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
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