My February: Snow and Satire

It's been cold and snowy in the Denver area this month--but not wanting to venture out some days meant it was great weather for reading. My favorite books of the month were satirical takes on parenting and race--The Gifted School, by Bruce Holsinger, and Such a Fun Age, by Kiley Reid.

The Gifted School 

Several school districts north of Denver announce that they are opening a special school for gifted students--the school will, by all accounts, be fabulous, incorporating all the best practices for educating high-performing and talented kids. But the parents of Crystal (very thinly disguised version of Boulder) go completely nuts in their efforts to ensure that their children--of course, they are gifted; of course, they are more gifted than the child of their housecleaner--get into the school. The narrative focuses on four friends with children who are the same age--and the competition to get into the school is hard on the friendship but even harder on the children! It's very funny (especially to someone who has served on a lot of school district committees with exactly these parents) but also addresses serious issues of privilege, education, friendship, and more. I thought the "surprise" at the end--while genuinely surprising--was kind of dumb, but it didn't take away from my enjoyment of the book.

Such a Fun Age

Such a Fun Age begins with an episode that is frightening--Emira Tucker, 25-year-old babysitter (she has a second job as a typist), gets a call late one night when she's out with friends. Her employer Alix (pronounced A-LEEKS) of the little girl Briar whom Emira cares for wants her to pick up the child for a bit (she can take her to the upscale grocery store, which the child loves) because the parents have had to call the police. Someone threw a rock through their window in protest of a racist comment the newscaster father made on the air that day (this piece is not explained to Emira). At the store, another customer wonders why a white toddler is out with a young black woman dressed in party clothes (and perhaps just a tiny bit drunk). The nosy customer calls security, and Emira and the security guard are soon yelling at each other. A man sees what is happening and videos the confrontation on his cell phone. It feels like things could go very bad--but the problem is resolved, and Emira just wants to forget about it and worry about how she's going to pay for health insurance when she is kicked off her parents' policy on her birthday.

When Emira sees the man who videoed the grocery store incident (his name is Kelley Copeland) on the train, they start dating. He has a lot of ideas about how she should be adulting, as does Alix, who imagines herself quite the "woke" white person. Alix is an "influencer" who is supposed to be writing her first book but spends more time secretly reading Emira's emails. Emira's group of three friends, all of whom are more successful in their careers than she is, also have some ideas about what she should be doing.

There are funny complications and a relatively happy ending (not an "everything gets wrapped up with a bow" ending but Emira does get health insurance!), but neither of these things obscure the act that author Kiley Reid is dealing with serious issues of race, coming of age, and relationships of virtually every type. One thing that bothered me a little was that Reid uses the trope of the black caregiver who truly loves the white child (and Briar certainly needed someone to love her, as her mother barely acknowledged her existence); generally, this trope appears in books by white women (The Secret Life of Bees and The Help) who don't even recognize that the black women who cared for them would rather have been home with their own families. But Reid, who is African American, was a childminder for several years so I recognize the trope has more legitimacy in her hands. At any rate, I really enjoyed the book.

Other Fiction

Trust Exercise, by Susan Choi. Trust Exercise, winner of the National Book Award, is the story of students at a performing arts high school. I found the first section, narrated by Sarah, a young woman who has just published a novel about her high school experiences rather dull. It seems like there have been SO MANY books about exceptional students who betray each other, have bad experiences with adults, etc. etc. The book got more interesting in the second section, when the narration switches to Karen, who describes events from a very different perspective. The third and final section has yet another narrator, Clare, whose identity I don't want to reveal (that would totally be a "spoiler"). I was happy for the varied perspectives, but Trust Exercise would not have made my list of the best books of 2019. Big disappointment.

Water Dancer, by Ta-Nehisi Coates. This Coates' first foray into fiction, and it's an ambitious story about slavery, the violence of white Americans, and the Underground Railroad. Although I could admire the author's intention, I didn't care for the fantastical element or the fact that so much of the book consisted of other people telling the protagonist, Hiram Walker, their stories. I know the book was very positively reviewed, but for me it just didn't work.

Mrs. Everything, by Jennifer Weiner. Weiner has written about the sexism of the literary world, with books about relationships written by male authors (e.g., Freedom by Jonathan Franzen) hailed as masterpieces and similar books written by women dismissed as chick lit. Her point is valid and I always feel bad when I don't love her books. Mrs. Everything (terrible title) is no different--it's the story of two girls from childhood in the 1950s to the present. Jo and Beth (there names are no coincidence) are opposites. Jo is a classic tomboy, intellectual rebel, and lesbian--but she marries a man after her true love betrays her and becomes a suburban housewife. Beth is a well-behaved girly girl, who is first molested by an uncle and then gang-raped at a music festival in college; she enters the "counterculture" eventually ending up at a women's commune and becoming a successful entrepreneur. The plot is crammed with events and issues--and still the book just isn't very interesting.

All This Could Be Yours, by Jami Attenberg. I found this story of family dysfunction more interesting, perhaps because it used multiple narrators and dipped back in time to build back story rather than employing a straight-on chronological approach. The patriarch of the Tuchman family, Victor, is in the hospital, having had a stroke. His children, daughter Alex and TV director Gary, both of whom are struggling, wonder why their mother Barbra stayed with the brutal and crooked Victor. Alex hopes desperately that her mother will explain her reasons now that her father is dying--as is the case in most families, though, she will never really understand her parents. My brief description only hints at the dysfunction--it's both deep and wide. Weirdly, Attenberg sometimes throws in a section narrated by someone outside the family whom they encounter in their travels around New Orleans, where most of the book is set--but in the end, even these sections add depth to the portrayal of a family in pain.

The Travelers, by Regina Porter. This is the story of two interconnected families--one primarily white, one primarily black--and other people in their orbits. I found the book really confusing--there were so many characters with so many different connections, it was hard to remember who everyone was. The fact that every chapter started somewhere not at all related to what happened in the previous chapter added to the confusion. It may be a book better read in print than listened to, but I didn't like it well enough to test that hypothesis.

The Tattooist of Auschwitz, by Heather Morris. To me, this book proved that a good story does not necessarily make a good novel. The author spent years interviewing a concentration camp survivor, Lale, a Slovakian Jew who was given the job of tattooing numbers onto the arms of fellow prisoners. He falls in love with a girl named Gita. Both of them endure horrifying experiences but survive and marry after the war. Sadly, the writing was so leaden that I was actually bored while reading. (Others in my book group liked it, however, so perhaps I cannot e trusted.)

The Jane Austen Project, by Kathleen Flynn. Liam and Rachel travel back to 1815 England with the aim of stealing letters and an unpublished manuscript from none other Jane Austen. The bulk of the book is about their attempts to pass themselves off as 19th-century Brits newly arrived from Jamaica as they try to reach their goal without changing history. At the end, there is a time-traveling twist that livened up the narrative--if the author had done more with the time travel possibilities, the book might have been more interesting. Reminded me a little of the only Jasper Fforde book I have ever read, although in his series, I believe, people actually travel into books--which  might have livened this novel up as well.

Memoirs

Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading, by Maureen Corrigan. Corrigan is an English professor and the book reviewer for Fresh Air. I often disagree with her reviews, but found her book interesting (it might not quite be a memoir, but I decided to put it in that category). She focuses on three themes in books that have meant a lot to her: (1) the notion that family dramas/epics of caretaking are the women's version of extreme adventure stories favored by men, (2) the idea that mysteries are one of the few genres of fiction that focus on the honor and details of work, and (3) Catholic martyr stories (this theme didn't resonate for me at all, so I have blanked out what the point was. Interesting if not earth-shattering.

Ordinary Girls, by Jaquira Diaz. This memoir feels like a lot of other memoirs I have read--girls' mother is a schizophrenic addict, father is a hustler and womanizer who lets their brother physically abuse the girls and doesn't seem to mind when the older girl (the author) continuously runs away, gets arrested, drops out of school, and drinks and uses drugs. Diaz was born in Puerto Rico, moved to Miami as a girl, and has obviously turned her life around. But I didn't find much new in her memoir.

Mysteries

The Silent Patient, Alex Michaelides. This mystery has gotten a lot of hype, and I agree it's pretty good--although not perfect. Alicia is an artist who killed her beloved husband Gabriel and has not spoken in the six years since. She is confined to a mental hospital, where new staff therapist Theo (who got the job there primarily because he wanted to treat Alicia) is determined to get her to talk. From the beginning, the reader (or at least this reader) feels like there is something off about Theo, but the author still manages to surprise us with a twist near the end. Definitely worth reading.

The Thinnest Air, by Minka Kent. A woman married to a wealthy older man disappears in a Utah mountain town. Her sister investigates the case--why are sisters, daughters, friends always better able to solve a crime (while almost getting killed themselves) than the police? I'm tired of that particular plot.

The Museum of Desire, by J. Kellerman. Pretty typical Alex Delaware mystery.

The Tenant, by Katrina Engberg. A translated Danish mystery, quite complicated and featuring a rather tortured detective, sometimes likable, sometimes not.

Poetry

An American Sunrise, by Joy Harjo. Harjo is the latest Poet Laureate, the first Native American to hold that post. In introducing this book, Harjo explicitly links the Trail of Tears and the current treatment of migrants on the Southwestern border. Many of the poems in the book, which are interspersed with text passages that provide historic perspective, are, in my view, a form of resistance.  Consider this one, for example:

“For Those Who Would Govern”

First question: Can you first govern yourself?

Second question: What is the state of your own household?

Third question: Do you have a proven record of community service and compassionate acts?

Fourth question: Do you know the history and laws of your principalities?

Fifth question: Do you follow sound principles? Look for fresh vision to lift all the inhabitants of the land, including animals, plants, elements, all who share this earth?

Sixth question: Are you owned by lawyers, bankers, insurance agents, lobbyists, or other politicians, anyone else who would unfairly profit by your decisions?

Seventh question: Do you have authority by the original keepers of the lands, those who obey natural law and are in the service of the lands on which you stand?

Wise questions that certainly would have screened out the current occupant of the White House. While I struggled with some of the poems (not unusual for me), I appreciated many others. Definitely worth picking up, even if you don't read every poem.


Young Adult

The Boy in the Black Suit, by Jason Reynolds. Reynolds is the new Library of Congress Ambassador
for Young People's Literature. Thus, I decided to read one of his novels. The Boy in the Black Suit is 17-year-old Matt, who works after school in the local funeral home. He is interested in observing how other people grieve, as he is still grieving his mother's death and his father is providing little help, having started drinking heavily and ended up in the hospital. At one funeral, he meets Love, whose grandmother recently died. Love and Mr. Ray, the undertaker, become good friends and supports for Matt, as he struggles to deal with his grief. Good book that should be helpful to kids struggling with grief.

One, by Sarah Crossan. My granddaughter had to read a novel in poetic form for her seventh-grade English class; she chose One and then recommended it to me. It's the story of conjoined twins, Grace and Tippi, who start attending school for the first time in as teens, make two amazing friends while facing scrutiny and ridicule from other classmates, and then face a health crisis when Grace's heart begins to fail. The poetic form seems like especially apropos to the exploration of identity that most of us cannot even imagine. I liked One a lot.

Favorite Passages

Women’s feats tend to be less Herculean and more Sisyphean in nature.

Words can summon up a skyline from the dark; they can bring back the people you loved and will always yearn for. They can inspire you with possibilities you otherwise would have never imagined; they can fill your head with misleading fantasies. They can give you back your seemingly seamless past and place it right alongside your chaotic present.

Maureen Corrigan, Leave Me Alone, I’m Reading

“Break My Heart” (excerpts)

The heart is a fist.
It pockets prayer or holds rage.

It’s a timekeeper.
Music maker, or backstreet truth teller.

“How to Write a Poem in a Time of War” (excerpts)

He knew one day, far day, the grandchildren would return,

Generations later over slick highways, constructed over old trails

Through walls of laws meant to hamper or destroy, over stones

Bearing libraries of the winds.

He sang us back

                To our home place from which we were stolen

                                                                In these smoky green hills.

Yes, begin here.

Joy Harjo, An American Sunrise

Maybe You Should Talk to Someone and Other January Reading

A new year, new books, some of them very good, some of them not worth writing about. But all in all, an interesting month.

The "Best of" List 

I continued reading from the LitHub list of books on the most "best of" lists for 2019, and it was really a mixed bag. At the top of the list was a wonderful nonfiction title (maybe a memoir--not sure how to classify it) Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, by Lori Gottlieb. Gottlieb is a therapist who is gobsmacked when "Boyfriend," with whom she was planning a future, suddenly breaks up with her. She seeks a therapist (the process of finding someone who is highly regarded by peers without telling them it's for you was indicative of Gottlieb's humor, which suffuses the book) and ends up with "Wendell." The book recounts breakthroughs and speed bumps on Wendell's couch while also describing the work Gottlieb is doing with four of her patients. She offers insight into various therapeutic approaches and, at a more fundamental level, into human nature. I found a lot to think about, talk about, and enjoy in this book. Highly recommended.

At the other end of the enjoyment spectrum was On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, by Ocean Vuong, which was one of the two books at the top of that LitHub list, appearing on 21 lists (the other was Nickel Boys, which I read last year). Vuong is a poet, and much of the language in On Earth is graceful and moving. The story is framed as a letter from a son, Little Dog, now in his 20s, to his mother, who it seems likely could not actually read it, and conveys a seemingly random series of memories from his childhood. The parts that focused on the mother-son relationship and the lives of the women of the family in Vietnam before they immigrated were insightful and moving. But the teenage sexual relationship between Little Dog and a white boy in a position of economic power over Little Dog was so abusive and so graphically described that I trouble had reading those sections. In addition, all of the different memories didn't seem to actually add up to anything. So despite some positives, I did not enjoy this book and wouldn't recommend it to most people.

The Topeka School, by Ben Lerner (another novelist-poet), was interesting but not completely successful. Adam Gordon, a high school senior and champion debater, seems to be the protagonist. But he shares so much time with his parents--his father a psychologist focusing on "Lost boys, his mother a feminist scholar--and an "outsider" classmate that Adam and his friends manipulate mercilessly that I did not feel I got to know him well enough to understand what this book was supposed to be about. I've read reviews that purport to know (though they don't necessarily agree), so it may be that I do not understand enough about white male rage or "trauma, sex, paradox, magic" to comprehend this book. But whatever the reason, it fell flat for me.

As an almost-70 white American woman, I am not the intended audience for Queenie, by Candice Carty-Williams, which is the story of a Jamaican British millennial journalist whose long-term boyfriend has recently broken up with her. While waiting for him to come to her senses, she dates some fairly hideous men and at work struggles with racism, frustration that her story ideas are rejected, too-frequent absences, and a totally unfounded accusation of sexual harassment. Things get so bad she's forced to move back in with her grandmother, which has both its ups and downs. The biggest plus in the midst of Queenie's breakdown is her group of three friends, nicknamed "The Corgis," who offer love and good advice (which she doesn't always heed). I appreciate the portrayal of day-to-day racism in Great Britain but I found Queenie's decisions so frustrating I often wanted to scream at her. Perhaps a typical Baby Boomer reaction to a millennial's stressors.

The Testaments is Margaret Atwood's follow-up to the classic The Handmaid's Tale. Because I only recently read The Handmaid's Tale, I didn't have the longstanding commitment to the book that made it hard for some readers to accept The Testaments. Consequently, I very much enjoyed the sequel's story focusing on three characters--Aunt Lydia, a young girl living in Canada who does not realize she is a famous child kidnapped from Gilead, and a Commander's daughter who is facing the prospect of marrying a repulsive older man and getting lost in the role of wife. It may not be as good as its predecessor, but it's plenty good!

Say Nothing, by Patrick Radden Keefe, has been been billed as a mystery about the death of a widowed Irish mother of ten during "The Troubles," but it's not really much of a mystery. It's more of a history of The Troubles from the perspective of a few of the participants. I took two main take-aways from the book: (1) Gerry Adams was a tool who denied his role in the IRA and managed to convince a lot of people that he was innocent of any violence and (2) the oral history project launched by a binational team of Irish and Americans (at Boston College) seemed like a good idea but was so ill-conceived it is mind-boggling. The book is a tad slow-moving but provides insight into the causes and consequences of political violence. 

I generally don't care for short stories, and Orange World & Other Stories, by Karen Russell did not change my mind. Many of the stories involve elements of creepy "magical realism"-- the living and the dead interacting, a woman's body taken over by a Joshua tree, young mothers must nurse demons to save their babies. The one story I enjoyed was "The Tornado Auction," in which a lonely former tornado farmer buys a baby tornado to bring meaning back to his life. Weird but entertaining. The rest of the stories . . . not so much.

I wanted to like Miriam Toews' Women Talking, which is based on real events in a Mennonite community in which women and children were drugged and raped by the men of the community. Toews imagines eight women who meet in a barn to debate whether the women of the community should leave, rebel, or do nothing--and how their decision will impact their relationship with God; they invite the male schoolteacher, reviled as unmanly because he failed as a farmer, to take minutes. The book is supposedly those minutes. I found the book repetitive and, finally, dull. Not recommended.

Other January Reading

I really enjoyed Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country, by Pam Houston. Houston shares how buying a ranch in the high country near Creede, Colorado, essentially saved her life. Part of the reason her life needed saving was the horrible abuse she suffered from her father and the lack of any kind of support from her mother. Somehow, caring for animals and doing the hard labor required to maintain a small ranch gave her solace and hope. I was less fond of a detailed description of the 2013 fire that came very close to her ranch. It presented a lot of information, with definitions of fire terms interspersed throughout the text, and just didn't flow like the rest of the book, which included many beautiful passages that made me stop to savor Houston's writing.

Thirty years ago, I used to read a lot of true crime. I read Fatal Vision, talked about it relentlessly, and went on a binge of Ann Rule-type books. So this month, I tried an Ann Rule book, Practice to Deceive, which focuses on a 2003 murder in Whitby, Washington. The book is not very satisfying, as Rule did not have access to the guilty parties and never uncovered a motive for the killing. This made me wonder how many cases a true crime writer starts working on before choosing one--if you choose the wrong one, years of research would go down the drain, or you end up with a mediocre book like this!

Everything Inside, by Edwidge Danticat, is an excellent collection of short stories, all involving characters with connections to Danticat's homeland of Haiti. The stories are mostly downers--in "Dosas," a woman helps her ex out financially when he tells her his new woman has been kidnapped, only to learn she's been scammed; "In the Old Days," a woman goes to visit the father she has never known only to find he died shortly before she arrives; a teenager with AIDS is given a worthless placebo in another story; and a man who survived being pushed from a boat en route from Haiti to the United States falls into a cement truck. Yes, the stories are hardly uplifting, but they're well crafted and worth reading.

Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living presents Krista Tippett's reflections following countless interviews with spiritual leaders, thinkers, and scientists on her radio program On Being. The work is organized around five "basic aspects of the human everyday . . . breeding grounds for wisdom": words, the body, love, faith, and hope. The book is hopeful, with many thought-provoking excerpts from interviews Tippett has conducted. All together, however, I felt like I might learn more by listening to old On Being programs.

My education was sorely lacking in terms of reading the classics, a fact I from time to time try to remedy. I don't think there's anything I need to say about Frankenstein, other than that I was surprised how much I liked it.

My YA book for the month was Dear Martin, by Nic Stone. Stone has admirable intentions--exploring racism, particularly police violence against African Americans, while also examining normal issues of teenage angst. While her protagonist, Justyce, an African American teenager, a senior at a private school with few African American students, is engaging, I don't think the book worked overall. The device of Justyce writing letters to Dr. King doesn't really go anywhere, and the dialogue often seems like a series of mini-lectures. Similar issues are explored much more skillfully in The Hate U Give.

Favorite Passages

Sometimes, I imagine the monarchs fleeing not winter but the napalm clouds of your childhood in Vietnam. I imagine them flying from the blazed blasts unscathed, their tiny black-and-red wings jittering like debris that kept blowing, for thousands of miles across the sky, so that, looking up, you can no longer fathom the explosion they came from, only a family of butterflies floating in clean, cool air, their wings finally, after so many conflagrations, fireproof.

Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

How do we become who we are in the world? We ask the world to teach us. But we have to ask with an open heart, with no idea what the answer will be.

There is love in these old logs and in RJ's workmanship and I can feel it every time I walk inside. We call such a limited number of relationships love in our lives, but there is always love around us--it's as ubiquitous as oxygen. It lives in the houses where we've slept, the kitchens where we've cooked, in the food we've prepared for the people we love and in the walls we've shaped with our hands.

Pam Houston, Deep Creek (and there are so many more!)