linked not only by their encounters with the defendant but also through Tina, Ruth's lover who befriends Pamela in the wake of the sorority attack in an effort to link the Washington, Utah, and Colorado disappearances and killings with the Florida murders. I found  interesting the depictions of the long-term impact of violence on loved ones of victims, as well as the cavalier way that law enforcement officers, the justice system, and the media treated (and treat) women. The book isn't exactly a mystery or thriller, although Knoll is known to write in that genre, but I did find it compelling.

Poetry (and More)

Why Fathers Cry at Night, by Kwame Alexander, is a unique collection of poems, essays, letters to Alexander's loved ones, conversations with himself, and even recipes. Written in the wake of his second divorce, his mother's death, and his estrangement from his older daughter, the book is quite often heartbreaking as he delves into his feelings toward the women in his life and his evolution as a husband, son, and father. Some parts are lighter--how he evolved from a student who believed his teacher Nikki Giovanni hated him (she gave him a C) to a close friend of the older poet. I intended to share the title poem on FB during poetry month, but I decided it was a little close to the bone for son #1, the father of a teenage girl. He won't read this, so . . . 

Ten Reasons Why Fathers Cry at Night 
By Kwame Alexander  

1. Because teenagers don’t like park swings or long walks anymore unless you’re in the mall.   
2. Because holding her hand is forbidden and kisses are lethal.   
3. Because school was “fine,” her day was “fine,” and yes, she’s “fine.” (So why is she weeping?)   
4. Because you want to help, but you can’t read minds.   
5. Because she is in love and that’s cute, until you find his note asking her to prove it.   
6. Because she didn’t prove it.   
7. Because next week she is in love again and this time it’s real, she says her heart is heavy.   
8. Because she yearns to take long walks in the park with him.   
9. Because you remember the myriad woes and wonders of  spring desire.   
10. Because with trepidation and thrill you watch your daughter who suddenly wants to swing all by herself. 

Nonfiction

No matter whether you like Brittney Griner or approve of the exchange that secured her release from a Russian labor camp, her book Coming Home is an informative read, casting light on the Russian "justice" system under Putin and the emotional and physical toll of being held in a foreign country with limited contact with family and friends (grueling in every way). One of the pleasant surprises (maybe the only one) is that Griner's Russian attorneys, while ultimately destined to fail in her case, were supportive and kind to her, as were a few women with whom she was imprisoned (others essentially spied on her or tried to use her fame to their own benefit). A brief description of Griner's subsequent work on behalf of other Americans detained in other countries ends the book. 

As you read the first essay in Bite by Bite: Nourishments and Jamborees, you realize that author Aimee Nezhukumatathil is doing something unusual, as she somehow connects rambutan, hairstyles and styling products of the 1980s, and identity--all in poetic language. Some subsequent essays do similar work linking specific foods to events and people in the author's life--some in a touching manner, some humorously--while others are more focused on the joys of the actual food she is describing. All are delightful. 

In writing King: A Life, Jonathan Eig had access to many sources not available to earlier biographers, perhaps most notably the voluminous recordings the FBI made of King speaking with friends, family members, and colleagues. Eig also interviewed numerous people who knew King, including his children, and reexamined well-known sources, such as Alex Haley's Playboy interview with King. In the latter case, by comparing the recording of the interview with the published article, Eig found that King's assessment of Malcolm X was much less negative than portrayed by Haley. The result of Eig's research is a "warts-and-all" portrait of King. There's an interesting discussion of plagiarism and how the traditions of the black church might have played into this practice--but Eig doesn't excuse King's plagiarism in his dissertation, though he does place some responsibility on his dissertation advisor for not catching and correcting the problem. Having only ever read a biography by Coretta Scott King, I had always discounted the FBI's portrayal of King as a philanderer--but his behavior with women was, indeed, problematic in the extreme. His friends abetted his affairs while wondering why he behaved as he did (Eig briefly considers the similarities in this regard between Kennedy and King, speculating on the possibility that their fathers' influence was paramount). In addition, we learn that King was often hospitalized for "fatigue" that was actually depression. Warts notwithstanding, we also see clearly that King, an accidental leader in the civil rights movement (his dream was to become a college professor), was more radical than he is typically portrayed and pushed on despite everything he faced. We also see the complicity of a variety of public figures in the FBI's intrusion into King's life and J. Edgar Hoover's attempts to portray him (falsely) as a Communist. While Bobby Kennedy later became a King supporter, his earlier actions are deeply troubling; I hope Doris Kearns Goodwin reads this book and is reminded that Bobby was not quite the paragon she portrayed in her recent book. An excellent narration by Dion Graham.

Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood is an eyeopener. Author Gretchen Sisson has been researching adoption, particularly the effects of relinquishing a child on birth mothers, for more than a decade. She positions her interviews with these mothers in the problematic history of adoption in the United States, a history shaped and scarred by slavery and racism, imperialism, religious beliefs, and exploitation based on class. Sisson reveals that the profile of the relinquishing mother is not what we normally think--drug-addicted minority women or scared teenagers--a majority of relinquishing mothers are white and many already have children. And they are overwhelmingly poor--some would be likely to make the decision to parent their child if they had access to more resources. Meanwhile, adoptive parents are more financially stable, and the adoption system is set up to serve their needs (and, through doing so, make a profit). The result is that pregnant mothers who are unsure of what to do are often not given good (or any) information about their options but are pressured to relinquish their children. And the subsequent experience is not as it was marketed; open adoption agreements are not legally enforceable in most states and contact often diminishes or ends soon after the adoption is finalized. (Adoptive parents are also not given useful information, such as the benefits of maintaining a relationship with their birth family for the children being adopted.) This book probably had a particularly strong impact on me because, in reading it, I realized I was involved with early in my professional career was creating a tool for the marketing of adoption (viz., a curriculum Adoption Builds Families designed to normalize adoption for K-12 students). Of course, adoption does allow people unable to have children to build families, often happy families, but the deep-seated societal inequities that underlie the adoption system are worth learning more about. 

Favorite Passage

. . . every time I cooked, I felt a little bit closer to her [his mother], perched on a branch of her life.

    --Kwame Alexander, Why Fathers Cry at Night