Hell of a Book, South to America, and Some Non-Serious Reading

Fiction

Hell of a Book, by Jason Mott, is about an African American author on a book tour (his book is titled Hell of a Book), which in any case must be a rather surreal experience. In Mott’s hands, it’s even more surreal, as the author seems to be having trouble distinguishing between atrocities in the news, his own life story, and the conversations he’s having with a dark skinned boy who is invisible to everyone else (his parents taught him to be invisible to protect himself)—or are the conversations memories of his own childhood? The book keeps the reader somewhat confused while considering the effects of racism, police violence, and colorism on Black creativity, mental health, and (basically) life.

Mystery/Thriller

I’ll Be You by Janelle Brown was classified as a psychological thriller. Not sure it’s really that, but I did find it interesting. Former child stars and identical twins Sam and Ellie are on the outs when their mother calls recovering alcoholic Sam to help care for Ellie’s daughter Charlotte. Ellie has gone to a weekend retreat but she hasn’t come back when scheduled. Sam soon suspects the retreat is actually more like a cult and begins investigating. Some aspects of the story were unbelievable, and the family relationships were fairly predictable, but the description of how someone who on the surface seems rational gets pulled into a cult and stays even after they realize what is happening was interesting.

While I was reading The Maid, by Nita Prose, I thought it was okay. But the more I have thought about it since I finished, the less I like it. Molly Gray is a maid at an upscale hotel, a job she enjoys. In speech and thought, she sounds like someone from a decidedly different era, but perhaps that is because she was raised by her Gran, who has recently died and left Molly in bad financial straits. Perhaps it is because she is neuro-atypical, which means she has trouble connecting to people. One day, she discovers a dead tycoon in his hotel room and then finds herself a suspect, clearly set up by nefarious others. Two friends from work--one of whom just happens to have a daughter who is a high-powered lawyer--help her clear her name. There's a twist at the end that makes clear Molly is an even less reliable narrator than we thought--and I think that's the main thing that has made my view of the book go downhill. The book has been wildly popular, but I don't recommend it. 

In David Baldacci's Daylight and Mercy, FBI agent Atlee Pine continues and completes her search for her sister Mercy, kidnapped as a six-year-old and subjected, it turns out, to a horrendous childhood and a challenging adulthood. Of course, Atlee and her trusty assistant Carol Blum manage to take down a lot of bad guys during the search. Now that Atlee has found her sister, will she disappear from Baldacci's repertoire? I find I do not care. 

In Five Total Strangers, by Natalie D. Richards, five late teens/early twenties travelers, desperate to get home for Christmas, rent a car when their connecting flight is cancelled due to an impending blizzard. One expects weather-related disasters, which are frequent, as are red herrings about why the protagonist feels like she's being watched and people's belongings keep disappearing. If you want a blizzard survival mystery, No Exit by Taylor Adams is a lot better.

Nonfiction

Good Talk, by Mira Jacobs, is subtitled A Memoir in Conversations, an apt description of this relatively short book. Jacobs is Indian American and her husband is Jewish, which makes for some interesting conversations with their parents. But my favorite conversations are with her son, who struggles to understand why some people don’t like him because of his skin color, why his grandparents were voting for Trump, and other mysteries of the modern world. While Jacobs deals with serious topics, such as colorism in the Indian community, she recounts conversations with humor.

South to America: A Journey Below the Mason Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation, by Imani Perry, reminds me somewhat of How the Word Is Passed, as both are examinations of race in the United States with a strong link to geography. The difference is that South to America is much harder to track; even though organized around geography, the text often seems to be almost stream of consciousness, well-informed and sometimes insightful stream of consciousness--Perry holds a named chair at Princeton--but not easy to track or to discern what, exactly, to make of Perry's analysis. An example: In a section on North Carolina, Perry moves through the following topics: the alleged rape involving the Duke lacrosse team, Michael Jordan's refusal to take political positions, memorials to the Confederacy, back to Duke, to "trees older than Jesus," to the belief that birds coming into a house brings death, to origin stories. Perry does use language beautifully--she describes Atlanta and respectability politics as an exemplar of the "choreography of self-creation."  And some of her insights ring true to me--for example, she argues that strong, loving interpersonal relationships across racial lines are not enough to bring change; people in the south have been having interracial sex for centuries, but that has not changed racism. Nothing can change without systemic change, changes to institutions. For someone less linear than I, this book might be more effective.  

Favorite Passage

American culture, even in its most rigidly segregated precincts, is patently and irrevocably composite …the so-called black and so-called white people of the United States resemble nobody else in the world so much as they resemble each other.
    ― Albert Murray, quoted in South to America