Damnation Spring--a Title for the Season

The last two weeks of March haven't been the greatest reading--don't even have any favorite passages. I do want to note that I am rereading Hidden Valley Road for an online book group and it's as fascinating to me as it was when I read it a year ago. 

Fiction

We Are the Brennans, by Tracey Lange, appears to be inspired by (that's the generous way of describing it) Joyce Carol Oates's We Were the Mulvaneys. The Mulvaneys and the Brennans are quite similar--Irish, four children--three boys and one girl,  well-regarded in the small New York towns where they live, somewhat problematic parents. Something happens to the daughter that isn't acknowledged/talked about but that sends the family into a decline. But then, somehow, there's redemption and family togetherness. Lange's book is unoriginal and unnecessary IMHO. 

Damnation Spring, by Ash Davidson, might be categorized as an environmental novel, but it's also more than that. Set among redwood timbermen in Oregon, the book looks at the consequences of not only spraying done to control brush in the forest but also of the logging itself. It also looks at the different ways people respond when their livelihood is threatened. At the same time, it's the story of Rich and Colleen Gunderson's marriage. Rich is a fourth-generation logger while Colleen is a midwife (although she doesn't seem to be officially trained) mourning her stillborn child and seven miscarriages. She is longing for another child (they have a five-year-old), but Rich doesn't want to see her suffer yet again. This causes stress and a sexual drought in their marriage, just as her teenage boyfriend, now an environmental scientist returns to town and asks for her help investigating water quality. Some of what happens is predictable and I didn't care for the ending, but the story is told so well and the characters are so well developed, those factors didn't bother me.  

People We Meet on Vacation, by Emily Henry, had been on my TBR list for quite a while--I think it was recommended in some magazine, but it was also on a few "best of 2021" lists. It's the story of Alex and Poppy who grew up in the same small Ohio town but didn't meet until they were students at the University of Chicago. Despite being very different, they become best friends; after college, Alex returns to their home town to teach while Poppy heads for New York and life as a travel writer. Each summer, they take a trip together. I'm guessing that just from this description, you can predict what happens--the story line is utterly predictable. Disappointing.

Mysteries/Thrillers

I'm not sure how Her Royal Spyness by Rhys Bowen got on my TBR list because I'm not a big fan of historical mysteries. And reading it did not change my mind. It's the story of a minor royal, Lady Georgiana, whose Scottish family is broke. As a result, she decides to try to make her way in London on her own. It's a struggle--and then a man trying to steal her family home winds up dead in her bathtub, her half-brother is arrested, and she is subject to a series of mishaps that just might be someone trying to kill her. It's played for laughs, but I don't think I even cracked a smile. Guarding my TBR more closely in the future.

Weirdly, I also just read another historical mystery, Messenger of Truth, by Jacqueline Winspear. Although I'm not keen about the plots in the Maisie Dobbs mysteries and Maisie herself is almost insufferably virtuous, I do appreciate the depiction of the difficulties of life in post-WWI Britain, so I read one every year or two. 

56 Days, by Catherine Ryan Howard, is a pandemic mystery told in multiple timelines. In one, a couple meet in Dublin just as the pandemic is starting. As Ireland shuts down, they decide to isolate together, despite having known each other for only a few days; the same events in that timeline are narrated from both the man's and woman's perspectives, which lets us know the man has some kind of terrible secret.. In another timeline, police officers are called to the apartment where the couple was living because a terrible odor was coming from the apartment. A male's decomposing body is lying in the shower with glass from the shattered shower door around him--but there's no blood and the apartment has been wiped clean. The lead officer feels sure a crime has occurred but can't find the evidence, while her partner is happy concluding the man's death was an accident. Well into the novel, we encounter a third timeline, starting before the couple met. By the time the author starts rolling out the twists, I was not actually surprised, but  I found the way the author put the story together so interesting that I didn't mind some degree of predictability. 

One thing I like about Peter Swanson's books is the way he references other literary works--and is transparent about it. In Nine Lives, nine people receive a mysterious list of names in the mail--the name of each person who receives the list is on it--but, with one exception, they don't recognize any of the other names. Days later, the murders of those on the list start. The plot references Memento Mori and And Then There Were None and characters talk about poetry and novels. Fun read!

If She Wakes, by Michael Koryta, is the second mystery I've read in which a character has "locked-in syndrome." It's a complicated narrative involving multiple paid killers trying to get their hands on a phone--but we don't know what's so special about the phone or why people want it til the very end. The protagonist is a former stunt driver, which may account for much of the book feeling like an extended chase scene. Not my favorite. 

Some time ago, I read Mr. Mercedes by Stephen King and thought it was a decent mystery. Then I discovered it was the first volume in a trilogy. So this month I read both Finders Keepers and End of Watch. Finders Keepers was again a mostly traditional mystery featuring retired police detective Bill Hodges and his rather unusual sidekicks, Holly and Jerome. They work a case involving a family, the father of whom was severely injured in the original crime at the heart of Mr. Mercedes. The interesting part about this book was that both the family's son and the criminal had an obsession with an author with similarities to J.D. Salinger and John Updike. Although End of Watch again features Bill Hodges et al., it takes a serious turn toward the weird--the perpetrator from Mr. Mercedes, believed to have been in a vegetative state for six years, can put his consciousness into other people and can communicate with people playing a video game, causing them to commit suicide. Not sure why King decided to go supernatural in the last book in the trilogy, but it was definitely my least favorite.

In Say Her Name, Dreda Say Mitchell and Ryan Carter deal with serious issues--police corruption and the ways in which the police and the media deal differently with crimes involving Black women versus white women. I appreciate their attention to those issues, but the plot had a lot of problems, not least of which being that an out-of-work doctor could unravel a historic case that her adoptive father, a retired police officer, had been unsuccessfully trying to solve for two decades. Not believable. 

Crossroads, The Anomaly, and Some Great Feminist Poetry

Some good stuff so far in March--and poetry month is coming! Woot, woot!!

Fiction

I thought the premise of Our Country Friends by Gary Shteyngart had promise: a group of friends--plus "The Actor" (never named) who is working on a project with the host--gather at a country place in the early days of the pandemic, planning to ride out the pandemic there (remember: we didn't think it would still be going two years later). Of course, there are numerous complications:  One old friend, dying of lung cancer, harbors a long-burning love for another. He is also searching for the manuscript for a novel he wrote (and was advised not to try to publish) by the host, not coincidentally a writer as well. Two of the women, one married to the host, have designs on The Actor. Meanwhile, the host's daughter, who appears to be on the spectrum, takes a liking to another of the women, making her mother jealous. At first it's an interesting and sometimes funny look at relationships and what might happen if stuck together in the country. But then the book devolves into the surreal--the author recounts too many of the characters' dreams--sleeping and fever--and I lost interest. Not recommended.

The "sticker" on the front of The Anomaly by Herve Le Tellier says it was a NYT "best thriller of the year." I wouldn't call it a thriller exactly--closer to science fiction in my book. But regardless of how you classify it, it's worth reading. The premise reminded me a bit of the TV show Manifest: a plane goes through a terrible storm and something weird happens.  The book does get off to a somewhat slow start, as we are introduced to a large number of characters without knowing exactly what is happening. When the "something weird" is revealed, the book really picks up, as we learn how the government responded, the various hypotheses developed to explain what happened, and how the people affected cope. Don't want to ruin the read by saying too much more, but I really enjoyed The Anomaly (even though I didn't understand every single thing!). 

The Idiot by Elif Batuman is essentially a fictional diary of a young Turkish American woman's freshman year at Harvard, followed by a summer teaching English in Hungary (prompted by a crush on a senior, Ivan, who happens to be from Hungary). Some of Selin's experiences (which seem likely to be Batuman's experiences, since much about the author and character is similar) are amusing, but I may be too old to truly enjoy this book. Batuman has written a sequel but I won't be picking it up. 

The Wrong End of the Telescope, by Rabih Alameddine, is a complex book that occasionally feels like it's about too many things. The narrator is Mina, a transgender doctor who is originally from Lebanon but has lived in the United States since college. She travels to Lesbos, Greece, when her friend, a nurse named Emma, asks her to come and help provide medical services to Syrian refugees arriving on boats. When she gets there, there are at first no new arrivals because of the weather. Eventually, however, Mina becomes involved with a critically ill Syrian mother, who is afraid her family will be sent back if the dire situation with her health is revealed. Sumaiya's story is probably the most engaging, but Mina also narrates the stories of other migrants--and also describes disturbing behavior on the part of journalists and volunteers who ostensibly come to help the refugees but have less pure/more selfish motives. That may not sound like too much--but Mina also tells two other stories. The first is her own--her estrangement from her family (except for one brother who joins her in Lesbos) and her life in Chicago with her wife Francine. The second is the story of the writer to whom she is addressing the entire book (who resembles Alameddine himself), who freaked out in his own attempt to help refugees, holing up in a hotel room; his attempts to write about the experience have failed, so he has urged Mina to tell the story. Occasionally I felt like Alameddine was doing too much, but I'm still glad I read the book. 

I'm not one of the people who greets every Jonathan Franzen novel with cries of "This is the great American novel." So I almost feel weird saying I loved Crossroads. Crossroads (which I learned from an author interview at the end of the audiobook is the first volume in a trilogy) is set in the early 1970s, and the Vietnam War, the folk music scene, the penetration of illicit drugs to the suburbs, and a church youth group more like an encounter group are all important elements of the story. The book has multiple narrators, all members of the Hildebrandt family. Russ, the father, is a frustrated assistant pastor at a suburban Chicago church, eager to cheat on his wife with a recently widowed parishioner. Russ believes himself to be an enlightened helper of the less fortunate but in reality he's a selfish sad sack. Marion, the mother, is keeping a lot of secrets, most notably that in her twenties she was hospitalized for a mental illness, which she now fears she has passed along to her son Perry. Their three older children--Clem, Becky, and Perry, all grappling with who they are and how they want to live--are the other narrators. (Hopefully, the youngest child will get his due in the next volume.) The book is an extended character study within the context of the times, the family, and each member's evolving religious or ethical beliefs. There's humor but there's also despair--it adds up to a potent mix. Highly recommended. 

Short Stories

The story of Anthony Veasna So, author of Afterparties: Stories, is a sad one--he died in 2020 from an accidental drug overdose before his first book was published. As a young gay Cambodian American, the child of refugees who fled the Khmer Rouge genocide, So brought an unusual voice to the table. And his stories clearly impressed the critics, as his book was on 12 "best of 2021" lists. Although moments in some of the stories grabbed me, generally the stories did not resonate with me--I may be too old, too cis, too white. I'm willing to grant that the stories are well-done--they just weren't for me. 

Mysteries/Thrillers

Madness of Sunshine, by Nalini Singh, was sitting on my nightstand for a few years; I started it a couple of times but couldn't really get into it. This month, I finally finished it. It's a mystery set in New Zealand, and the descriptions of the landscape are lovely, but that's about the only thing I liked. Every character is incredibly damaged, and the story drags--a young woman goes missing and everyone in town looks for her and looks for her and searches some more. Then suddenly the perpetrator of an older crime is discovered. And the person who is responsible for the woman's disappearance is apprehended, though how the police officer in the town and his sidekick (a pianist recently returned to her home town because, you know, pianists are the best detectives) settled on the guilty party wasn't clear to me. And some of the writing, in an attempt to be poetic, is just bad: "Hanging up, Will began the nearly four-hour drive toward the hopeless scent of a beautiful young woman's death." What? 

In Nothing to Lose, by J.A. Jance, J.P. Beaumont, the retired Seattle cop who anchors one of Jance's four series, heads to Alaska looking for his former (and dead) partner's long-missing son. He solves cold and hot cases in his visit the Last Frontier. It's fairly standard fare, but Beaumont is one of the better characters in series mysteries and Jance's work on her other series seems to keep this one fresh.

I'm not really sure where The Dilemma by B.A. Paris fits, but I guess it's supposed to be a psychological thriller.  Adam and Livia are a married couple planning her 40th birthday party, over which she has been obsessing her entire adult life (ostensibly because she didn't get the big wedding she wanted--seriously??). They each have a secret about their daughter that they don't want to tell the other until after the party. If it sounds like a stupid premise, then you understand the book. Not recommended.

A Good Day for Chardonnay was my second Sunshine Vicram book by Darynda Jones--and it will be my last. Sunshine seems like an imitation Stephanie Plum in a different setting (small-town New Mexico) with more explicit sex. Also, Sunshine's love interest is part of a family of moonshiners turned whiskey entrepreneurs that could be right out of a Deborah Knott novel by Margaret Maron (and would fit better in North Carolina). Jones is trying too hard to be funny and just isn't. 

Poetry

It's almost poetry month, when I go a little crazy posting poems on FB. So when I heard Kate Bowler's interview with poet Kate Baer and thought her work sounded interesting, I immediately ordered both of her books. I liked her first book, What Kind of Woman, a collection of poems about being a woman, a wife, a mother, a friend, a human. And I loved I Hope This Finds You Well: Poems. Baer started her writing life posting feminist short stories and essays on a blog. One day as she was reading an unfriendly response to one of her posts, she saw new potential in the response--she printed it and began blacking out words, ultimately creating an erasure poem. After that, she says, she saw poetry potential everywhere. The result is this book, which includes poems she has created from nasty responses on social media, fan letters, promotional emails, congressional testimony--in other words, a wide array of sources. She publishes each poem next to its source material. Some of the poems flip the original material's message, while others intensify the original message by distilling it to fewer words. Some of Baer's poems are very funny. Others pack an emotional punch. You really need to see them to appreciate them. If we're friends on FB, you'll get some samples there during April.

Favorite Passages

. . . it would take only one of his sentences being more intelligent than he is for this miracle to make a writer of him.

The direct route hates a pothole, and the obscure professes hatred of the inexplicable.

. . . freedom of thought on the internet is all the more complete now that it's clear that people have stopped thinking.

Herve Le Tellier, in The Anomaly

It's like there are these words, they're out in the world, and you start wondering what it would be like to say them. Words have their own power--they create the feeling, just by the fact of your saying them.

Jonathan Franzen, in Crossroads

. . . There are many poems 

about the seasons, less about the time it takes 

to bury another child. It's true--

Kate Baer, "Social Studies," in What Kind of Woman