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!)
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