My Favorite Reads of 2022

 Like everyone else, I usually call this list the "best of"--but I realized that was a bad choice of title because (1) I read a lot of books not published in 2022 and (2) I clearly have different tastes than critics so I may not know what is best but I do know what I like! So here are my favorites from just shy of 300 books read this year (many of them truly terrible mysteries I never mentioned on the blog).

Favorite Novel 

True Biz, by Sara Novic, is a book I'm not seeing on any "best of" lists, but I thought it was compelling and deeply moving. It's the story of a 15-year-old deaf girl with a faulty cochlear implant, no knowledge of ASL, and parents deeply divided about how to give her a good future. The audiobook has a unique feature: when conversations in the book would have been signed, the author was actually signing in the background. Hearing the movement of her arms and smacks when one hand hit the other was a reminder that these conversations would have been silent. I loved that. 

Honorable Mention: Our Missing Hearts, by Celeste Ng; Great Circle, by Maggie Shipstead; Olga Dies Dreaming, by Xochitl Gonzalez; The Anomaly, by Herve Le Tellier (best sci-fi/fantasy of the year by far, but I don't read enough to make it a category); Crossroads, by Jonathan Franzen; Klara and the Sun, by Kazuo Ishiguro; The Many Daughters of Afong Moy, by Jamie Ford (I know it's a lot, but they were all wonderful)

Favorite Short Story Collection

Festival Days, by JoAnn Beard, is a collection of stories that are not only enjoyable but memorable. The subject matter is sometimes grim but the stories still manage to be redemptive. One story in particular, about a woman who seeks help from Dr. Kevorkian, has come back to me numerous times throughout the year (I read the book in February). 

Honorable Mention: Land of Big Numbers, by Ti-Peng Chen 

Favorite Mystery/Thriller

I read so many bad mysteries that I can't choose between the two I thought were unusual and great this year (does that even make sense?). 

Five Decembers, by James Kestrel, has a classic noir feel. Set in Hawaii and Asia during World War II, the book follows police officer Joe McGrady as he tries to solve the murder of two young people with powerful family connections in the U.S. and Japan.

Wrong Place Wrong Time, by Gillian McAllister, is a singular mystery in which the protagonist travels backwards in time to try to figure out what she needs to know to prevent her son from murdering a man. Beautifully constructed with many twists.  

Favorite YA

Speak, by Laurie Halse Anderson, is an incredible book about high school freshman Melinda, who has been abandoned by her friends because she called 911 from a summer party where she was assaulted. Through the process of making art and the support of her art teacher, Melinda finds the strength to take action. Melinda's voice is authentic and sad, but there is also humor in the book and the ending is upbeat. Teenage boys and girls should read and talk about this book. 

Honorable Mention: They Both Die at the End, by Adam Silvera

Favorite Nonfiction

Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty, by Patrick Radden Keefe, is the book I couldn't stop talking about this year. It details the criminal perfidy of the Sackler family across three generations, demonstrating their complicity in the opioid crisis.  Despite thinking I am a fairly well-informed person, I found this book shocking. The dilemma posed by the revelations of the family's criminality for the many institutions to which they had donated huge sums of money was another issue I knew a bit about but learned much more about from Keefe's discussion.

Honorable Mention:  How the Word Is Passed, by Clint Smith; and Four Hundred Souls: A Community History, 1619-2019, edited by Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain (these are both wonderful books that I just didn't talk about quite as much as Empire of Pain)

Favorite Memoir/Autobiography

I am making this a separate category this year instead of lumping in with nonfiction because I read a couple that I loved and wanted to highlight: 

In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss, by Amy Bloom, is the moving and instructive story of her husband's decision to seek aided suicide when he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's. She writes about each step in the difficult process with great insight and grace. 

All In, by Billie Jean King. I always admired Billie Jean and thought I knew quite a lot about her, especially her career, so I was surprised at how much I learned about her work, not just as a tennis player but as an advocate for women, in sports and beyond. For me, the book made her a three-dimensional person, rather than an icon. 

Honorable Mention: Going There, by Katie Couric

Poetry

I Hope This Finds You Well, by Kate Baer. Baer creates erasure poems from nasty responses to her work on social media, fan letters, promotional emails, congressional testimony, virtually any kind of source. And the poems are funny and often pack an emotional punch. Having tried doing erasure poems, I know creating works of this quality is really hard, and she does it so well.

Honorable Mention: What Kind of Woman, by Kate Baer; You Better Be Lightning, by Andrea Gibson

Favorite Passages

I find it informative to look over the quotes I have chosen as favorite passages throughout the year--the process may provide more insight into my state of mind than that of authors, but still. This year I was trying to impose some themes on the quotes I chose as favorite passages--the loss of connection, the power of words or story.  But I think they were more random--perhaps a reflection of the state of my brain after nearly three pandemic years. But here is one worth thinking about:

Who we are and who belongs is the most fundamental question that we have ever asked or can ever ask. We are still struggling to get the answer to this question right. We are still coming up short.

                --John A. Powell in an essay on Dred Scott from the book Four Hundred Souls

Wrapping up the Year with The Many Daughters of Afong Moy, Wrong Place Wrong Time, and More

Well, LitHub did indeed come out with their "ultimate" list of best books in which they rank books by how many "best books" lists they appeared on. More than 80 books were on anywhere from 4 to 14 lists; I had only read 14 of them. I have started chipping away at some others (Devil House and Free were both from the list, as was Sea of Tranquility, but I'd been on the hold list for that for months). There won't be a lot of overlap between my list of favorite reads of the year (coming up shortly), in part because many of the books I read weren't published in 2022 and in part because I just didn't like some of the books that the literati did like (hello, Vladimir and Either/Or). 

But on to the last two weeks of reading in 2022, which included some very good books!

Fiction

The Many Daughters of Afong Moy, by Jamie Ford, is a richly imagined and rigorously researched story about six generations of women of Chinese ancestry (most living in the United States but others in China and the UK). Through the stories of these six women, spanning the years from the 1830s, when the first Chinese woman (the real Afong Moy) came to the United States,  to 2045, when her descendant Dorothy is living in storm-ravaged Seattle, Ford explores epigenetics, the inheritance of experiences, particularly traumatic experiences. In the intervening years we meet Lai King Foy, put on a ship to China when the plague swept through the Chinese community in San Francisco; Zoe, who attended Summerhill in the 1920s; Faye, a nurse in China during World War II; and Greta, Dorothy's mother and the inventor of a feminist dating app, whose career is ruined by a MeToo style abuser. Each woman has moments in which she feels the experiences of Afong giving birth in an alley, as well as experiences of others of the ancestors. For Dorothy, the experiences are intense--and she sees signs that her five-year-old daughter Annabel is also experiencing something similar. Dorothy seeks help from an indigenous doctor who is experimenting with treatments for inherited trauma and the results might be described as mind-blowing. My description is definitely not doing justice to the book--I'll just summarize by recommending you read it. 

The Final Revival of Opal and Nev, by Dawnie Watson, has some similarities with the much-lauded (but not liked by me) Daisy Jones and the Six--it's a book about a rock group that uses fake oral histories as one narrative device. But Opal and Nev stands above Daisy Jones, in my opinion, because it is not only a story of relationships and the music industry but gains depth through the author's look at race in those contexts. Opal is a black woman who is more or less plucked from obscurity by Nev, a British rock star wannabe who has little success until he brings Opal into the band. But, early in their career, their drummer (Opal's lover and the father of Sunny, the book's fictional author) is killed by fans of a redneck band sharing the bill with Opal and Nev at a music festival. Though many years have passed, the event still looms large for Opal, who does not want to reexamine her beliefs about what happened, and Sunny, who wants to truly understand how it happened. Watson uses the oral histories that Sunny gathers to untangle and re-tangle the "facts." Recommended.  

The world is so insane these days it can be difficult distinguishing satire from serious commentary (not that satire isn't serious in its own way). However, I'm banking on The Unfolding by A.M. Homes being a satire--even though a lot of what the author talks about seems to have happened. The book centers on a character known only as the Big Guy, who decides on election night 2008 that people like him--rich white hide-bound and racist Republican men--must take action to save the United States from Barack Obama and those who would vote for him. He puts together a group of like-minded dinosaurs, framing his argument as: "We are among the last of an era, a generation where phrases like noblesse oblige, and haberdashery and supper, along with a glass of milk at night and a stiff shot of scotch during the day, were all a piece of something. We summered in one place and had Christmas in another."  The group begins plotting a long-range plan to regain control (or, one might say, to make America great again). At the same time, the Big Guy's alcoholic wife rebels after he checks her in to Betty Ford and his 18-year-old daughter is having experiences causing her to think for herself for the first time. Although Homes's writing is sharp and often funny, I found the long conversations between the Big Guy and his compatriots became tedious. And, of course, the proximity to reality is alarming. 

Woman of Light is Kali Fajardo-Anstine's second book, and it is a worthy successor to her collection of short stories, Sabrina and Corina. Woman of Light is Luz Lopez's story. At the beginning of the book, set un 1934, Luz reads tea leaves and does laundry for rich white Denverites, but when her brother is chased out of town by the family of a girl he was involved with, Luz needs a better job to help her aunt pay household expenses. She becomes the secretary for a Greek American lawyer, who fights for justice but is sometimes inappropriate in his behavior towards Luz. Fajardo-Anstine provides vignettes on the challenges faced by previous generations of Luz's family, which provide context for the resilience she, her family, and community show in the face of economic hardship and discrimination. Well worth reading. 

I probably should have a sci-fi/fantasy header for Sea of Tranquility, by Emily St. John Mandel, but somehow that feels like too much work right now (yeah, really feeling the post-holiday laziness). The problem with really loving the first book by an author that you encounter is that subsequent books have a hard time measuring up--and that's the case with this one. I had the feeling Mandel wanted to write about the pandemic but doing that in a straightforward way would not be her, so she constructed a complicated story involving seemingly unrelated characters experiencing a slip in the space-time continuum. The relationships among the characters became clear in the end, but it just didn't add up to anything eye-opening for me. As my friend Suzy said, "Not sorry I read it but not what I have come to expect from Mandel." 

It took me a long time to commit to The Committed by Viet Thanh Nguyen, a sequel to his award-winning book The Sympathizer, a book I thought very highly of. Here the unnamed protagonist and his friend Bon have once again left Viet Nam, this time after surviving a re-education camp. This time they have traveled to France, a country Vietnamese people have many feelings about; this is most particularly true for the protagonist, whose father was a French priest. The book is full of violence and philosophy, and I didn't much care for it. 

Ms. Demeanor, by Elinor Lipman, is a pleasant enough read about an attorney who has sex on the rooftop of her building, is reported to the police, and ends up on home detention for six months, her license to practice law suspended. She has various adventures and everything turns out great in the end. Sadly, the book lacks the edge found in Lipman's other books; I suppose there's some minor commentary on the judicial system and immigration problems, but it lacks the satirical bite I've found in other books. Perhaps Lipman is beating a retreat from her previous book (Rachel to the Rescue), in which she took on Trump pretty directly. I hope in future she'll return to that middle spot where her work has lived for decades. 

Mysteries/Thrillers

I wanted to read Robert Galbreath's latest, The Ink Black Heart, to see if I agreed with J.K. Rowling's critics, who claimed the book was an extension of her transphobic remarks. And, no, it was not, although it did deal with the toxic nature of online culture, which Rowling has experienced. In the novel, Edie Ledwell, the co-creator of a popular web cartoon who has been subject to online harassment after speaking dismissively about a fan-developed game based on the novel, is murdered. Cormoran Strike and Robin Ellacott are hired to find out who the anonymous developer of the game is, which in essence means solving Edie's murder. Sadly, the book is WAY too long and involves WAY too many red herrings. To make matters worse, all of the ongoing story lines--the sexual tension between Corm and Robin, Corm's reluctance to meet his sister Prue--remain stagnant. Definitely not recommended, but I do recommend the LA Times review, which deals with the transphobia issue:  https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2022-09-10/column-the-new-j-k-rowling-book-is-not-great-but-it-has-nothing-to-do-with-transphobia 

I'm not sure Acts of Violet by Margarita Montimore, really belongs in this category, but there is a mystery at the center of the narrative: What happened to Violet Volk, a gifted magician who disappeared 10 years ago? I think I should have known I was going to have problems with the book when I discovered Montimore uses the overworked podcast trope. There was also a fantasy element that, like the fantasy element in Montimore's Oona out of Order, was not well explained. While I didn't mind it in the earlier book because the story was so intriguing, here I found it irritating. While unraveling the mystery helped Violet's sister, niece, and brother-in-law resolve a number of family issues, those issues could have been more easily solved much earlier if they had just freaking talked to each other. Disappointing. 

Hide, by Tracy Clark, launches Clark's second series set in Chicago and, despite the fact that it was a freebie from Amazon Prime, I enjoyed it (this is a fairly rare occurrence). The protagonist is police detective Harriett Foster, who is just returning to work after her former partner's suicide. Foster's grip is tenuous at best--her 15-year-old son was murdered several years ago, she divorced, and she now lives in a house where she can see the tree her son leaned against as he died. So it's challenging when her first case back on returning to work turns out to be a serial murderer. There's also a slightly off psychotherapist and a family with murder in their pasts. 

Wrong Place Wrong Time, by Gillian McAllister, is a singular mystery. One night, waiting for her son Todd to come home, Jen looks out the window and sees a strange man on the street. Before she realizes what is happening, her son has stabbed the man. After hours at the local police station, she goes home and wakes to find herself reliving the day before the stabbing. She proceeds backwards through time, trying to figure out what she needs to know to stop the murder and return to the present. Its beautifully constructed with lots of surprises (only one of which I was able to anticipate). Highly recommend. 

I have long thought that what Scott Turow does best is construct courtroom scenes, which he does beautifully in Suspect, the story of a police chief accused of sexually abusing her officers. Sadly, too much of the book is taken up with other aspects of political corruption in Kindle County, familiar to Turow readers, and with the "romantic" life of Pinky Granum, the book's protagonist (and granddaughter of Alejandro "Sandy" Stern). In general, I don't think Turow's later works hold a candle to his earlier books--and this follows that pattern. 

I'm not sure Devil House, by John Darnielle, really belongs in this category but it was mysterious to me so this is where it landed. Gage Chandler is a true crime writer who is talked into moving into a house (and former porn shop) where a notorious double murder took place in the 1980s. At the time, the crime was rumored to be the work of teenagers wrapped up in Satanism. Gage thinks he can set the record straight and sets about his research (the descriptions of his method are very interesting). He's also thinking a lot about his first book, which featured a teacher who killed two students when they broke into her house. Gage had sympathy for the teacher, and when he receives a letter from the mother of one of the victims, he really begins agonizing about the ramifications of his work. There's a twist at the end that both surprised and confused me. Definitely a unique book. Last note:  I listened to the audio book, which was read by the author in a manner that included many somewhat odd pauses--authors can be great or not so great narrators of their work--in this case not so great. Maybe in 2023 I'll keep notes on the good and bad of narrators and do a post devoted just to that topic. 

Nonfiction

Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future, by Elizabeth Kolbert, is a look at possible human solutions to human-created environmental problems. The title is based on the fact that some of the geoengineering strategies proposed as a means of controlling global warming would turn the sky white. The book is informative and alarming, though I don't know what exactly to do with the information. Not exactly an enjoyable read but still worthwhile. 

The subtitle of Dinners with Ruth: A Memoir on the Power of Friendships, by Nina Totenberg, is more descriptive of the content of the book than the primary title. While there is certainly a lot about Totenberg's friendship with Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the author spends considerable time talking about her marriages, her friendships with Cokie Roberts and Linda Wertheimer, friendships with other SCOTUS justices (including Antonin Scalia), and even the theft and recovery of her father's violin. "Dinners with Ruth" is more of a symbol for the ways in which friends demonstrate their love. I appreciated the examination of friendship, as well as insider information from Totenberg's many years covering the Court. I did have some reservations about her socializing with people she covered (RBG was a somewhat different case since they were friendly before RBG was a judge), although she makes a case for why "old Washington" offered advantages over "new Washington," where there's less friendliness among politicians, jurists, and journalists (I had a similar reaction to reading about SDO's socializing with political folks when I read her biography). I can certainly see the advantages of Democrats and Republicans in Congress being more friendly, but I'm less sanguine about relationships between jurists and politicians and journalists and those they cover. Something to think about--and there are lots of other things to think about as well. Two points, one that made me angry and one that made me laugh. Anger-provoking: Mitch McConnell refused to give permission for Ginsburg to lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda, so instead she was relegated to Statuary Hall. Laughter-provoking: one of RBG's grandchildren once unfriended her on social media. This book wasn't what I expected, but I enjoyed it. 

Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History, by Lea Ypi, is the first book I picked from the LitHub ultimate list that I didn't already have on my TBR list. It presents one young person's experience of Albania in the years leading up to and following the collapse of the Communist regime. Her parents did such a good job convincing her to support the Albanian state that, as a child, Ypi was devoted to Stalin and former Albanian leader Enver Hoxha, not realizing that her parents were from bourgeois families and that both of her grandfathers had been political prisoners. When the regime fell, she was shocked to learn that her family did not support Communism (or socialism as she refers to it). She details the challenges the family and nation faced in trying to rebuild. The book is informative (I knew virtually nothing about Albanian history), but I didn't find it funny as some reviewers promised it would be. If you are interested in Albania or what happened in various eastern bloc nations after 1989, this would be a good choice for you. Otherwise, give it a pass.

Favorite Passages

There's a low-level, specific pain in having to accept that putting up with you requires a certain generosity of spirit in your loved ones.

    --Emily St. John Mandel in Sea of Tranquility

Keep your eye on the horseshoe. I'm telling you something real: the far sides, the extremes, are closer to each other than any of us are to the center. 

There are those who demand attention and others who do not need to be known . . . Perhaps it is safer to go unseen.

    --A.M. Homes, The Unfolding

Signal Fires and Some Unusual Mysteries

It's that time of year when numerous lists of "best books" come out and I ask myself: "What have I been reading? I've never even heard of half these books!" Hoping LitHub comes out with their list of books on the most lists soon so I can attack a few of 2022's great books that I missed/ignored. Until then . . . 

Fiction

I first encountered George Saunders' work in his wonderful novel Lincoln in the Bardo, but he is primarily known as a writer of short stories. Liberation Day, my first experience reading his short stories, left me feeling ambivalent. The stories, which seem to be set in an America deep in a post-democratic malaise, are well crafted but somehow unrewarding (at least to me). The title story is one of the most interesting. Three people are more or less hung on a wall, where their "owner" Mr. Untermeyer coaches them in performances that are presented to friends of the U's and Mrs. U uses one of the men, Jeremy, for sexual gratification when her husband is asleep. It's not clear how these people came to be "Speakers"; their memories have been erased--Jeremy believes he was born four years ago as a full-grown man. The Untermeyers' adult son becomes involved with a group who want to liberate the Speakers; the group breaks into one of the performances with disastrous results. Suffice it to say, liberation does not occur. Characters in some of the stories seem to be in similarly restricted circumstances; in "Ghoul," for example, Brian works in an underground amusement park called The Maws of Hell, but there are no visitors and no real justification for the existence of the park. I didn't really have a favorite story, as they all left me feeling rather empty--which may, of course, be Saunders' intent. Hard-core short-story fans may enjoy this collection, but I wouldn't recommend it for the average reader.

Dani Shapiro writes with such grace and empathy that Signal Fires, her new book about loss, grief, and the corrosive power of secrets, is uplifting despite its sad subject matter (I didn't even mention dementia and bad parenting). The book opens with a fatal accident in which three members of the Wilf family are involved--unlicensed Theo was driving the car when it crashed, older sister Sarah was not driving because she was drunk but protects Theo by saying she was driving, and father Benjamin, a doctor who pulls the teenagers' friend from the car, not realizing her neck is broken and she should not have been moved. The girl dies, but no charges result from the accident. Still, their roles in the death--and the fact that they never talk about what happened--affect the lives of the family members, particularly Theo and Sarah. Theo disappears for years as a young man, causing his parents great pain. Sarah builds a successful career and family but is an alcoholic. Meanwhile, their mother Mimi has developed dementia, which Ben hides from them for years. Intertwined with Ben's life is the story of Waldo, a young neighbor obsessed with the night sky, whose father is exactly the wrong person to be raising a brilliant child who appears to be on the autism spectrum (interestingly, Shapiro provides distance between the father and readers by referring to him by his last name--and, while we may understand him, he is never quite redeemed . The narrative is not chronological and is told from multiple perspectives as everyone in the story is touched by loss and grief. Yet, in the end, Shapiro gives us hope that grief can be overcome, that we can experience glimmers of those we have loved and lost. Recommended. 

Mysteries/Thrillers

Local Woman Missing, by Mary Kubica, is one of the twistiest mysteries I've read in a while. The set-up: New mother Shelby disappears. Days later, Meredith (Shelby's doula) and her daughter Delilah go missing. The women are eventually found dead, Shelby murdered and Meredith an apparent suicide. Eleven years later, Delilah escapes from a basement "prison" where she was held. The story from the time of the women's disappearances is narrated by Meredith and her neighbor Kate. The story following Delilah's return is told mostly from the perspective of Leo, Delilah's brother, with a final chapter narrated by Kate. Within that frame, there are a number of surprises that I did not anticipate. There's also one very creepy scene in which Kate, suspicious of the OB/GYN who delivered Shelby's baby pretends she is pregnant and goes to him for an office visit, even letting him do an internal exam. I definitely could have done without that episode, but otherwise I liked the book quite a bit.

By a weird coincidence, I finished listening to the new Armand Gamache book, World of Curiousities, by Louise Penny, the same day the Gamache series Three Pines premiered on Amazon. Having watched the first two episodes, I think it's a decent cop show but doesn't really capture what makes Gamache different from other fictional detectives. But back to the book. I tend to prefer the Gamache books that aren't so firmly set in Three Pines, but this one, while taking place to a large extent in Three Pines, doesn't focus so much on the residents' eccentricities. It includes back story on how Gamache and Jean-Guy Beauvoir met on a case that involved two abused children, who resurface in this book as potential bad actors. The title describes a work of art, a copy of which has shown up in a secret room above Myrna's apartment and bookshop. The copy has been altered with items targeted at Three Pines residents. Armand and Jean-Guy figure out who the primary bad guy is but who he has disguised himself as and how he is linked to the two young people involved in the earlier case is not readily apparent and people are dying! It's complicated and not very realistic, but entertaining. 

The Body in the Snowdrift, by Katherine Hall Page, is a culinary mystery and Agatha Award winner. Thus, you can assume it is a "cozy" mystery and you would be right. It features caterer Faith Fairchild, who is on a ski vacation with her husband's family when all hell breaks loose. Cozy mysteries aren't my favorite because too often the female sleuths go off half-cocked and only "solve" the case when the villain tries to kill them, which describes this book well. Interestingly, this is the 15th title in a series of 25 books and the only one, as far as I can tell, to be a major award-winner (although her first book did win the "Best First Novel" from Malice Domestic so I'm being a tad unfair). I will not be going back to read the other 24 titles or the new one coming out in 2023. 

I picked up Tess Gerritsen's latest, Listen to Me, and realized I hadn't read a Rizzoli and Isles mystery in quite a while (the last one one came out in 2017). I was also reminded how little the TV series resembled the books--about the only things that were close to the books were that Rizzoli was a Boston PD detective, Isles was the medical examiner, they were friends, and Rizzoli's mom was a bit of a pain. Why even base a TV series on a book series if they're going to be totally different (Bones is another example)? I guess the built-in base of readers might be a reason, but wouldn't devoted fans of the books be irritated by the lack of fidelity or do they just see show and books as totally different entities? I don't know. Anyhoo, the book is okay--Jane must find the link between two cases 19 years apart that seem unrelated but are somehow intertwined, Angela (her mom) deals with neighborhood chaos, and Jane realizes she might not know Maura as well as she thinks. I figured out both Jane's and Angela's mysteries fairly early on, but the book was still a nice light read. 

Louise Candlish constructs some extremely twisted mysteries, and The Other Passenger is no exception. After a personal crisis, former marketing exec Jamie is working at a coffee shop, essentially living off his partner Claire, who would like him to be more motivated to find a better job (she gifts him with a series of sessions with a career counselor). They become friendly with a younger couple, Kit and Melia, who are burdened with heavy debt. Jamie and Melia start an affair, and then Kit disappears. Suspicion falls on Jamie . . . and that's when the twists start. I don't think I can say more without saying too much so I'll just say it was enjoyable!

Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead, by Sara Gran, is one of the oddest mysteries I've ever read--and I've read a lot of mysteries! Claire, like her late mentor Constance, is a follower of the (fictional) detective Jacques Silette, whose master work Detection includes such practical advice as "the truth lies . .. at the intersection of the forgotten and the ignored, in the neighborhood of all we have tried to forget." Perhaps no surprise given this inspiration, Claire does not investigate cases in the way other detectives do. For example, Claire does not find clues, she recognizes them, aided by the I Ching, among other tools. Claire is hired to find out what happened to an assistant New Orleans DA who disappeared shortly after Hurricane Katrina. It's two years later, and New Orleans is a mess--although Gann suggests the city was always a mess and the storm only intensified its awfulness. While I respect Gran's creativity, I doubt I will read any more Claire DeWitt books; I'm perhaps too left-brained for Gran's work (I know the left-brain/right-brain thing is a myth, but sometimes it is useful nonetheless).

YA

Piecing Me Together, by Renee Watson, is a coming-of-age story for the 21st century. Jade is starting her junior year at the private high school where she is a scholarship student and one of a small number of African American students. She's made few friends in her first two years but finds a friend in a new student, Samantha, a white girl who is also a scholarship student. On the first day of school, she learns she has been chosen to take part in a citywide mentorship program, Woman to Woman, in which successful African American women mentor high school girls, who will receive a college scholarship when they complete the program. Jade is not sure she wants to participate, but the chance for a scholarship is too attractive to ignore. Her mentor Maxine lets her down in a variety of ways, as does her new friend Sam, but she learns to speak up for herself and both relationships improve. Woven into the very personal story are a variety of issues, from police brutality towards black people to shopping while black experiences and the difference between opportunities to help and opportunities to be helped. Definitely a good read--I just wish I could have seen pictures of the collages Jade created!

Nonfiction

I often think memoirs serve the purposes of their authors much more than their readers, and often the authors' purposes have something to do with working through the traumas of childhood. This certainly felt like the case with Beautiful Country, by Qian Julie Wang. The book relates the story of Wang's five childhood years living in Brooklyn with her highly educated parents who, as unauthorized immigrants from China, were reduced to working menial jobs. They lived in a single room, sharing a kitchen and bathroom with other families. Wang was constantly hiding the truth of her life from her friends (when she was finally able to make some) and teachers. When her mother had to be hospitalized, she was terrified they would be deported. When Wang is about 12, her mother arranges for them to move to Canada, where they can be legal residents. Except for a brief final reflection from the author's perspective as an adult, the story ends there.  As a memoir skeptic, I can't help wondering why we don't learn more about that time, why Canada was so difficult for Wang's father (she mentions this is in the final reflection), why she decided to go to college in the U.S. (Swarthmore and Yale Law) and to pursue what she refers to an "empty life" as a lawyer. This is not to say that the book does not paint a moving picture of an immigrant child's life. It does. And it likely helped Wang integrate the scared child she was with the competent adult she now is, but as a reader, I feel that the transition would also be interesting.

Poetry

And Yet is Kate Baer's third collection of poetry and it covers much of the same territory as her earlier work--men and women's relationships, parenting, friendship, self-acceptance, and social issues. As a rather shallow reader of poetry, I  appreciate that all of her poems are confined to a single page--they concentrate language and thought and, in my opinion, are more powerful for it. She also employs humor in a way that packs a punch, as in this brief piece:

Grounds for Divorce

My husband recounts our children's births
like a camp counselor describing cold lake  water.

It's not that bad
We pushed through
Actually kind of beautiful once you get used to it

A few of her poems are what I would consider "prose poems," although I'm not sure I know the explicit definition of that term. I'm not generally fond of this form, but she works it to good effect:

Awake

When an officer is asked to administer the death penalty, they are given two
or three days off to recover from what they've done. I think of this at night,
alone with my list of rude awakenings; how a mother finds her baby dead
without a reason, how a kindergartner feels at the sight of a loaded gun.
I admit there have been occasions when I've found it difficult to be alive.
To remember this in the wake of such injustice fills me with a shame I've
always known.

If I'm honest, I'll say this is not my favorite Baer collection, but it's still very much worth reading.

Favorite Passages

He'd been counting on a happy ending. But there is no such thing. Nothing ever really ends. The fat lady never really sings her last song. She only changes costumes and goes on to the next show. It's just a matter of when you stop watching.

    --Sara Gann, Claire Dewitt and the City of the Dead

Sometimes it feels like I leave home a whole person, sent off with kisses from Mom, who is hanging her every hope on my future. By the time I get home I feel like my soul has been shattered into a million pieces.

    --Renee Watson,  Piecing Me Together

You Can't Be Serious: Refocusing after COVID

Shortly after publishing my last post, I started feeling sick. Yep, I had COVID. This led to listening to a bunch of free mysteries on Audible that were so militantly mediocre that when I fell asleep (a frequent occurrence), I didn't worry about going back and figuring out what I missed. They will not be mentioned further here. 

Now that I'm mostly recovered and am caught up on the work I missed while sick, I'm trying to refocus. It's hard . . . 

Fiction

Emily Henry's Book Lovers appears on NPR's "Books We Love" list for 2022. Granted, it's a long list (400 titles), but I don't think Book Lovers belongs on it. It's a romance novel featuring a book editor and a literary agent, who hate each other on first meeting but very quickly thereafter find each other nigh-on irresistible. Passable escapist listening when one has COVID; otherwise, no. 

I had had a book titled The Writing on the Wall on my TBR list for a few years. After I read the book by W.D. Wetherill, I discovered the book on my list was by a different author. But this one was interesting. It features three protagonists--Vera, a modern-day teacher whose daughter is in some at-first-unnamed legal difficulty; Beth, a young married woman wishing she could get an education in Post-WWI America; and Dottie, a nurse whose son has enlisted in the Army during the Vietnam era. What makes the book interesting is that Vera discovers the latter two women as she is pealing wallpaper in a mountain getaway her sister has purchased. Vera is staying there trying to come to terms with her daughter's situation and has volunteered to help rehab the house to thank her sister. Beth and Dottie, it turns out, wrote their stories on the walls of the house and then covered them with wallpaper. There's a strong anti-war message in the three women's stories, as well as a theme of women's need to tell their stories even if they're never heard. To me, it didn't seem like a very realistic way of telling one's story, but I did enjoy the book. Meanwhile, the other The Writing on the Wall is still on the TBR list. 

I admire Gabrielle Zevin's work because every new book is totally fresh. Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow is no exception. Sam and Sadie became friends when Sam was in the hospital following a terrible car accident in which his mother was killed and he was seriously injured; Sadie visited him regularly but their friendship ended abruptly when he learned she was receiving community service credits for visiting him. They run into each other years later when he is at Harvard and she is at MIT; they start developing a game together and eventually become successful game developers. There are ups and downs in their business and their relationship and, as they experience these ups and downs the reader is challenged to think about disability and how one copes with physical pain, the benefits of building alternative worlds and playing in them, art, what makes a good teacher (not sleeping with students), and cultural violence. Sometimes Zevin went a little deeper into various aspects of gaming and game development than I needed to go, but overall, I enjoyed the book. 

I don't have high expectations for the free books you can get from Audible and Amazon, but occasionally one surprises me. I Came to Say Goodbye by Caroline Overington was one of those. It was doubly surprising because it involved a plethora of issues--parenting ranging from questionable to abusive; the perfidy of the social welfare system, particularly child protective services; immigration to Australia; female genital mutilation; treatment available for the mentally ill; quacks promoting misinformation about children's health. And it's narrated by a father and daughter who have some serious character flaws--yet I ended up caring about them. Maybe I've gotten soft.

Mystery/Thriller

If you liked the movie Memento, you will find the premise of  Stay Awake by Megan Goldin familiar. I definitely can't adequately describe the plot, but here's an attempt:  Protagonist Liv has a rare form of amnesia: when she wakes up, she has forgotten everything that came before. Her arms are covered with admonitions like "Don't fall asleep." Her low-rent apartment, when she can find it, contains many Post-its with similar messages. When she sees "Wake Up" painted, in blood, on the window of an apartment where a man she knows (although she doesn't remember him!) was murdered, she fears she is being set up. I'll stop there to avoid spoilers. Goldin doesn't execute her idea perfectly and Liv can be an annoying character, but I enjoyed the book. 

Nonfiction

Questlove is a very smart man, and what he doesn't know about music is likely not worth knowing. In fact, his encyclopedic knowledge of music sometimes made it hard for me to track where he was going in Music Is History, in which he starts the year he was born and examines musical highlights and historical connections year by year. He also puts together playlists that support the themes he identifies for various years. I respect this work, but someone younger and more knowledgeable about contemporary music would probably "get it" more fully than I did. Since I listened to this as I was recovering from COVID, I might have had some brain fog (how's that as a way to excuse myself for keeping up with Questlove's genius?). 

My sister-in-law Kathy recommended Kal Penn's You Can't Be Serious, so I picked it up and found it both entertaining and informative. Penn ("real" name Kalpen Modi) basically tells his story in four large chunks: growing up as a somewhat nerdy Indian American kid in New Jersey (not gravitating toward his extended family's career expectations for him), his efforts (eventually successful) to make it in Hollywood in the face of rampant discrimination, his time working in the Obama Administration (he remains a big fan of how President Obama approached governing), and his efforts to get a show featuring a multiethnic cast treated fairly by NBC (spoiler: that did not happen). I guess I am naive, but I did not expect that discrimination in the entertainment industry would have been so open in the 1990s and early 2000s and would remain so institutionalized in the 2010s. Sad. I had read when the book was published that Penn came out in his memoir. Somehow, this "big news" kind of approach had prepped me for a lot of angst about the process. Totally not hte case. He writes about dating guys and finding his somewhat unlikely fiance in a matter of fact manner, which feels like the way LGBTQ+ people should be able to write about their lives. Recommended.

Poetry

I read Elizabeth Alexander's memoir about her husband's death and thought it was brilliant. I've also enjoyed a couple of Mellon Foundation (she is currently the President) webinars that she facilitated. Crave Radiance: New and Selected Poems 1990-2010 is her first poetry collection I have read. Many of her poems focus on African American history and life--I especially enjoyed the series of poems on  Miss Crandall's School for Young Ladies and Little Misses of Color and the poem "Tina Green," that tells a

small story, hair story, Afro-American story
only-black-girl-in-my-class story,
pre-adolescence story, black-teacher story.

Another theme of her work is family (there's a series on postpartum dreams that is wild).  I found "Cleaning Out Your Apartment," written about her grandfather, deeply moving. 

A fifty-year-old resume
that says you raised delphiniums.
Health through Vegetable Juice,
your book of common prayer,

your bureau, bed, your easy chair,
dry Chivas bottles, mop and broom
pajamas on the drying rack,
your shoe trees, shoe-shine box.

I keep your wicker sewing kit,
your balsa cufflink box. There's
only my framed photograph to say,
you were my grandfather.

Outside, flowers everywhere
the bus stop, santeria shop.
Red and blue, violent lavender.
Impatiens, impermanent, swarm.

Among my other favorites in the collection are the poem she read at President Obama's inauguration in 2009 ("Praise Song for the Day") and a poem on "Butter" that ends with a reference to Little Black Sambo, which was an odd reading moment--but still, it's about butter!

Favorite Passages

In today's sharp sparkle, this winter air,
any thing can be made, any sentence begun.
On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp,

praise song for walking forward in that light.

Excerpt from "Praise Song for the Day," by Elizabeth Alexander

Books that Moved Me: Our Missing Hearts and Speak

Just spent the morning with my book club talking about why books are challenged/censored (fear was our main conclusion) and why people feel compelled to try to limit what other people's children read rather than just choosing deciding if a book is suitable for their own children (I think "people are annoying" was our main conclusion).  Speak, the book I read for the meeting (see YA section below) definitely deserves to have a wide audience of teenagers and those who love them.  But on to what I've been reading.

Fiction

With her new book, Our Missing Hearts, Celeste Ng has gone in a new direction. Following an economic crisis, blamed by leaders on China, the United States has passed the PACT act--the Preserving American Culture and Traditions act (yes, the PATRIOT act echoes here). PACT means that books are restricted, people are asked to report on their neighbors, children are removed from parents with dangerous ideas, and Asian Americans are treated as potential traitors. The book essentially tells two stories--the first is the story of Bird, a preteen boy whose mother Margaret, a Chinese America poet, disappeared some years before. He lives with his father, a former linguistics professor who now shelves unread books in a library. The title of one of Margaret's book, Our Missing Hearts, has become a slogan for those protesting removal of children from their families. Motivated by this fact and his receipt of a page filled with drawings of cats that he knows is from his mother, Bird sets out to find her. When he does, the book becomes Margaret's story--how she came to be in the situation she is currently in and what she plans to do about it. It's a powerful book about intolerance and injustice, courage, art, and resilience. And, librarians are the true heroes in the story! And it's beautifully written! Highly recommended. 

The online University of Illinois alumni online book group I joined earlier this year is currently reading The Violin Conspiracy, by Brendan Slocumb. It's the story of Ray McMillian, a gifted young African American violinist who discovers the family fiddle is actually a Stradavarius worth $10 million. This causes various conflicts, in his family (the elders claim that the violin belongs to them, not to Ray) and with the descendants of the slave-owning family who "owned" Ray's fiddle-playing ancestor (who claim the violin was stolen from them). Then, as Ray is preparing for the prestigious Tchaikovsky competition, the violin is stolen. The narrative moves back and forth between Ray's childhood, when he got no family support and was subjected to discrimination as a black child playing classical music,  and his preparation for and participation in the competition, as he freaks out (understandably) about his violin. I enjoyed everything about Ray's life as a black musician, including encounters with unfriendly police, but didn't find the "mystery" particularly compelling. Interesting note: Several commenters in our group thought that Ray's childhood was taking place in the 1970s, while it was actually the early 2000s (I think). I feel like this might reflect white readers' self-delusion about how much has changed--in schools, in the classical music world, and in society in general. We want to believe Ray would not have experienced discrimination from his music teacher in the 2000s, but, sadly, Slocumb, a musician and music teacher, knows more than we do.  

Mysteries/Thrillers

Ice and Stone is the latest entry in Marcia Muller's Sharon McCone series, and it's pretty good for the 34th book about one character, perhaps because it deals with a timely topic--the murder of indigenous women. Although the specific reason for their murder seems unlikely to be the motivator for the murders that have and are occurring in the real world, the prejudice and lack of investigation by law enforcement seems on point. There is a weird subplot about an attack on Sharon and Hy's office that goes nowhere, but I still recommend the book.

I know I complain a lot about bad mysteries, but The Coroner, by Jennifer Graeser Dornbush, may be the worst ever--obnoxious main character who is supposedly a brilliant doctor but acts like an idiot (I actually kind of wanted her to die when she was attacked by a murderer); constant mentions that she drives a leaf (is the author getting a kickback from Nissan or is she trying to virtue-signal?);  multiple violations of the Fourth Amendment by law enforcement officers (mystery writers really need to get the law right--no one in this book could ever have been convicted because pretty much all the evidence was illegally gathered); a corny romance;  and a terrible cliffhanger. Authors who write cliffhangers clearly don't care about their readers--they just want to sell the next book in their series. To make matters worse, this one involves the main character--a freaking doctor--sitting by someone praying for their survival. Why isn't she DOING something? Seriously, the worst. 

I first thought Look What You Made Me Do was a complete rip-off of My Sister, the Serial Killer, by Oyinkan Braithwaite. It certainly starts off similarly, but author Elaine Murphy does take the story in a different direction. Carrie is the witless accomplice to her sister Becca's crimes, helping her dispose of the bodies. But Becca's latest victim is discovered in a park--along with 13 other bodies, not killed by Becca. Because it's a mystery novel, Carrie and Becca start trying to identify the other serial killer. And chaos ensues. Not really a fan. 

Black Widows by Cate Quinn is not the first mystery I've read in which the murder victim had more than one wife, but it's still quite different. Told from the perspective of the three wives of dead husband Blake--Rachel, the controlling first wife, who was raised in a polygamous cult; Emily, a teenager who has an unspecified sexual problem; and Tina, a former drug addict and hooker, who probably loved Blake the most. The police ping-pong back and forth in terms of who they think the killer is--all three wives are arrested at different times--before the "surprise" of who really killed Blake is revealed. The book was somewhat entertaining, but a couple of things bothered me. First, all three wives (as well as Blake's mother) were presented as somewhat mentally damaged, which I don't think is a fair portrayal of LDS women (although, granted, I don't know any women in plural marriages). Second, while I'm not generally one to worry about authors writing about people different from themselves, it seems odd that a British author who has apparently never even been to Utah, would decide to write this book. Perhaps if she had actually spent some time with LDS folks, she might have drawn more complex characters and not portrayed every LDS character (except for one kid missionary who loaned Tina his car) so negatively. 

In Desert Star, by Michael Connolly, Renee Ballard has become the lead detective of the LAPD's newly reconstituted cold case unit. The catch is no other detectives are assigned to the squad--she must rely on volunteers and consultants. Of course, she draws Harry Bosch into the unit with the promise he can work on a case that has haunted him because he knows who did it but can't bring the perpetrator to justice. But first he has to help find out who killed the sister of the city councilman largely responsible for getting the unit funded. Lots of red herrings, but overall it's okay, though it's hard to believe a major city would actually have a unit manned by volunteers. Also, I feel like the more closely she works with Bosch, the less interesting Ballard becomes. Hopefully, the next title in this series will do more with her character. 

Science Fiction

Blake Crouch's latest, Upgrade, explores the idea that humans might be perfectible via gene modification (think CRISPR), delivered without the manipulated realizing what is happening. Protagonist Logan Ramsey, an agent with the Gene Protection Agency, goes into a basement where an IED with ice shrapnel explodes. At first, doctors do not think he has suffered any lasting damage, but then he starts noticing he's stronger, smarter (he can beat his daughter at chess), and more focused than ever before. Soon enough, he learns that this was all a trick by his mother, a brilliant scientist who everyone thinks committed suicide after she was responsible for the deaths of 200,000 people when one of her attempts to edit genes had the opposite effect of what was intended. She has also "upgraded" Logan's sister and wants the two of them to "save humanity" by upgrading people globally. Logan sees the potential downsides, while his sister decides to take on their mother's challenge. The rest of the book is a bit too much of a "chase scene" for me--and it's hard to develop character when the focus is on action (and science). Not my favorite Crouch book. 

Young Adult

This month, my book group decided we would each choose a banned book and report back to the group on what we read and how it informed our perspective on people who challenge books in a supposed effort to protect young people. I chose Speak, by Laurie Halse Anderson, and it's incredible. It's narrated in first person by a high school freshman, Melinda, whose friends have all abandoned her because she called 911 from a summer party. She hasn't told her friends what happened to her at the party (it's clear she was assaulted, but we don't learn the details until we're quite a ways into the book)--they're just mad because the police came and friends and older siblings got in trouble. Melinda opts to speak as little as possible, which frustrates her parents (who are not the most insightful folk) and teachers. Only her art teacher seems to understand how to help her. Although much of the book is sad--Melinda's voice seems authentic and the reader aches for her--but parts are also funny, and the ending is upbeat and carries a positive message about how taking action can help not only yourself but others. The edition I got from the library was the 10th Anniversary Edition, which included a poem constructed from letters and emails Anderson received from readers as well as some thoughts from Anderson on censorship. She is more understanding than I:

"Most of the censorship I see is fear-driven. I respect that. The world is a very scary place. It is a terrifying place in which to raise children, and in particular, teenagers. It is human nature to nurture and protect children as they grow into adulthood. But censoring books that deal with difficult, adolescent issues does not protect anybody. Quite the opposite. It leaves kids in darkness and makes them vulnerable.

"Censorship is the child of fear and the father of ignorance. Our children cannot afford to have the truth of the world withheld from them. They need us to be brave enough to give them great books so they can learn how to grow up into the men and women we want them to be."

 Absolutely think teenagers and their parents and teachers should read this book.

Nonfiction

My friend Carolyn loved The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics so much she recommended it in her Christmas letter a couple of years ago. Although it took me a long time to get to Daniel James Brown's book, once I did I really enjoyed it. I knew NOTHING about rowing, but Brown does such a great job, I actually got totally engaged in his descriptions of the crew's workouts and competitions. But the real heart of the book is the story of the "boys" from the University of Washington who made up the victorious team, particularly Joe Rantz, who got the author interested in the story; the UW team members were from middle class and lower middle class families, many hard hit by the Depression, little resembling my stereotype of crew as practiced at the elite schools of the East Coast. I was amazed at how popular rowing was as a spectator sport, one that was broadcast over the radio--who knew? The author also does a great job detailing Germany's successful plans to use the games as a propaganda opportunity while hiding the atrocities already occurring there. Given the extent to which Avery Brundage was complicit in this propaganda effort, I'm amazed he continued to hold high office in the U.S. and International Olympic Committees after the war--and into the 1970s!! 

Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teaching of the Plants was written by a botany professor, member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, poet, and mother,  Robin Wall Kimmerer. I don't think I will capture it's essence, but it's an examination of how the two ways of knowing represented by science and the wisdom of people who learn by engaging deeply with the world around them (over generations) are both complementary and contradictory. Kimmerer makes a case that in order for life on earth to be sustainable given the current challenges, we must move away from the culture of commodification to a recognition that humans have a reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. She makes this case through stories from her own life and teaching,  explorations of indigenous wisdom, and scientific research she and her students have done with a view toward exploring those reciprocal relationships. It's deep and inspiring, but I feel like it was almost too much to process. I think I should probably have read it over a period of time, spending time with each chapter or, perhaps even better, choosing a couple of chapters and digging deeply into them with other readers.  

Favorite Passages

Today it strikes Bird as unbearably sad, to pass by and leave no trace of your existence.

The world was on fire, you might as well burn bright.

Because telling you what really happened would be espousing un-American views, and we certainly wouldn't want that. [Yes, some of the book rings almost unbearably true of our current situation.]

    --Celeste Ng, Our Missing Hearts

. . . I take it [War and Peace] with me whenever I have to travel, hoping that one day I'll understand it. POr at least understand why Leo Tolstoy had wanted to gift the world with a mostly boring novel of over a thousand pages. It's still a mystery to me, and I keep hoping I'll come upon some gem-like insight that will explain it. 

    --Marcia Muller, Ice and Stone

They were now representatives of something much larger than themselves--a way of life, a shared set of values. Liberty was perhaps the most fundamental of those values. But the things that held them together--trust in each other, mutual respect, humility, fair play, watching out for one another--those were also part of what America meant to all of them.

    --Daniel James Brown, The Boys in the Boat

Philosophers call this state of isolation and disconnection "species loneliness"--a deep, unnamed sadness stemming from estrangement from the rest of Creation, from the loss of relationship. As our human dominance of the world has grown, we have become more isolated, more lonely when we can no longer call out to our neighbors.

    --Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass [I could reproduce a lot more passages, but I've already gone a bit overboard]

You Better Be Lightning lights up late October

How can it be November already? Here's a look at how October ended.

Fiction

A friend gave The Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell, by Robert Dugoni, a rave review, so I picked it up. Sam "Hell" Hill was born with red eyes--a fact that subjected him to discrimination and bullying as a youngster. The bullies were a classmate and the principal of his Catholic school, a nun with a drinking problem. He finds two friends--Ernie, the only black student in the school and, Mickie, a rebellious girl--who make his life bearable and who continue to be his friend into an adult. As an adult, Sam becomes a tinted-contact-wearing ophthalmologist who takes on the case of his childhood bully's daughter, whom he suspects is being abused. The result is a personal crisis that sends Sam careening away from his friends and the life he has built. I thought the story of Sam's youth was engaging, but I was so annoyed by his interpersonal idiocy in his adult life that I found the adult portions of the story unsatisfying.  

This Is How It Always Is, by Laurie Frankel, is the story of a family with five sons, until the youngest son Claude declares he wants to wear a dress and be called Poppy. It's certainly worthwhile to explore how a transitioning child affects all the other members of a family, and I liked the book's treatment of Poppy and her brothers. On the other hand, I often wondered what her parents were thinking and why they were doing things like suddenly moving the family from Madison to Seattle and then trying to keep Poppy's status secret. And the event that seemed to bring the family to some kind of resolution--a medical mission to Thailand, in which the doctor-mom took Poppy along and both had life-changing experiences--seemed quite unrealistic. I wanted to like the book more than I actually did.

I might say the same thing about Lessons in Chemistry, by Bonnie Garmus. Here the central character is a brilliant woman, Elizabeth Zott, trying to succeed as a scientist in the 1950s and 1960s, further handicapped by being a single unmarried mother. The challenges are undoubtedly real, and her efforts to continue her career in unusual ways are admirable if slightly unbelievable. Her gifted daughter Mad is a wonderful character who wants to figure out the mystery of her dead father's family history, with the help of her friend Rev. Wakely, another wonderful character. I enjoyed much about the book, but I sometimes thought that the author was trying for humor in situations that really had no room for humor. For example, Elizabeth was sexually assaulted by her thesis advisor in grad school--not a humorous situation, but the way in which Garmus describes how Elizabeth stabbed him with her pencil is written in a way that seems intended to be funny. Sorry--not funny. 

Two of Kate Atkinson's works of historical fiction--Life After Life and A God in Ruins--are among my favorites of the past 20 years. But her new book, Shrines of Gaiety, is a disappointment. Set in the seamy underside of London in the years after World War I, the book features a large cast of characters, three of whom stand out: Gwendolen Kelling, a former combat nurse who has come to London to look for two young girls who have run away from York (and to escape the boredom of her life there); Freda, one of the girls Gwendolen is searching for, who has found London to be rougher than she imagined; and DCI John Frobisher, who is investigating the deaths of young women and to whom Gwendolen turns for help.  Other, less interesting characters are the family of nightclub impresario Nellie Coker and two crooked cops trying to steal Nellie's businesses. Bad things happen to almost everyone and then the book ends with a "here's where everyone ends up in the future" tacked on. I guess if you're very curious about the underside of this period, you might find the book interesting, but I did not. Not recommended. 

Mysteries

Five Decembers, by James Kestrel, is the most recent winner of the Edgar for Best Mystery Novel and, for once, I think the honor is well-deserved. Indeed, Five Decembers is more than just an excellent mystery--it's an excellent novel. The action begins in Honolulu in November 1941. Police officer Joe McGrady is faced with a challenging case--two young people murdered and found in a barn; one is the nephew of a high-ranking naval officer, putting more pressure on the police. Joe finds clues that lead him across the Pacific, and he heads to Hong Kong in search of the killer. Given the time, you can guess what happens--although what happens to Joe after the attack on Pearl Harbor is far from predictable. I don't want to give the rest of the story away--suffice it to say, I recommend this book. 

22 Seconds is the latest entry in the Patterson/Paetro Women's Murder Club series. This one involves violent protests against a new California gun law, as well as gun runners and drug cartels moving goods between Mexico and the United States. Subplots involving anyone other than Lindsay Boxer are underdeveloped--either a total waste or a set-up for something in volume 23. Not great, not horrible. 

I did a mini-binge of the first three novels in the Jane Ryland/Jake Brogan series by Hank Phillippi Ryan--The Other Woman, The Wrong Girl, and Truth Be Told, the latter two of which won Agatha awards. Jane is a reporter, Jake is a police officer, they're attracted to each other but can't have a relationship (or at least a public one) because it would be a conflict of interest. They get involved investigating the same crimes, and both seem to go off half-cocked fairly often. Crimes that seem unrelated actually end up being part of one big criminal fiasco. The sexual tension story line gets tedious, but the books are fairly entertaining.  

The Housekeeper, by Joy Fielding, is kind of Halloween-appropriate. A daughter hires a housekeeper to help her father care for her disabled mother and the woman goes from being a dream to a nightmare. It's a decent premise, but Fielding foreshadows so much that there's little suspense.

We know from the beginning of Things We Do in the Dark, by Jennifer Hillier, that protagonist Paris Peralta is now who she claims to be. But her current life has plenty of drama--her husband has been murdered and she's a suspect. Then an old friend, who also happens to be a true crime podcaster (that trope is getting tired and it's not used particularly well here), starts to investigate a case that involved her in her earlier life. Soon, her two lives come together. There are some surprises although one is signaled a bit too obviously before it is fully disclosed. Mediocre.

Nonfiction

Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (second ed.), by bell hooks, is a well-argued discussion of why the situation of black women must be considered as due to both racism and sexism/misogyny. hooks examines how misogyny affected black women in slavery; she also looks at black men's misogyny and the varied ways that this misogyny affects black women. Also of note is the racism of the feminist movement, which rests hard on women of my age, but is supported by the evidence. Recommended.

Poetry

A friend posted enthusiastically about going to a performance by queer poet Andrea Gibson, so I ordered her latest book, You Better Be Lightning. It took me a while to finish the book as it's pretty intense. She writes about relationships, about love and loss, the vulnerability of LGBTQ youth, illness, goosebump moments . . . life.  Some of her poems are exceptionally brief but still pack a punch:

No Such Thing as the Innocent Bystander

Silence rides shotgun
wherever hate goes.

Spelling Bee without Stinger

I love myself
is often spelled
g-o-o-d-b-y-e

Some of the poems are quite lengthy, some look like prose. There's a wide array of material here, but every piece conveys emotion, often painful, but sometimes joyful (check out Gibson reading "Acceptance Speech after Setting the World Record in Goosebumps," which reminds us that joy comes in diverse and individual forms: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XK-hb_bjqU). As with any poetry collection, some poems resonant, others don't, but Gibson's work is affecting and I plan to check out more of what she's written. 

Favorite passages

The process begins with the individual woman's acceptance that American women, without exception, are socialized to be racist, classist and sexist, in varying degrees, and that labeling ourselves feminists does not change the fact that we must consciously work to rid ourselves of the legacy of negative socialization.

When feminists acknowledge in one breath that black women are victimized and in the same breath emphasize their strength, they imply that though black women are oppressed they manage to circumvent the damaging impact of oppression by being strong--and that is simply not the case. Usually, when people talk about the "strength" of black women they are referring to the way in which they perceive black women coping with oppression. They ignore the reality that to be strong in the face of oppression is not the same as overcoming oppression, that endurance is not to be confused with transformation.

    bell hooks, in Ain't I a Woman (and I could pull out a lot of other wisdom as well) 

Widowland, People Person, and More October Reading

 

Fiction

The idea of Widowland, by C.J. Carey, is interesting. The book is set in Great Britain, 13 years after Britain agreed to be ruled by Hitler's Germany. Women have been divided into several castes that define how they live their lives. King George and his family have disappeared, and King Edward (he of Wallis Simpson fame) is about to be re-crowned, an event that will end some aspects of the British-German agreement (including protection of British Jews). The protagonist Rose works rewriting literary classics to reflect the new views of women's roles. All that is interesting. But then the book goes off the rails when Rose receives a special assignment to investigate whether a group of widows (a disrespected caste) is responsible for anti-regime graffiti. That could also have been interesting but it just didn't work (e.g., why would Rose have been chosen for this assignment, for which she had no discernible skills?). Disappointing. 

People Person, by Candice Carty-Williams, is an entertaining but completely unbelievable story. Dimple has four half-siblings (same father; the five have four different mothers) whom she has met exactly once, when she was a child and their narcissistic father decided they should all meet. When her ex-boyfriend falls in her kitchen, hitting his head on the counter and apparently killing himself, she calls her eldest sister, who brings the rest of the crew alone to help dispose of the body. The rest of the book is about the five of them helping Dimple and building a family relationship. I found this so unlikely as to be a fantasy--but perhaps I am just a bad person. 

The Every, by Dave Eggers, is a sequel to The Circle, a cautionary tale about what can happen when your life is lived entirely in public via social media. In The Every, the Circle (essentially a combination of Google and Facebook) has merged with an on-line digital retailer named for a South American jungle, and the merged company's cultural influence is even greater than in the The Circle. A technocritic named Delaney decides to destroy The Every from within by getting a job there and proposing terrible ideas that will ultimately bring about economic failure. But the ideas are not only adopted by the company, they become wildly popular, albeit with some bad effects. The book is more satirical and less frightening than its predecessor, perhaps because the plot isn't strong and aspects of the company's practices and culture seem so ridiculous. But I enjoyed it.

Up until a couple of years ago, I had never read much Stephen King--but I've picked up several of his books recently and I do admire his writing skills while occasionally wondering how his brain works. Billy Summers is interesting because it's a story in which the main character is a hired killer (although he only kills truly bad people, so there's that)whomt I sometimes found myself liking. Then I remembered there was a lot not to like about the man--but he was dealing with so many worse people so maybe that meant he was all right. At any rate, Billy was a fully realized character. I don't know if Stephen King actually knows how assassins work, but the details mostly seemed plausible. Somewhat uncomfortably enjoyable.  

Mysteries/Thrillers

What She Saw, by Diane Saxon is evidently the third entry in a series featuring D.S. Jenna Morgan. I listened to it because it was free on Audible and, while I didn't hate it, was glad I hadn't used a credit on it. It opens with a man murdering his family members and setting his house on fire. One of his daughters survives and hides in a neighbor's barn. Why she thought she should hide is not entirely clear,  and it's kind of a distraction from the narrative about the work of the police. On the other hand, it's key to the climax, so maybe that's why. Probably won't read any more of the series. BTW: What She Saw is the title of multiple books. 

The Guilt Trip, by Sandie Jones, which was advertised as a mystery but seemed more of a domestic drama, had me wishing someone would die a lot sooner than they did--and I wouldn't have cared which character it was. In sum, the narrator is happily married until she goes to her brother-in-law's destination wedding and becomes convinced her husband is having an affair with the bride. She spends the weekend melting down, arguably too late, until she figures out what's really going on. Not recommended.

In Righteous Prey, by John Sandford, Lucas Davenport and Virgil Flowers take on a band of bitcoin billionaires who have decided to become vigilantes, killing "assholes," sending out press releases on their kills, and maintaining a Dark Web presence. Interestingly, Virgil's presence seems to prevent Lucas acting like the vigilante he himself has become in other recent books. The story is entertaining enough but is a clear set-up for a sequel, which I generally find annoying. 

I'm not a fan of Harlan Coban, but Gone for Good was available on Libby, so . . . I checked it out. It revolves around a 15-year-old crime that might have been committed by the protagonist Will's brother, Ken, who has been missing ever since. Now, with a new crime at hand and evidence that the brother may be alive, Will must figure out what is going on. If it sounds similar to my description of Alex Finlay's The Night Shift, that's because there are similarities. But The Night Shift is better. 

The Last to Vanish by Megan Miranda is not a particularly great mystery about a series of disappearances from a North Carolina inn. For me to think something is a great mystery, it has to have interesting twists -- but give the reader enough information as they go along to think the twists make sense at the end. The twists in this book are so out of left field that they don't seem believable. However, I did learn about an interesting concept from the book: trauma tourism. Trauma tourists go to places where bad things have happened and wallow in the horror. I guess this is really a thing!!

The Judge's List by John Grisham is one of those books that starts out strong--a woman whose father was murdered believes she has identified the killer--a sitting judge in Florida. She takes her evidence to Lacy Stoltz, an investigator with the Florida Board on Judicial Conduct. Since the Board doesn't generally handle murders, Lacy initially refuses to take the case--but the law demands that they look into every complaint, so she begins an investigation. Around the time the judge figures out he is being investigated, I thought it broke down and became a typical "chasing the bad guy" scenario. And the ending--truly hated. 

Cajun Kiss of Death, by Ellen Byron, won the Agatha Award for 2021, Byron's second win for the Maggie Crozat series in four years. The series is set in a small Louisiana town and is just way too cutesy for me--even though people are dying, being stalked, getting food poisoning, etc. all around. I thought it might be interesting because it was all about food--a chef was murdered, other chefs/cooks were suspects, there were recipes at the end. But nothing redeemed it for me. 

Nonfiction

Although I don't live in Broomfield any more, I'm still in a Broomfield-based book group and interested in the town's literary goings-on. This year, the One Book One Broomfield selection is The Honey Bus: A Memoir of Loss, Courage and a Girl Saved by Bees, by Meredith May. As one might guess from the title, there's a lot about bees and the beekeeping grandfather who taught Meredith about the habits and wisdom of the bees. Sadly, others in her life were less supportive--her mother barely leaving her bed for years after she was divorced from May's father and her grandmother--perhaps from some guilt complex--defending her daughter when she abused Meredith and her brother. I guess the book is well done for what it is, but I found the bees as a model for human community overdone and the family dysfunction of a piece with so many other memoirs that it failed to provoke the outrage it deserved. Again, perhaps I am just a bad person.

Favorite Passages

He knew there should be a balance between the taking and the giving a person does in one lifetime. That a good relationship, between bees and humans, or two middle school classmates, or between a mother and daughter, needs to start from a mutual understanding that the other is precious.

    --Meredith May, The Honey Bus

People liked the idea of a strong leader--they didn't much care what that leader stood for. What citizens wanted above all things was a quiet life. They didn't mind shrinking their horizons. They didn't object to not travelling, as long as nobody else was travelling either. They wanted an orderly life with everyone knowing their place. Plenty of rules, the more of them the better.

    --C.J. Carey, Widowland

Good Memoirs: In Love and Going There

So I have mentioned ad nauseum that I am not a fan of memoirs, but two very good ones were highlights of my late September reading. Other than those two books, most of what I read since I last posted just made me grumpy although I should say I did actually enjoy a couple of light beach reads.

Fiction

I was surprised to enjoy Golden Girl, by Elin Hilderbrand, because I had read a few of her books and never been too impressed. There's a fantasy element here that was actually entertaining--Cape Cod author Vivi is killed in a hit-and-run early in the book; a heavenly guide allows her to watch over her family for a few months and intervene with three "nudges." Who wouldn't want to do that, especially if you were a mom leaving three children behind? For me, the question of who killed Vivi wasn't that important (I guessed early on!) but getting the kids straightened out did engage me. Fun beach read (or, if you're me, fun listen on my morning walks).

Another fun though not deep read is The Bookish Life of Nina Hill, by Abbie Waxman. It's basically a rom-com but it's set in a bookstore (score) and trivia contests (funny) with family drama involving the heroine learning she has a large extended family she knew nothing about. Not very realistic but another fun late-summer read.

Mysteries/Thrillers

The Overnight Guest, by Heather Gudenkauf, has a Room-esque element, as well as the popular trope of having a true crime writer as a protagonist.  The writer Wylie Lark writes about cold cases and, rather creepily in my opinion, is staying at the Iowa farmhouse that was the scene of the crime she is trying to solve. Who would do that? Seriously? The story is told in three narrative threads: Wylie's present-day research, events around the time of the crime in 2000, and brief snippets about a child and mother trapped in a basement by the child's father. The three threads come together in a way Gudenkauf clearly intends to be surprising but just felt highly unlikely to me. Didn't love. 

The Island, by Adrian McKinty, is one of those thrillers in which people do something really stupid and spend the rest of the book trying to escape. Here it's a woman and her two stepchildren trying to escape from a crazy Australian family's island. It's basically an extended chase scene that I grew weary of.

Continuing my grumpy commentary, Do No Harm, by Christina McDonald, is a stupid story about a doctor who, upon learning her child has leukemia and needs an expensive treatment not covered by her insurance, becomes a drug kingpin pretty much overnight. And she's cavalier about any harm (substantial) she is causing; at points, the author seems to be arguing that opioid deaths are the price we have to pay for people getting some relief from chronic pain. Also stupid is the fact that the two local cops investigating opioid deaths are the doctor's husband (despite the fact that her brother is a known drug dealer) and a woman involved romantically with a doctor who has already been arrested on drug-related charges. Conflict of interest much?  Unsure why I finished this book. 

Lonely pregnant woman befriends another apparently lonely pregnant woman at a prenatal class. Second pregnant woman starts stalking first pregnant woman though first pregnant woman doesn't seem to notice. Weird doings ensue. Way too much explication at the end of the book. That's Greenwich Park, by Katherine Faulkner.

Slight break from grumpy negativity: The Night Shift, by Alex Finlay, is actually a decent mystery. On New Year's Eve 1999, someone attacks the employees of a Blockbuster, killing four (three teenage girls and the manager) and leaving one girl alive. Fifteen years later, the employees of an ice cream shop are attacked and, again, three teenage girls are killed and one survives. Are the two crimes linked? Could the suspect in the first crime, who escaped and has not been seen since, have returned? Is his brother, now a public defender, somehow involved? Is the survivor of the first crime? Pregnant FBI agent Sarah Keller has to put it all together. While I had suspicions about the person eventually revealed to be the killer early on, I still enjoyed the book. 

Like other well-established mystery series, Linda Castillo's Kate Burkholder series has gotten a bit tired. Perhaps because it strains credulity that there could be so much violence among the Amish in Kate's small Ohio community, The Hidden One involves the discovery of the body of a long-missing Amish bishop in Pennsylvania instead of Ohio. Kate and the suspect were close as teenagers and the elders in the community ask her to investigate. Of course, she is threatened and of course she solves the case. Not terrible but not great.

YA

I can't remember who recommended The House in the Cerulean Sea, by T.J. Klune to me, but they sold it as a sweet fantasy/queer love story about children with special powers who suffer discrimination but feel safe in the residential orphanage/school where they live. I found it mildly interesting but predictable. Then I read that the author said he had been inspired to write the book upon reading the terrible news stories about the horrific treatment of Native Canadians at residential schools. For the second time in this post I ask, seriously? To trivialize and misrepresent that experience through a treacly fantasy story is despicable.

Nonfiction

In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss by Amy Bloom is the moving and instructive story of her husband's decision to seek aided suicide when he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's. It turns out that this is not an easy thing to do if you are expected to live longer than 6 months. Bloom and husband Brian Ameche (who seemed like something of an odd couple and yet clearly had a happy marriage) eventually landed on Dignitas, a Swiss company, as the route to a dignified death rather than "the long good-bye." Bloom reflects on the early signs of Brian's dementia, recounts the process of getting approved as a Dignitas client (grueling), and describes their trip to Zurich for Brian's planned death--and she does it all beautifully. 

More of a surprise to me was how much I enjoyed Going There, by Katie Couric. I've never been a huge Couric fan, but it was interesting to read how her career developed in an era when women journalists were subjected to various forms of discrimination and misogyny. And she does not hold back in calling out a lot of people who acted badly, especially at CBS during her 5 years there. The story of her first husband's illness and how she brought all her research skills to bear on trying to keep him alive was moving; her insight later that she had spent too much time trying to help him live and not enough helping him prepare to die was devastating. Years after his death, her daughter's research into her family's "Southern-ness" brought out some things about Jay's attitudes that were challenging, and I respect her for bringing them into the light. On the other hand, I have some doubts about her response to #MeToo and Matt Lauer. Although she acknowledges Matt did some terrible things, I felt she still has trouble accepting that these things happened (and that perhaps she should have known). In fact, she admits to being "tone deaf" or wrong a number of times throughout the book--and I felt in many of these cases she should have known better even as these things happened. So I'm still not a huge Couric fan, but the book is interesting and I recommend it. (And I was sorry to hear this week that she has been in treatment for breast cancer since June--the disease has definitely been a scourge on her loved ones.)

Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s, by historian Nicole Hemmer, is most notable in (1) pointing out that, although the right loves to quote him and pretend a reverence for Ronald Reagan, his optimistic view and willingness to compromise made him different from the conservative movement that he helped to launch (and actively disliked by some of its denizens), (2) reaffirming the influence of the right-wing chattering class, in part on television but maybe more effectively on talk radio and the internet, and (3) drawing a direct line from Pat Buchanan to Donald Trump. Donald Trump was not as new or surprising as we may have thought--he was the successful incarnation of the hateful and racist ideas that Buchanan had advocated for and eventually brought into the mainstream of the Republican Party, which, as Hemmer says, "gave up on governing in 2014" (I might say it was before that, when they announced their goals were for Obama to fail and be a one-term president). It's about power, more specifically, white power (she didn't say that specifically--but I am saying it). 

Favorite Passages

All happiness is fleeting, but I see now that there is fleeting and then there is the true and wall-like impossibility of ever experiencing this kind of happiness again, even once, even next week, let alone a year from now. Doors are closing around us, all the time.

"You should be with a guy who doesn't mind that you're smarter than he is, who doesn't mind that most of the time, you'll be the main event," he said. "You need to be with a guy who supports how hard you work and who'll bring you a cup of coffee late at night. I don't know if I can be that guy"--he broke into tears--"but I'd like a shot."  We married.

    --Amy Bloom, In Love

Empire of Pain and Other Late Summer Reading

You know the feeling when you read a book and you realize how ill-informed you truly are? That's how I felt reading Empire of Pain, which I highly recommend. 

Fiction

A few months ago, I decided to join the University of Illinois alumni online book group, which reads and discusses a book every quarter. There was a great series of discussions about Hidden Valley Road (a book I loved). Being over Isabel Allende, I then skipped reading A Long Petal of the Sea. This quarter, I was somewhat disappointed with All the Lonely People, by Mike Gayle. It's a pleasant enough book about an elderly Jamaican Brit, Hubert Bird, a widower who is estranged from his son and whose communication with his daughter is confined to weekly Facetime calls, in which he describes an active but totally fictional social life. When she announces she will be visiting in a few months, he decides to start making some friends so his stories won't be lies. The contemporary story is intercut with the story of Hubert's earlier life and the discrimination and challenges he faced as an immigrant in Britain. The book is okay, but I felt like it could have been so much more. Rather shallow in comparison to  many other novels about the immigrant experience. 

I read We Are Not Like Them, by Christine Pride and Jo Piazza, right after reading Fiona and Jane (see below), which was interesting because both books are about best friends. Like the interracial pair of writers who penned the book, Riley and Jen are best friends of different races. They grew up together in Philadelphia, where Riley was ensconced in a solid African American family and Jen, whose single mom was somewhat irresponsible, relied on Riley's family, especially her grandmother, for stability. Riley grew up to be a successful television journalist, while Jen is married to a cop. When Jen's husband shoots a black teenager and Riley covers the story, their friendship is severely tested. Their alternating perspectives reveal the betrayals both felt. While some of the explications of their feelings felt a bit obvious and the happy ending somewhat unlikely, I still enjoyed the book and hope the team of Pride and Piazza will work together again.

I must admit I struggled with Assembly, by Natasha Brown. It's a short novel but it's told in vignettes that I found hard to piece together. In addition, because the author doesn't name many characters, it's sometimes hard to figure out who she is talking about. We do know the protagonist is a black Brit who works in finance, has a white boyfriend whose family she is about to visit (with dread), and has cancer. Her company sends her out to schools to talk with young people about her success (touting the company's diversity), but she knows she is lying to them, as she doesn't talk to them about the reality of the micro and macro aggressions she suffers from colleagues. When diagnosed with cancer, she decides to regain agency by deciding not to have any treatment, choosing death over a life in which she has no control. 

So a second "theme" (besides best friends) in this batch of books was the #MeToo movement. Vladimir, by Julia May Jonas features an older academic whose husband John has been accused of inappropriate sexual relationships with students. The accusation is true, but his wife, the book's narrator, defends him because none of the relationships occurred after the college banned such goings-on and she and her husband had an open marriage. As John awaits his hearing, our narrator is under pressure herself--students feel uncomfortable around her. She has what I would call a breakdown, more or less kidnapping a new younger professor, the titular Vladimir (this isn't a spoiler because we know from the beginning that she has Vladimir chained somewhere). I have seen the book described as the first "camp" take on #MeToo. I just found it creepy. 

Surprisingly, I much preferred Jennifer Weiner's That Summer. I'm not generally a fan of Weiner, but I enjoyed her tale of a woman who, many years after being raped by a boarding school boy as a teenager, decides to seek out the boys who harmed her. She herself isn't sure if she's seeking revenge or simply some kind of acknowledgment. She finds herself facing a dilemma when she cultivates the rapist's wife as a means to get to him--and finds that she likes both the wife and their daughter. Entertaining, while still exploring the damage done by the "boys will be boys" attitude. 

The Man Who Lived Underground is a previously unpublished novel by Richard Wright. It opens with Fred Daniels, a Black man, walking down a Chicago street, counting his pay and thinking about his pregnant wife. He is picked up by the police, tortured into confessing (having worked on a Chicago Public Schools curriculum about the police torture of the 1970s and 1980s, I know this description, while horrifying, is not overdone), and then escapes into the sewer system. It's a gripping narrative that is well worth reading, made even more interesting by its publication with an essay by Wright, "Memories of My Grandmother," in which he discusses his thinking as he wrote the book. What he was thinking as he wrote didn't parallel what I was thinking as I read, but it definitely shed light on his intentions. Highly recommended.

In writing Cult Classic, it seems that Sloane Crossley was trying to inject a sci-fi element into her story of a woman who has had too many boyfriends that she is still thinking about as she prepares to meet her fiance. The sci-fi piece has several of those old flames cross paths with her. For me, neither the sci-fi element or the basic story worked--though Crossley does turn some interesting phrases ("I'd done nothing wrong except, perhaps, to lay the groundwork for wrongdoing"). Not recommended. 

I've seen Reputation, by Lex Croucher, described as feminist and compared to Jane Austen. I'd say it's more like a Georgette Heyer with female debauchery. 

Short Stories

Fiona and Jane, by Jean Chen Ho, is a collection of linked short stories about two best friends. Both girls are Taiwanese American, though one was born in the U.S. and the other was an immigrant. The stories begin when the girls were young and jump forward into adulthood. I particularly liked the story in which Jane visits her father, who has moved back to Taiwan, and learns that he is gay, involved with a man whom he knew years before he left for the States. This revelation threads through other events in her life, including her friendship with Fiona and her sexuality. While I did enjoy some of the stories, because they are about the same two characters, I wished for them to add up to more as a whole. The book was very positively reviewed in the NYT and elsewhere. 

Mysteries/Thriller

Cold, Cold Bones is one of the better recent entries in Kathy Reichs' Temperance Brennan series-- perhaps because she doesn't seem compelled in this book to instruct us on some arcane aspect of forensic anthropology. She is still trying to educate us--this time about issues faced by veterans, including Tempe's daughter Katy, but it fits in the story and isn't overwhelming. The story is one of revenge, although it takes a while for Tempe and Skinny Slidell (who is now in business with Tempe's significant other Ryan) to put together how a series of grim events--starting with a human eyeball with GPS coordinates etched into it being delivered to Tempe's back door--are linked. Entertaining.

So I was wrong about Dalton and Casey having a baby in Kelley Armstrong's next book in the Rockton series. Instead,  A Stranger in Town brings us an incredibly complicated story of murder and manipulation linked back to Rockton's early days, as well as a suggestion of another future direction--it appears Rockton will be closed and Dalton and Casey will start their own hidden community. Or is this, too, a false lead?

American Girl, by Wendy Walker, is a murder mystery featuring longstanding conflicts between the powerful and powerless in a small town. The protagonist is presented as being autistic, but the characterization is incredibly lazy--the girl is good at math and likes order but in no other way does she seem autistic. Nor recommended.

Lola, escaping from a dead-existence in London, heads to Paris to stay with her half-brother in The Paris Apartment. But when she arrives on his doorstep, he has disappeared. As she tries to find him, she discovers that all is not as it seems in the fancy building where he lives. The author inserts French phrases throughout, then translates them into English. Of course, many of these conversations would be entirely in French since the setting is Paris. Kind of wondering if that technique actually makes many readers feel more ensconced in France. Overall, just okay.

Nonfiction

 As I mentioned above, Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty, by Patrick Radden Keefe, was an eye-opener. Although I am aware of the opioid crisis and the protests against Purdue Pharma and the many cultural organizations bearing the Sackler name, I really had no idea of the criminal perfidy of the Sackler family across at least three generations. They knew what oxy was; they marketed the hell out of it, including selling it to known pill-pushers; they corrupted FDA officials; they sucked all the money out of the company after it became clear the company was going to be hit with huge penalties. They were/are horrible human beings. The fact that the revelations of their criminality has posed a dilemma for the many institutions to which they donated huge sums of money suggests that perhaps people should be more discerning when they ask the wealthy for donations. Highly recommended. 

Favorite Passages

A 2016 study found that purchasing even a single meal with a value of $20 for a physician can be enough to change the way that he prescribes. And for all their lip service to the contrary, the Sacklers didn't need studies to tell them this.

OxyContin was, in his view, entirely beyond reproach--a magnificent gift that the Sacklers had bestowed upon humanity that was now being sullied by a nihilistic breed of hillbilly pill poppers.

    --Patrick Radden Keefe, Empire of Pain (I could put a lot more quotes here--just read the book!)